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Heather D

Berkman Center - 1 views

cyber.law.harvard.edu

shared by Heather D on 03 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Heather D on 03 Jun 10
     
    This is the page for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Has info about digital natives, social media and journalism, and internet and democracy.
Audrey B

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

www.washingtonpost.com/...DI2009061702232.html

Social-Networking twitter iran

shared by Audrey B on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • Audrey B on 21 May 10
     
    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.
jardinejn

Stuart Moulthrop - You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media - Pos... - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu.erl.lib.byu.edu/...1.3moulthrop.html

digital revolution cyber evolution media control

shared by jardinejn on 29 May 10 - No Cached
  • . But
  • But
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  • Stoll excoriates "cyberpunks," virtual vandals who abuse the openness of scientific computing environments. Their unsportsmanlike conduct spoils the information game, necessitating cumbersome restrictions on the free flow of data.
  • Orthodox McLuhanite doctrine holds that "every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics" (Laws of Media viii).
  • Who decides what information "belongs" to whom? Stoll's "popular elite" is restricted to academic scientists, a version of "the people" as nomenklatura, those whose need to know is defined by their professional affiliation.
  • The telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in its true sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited by a relentless disintegration of global authority. Since information is now virtually an equivalent of capital, and since textuality is our most powerful way of shaping information, it follows that Xanadu might indeed change the world.
  • Electronic information, as Stoll sees it, lies in strict analogy with material and private property.
  •   "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" (Gibson 51).
  • The vision of Xanadu as cyberspatial New Jerusalem is conceivable and perhaps eligible, but by no stretch of the imagination is it inevitable.
  • But it seems equally possible that our engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution
  • jardinejn on 29 May 10
     
    Pros and Cons of the newly evolving concept of networking information back in the early 90s
  • jardinejn on 29 May 10
     
    Some interesting questions and speculations about potential controls on media from an early 90s perspective
jardinejn

Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation -- Dahl... - 1 views

nms.sagepub.com/...827

group think cyber democrasy fragmentation

shared by jardinejn on 29 May 10 - Cached
  • jardinejn on 29 May 10
     
    An article about "the democratic implications of the formation of 'like-minded' groups online."
  • jardinejn on 29 May 10
     
    Involves assymmetries in free speech on the Internet
jardinejn

The Impact of Community Computer Networks on Social Capital and Community Involvement - 0 views

proquest.umi.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/pqdlink

social capital networks

shared by jardinejn on 02 Jun 10 - No Cached
  • Putnam defined social capital as the "features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions
  • , civic engagement is a function of communication among members via their social networks, and as civic engagement increases, so does quality of life in the community. Thus, communities with vibrant communication networks are likely to have a preferable quality of life.
  • . Dimmick, Patterson, and Sikand (1996) argued for the role of the traditional telephone in developing and maintaining strong interpersonal communication patterns in the local community.
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  • examination of the role of interactive media in building social capital.
  • Several scholars viewed the computer network of the Internet as especially well suited to communication activities that lead to community building, virtual or otherwise (Jones, 1994; Rheingold, 2000; Wellman, 1997).
  • jardinejn on 02 Jun 10
     
    How networking can influence social causes
  • jardinejn on 02 Jun 10
     
    This study found how group efficacy improves with networking.
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Weiye Loh

Our Greatest Political Novelist? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...eatest-political-novelist.html

Science Fiction Politics Identity Society

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.
  • Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13
     
    "When we call literary writers "political" today, we're usually talking about identity politics. If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction.2"
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