how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
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Doug Rushkoff: Program or be Programmed | WEBLOGSKY: Jon Lebkowsky's Blog - 0 views
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How much of this is the bias of a binary medium, and how much of it is attributable to the biases of the people who program our technologies
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invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
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In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.
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In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
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Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.
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8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.
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3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”
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By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.
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7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
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you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
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We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.
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10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
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The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.