The public world has since become less urgent, more remote, and more tainted.
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shared by Mike Wesch on 26 May 09
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The Public Vanishes - 0 views
www.princeton.edu/...r.Review.BowlingAlone-8-00.htm
review critique putnam community engagement participation pdf2009
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face-to-face civic activity has dropped as groups with local chapters have given way to groups that count as members everyone who sends in a check in response to a direct-mail appeal.
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The important question is the share of income that Americans devote to charity; and by that measure, charitable giving has dropped sharply
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He acknowledges that there has been growth in support groups, but he insists that these are concerned with their own members' psychological well-being rather than with any civic interests
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The rise in volunteering among young people is just about the only data in Bowling Alone that provides a basis for hope about the future.
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One reason for the decline in face-to-face sociability may be that Americans can now sustain relationships with people whom they do not regularly see face-to-face.
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This difference in causal lineage between civic activity and other social activity seems critical to me, though Putnam seems to forget it when he summarizes his causal analysis a chapter later. There he bundles civic engagement together with sociability, and concludes that half of the decline in "social capital" is due to generational turnover, another quarter of it is due to television, and the remainder is the consequence of time pressures and money pressures and suburbanization.
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Measuring Classroom Progress: 21st Century Assessment Project Wants Your Inpu... - 8 views
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“21st Century Literacies” compiled by Cathy N. Davidson Media theorist and practitioner Howard Rheingold has talked about four “Twenty-first Century Literacies”—attention, participation, collaboration, and network awareness—that must to be addressed, understood and cultivated in the digital age. (see, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/category?blogid=108&cat=2538). Futurist Alvin Toffler argues that, in the 21st century, we need to know not only the three R’s, but also how to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Expanding on these, here are ten “literacies” that seem crucial for our discussion of “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” • Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age? • Participation: Only a small percentage of those who use new “participatory” media really contribute. How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level? • Collaboration: How do we encourage meaningful and innovative forms of collaboration? Studies show that collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of “collaboration by difference” to address the most meaningful and effective way that disparate groups can contribute. • Network awareness: What can we do to understand how we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do? • Design: How is information conveyed differently in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices? • Narrative, Storytelling: How do narrative elements shape the information we wish to convey, helping it to have force in a world of competing information? • Critical consumption of information: Without a filter (such as editors, experts, and professionals), much information on the Internet can be inaccurate, deceptive, or inadequate. Old media, of course, share these faults that are exacerbated by digital dissemination. How do we learn to be critical? What are the standards of credibility? • Digital Divides, Digital Participation: What divisions still remain in digital culture? Who is included and who is excluded and how do basic aspects of economics, culture, and literacy levels dictate not only who participates in the digital age but how we participate? • Ethics and Advocacy: What responsibilities and possibilities exist to move from participation, interchange, collaboration, and communication to actually working towards the greater good of society by digital means in an ethical and responsible manner? • Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Alvin Toffler has said that, in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in one’s tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn. This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach. It means that, whenever one thinks nostalgically, wondering if the “good old days” will ever return, that one’s “unlearning” reflex kicks in to force us to think about what we really mean with such a comparison, what good it does us, and what good it does to reverse it. What can the “good new days” bring? Even as a thought experiment—gedanken experiment—trying to unlearn one’s reflexive responses to change situation is the only way to become reflective about one’s habits of resistance.
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""21st Century Literacies" compiled by Cathy N. Davidson Media theorist and practitioner Howard Rheingold has talked about four "Twenty-first Century Literacies"-attention, participation, collaboration, and network awareness-that must to be addressed, understood and cultivated in the digital age. (see, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/category?blogid=108&cat=2538). Futurist Alvin Toffler argues that, in the 21st century, we need to know not only the three R's, but also how to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Expanding on these, here are ten "literacies" that seem crucial for our discussion of "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." * Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age? * Participation: Only a small percentage of those who use new "participatory" media really contribute. How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level? * Collaboration: How do we encourage meaningful and innovative forms of collaboration? Studies show that collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of "collaboration by difference" to address the most meaningful and effective way that disparate groups can contribute. * Network awareness: What can we do to understand how we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do? * Design: How is information conveyed differently in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices? * Narrative, Storytelling: How do na
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shared by Adam Bohannon on 30 Jun 09
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"The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online" danah boyd - 0 views
www.danah.org/...PDF2009.html
inequality stratification facebook myspace politics sociology anthropology technology socialnetworking
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Structurally, social networks are driven by homophily even when there are individual exceptions. And sure enough, in the digital world, we see this manifested right before our eyes.
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One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics.
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason than the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given. And if the ways in which we construct the digital public sphere reinforce the divisions that we've been trying to break down, we've got a problem.
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Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on. People use these sites to connect to the people they know.
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1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in. 2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present. More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.
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3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them. 4) The Internet has enabled many new voices to enter the political fray, but not everyone is sitting at the table. There's a terrible tendency in this country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an advancement as a solution. We have not eradicated racism. We have not eradicated sexism. We have not eradicated inequality. While we've made tremendous strides in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened. Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification.
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Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Pa... - 0 views
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Tim O'Reilly's concept of "web 2.0" was first promoted at a 2004 conference of key industry leaders and later spread via his "What is Web 2.0" essay.
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There is an urgent need for serious reflection on the core models of cultural production, distribution, ownership, and participation underlying "web 2.0."
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those of us who have long advocated for a more "participatory culture" need to better define our ideals and identify and confront those forces that threaten the achievement of those ideals
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A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.
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I have been seeking to better understand the mechanisms by which consumers curate and circulate media content, rejecting current discussions of "viral media" (which hold onto a top-down model of cultural infection) in favor of an alternative model of "spreadability" (based on the active and self conscious agency of consumers who decide what content they want to "spread" through their social networks.
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This new emphasis on "participatory culture" represents a serious rethinking of the model of cultural resistance which dominated cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s.
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In this new context, participation is not the same thing as resistance nor is it simply an alternative form of co-optation; rather, struggles occur in, around, and through participation which have no predetermined outcomes.