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David McGavock

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

  • how culture drove human evolution
  • cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
  • but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
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  • or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status
  • Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.
  • social status
  • second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
  • from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,
  • From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige
  • give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back
  • you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
  • some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
  • may have started early
  • another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.
  • here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
  • Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
  • 400,000 years ago
  • there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
  • In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
  • we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
  • for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.
  • trying out different technique
  • take advantage of the variation
  • the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?
  • only humans have it
  • humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down
  • idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
  • Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.
  • when societies begin to get big and complex
  • large-scale cooperation
  • What are the causal processes that bring these things about?
  • There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
  • I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.
  • there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
  • they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups
  • In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.
  • but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
  • if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
  • more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
  • ritual plays a role in this
  • rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
  • elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods
  • high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind
  • Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
  • People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
  • We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
  • There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
  • In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
  • We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
  • , it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
  • what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
  • you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
  • One possible exception to that is bird song.
  • One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
  • looking at a case study in Tasmania.
  • You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
  • You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
  • study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline
  • larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
  • more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.
  • rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
  • As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
  • An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.
  • Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
  • a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have
  • I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.
  • Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife
  • pushes us towards polygyny
  • But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
  • European Marriage Pattern,
  • Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage
  • people are ready to moralize it,
  • it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
  • If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,
  • especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
  • to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
  • Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 
  • Culture is part of our biology.
  • We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
  • Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,
  • A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
  • One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
  • at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
  • behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
  • The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
  • I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this
  • I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
  • they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
  • over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
  • we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
  • able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
  • there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
  • measured market integration much more carefully
  • subsequent project
  • large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
  • did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
  • Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
  • This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers
  • one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game
  • three measures of fairness
  • size of the community predicts willingness to punish
  • suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.
  • It could be some kind of reputational mechanism
  • There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.
  • In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
  • This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
  • but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
  • these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers
  • large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
  • if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.
  • A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
  • In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
  • Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion
  • adherence to a world religion matters
  • People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
  • Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
  • political scientists call it the rule of law
  • those rules apply independently of the identities
  • If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
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    [JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
Charles van der Haegen

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

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    "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

Skeptic » About Us » A Brief Introduction - 1 views

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    "A Brief Introduction All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. -Albert Einstein The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science. Our mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on those controversial ideas and claims. Under the direction of Dr. Michael Shermer, the Society engages in discussions with leading experts and investigates fringe science and paranormal claims. It is our hope that our efforts go a long way in promoting critical thinking and lifelong inquisitiveness in all individuals. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. -Baruch Spinoza Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas - no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are "skeptical," we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe. Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when Socrates observed: "All I know is that I know nothing." But this pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. If you were skeptical about everything, you would have to be skeptical of your own skepticism. Like the dec
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    a nice source of curated uncomfortable knowledge
Charles van der Haegen

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

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    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
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    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!
David McGavock

Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views

  • researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
  • Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
  • Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:
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  • The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
  • Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
  • same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
  • said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
  • Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
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    Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
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  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
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    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
Charles van der Haegen

SMUPreprint.pdf (Objet application/pdf) - 1 views

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    The first chapter of what is for me a fundamental book that complements our learning here, and hints at how Social Media might contribute to creating a better World. The article elaborates on how new Social Theory brings new perspectives to finding and implementing solutions to the intractable problems of our time. These ideas originally developped by Mary Douglas, an antropologist, and have been further refined and developped into a fully integrated Social Theory, called Theory of Socio-Cultural Viability, anso sometimes called "Cultural Theory". The lead researcher in this field is Michael Thompson, co-author of this book and chapter. Here are some highlights I have jotted down: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineer
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    Hi guys, this might be stuff that is of interest to you...
Charles van der Haegen

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

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    "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."
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    Interesting-looking talk, but long. Is there a text version?
David McGavock

