Group items tagged

This is an article that discusses the views of professional historians regarding wikipedia. I think it makes a number of interesting claims both regarding the management or historical data and wikipedia's role in promoting a particular historical paradigm.

Interesting in terms of issues of ownership. Once our identities are "published" online, who owns them? Who "owns" our search histories? Google owns most of mine, I'd say, but it also allows me to supposedly delete items. Are our search histories too public now to be hidden? And who ever said we had a right to privacy on the world wide web? It does seem contradictory to the nature of a "web."

Even though Dibs is right in saying that erasing your history does not essentially change anything, if you want to access a utopian fantasy, this could be helpful.

This was interesting trying to turn off (or "pause") my web history! This kind of stuff creeps me out-how much "web people" know about us and our personal lives.

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a "We do not track or bubble you!" policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.) *I don't particularly care about my privacy (nothing to hide and honestly don't care whose watching), but I do care about the information being fed to me through search engines. I pride myself on doing all the research I can before supporting or criticizing a position. If google is simply feeding me what I want to hear, how do I know I have the full story? This seems like a particularly nefarious form of censorship--one that makes sense in an age of "truthiness" and pandering to ignorance. Bad google. No bubbles.

A brief history of storytelling.

Self explanatory title tracing the history of online spaces through its inception in a mass scale political context.

Fascinating article from frequent Chronicle tech blogger on why some academic scholars continue to use the typewriter. The primary answer - nostalgia - is both a mood (in the sense of a feeling one has in relation to history and technology), a political statement (opposed to forward modernization), and - perhaps - deeply related to the "literary" or writing (notalgia as why one writes).

This is a very user friendly time frame of viruses from the birth of the concept up until 2004. It doesn't cover everything, but it is interesting to see the evolution.