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Charles van der Haegen

Internet Society (ISOC) All About The Internet: Legal Guide - 1 views

www.isoc.org/internet

internet resources links history law research statistics surveys markety infrastructure code of conduct

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 01 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 01 Jun 11
     
    "About the Internet Histories of the Internet ISOC has gathered links and resources on a range of important Internet topics. Please explore this collection of background material. Internet Scenario The Internet Society has developed four future Internet scenarios that reveal plausible courses of events that could impact the health of the Internet in the future. All about the History of the Internet. Articles from various organisations and personalities. Read more ... Guide to Internet Law The Internet Society provides this guide as a public service for all interested parties. The guide offers links to many useful legal research sites on the Internet, along with brief descriptions. Read more ... Market Research/Statistics Statistics, surveys, and Market research regarding the Internet. Read more ... About the Internet Learn more about the Internet Infrastructure Descriptions of the Internet's infrastructure. How is the Internet organised? What are the bodies involved at different levels? Read more ... Internet Code of Conduct Guidelines on conduct and use of the Internet. Read more "
Charles van der Haegen

Manuel Castells on Vimeo communication Power. Protecting the Commons of Communication S... - 0 views

social media communication power information journalism democracy

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 17 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Jul 11
     
    This is a fundamental lecture. Everyone interested in the future of the World should see this: Basic points (litterally transcribed from manuel Castells' conclusions * communication is the field of Power Making *Communication space has been transformed both by technology and by the restruction of Business and of the Madia *Because of that one of the things that has happened is that the space in the networked society, the space of communication, is more pervasive than ever in History: We all live in a hypertext of Communication * In that space, one of the things that has happenend is to increase the possibilities of the intervention, in autonomous terms, by people, by social actors, by grassroots movements, by social movements and by insurgent politics *It doesn't mean that there is freedom, it means that there are greater chances, greater possibilities *At the same time, because of that, business powers and political powers have understood the need to control also the horizontal networks of communication * Also to play the politics of the internet now has become too important and therefore we have all the attempts to senson the internet * We have all the attempts to use Internet users as potential hiders and cheaters *We have the debate of Internet neutrality because the owners of internet infrastructure are trying to appropriate the infrastructure for the servive of their clients and customers SO WE HAVE A MAJOR? MAJOR POLITICAL BATTLE? AND BUSINESS BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL OF INTERNET And so the most important practical conclusion of my analysis is that the autonomous construction of meaning can only proceed by preserving the commons of communication networks made possible by Internet, a free creation of freedom lovers This will not be an easy task, becuase the power holders in the network society must, to be in Power, must enclose free communication in commercial and public networks in order to close the public mind by programming the connection between communica
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Jul 11
     
    I believe this video to be fundamental, and so close to our themes: Learning, mind Amplifying, collaboration... Let's all together protect the commons of our Communication Space!
Antonio Lopez

Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a 'Rights of the Internet' declaration - Opinion - Al J... - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201228715322807.html

internet cultural citizenship proflopez digital media decolonize media decolonize the media

