In response to a 3% tax on broadband access,Mexican citizens began on and off-line protests.

PSFK sat down to talk with Diesel Founder Renzo Rosso about inspiration, the Internet, nature and more.

Scientists at UCLA have discovered that older adults with limited Internet experience were able to boost brain functions after a week of interacting with the web.

GDS International sent us their most recent infographic which helps visualize this significant power usage by the data centers in the US that help power the Internet.

Finland is set to become the first country in the world to make broadband Internet a legal right, according to their Ministry of Transport and Communications.

Rather than lament the passing of traditional values, beliefs and rituals, let’s invent ways to save them. Let’s examine the ‘dying’ practices we value and design new tools, strategies, and products to keep them (or the essence of them) alive.

MIT has also developed a tool called Eyebrowse, a Firefox add-on that enables you to record, visualize and share your browser history in real-time.

We recently covered what the internet is killing and this video we came across shows through various statistics how the internet is changing our lives.

The Whuffie Bank, is hoping to reward Internet users who have a positive impact by giving them bits of a new social currency every time they contribute to the greater good.

The Telegraph recently featured a list of fifty things that are being destroyed by the internet. The article is hardly surprising given the massive shifts the internet brings to society, but it does raise a debate about what will be missed from a bygone era and what will be rightly forgotten.

Image credit: Getty Images, Appleping/Flickr
The internet is a rather polarizing force, drawing us in with its promise of vast pools of knowledge and greater efficiencies, at the same time it overwhelms us with superfluous information and whittles away our attention spans. It is the driver of behavioral shifts that have happened so gradually, that it’s difficult to say whether the web evolved alongside of us or we along with it.
And now that we’ve welcomed this convenient, pervasive technology into our lives and are finally beginning to understand its impacts – both good and bad – how do we step back and [...]

Today, in Fall City WA, 2-6 people will be admitted into Re-Start- a 45-day addiction recovery program that treats obsessive Internet and video game habits. The program employs a combination of mindfulness training and meetings based upon the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, as well as nutritional education and adventure expeditions in a “family-style” setting that lends itself to social interaction- with the end goal being to help the patient re-establish connections to the real world.
Although the problem of Internet addiction has been addressed in South Korea and China with mixed results, the ReStart press release claims it is a growing [...]

Image credit: Getty Images, Craig P. Jewell/Flickr
Turns out there might be a biological imperative to explain our addiction to information that leads us to obsessively check our Facebook profiles for updates and inexplicably lose hours at a time searching for obscure bits of information on Google. Scientists refer to this desire as seeking or wanting, a practice that affects the dopamine centers of our brains and causes us to chase the potential reward just around the corner rather than settle for the tangible one right in front of us. This quest for what might be, creates a seemingly infinite feedback loop where [...]

We’ve written previously about the reverse trend of internet memes inspiring honest-to-goodness books, but it appears that the web’s influence on real life as reflected in popular media knows no bounds following news that five of New York Magazine’s most prolific commenters have made the unprecedented leap from peanut gallery to professional.
The five vocal contributors will be lending their unique perspectives to a series of chatroom-style ads for British bank HSBC. The campaign is tied to the bank’s “Soapbox” television and print ads, which feature conversations on hot button topics such as education, the economy and the environment. For the online component [...]

Without coming across as too macabre and curmudgeonly, we’ll simply say that with dawn of the internet, the business of death has gotten a lot more complicated these days. Consider that wills once existed for the sole purpose of ceding ownership of physical objects, and quests for immortality - things like cryonics, transhumanism, fountains of youth and religion (ahem) - remained firmly planted in the realms of fantasy, but as the lines between our real and digital worlds continue to blur, these customs have changed. The things we leave behind, from virtual businesses to entire online lives, now have an immaterial existence and longevity all [...]