Multitude Project - 1 views

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    "The scope of the Multitude Project is to drive the multitude social movement. In other words, we try to understand how the new technology is changing the power structure in modern societies, we build a new vision for a brighter future, and we propose a path towards this future, whereby the potential introduced by the new technology is actualized to the advantage of the multitude. Change is clearly on the way, in the natural direction of the emancipation of masses, a trend which can be clearly recognized throughout history. Major institutions will be greatly transformed in the near future due to immense pressure mainly induced by rapid technological advancements. Our goal is to predict some of these changes and to channel the change into a peaceful, incremental and constructive revolution. Along with the aforementioned exploratory and speculative activities, we also propose new methods and tools, to help individuals and groups all around the world in their daily struggle against injustice and economical inequality."
Charles van der Haegen

Global Voices · About - 0 views

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    "Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices. Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs. Our Projects Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua project. Additionally, Global Voices has an Advocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world. Read more about our projects. Our History Global Voices was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an internat
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    Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified
David McGavock

Interpersonal ties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties.
  • Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.[1]
  • the fact that two people may know each other by name does not necessarily qualify the existence of a weak tie. If their interaction is negligible the tie may be absent. The "strength" of an interpersonal tie is a linear combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (or mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize each tie.[2]
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  • In 1954, the Russian mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport commented on the "well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals." This argument became one of the cornerstones of social network theory.
  • In a related line of research in 1969, anthropologist Bruce Kapferer, published "Norms and the Manipulation of Relationships in a Work Context" after doing field work in Africa. In the document, he postulated the existence of multiplex ties, characterized by multiple contexts in a relationship.[4][5]
  • Social networks In social network theory, social relationships are viewed in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied.
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    "Interpersonal ties From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nodes (individuals) and ties (connections) in social networks. In mathematical sociology, interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak, or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. "
David McGavock

Shame and honour drive cooperation - 0 views

  • Shame is a traditional deterrent from asocial behaviour and is employed when offenders are singled out for public scorn.
  • Modern democratic societies have moved away from including the public in the punishment, although in some cases (e.g. drunk driving licence plates) the state still sanctions shame [1].
  • shame as well as honour could become more prevalent as digital technology
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  • We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.
    • David McGavock
       
      Point of the study
  • If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?
  • In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]
  • We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.
  • expected that shame might be more effective than honour
  • n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.
  • confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group
  • Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.
  • Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.
  • Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.
  • language, replaced direct observation
  • the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.
  • The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.
  • Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.
  • difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].
    • David McGavock
       
      Interesting distinction; that attention is in shorter supply than information.
  •  
    Full description of study by Jennifer Jacquet
David McGavock

Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law | SmartPlanet - 1 views

  • David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.
  • Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.
  • His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.
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  • “To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”
  • Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.
  • Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.
  • I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.
  • It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.
  • I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.
  • Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.
  • My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.
  • Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data
  • Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.
  • I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it
  • Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,
  • You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.
  •  
     "To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy," he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  "If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza."
Antonio Lopez

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

  • 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).
  •  
    This is a very provocative essay, worth lots of discussion.
David McGavock

Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
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  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  •  
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
Charles van der Haegen

Michael+Thompson+Lisbon+Report+Democratic+Governance+Technological+Change+and+Globalisa... - 0 views

  •  
    A fundamental article on how new social theory brings new perspectives on how to find and omplement solutions to the intractable problems of our time. These ideas originally developped by Maruy Dougleas, have been refined and developped into a full theory, called Theory of Socio-Cultural Viability, anso sometil$mes called "Cultural Theory". The lead researcher in this field is Michael Thompson, author of this Workshop Report
Charles van der Haegen

The International Society for Ecological Economics - 0 views

  •  
    "ISEE is a not-for-profit, member-governed, organization dedicated to advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people. Ecological economics exists because a hundred years of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry has left us unable to understand or to manage the interactions between the human and environmental components of our world. While none would dispute the insights that disciplinary specialization has brought, many now recognize that it has also turned out to be our Achilles heel. In an interconnected evolving world, reductionist science has pushed out the envelope of knowledge in many different directions, but it has left us bereft of ideas as to how to formulate and solve problems that stem from the interactions between humans and the natural world. How is human behaviour connected to changes in hydrological, nutrient or carbon cycles? What are the feedbacks between the social and natural systems, and how do these influence the services we get from ecosystems? Ecological economics as a field attempts to answer questions such as these."
  •  
    ISEE's Dedication: Advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people: My question: Did this understanding ever exist. If yes, why was this understanding lost ??? If not: How come?
Charles van der Haegen

