The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

I found this post — a google horror story by danah boyd — to be interesting reading in light of Jean’s recent post about leaving Facebook. [more]

Lifestreaming seems to be making a comeback. It’s “hot” at various trend sites right now. I wonder where people draw the line. Do people take a photo of every meal they have and upload it to a public site? I think the old Nokia Lifeblog sites were private, weren’t they? I guess some people would consider that kind of record valuable regardless, even though it holds no information for anyone else. Unless you’re eating at an interesting restaurant every night, I suppose. And even then, it’s not much more than a top-slice and a record of plates that have been shoved in front of you. Unless you consider the massive aggregation of feeds from online services that represents the bulk of lifestreaming as digital entrails that meaning can be divined from.

Link

News Corporation has begun blocking user-generated content from Photobucket on Myspace.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education Henry Jenkins’s provocative enquiry into the role of the university in the age of blogs, YouTube, and the temporary social networks that are enabled by this technology:

The science-fiction writer and Internet activist Cory Doctorow has called such groups “adhocracies.” An adhocracy is a form of social and political organization with few fixed structures or established relationships between players and with minimum hierarchy and maximum diversity. In other words, an adhocracy is more or less the polar opposite of the contemporary university (which preserves often rigid borders between disciplines and departments and even constructs a series of legal obstacles that make it difficult to collaborate even within the same organization). Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let’s call this new form of academic unit a “YouNiversity.”

Henry concludes that…

I’m re-posting Nick’s reference to “Making Light”. There was something bizarre going on with that page that was preventing comments. If you tried to comment and couldn’t, please consider trying again.

Via Making Light, a soc1alist defense of space exploration from UK writer China Miéville.

Steven Brust’s comment in the Making Light discussion is worth a read too.

Via Making Light, a socialist defense of space exploration from UK writer China Miéville

Steven Brust’s comment in the Making Light discussion is worth a read too.

The British scientist who developed the world wide web says that he is concerned the internet could be misused as it grows and is advocating a research project to study its future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who is credited with creating the internet, said in an interview with the BBC that the way the web is used should be examined by a broad spectrum of experts.

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Berners-Lee wants to convene scientists from various disciplines – including biology, political science and sociology – to study the web and the way it affects society.

Hey, what a great idea! Pity no one in the humanities ever thought about studying the Internet!

There are countless researchers in the humanities and social sciences looking at the Internet, digital technologies, and issues in the philosopy of science, and if any one of them ever made a public comment that demonstrated such a fundamental lack of knowledge about an important field of scientific research, there would be outcry about the discipline’s lack of relevance. But Sir Tim can get away with parading his ignorance with impunity.

Seems like the Two Cultures are alive and well.

Scholars who wish to free themselves from the tyranny of Endnote et al and who aren’t afraid to run Firefox 2.0 Beta are advised that Zotero, the Firefox-based citation and bibliography manager, finally has a publicly available release.

It looks like the ABC is making a more sustained push towards covering digital cultures with a new gaming-focused show called Good Games. From the look of the ABC’s own site for the show, it’s going to be a long time before we see a more sophisticated focus on gaming from television media. Still, it’s a start.

Blackboard, the market-leading provider of learning management systems to higher education, has just announced that they’ve been granted a patent for pretty much the entire field.

I’ve long been suspicious of proprietary LMS tools, particularly with regards to the way that they can lock away academic knowledge. In particular, I think that their encroachment into the Higher Education system has contributed greatly to the Academy’s decline in social relevance and slow transformation into a mass of corporate think-tanks. But what this patent means that it’s going to become harder—using the terminology of the network—to route around the damage, or, in other words, to use communication technologies that might create other ways of learning and sharing knowledge.

I’ve got some thoughts that I want to put together on the highly free-market capitalist discourse of ‘innovation’ and how it might be bent to progressive ends. Expect something soon. Ish.