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Gideon Burton

"Things as they really are" CES Fireside 2009 - Bednar - 0 views

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    LDS apostle David Bednar cautions youth about respecting the role of their physical presence within relationships.
Audrey B

Digital Zapatismo and the Threatened Persecution of Prof. Ricardo Dominguez (UCSD) | Ca... - 0 views

  • The EDT and other Digital Zapatistas succeeded in furthering the message of the EZLN and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but they never physically harmed anyone or anything, in spite of the government violence directed at them.
    • Audrey B
       
      nonviolent electronic civil disobedience
  • As an artist, Dominguez has always looked to open “disturbance spaces” inside our contemporary communication platforms. He is a former member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists and activists whose focus is “the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.” Later Dominguez helped found the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) which sought to expand the work of the CAE into cyberspace. They developed the idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), which just as the name suggests is an electronic extension of Thoreau’s old idea.
  • With black tape across their mouths, surgical masks marked with X’s, and holding signs that read “Art is not a Crime,” and “Academic Freedom,” over 200 students gathered on Thursday, April 8th at the Silent Tree on library walk.
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  • In 2009 Dominguez was named by CNN one of its “Most Interesting People” for his work in developing the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT
  • Professor Dominguez’s work, first with Critical Art Ensemble and then with Electronic Disturbance Theater, has been highly cited, and he has been invited to lecture on the work across a host of important international venues…The esteemed status of Professor Dominguez’s field-defining work has been duly noted by the external referees, who include major international intellectuals working in performance art, new media and globalization.
  • EDT illuminates a new set of possibilities for understanding the relation between performance, embodiment, and spatial practice in cyberspace. Unlike a number of other performance artists, who have explored the relation of the body to technology through the literal encounter of individual physical bodies to machines, those working at EDT have placed the very notion of “embodiment” under question. Rather, they have sought to understand the specific possibilities for constituting presence in digital space that is both collective and politicized.
  • taking known forms and then augmenting or subverting their messages in order to provoke thought, discussion and emotion. What made the EDT different is how they applied these age-old principles of artistic expression to “new” media and digital technology.
  • performances and interventions were based upon questioning (but never fully answering) contemporary social problems and injustices.
  • Members of the EDT, including Dominguez, contributed to the artistic front of the EZLN’s fight for the indigenous people of Mexico. They crafted themselves as Digital Zapatistas, “attacking” the websites of the Mexican government and the agencies of the US government, which were supporting the oppression of the people in Chiapas. But the “attacks” were never effective… only affective.
  • developments of EDT was FloodNet — the technology behind Virtual Sit-Ins such as the one against the UCOP website for which Dominguez is now under investigation.
  • EDT’s goal was to take the long respected tradition of a peaceful sit-in to the virtual space of a website.
  • And, just like an embodied sit-in, to be effective the virtual sit-in must be open and transparent.
  • There are key differences between the virtual sit-in and a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack,” which Dominguez has been accused of launching. With the latter, computers of unknowing individuals become conduits to increase traffic to a particular Internet address, therefore rendering it inoperable, threatening the potential crash of the system itself. In this type of attack the identity of the perpetrators remains obscured in a prolonged assault usually motivated either by retribution, financial gain, and/or attempts to censor free speech.
  • In contrast, with the virtual sit-in, the goals of the action are stated, grievances described, participants known and once it is over no physical damage is done. FloodNet is a Java applet that is the code equivalent of going to the target website and constantly clicking the “reload” button. It also allows the participants to leave messages in the server’s error log by looking for non-existent URLs in the target server, which will then generate error messages. For example, a search for “human_rights” will generate an error message “File not found. ‘human_rights’ does not exist on this .gov server.”
  • by the same administration, which is now threatening him.
    • Audrey B
       