shared by Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • bitroots politics
  • For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be
  • A perfect storm of counterintuitive grey ethical areas, the internet is metal, code and flesh looking for harmony. This harmony will only come as the full potential of the assemblage is realised, as (and if) it overcomes the enclosures that contain it: capitalist mandates of profit and accumulation, modern human fear and pettiness, and the artificial territorial boundaries imposed by the concept of the Westphalian nation-state.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The corporate legislation project to gradually asphyxiate life in the web follows a twofold strategy: first, to gain terrain inch by inch by crafting ridiculously crippling legislation only to "tone it down" - making legislators look cooperative and magnanimous - while still advancing petty agendas
  • As Shirky notes, what is constantly in play is always how deep the "next turn of the screw" will go.
  • Code and hardware change us as much as we change them. Because we can’t uninvent the internet, we need to make sure it is the healthiest possible web.
  • Healthier code and healthier computers are critical for a society shaped by code and computers. As the recently deceased German philosopher Friedrich Kittler put it: "Codes - by name and by matter - are what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid disappearing under them completely."
  • Codes now reside in brains and bodies as much as in processors and hard drives. These particular individuals are there in representation of those who could not attend, but also in representation of the thick wilderness of codes and machines that bind them together.
  • an assemblage
  • Humans, encompassing their biological selves and their cultures and institutions. Hardware, including computers, mobile devices, mass storage facilities, transmission equipment, transoceanic cables, and so on. Code, including a vast wilderness of ever evolving protocols and software.
  • The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming
  • that life itself is, in ultimate analysis, a series of information streams that bind diverse entities through feedback: "Any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information."
  • The ultimate political challenge that defenders of the internet must face today is to secure lasting health for this hybrid life-form made of metal, code and flesh.
  • It is still relatively uncontroversial to attack a network protocol because everything about it seems morally trivial: Isn't it all artificial in the end? Seen as just a result of human cultural, economic and political forces, machinic life seems enslavable.
  • Ethics in this realm, it must be stressed, are not about what good the machine can do for us, and not even about how we can use the machine to do good - for we are in fact part of the machine, part of the life-form. It means making the whole assemblage healthier for all its parts by fostering "the means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information", within and among its three actors.
  • For example, by noting that the list of corporations co-writing and lobbying SOPA, PIPA and ACTA include not only entertainment but also pharmaceutical corporations, it is evident how human health is tied to the network's health in very real ways.
  • "the internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer
  • With the decline of state colonialism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.
  • The internet is not territory to be conquered, but life to be preserved and allowed to evolve freely.
  • Thinking of the web in terms of machinic life is important in practice for three powerful reasons: First, it guides us through the building of political models that encompass the human and the non-human, a politics for radical yet peaceful diversity needed now more than ever. Second, it unveils the ethical dimensions beneath seemingly neutral issues, allowing stronger defence for issues such as sharing and peer-to-peer practices that depend on healthy protocols and healthy hardware. Third, it is an approach that operates at any scale, allowing us to have nuanced and yet consistent positions regardless of whether we are debating the microscopic labyrinths of a computer chip (metal), the intangible nature of the BitTorrent or Bitcoin protocols (code), or the global impact of WikiLeaks (flesh).
  • Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12
     
    This is a very provocative essay, worth lots of discussion.
Charles van der Haegen

YouTube - Jonathan Zittrain - The Future of the Internet - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11
     
    "Jonathan Zittrain, chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute argues that with the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation - and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11
     
    A speech about The future of Internet by Prof. Jonathan Zittrain see my blog http://ow.ly/5asW2
David McGavock

BPS Research Digest: Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain? - 2 views

bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/...ecome-external-hard-drive.html

shared by David McGavock on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.
  • it's important to keep these new findings in perspective: they hint at how the Internet could be altering our memory habits, but they haven't demonstrated that this is any different from other forms of memory support.
  • similar results might have been obtained if trivia statements had been written in notebooks or told to friends, as opposed to typed into a computer.
  • David McGavock on 03 Aug 11
     
    Last year's annual question posed by Edge was "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Several psychologists answered that it was becoming an extension of their minds. "The Internet is a kind of collective memory,' wrote Stephen Kosslyn (Harvard University). "When I write with a browser open in the background, it feels like the browser is an extension of myself."
Charles van der Haegen

Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet! | Video on TED.com - 1 views

www.ted.com/..._s_take_back_the_internet.html

Freedom Internet democracy corporate power cyberspace contol magna carta for

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 15 Jul 11
     
    "In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 15 Jul 11
     
    Thanks @SailWozniak for drawing attention on this fundamental problem. A magna carta for Cyberspace... But who is the KING??? #mindamp
Antonio Lopez

Practically Nonideological: A Chat with Ethan Zuckerman | Motherboard - 2 views

motherboard.vice.com/...al-a-chat-with-ethan-zuckerman

shared by Antonio Lopez on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • One of the things that I thought was very interesting with Occupy early on was not just the desire to occupy physical spaces, but the desire to occupy media.
  • Now, instead of it being difficult to get footage, what’s really difficult is to edit it down into a narrative in one fashion or another.
  • One thing I’m fairly well known for in my work is trying to be critical about whether we’re adopting technologies because they’re practical, or because they’re ideological.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The reason I push back against this and say, ‘There’s some pretty good tech in Wimax, which probably is an easier way to put a pretty big cloud over an Occupy encampment, and then connect it into the Internet,’ is that I think it’s the Utopian technological politics that have people pursuing a very ground-up, very ad-hoc solution that may or may be the right technological solution.
  • There are two groups right now that are fighting for influence over the Internet. One groups is the guys who’ve run the Internet for a very long time. And I do mean guys. It’s mostly engineers – some with major tech companies, some with major telecom companies – who dominate meetings of things like the IETF, who are representatives of organizations like ICANN.
  • There’s a second camp in all this that is represented by governments, particularly governments of China, Russia, some governments from the global South, that are essentially saying ‘Look, this needs to be run through something closer to the UN system. It needs to be multi-national. It needs to be more representative.’
  • It’s interesting to think about how popular movements might insert themselves in that space. The truth is that with SOPA/PIPA, the traditional tech guys were on one side fighting more or less against Hollywood. And they pulled in support from millions of Internet users who signed up and said ‘We’re with you on this. We’re going to participate.’
  • I don’t see that popular movement [OWS] as the main actor in this space. I see companies like Tumblr, and Twitter, and Google doing a pretty good job of motivating their users. But whether that group of motivated Internet users actually maps onto Occupy…
Charles van der Haegen