Geoff Mulgan: A short intro to the Studio School - YouTube - 2 views

  •  
    "Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, "for real." TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Category: People & Blogs Tags: TED TEDTalks TEDGlobal Geoff Mulgan Creativity Culture Design Education Work learning learn Studio School projects active learning participatory License: Standard YouTube License 223 likes, 4 dislikes Top Comments 1) 0:15 (to skip intro) 2) I'm sending this to my all my professors and even my old high school teachers too! More people need to hear about this idea! It may not be perfect now, but with more minds working together, it can be fine-tuned into something to suite ALL students (not just those in Media and Arts). Thanks TED! jerrylittlemars 14 hours ago 28 @merkowaty1 additional: just about ANYTHING is going to be more fun than traditional school as we have them today. ion010101 13 hours ago 6 see all All Comments (58) Reactions (2) Respond to this video... we do indeed learn by doing yet we are watchin
  •  
    This is a really great initiative, worth watching. Sometimes I feel a bit unsettled, so much things happening in every corner of society at large... accelerating at such a fast pace... Whare, When, will this lead us towards... What can I do?
Alex Grech

Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia - Josh Sternberg - Technolog... - 0 views

  • If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they'd be dead,"
  • "If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do."
  • So they went back to school to learn how to create Facebook campaigns, how to incorporate SEO best-practices, how to blog, and how to create social media strategies.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • But as social interactions and technologies mature, there has been a swing in the pendulum. Professors are now approaching the teaching of social media from a pedagogical perspective, as much as a practical one.
  • the theories behind social media: why do things go viral, the social theories of how people act and how they communicate to a network, or one person at a time, and why do certain tools work they way they do for us
  • Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.
  • With social media being a pervasive, if not invasive, aspect of our lives, it makes perfect sense for the Ivory Tower to embrace social media from a theoretical perspective to help students understand the technology and its effect on their daily lives, as well as the epistemological question of "how do we know what we know?"
  • The medium is relatively new enough that there's no canon shaping social media, just conceptual frameworks for looking at the effects of social media on students' lives and communities and on society as a whole. The task of academics is to give students a vocabulary to understand these perspectives, tools to make sense of the theoretical discussions and think critically about social media.
  • "I don't think you have the credibility of doing research, of writing about, unless you get to really know that culture. And the best way of knowing the culture is to actually be immersed in it."
  • "no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."
  • Rheingold puts it,
  • Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies
  • Terms like "digital native" (those born during or after the introduction of digital technology -- computer, Internet, etc. -- and have an assumed greater understanding of how technology works because they've been using digital technology their entire lives) and "digital immigrant" (those born before this introduction and have had to adapt and adopt the technology at a later point in life) have been bandied around by experts and marketers as ways of classifying and differentiating between generations, and, more importantly, the expectations of those who fall into either category.
  • it has stopped educators from teaching what they need to teach. It has scared educators into thinking students know more than us. God forbid we learn something from our students. And, so, we assumed these kids already know, and we don't teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don't. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?"
  • the lack of critical literacy.
  • ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi
  • al and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations.
  • "We have on our hands the last generation of educators who do remember life before these tools, and so therefore, we have an opportunity to teach some critical literacy that these students may not get otherwise; this generation may not get otherwise
  • Rheingold puts the onus on the students to learn not just from him, but from each other. Instructors can serve as a facilitator, but the student has to want to be there, process that information, and use that information in a productive way.
  • "The issues around social media -- community, identity, presentation of self, social capital, public sphere, collective action; a lot of important topics from other disciplines -- aren't really being raised in academia," said Rheingold. "They ought to be because these topics, not only academically, in terms of the shifts in media and literacy that they're triggering in the world, are where the students live and work."
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