      So let me get this right, basically UCSD hired him after they knew that he co-founded EDT, had participated in ECD, and they knew what he was capable. So they were fine with him "attacking" the Mexican government. But when he and students non-violently protest through a virtual sit-in, because it is aimed towards them, they get mad and are now trying to take his tenure away? Hello, Dr. Dominguez is a professor teaching ECD. Are they going to fire him and take him to court for something he teaches their students?
  • Also among his scholarly and artistic accomplishments cited as reasons to grant Dominguez tenure were the various uses of FloodNet technology to conduct virtual sit-ins on websites run by governments, international finance organizations, anti-immigrant sites and even UCOP’s website.
  • In the hour to come Professor Dominguez would frame his encounter with the administration “Zapatista style,” transforming a closed meeting, the purpose of which was to conduct “fact finding” in relation to his March 4th actions, into a collective meeting or “consulta.”
  • Rejoining the crowd of supporters he sat quietly listening to faculty and students as they read letters that spanned the globe, and which voiced solidarity, alliance, and outrage at the administration’s criminalization of his work.
Krista S

The Rumors Are True: We Spend More And More Time Online - 0 views

  • Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week.
Amanda Giles

Keeping True Identity Online Becomes Battle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But in this more narcissistic Internet era, people who were once happily anonymous view themselves as online minicelebrities with their own brands to promote.
  • vanity addresses
  • accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to show up at the top of the list when people search the Web
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  • his is a new world that we are having to step into in order to protect our brand, and they did not give us a huge window of time to prepare for it
Weiye Loh

Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
  • This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
  • There is also anxiety, however, about the potential of electronic tools to reduce literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important subjects that cannot be easily quantified.
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  • Some scholars are wary of the control an enterprise like Google can exert over digital information. Google’s plan to create a voluminous online library and store has raised alarms about a potential monopoly over digital books and the hefty pricing that might follow. But Jon Orwant, the engineering manager for Google Books, Magazines and Patents, said the plan was to make collections and searching tools available to libraries and scholars free. “That’s something we absolutely will do, and no, it’s not going to cost anything,” he said.
  • Mr. Houghton sought to capture what he called a “general sense” of how middle- and upper-class Victorians thought, partly by closely reading scores of texts written during the era and methodically counting how many times certain words appeared. The increasing use of “hope,” “light” and “sunlight,” for instance, was interpreted as a sign of the Victorians’ increasing optimism.
Audrey B

Iran Elections: A Twitter Revolution? - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

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    Evgeny Morozov, a blogger for Foreign Policy magazine and a fellow with the Open Society Institute, discusses the role of Twitter and other social-networking services during the Iranian elections.
Audrey B

Green Iran pic and blog post - 0 views

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    Blog report on iran elections and twitter.
Audrey B

Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines | DigiActive.org - 0 views

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    This is great. Digital Activism and I'm writing on Electronic Civil Disobedience. I like it.
Amanda Giles

Executive Summary | Pew Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

  • Only 6% of the adult population has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be “especially significant” in their life.
  • contrary to the considerable concern that people’s use of the internet and cell phones could be tied to the trend towards smaller networks, we find that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks. (Discussion networks are a key measure of people’s most important social ties.)
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    Social networking decreases social isolation.
Gideon Burton

Academic Evolution: Scholarly Communications will Transform via Cybermetrics - 3 views

    • Gideon Burton
       
      Note the features of this online writing: -situates itself relative to ongoing discussion (via explicit reference and links) -contains an explicit thesis statement early in the post -includes headings to make subsections easier to navigate and the longer post easier to read -includes appropriate images to draw interest, break up the text, and illustrate the argument -includes mild use of formatting options for emphasis (highlighting in this case) -includes hyperlinks to references -quotes and cites both traditional and online sources (uses the blockquote formatting for a longer quote) -links not only to sources for quotations, but to relevant entities or organizations, or to discussions of the issue (maybe less scholarly, but timely and relevant) -rhetorically, it lays out a story about the past, situates a phenomenon in the present, and discusses the impact for the future of these ideas within our more mediated digital environment -includes relevant tags -has received comments from others (due in part to the author "pinging" or announcing that he'd published a post on his blog via Twitter or other social media
Ashley Nelson

The Public Domain Blog - 0 views

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    This is a blog that I found about the Public Domain. For those who are interested in a little more what the Public Domain is about this guy goes through a pretty good outline of the basics of every chapter. If there is a chapter that interests you, you can also find the book online.
Gideon Burton

Augmented Reality: An Introduction to Digital Literature - 3 views

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    A showcase of various types of electronic or digital literature. A good list of various boundary-breaking genres being experimented with.
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