Bruce Cahan Helping Consumers Buy Products that Reflect their Values; How Google's Mobi... - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Bruce Cahan internet searching consumer decisions advertising

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 19 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 19 Sep 11
     
    "ABSTRACT Internet searching and advertising increasingly plays a role in consumer decisions and purchases, yet pertinent information for making value-judgments is currently awkward to ferret out and certainly not universally accessible or useful. There is rarely a feedback loop aligning vendor or manufacturer's environmental, social or governance policies with a shopper's values, so shoppers, over time, rarely cause industries to change their behavior. There needs to be a way for shoppers to aim their purchasing power at achieving social values of highest regional priority. There needs to be a way to accumulate and redeem "social values rewards". What's missing is timely and impactful analysis of a candidate purchases' impact on the Shopper's family, region and planet (expressed according to their values), so that the purchaser can more easily make informed purchasing decisions. With some modifications to Google ads and Google product search, Google could solidify the feedback loop and help consumers, by their actions, build a greener and better world. Speaker: Bruce Cahan Bruce B. Cahan, President Urban Logic, Inc. (a nonprofit organization) Email: bcahan@urbanlogic.org Bruce Cahan is an Ashoka Fellow, a social entrepreneur, a non-residential fellow of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, a lawyer, and a banker."
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Sep 11
     
    Interesting-looking talk, but long. Is there a text version?
David McGavock

In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating - page 1 - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011021902888.html

cooperation corporate google twitter facebook washingtonpost

shared by David McGavock on 30 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • In a hard-knuckled, free-market economy built on competition, the most successful Internet companies put a high stake in another value: cooperation.
  • Friendly competition is the explanation often given for the unique success of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
  • Across the Internet industry, the most successful organizations compete by cooperating.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Search giant Google dedicates a team of engineers to help users "move their data in and out of Google products," as the company puts it, free of charge and in a format that can be easily uploaded to competitors' Web sites.
  • David McGavock on 30 Apr 11
     
    In a hard-knuckled, free-market economy built on competition, the most successful Internet companies put a high stake in another value: cooperation.
David McGavock

What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space :: Articles :... - 0 views

the99percent.com/...-of-Deep-Thinking-Sacred-Space

Infotention downtime creativity thinking meditation neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 19 May 11 - No Cached
  • /// article Appreciate (989) Tweet (512) Comment (106) What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space by Scott Belsky Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world's information at our fingertips.
  • Why do we crave distraction over downtime?

Why do we give up our sacred space so easily? Because space is scary.
  • It is now possible to always feel loved and cared for, thanks to the efficiency of our “comment walls” on Facebook and seamless connection with everyone we've ever known. Your confidence and self-esteem can quickly be reassured by checking your number of “followers” on Twitter or the number of “likes” garnered by your photographs and blog posts.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Our insatiable need to tune into information – at the expense of savoring our downtime – is a form of “work” (something I call “insecurity work”
  • five potential mindsets and solutions for consideration:
  • 1. Rituals for unplugging.

  • We need some rules. When it comes to scheduling, we will need to allocate blocks of time for deep thinking. Maybe you will carve out a 1-2 hour block on your calendar every day for taking a walk or grabbing a cup of coffee and just pondering some of those bigger things.
  • 3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.

  • It is supremely important that we recognize the power of our insecurities and, at the very least, acknowledge where our anxiety comes from. Awareness is always the first step in solving any problem.


