The Role of Inconvenience in Designing Social Systems (slyt via robowhiz)
posted on Sep 19, 2008 - View this thread

Anthropologists in the digital domain tend to be a day late and a dollar short as far as us early adopters are concerned, but Michael Wesch managed to capture the popular imagination with his YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. He recently gave a presentation to the Library of Congress titled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube in which he talks about the best of the web (not to be confused with The Best of The Web.)
posted on Aug 4, 2008 - View this thread

E-motional breakdown: The state of e-mail misery. Is email finally at the breaking point? My inbox is so oversaturated I need professional advice to avoid bankrupcy. Or maybe I'll just wait it out -- the kids might know best.
posted on Jul 23, 2007 - View this thread

Reality Sandwich is a new web magazine whose subjects "run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies." Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of Breaking Open the Head, is the editorial director of the site. [Via Disinformation.]
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread

MITV: A how to for internet video production, from the friendly people at the Participatory Culture Foundation (makers of the Democracy Player).
posted on Apr 16, 2007 - View this thread

While Courtney pulled an Albini, Jeff handed out the bread. Are the peasants acting like emperors, or do they still want something shiny, aluminum, plastic, and digital? Debacle or cage, something's got to give (pdf). Alternatively, you can just roll your own.
posted on Feb 4, 2007 - View this thread

Distance Learning by Eric Morin. Background on the short film. (QT instead of IFilm)
posted on Sep 14, 2006 - View this thread

Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere. Habermas' conception of the public sphere has become increasingly interesting to scholars of internet theory. Any thoughts on what role MeFi plays in creating a public? What about issues of accessibility, autonomy, and quality? Could Mefi be the realization of Habermas' public sphere?
posted on Dec 20, 2005 - View this thread

Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place. So far we've established that blogs can get you fired, keep you from getting a job, give pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*, endanger the marketing , product planning, and product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can infect your computer with virii, and have all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given "Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in local station marketing payola. The FEC has held public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement) discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women. The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted on Jul 29, 2005 - View this thread

Steven Levy and Mark Pesce on the future of television. Oh and Conan O'brien! :D [via]
posted on May 23, 2005 - View this thread

Fandom is, at the core, neither good or bad. It simply is. [+]
posted on Feb 16, 2005 - View this thread

Megametajapanfilter --feel the fury of 2ch, Japan's largest message board. Not only have bus hijackings (CNN) and group suicides been announced there, but 2ch helped spawn a world of memes and spin-off sites. The likes of pancake bunny (Oolong) and roflcopter have been breeding freely in the English-language mirror-world 2ch would help create. There is the (frequently disgusting and sexual) spin-off image board 4chan (English), which is a legend in its own right, plus many other *chans you'd rather not see. (See also the Japanese Futaba Channel.) Obviously Something Awful goons had their fingers in the 4chan pie.
posted on Dec 2, 2004 - View this thread

The Digital Journalist: Features. The Digital Journalist: Features. Photojournalism features on a spread of human life, from Afghan child labour, the Dalai Lama and the Soviet Union to Marilyn Monroe, jazz and Smalltown USA. (Warning - adverts).
posted on Jun 1, 2003 - View this thread

Hot, or Not? (via Corante)
posted on Mar 7, 2003 - View this thread

"If you like surfing the web, it is probably because you believe people are basically good." That's the Economist interpreting the results of a recent study by IBM researchers of how cultural characteristics apparently affect people's readiness to adopt new communications technologies.
posted on Oct 8, 2002 - View this thread

Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired. I found the link in a newsletter from WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:

1. Information gods amongst mortals
2. The Information Gods respond
3. Information Gods Srike Back

He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted on Sep 27, 2002 - View this thread

"In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us -- white folks and people of color -- will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race." So says Henry Jenkins in a Technology Review article on Cyberspace and Race. On the Internet, nobody knows you're oppressed?
posted on Mar 22, 2002 - View this thread

Make World event in October, Germany - about borderless digital culture, no doubt curated long before The Current Situation, but I'm sure will be rendered far more relevant as a result.
posted on Sep 26, 2001 - View this thread

Digital Divide or Dividend? Is the Internet killing unique local cultures or strengthening them?
posted on Mar 16, 2001 - View this thread

"This stuff is still great." Paul Ford reminds us, as ever, why we're here, and thinks smart about the downturn: "We thought that Metcalfe's law on networks and Moore's law on processor power would change everything. But people don't change every 18 months; cultures don't start moving faster than processors. People don't increase their value with the increase in value."
posted on Feb 27, 2001 - View this thread

John Seely Brown interviewed by Wired. The former head of Xerox Parc. There were two really insightful quotes I came across in this article;

Lurk is the cognitive apprenticeship term for legitimate peripheral participation. The culture of the Internet allows you to link, lurk, and learn. Once you lurk you can pick up the genre of that community, and you can move from the periphery to the center safely asking a question.

Sort of like Metafilter =) And...

Bob Metcalfe has it all wrong: The power of a network isn't the square of the number of people - it's the number of communities it supports. If you look at n people, there are potentially 2**n communities.

I've actually wondered about Metcalfe's law. This n^2 has always seemed metaphorical to me, but it seems a lot of people mention it as if it were a literal relationship. What is the "value" of a network anyway? Anyone know of research on this?
posted on Aug 16, 2000 - View this thread

Flame Warriors! (Recognize yourself? I did...)
posted on May 28, 2000 - View this thread

Do we all need to get out more? Although they're putting the "too much time with computers, not enough social interaction" spin on this study's findings, there are actually some good results of it. Heavy internet users spend less time in traffic (because they look up traffic before going anywhere?), less time in malls (shopping online instead, duh), and less time watching TV (this is the best news of all, I barely watch it anymore because it's mostly inane garbage, whereas on the internet, I can find interesting things to read and enjoy). As for the less face time with friends and family, I have a growing number of friends online that I consider to be as close as any Real Life friend could be.
posted on Feb 17, 2000 - View this thread

An interesting article over at Slashdot on the 9 continents of the Internet. I've always had a sense that there were these different "circles" that people ran in, but I never could quite pin them down. Of course, I'm not sure that they can be pinned down precisely to 9, but I can appreciate the attempt.
posted on Feb 14, 2000 - View this thread