One of social media's biggest benefits, from the governmental perspective, is that it encourages people to divulge all kinds of details about themselves publicly, making it easier to create a ubiquitous, panopticon-type surveillance system, otherwise known as the Eye of Sauron. Yay!

Online flirtation can have violent consequences: over the weekend a Texas man was shot and killed during an argument about a tweet the assailant had left for another man's girlfriend.

Less than a year after Facebook's disappointing IPO, social media stocks are on the upswing, reflecting growing investor confidence in the sustainability of social media business models -- at least in some cases.

While a handful of states have passed bills forbidding employers to ask employees or prospective employees for social media passwords, so far there hasn't been any federal legislation on the subject. That may change (or not) now that three members of the House of Representatives have reintroduced a law, the Social Networking Online Protection Act, for consideration by their peers.

A majority of Facebook users say they sometimes take breaks from the social network because they feel bored or overwhelmed, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which surveyed 1,006 U.S. adults about their online habits.

Where romance is kindled poor judgment reigns, it seems, judging by the results of a Match.com survey of the online habits of 5,000 single folks. According to Match.com one-third of the singles surveyed (32%) have sent a "sext" -- that's a revealing photo of yourself sent electronically, for those readers living in burrows -- and over half (51%) have received one.

You know it's a crappy Super Bowl when the most interesting part is the lights going out. But that didn't stop people from talking about it online: despite the general tedium of a one-sided game and a raft of totally insipid, uninspired advertising, Super Bowl XLVII generated a whole bunch of activity of Twitter, proving that people will talk about pretty much anything, even if it's just to say they can't see what's going on.

After Notre Dame’s football program suffered through an embarrassing “but she didn’t actually exist” scandal with Manti Te’o and his fake girlfriend, who tragically died of fake leukemia, it’s understandable that university sports programs might be concerned about who their athletes are talking to online -- or rather, who they think they’re talking to, and what they might tell them, or, ahem, show them.   According to SI.com, the University of Michigan athletic department decided to …