  • David McGavock on 19 May 11
     
    Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction.
David McGavock

Freedom - Windows and Mac Internet Blocking Software - 0 views

macfreedom.com

productivity tools mindamp infotention thinking tools

shared by David McGavock on 15 Jun 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 15 Jun 11
     
    Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time."
  • David McGavock on 15 Jun 11
     
    Tools that helps one to focus. Turn off the distractions.
Charles van der Haegen

Collusion - 0 views

collusion.toolness.org

tracking personal behavior web internet cookies freedom privacy independence

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    I followwed Georges Siemens' advice on twitter Have a look at Collusion: http://bit.ly/pwcMSc Follow the directions to see how you are tracked across sites. Connections amplify insight I found the site "Collusion" ttp://collusion.toolness.org/ The fundamental problem of the web, and why the battle for web freedom will be so harch to win The site provides you indication which tools you might use to limit companies (and other services) tracking you See also Eli Parisels Ted Talk for his warning of not transparant behavior on the web, or read Jonathan Zittrain's book The Future of Internet
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    This is a great demo, I recomment you to follow and view, and learn and decide from it
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
David McGavock

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead | Video on TED.com - 2 views

www.ted.com/...din_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

ted tribes sethgodin learning culture commons socialmedia leadership

shared by David McGavock on 27 Apr 12 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 27 Apr 12
     
    "Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so. Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead. Full bio »"
  • David McGavock on 27 Apr 12
     
    Godin enjoins us to organize tribes for doing good.
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868

Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted

shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
David McGavock

Steve Rosenbaum | Future of Content - 0 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4847.html

Cooperation Infotention augmentation thinking tools learning culture curation

shared by David McGavock on 14 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 14 May 11
     
    "Dr. Moira Gunn talks with Steve Rosenbaum about how the data aggregator's new role on the Internet from the pages of his new book, Curation Nation: Why the Future of Content is Context. " Rosenbaum predicts a new stage in web interactions where the overwhelming data that is being created is balanced through the efforts of curators: people organizing knowledge.
David McGavock

Tag (metadata) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Tag_(metadata)

tagging wikipedia web2.0 tag mindamp

shared by David McGavock on 17 May 11 - Cached
  • Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating online identity.
  • computer based searching made the use of keywords a rapid way of exploring records.
  • In 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later);
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no "wrong" choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags.
  • David McGavock on 17 May 11
     
    In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file).
David McGavock

critical-thinking - home - 3 views

critical-thinking.iste.wikispaces.net

wiki critical-thinking diigo tools resources

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jun 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 12 Jun 11
     
    "Welcome to the Critical Thinking Compendium! Join Howard Rheingold and other noted educators in creating a world-class resource for teaching critical thinking and Internet literacies."
Charles van der Haegen

‪Yochai Benkler on the eG8‬‏ - YouTube The liberty of Internet - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

freedom internet resistance change technology liberty free speeech open democracy intellectual property creatives

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11
     
    Interview of Yochai Benklepresents his conclusions of the eG8 in Paris DANGER for the liberty of the Inyternet
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11
     
    I believe all people should try to understand what's at stake here. Let's feriousosly oppose any move that could lead to the net doesn't get hyacked by particumar interests monopolies and partisan hegemonies. Let's not allow discouragement to take the upper hand, let's not get influenced by the fact that all prior information empires have been.through, if we have to believe Tim Wu in his book the Master Switch, But let's be watchfull, very watchfull indeed. This time the fate of closed hegemonies getting the upper hand should be disavowed. People who still believe in freedom, equity, and humanness, please, let's band together beyond all our differences tp disavow this fate. Democracy and our grandchildren's life are at stake
David McGavock

Digital Diva * Ten Commandments for a Digital Age - 1 views

www.digital-diva.co.uk/...ten-commandments-digital-age

ten commandments Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 19 Jul 11
     
    "1. Thou shall not be always on - Resist the temptation to always being on. Turn your phone off occasionally. 2. Thou shall not do from a distance what can be done in person - Some powerful global brands can become weak at a local level. 3. Exalt the particular - Not everything scales or needs to scale. 4. You may always choose none of the above - Don't tick the gay/straight/married/single boxes. Human beings are more complex than the simple choices 5. Thou shall never be completely right - The internet verses complexities 6. Thou shall not be anonymous - Anonymity has lead to the conversation being well thought out by those who choose to sign in against the hatred spat out by the anonymous 7. Contact is king - Social marketing is an oxymoron. 8. Abstraction - Don't confuse abstract models and the real world. 9. Thou shall not steal - Without a social contract, openness can continue until there is nothing left to give things away. 10. Program or be programmed - We should ask 'What can we make it do?" rather than "What can it do for us?"."
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