Group items tagged

A comic state of, well, The State of the Web. This is part of a quarterly series done by The Oatmeal and addresses many of the topics we've been touching on regarding ownership, social media, etc.

I think this one counts as topical, as well because he's slicing out the conventions. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_suck

New technology: take a photo with a web-enabled camera, and receive a short description of said photo, provided by a real, live human! Will this really change the way we take photographs? The reasons we photograph? What about questions of editing, curating, filtering?

Chapter 1- Survivor Spoilers: I became terribly interested in the idea of "tele-tourism" and upon looking it up some more I found Jenkins had written this article for MIT/tech review. Just recently, I had friends go on an epic quest to visit the house that the "Goonies" was flimed at. Columns Tourism with a Twist Ecotourism, meet teletourism. You've seen it on TV. Now see it in person. What did I do on my summer vacation?

my kids are obsessed with this station....interesting illustration of some of the convergence between radio & social media discussed in reading this week...

In a move that heightened competition in online education and brought more prestige to the still-fledgling field, Harvard University and MIT announced a partnership Wednesday to offer the public mainly free Internet classes.

Heard about this on NPR today, M.I.T. and Harvard are actually starting a non-profit and have already dumped $60 million into a project they call edX, intended to "improve, not replace, the campus experience." Should turn out to be an honorable donation to the global learning community. This is an interesting move towards providing free access to quality educational information. -Another article containing a press release: Engadget Article

The article John mentioned in class today

Youth and social networking as mentioned in class: http://dmlcentral.net/newsletter/05/2012/analytical-take-youth-social-networking-and-web-20-few-moments-amanda-lenhart

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well. [End Page 67] Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.

Let's read this at the end of the term!

(CNN) -- Remember earlier this year when Wikipedia went black in protest of anti-piracy legislation moving through the U.S. Congress? Yeah, well, that may be nothing compared to this. A group called the Internet Defense League, borrowing a page from Batman, is trying to create a "bat signal" for mobilizing open-Internet activists against similar legislation.

The battle for "internet freedom" continues! This time Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian will introduce the Internet Defense League just in time for Congress to visit the CISPA legislation, which allows the U.S. government, in cooperation with certain tech companies, to access various personal internet traffic information. The president has already threatened to VETO this bill due to concerns for confidentiality and civil liberties.