MetaFilter posts tagged with Internet and Culture

Mark Helprin vs The Mouth Breathing Morons

shoesfullofdust — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:56:15 -0800

The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn. A review of Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism : A Writer's Manifesto. This is an insanely long review of Helprin's book by Lawrence Lessig. You can read Helprin's 2007 NYT editorial, the impetus behind all of this, here. [previously]

Miro, Miro, on the wall

hippybear — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:18:42 -0800

Been overjoyed with hulu and other online internet television sources? You need to know about Miro, the video podcast tracker and media display program for everyone. Subscribe to some of the feeds. Can't find your favorite listed? It will still work for you. It's a full featured bittorrent client, it works with any media RSS feed, and it's an attractive alternative to VLC for Mac users weeping into their folders full of .avi files. (Plus it's open source!) With many HD sources, including the ability to download YouTube HD content for offline viewing, it's also a resource for original online content, including spawning new "networks." Previously, sort of

Science Fiction, LiveJournal, and "Magical Negros"

happyroach — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:53:37 -0800

A tempest in a Livejournal: It starts with author Elizabeth Bear's post Writing for The Other. Or maybe it started with Jay Lake's Thinking about the Other. It leads to a wide ranging, intense and angry debate on the portrayal of ethnicity in fiction, culture and the media. Avalon's Willow responds with an open letter on the racial content in one of her books, and relates it to media portrayals of ethnic peoples. Deepa D follows up with a post on, cultural appropriation. And then things get intense. Elizabeth Bear apologizes, and says her intent wasn't racist, while shewhohashope tackles criticisms on cultural appropriation. Things could end quietly, but in defending Bear, truepenny posts about how intent and perception. This ticks people off for some reason. Finally, as it ends with no reconcilliation , some people try to put it all in context. So with the debate ended, we see that one side is angry and confrontational, the other is apologetic and trying to draw a lesson out of it. The question is, when it's all over, what good has come from this? Is this people calling out white privilege? Is it a case of perpetual victimhood? Should Elizabeth Bear get her works approved by Avalon's Willow and Deepa D from now on? Or is it just yet another LJ controversy?

Clay Shirky In Charge

kliuless — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:12:18 -0800

The Role of Inconvenience in Designing Social Systems (slyt via robowhiz) cf. affordances & infinite games

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

PeterMcDermott — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 02:34:09 -0800

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.)

Email Overload

Chinese Jet Pilot — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:09:01 -0800

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.

Reality Sandwich

homunculus — Fri, 11 May 2007 00:01:22 -0800

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.]

Make Internet TV

signal — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:55:21 -0800

MITV: A how to for internet video production, from the friendly people at the Participatory Culture Foundation (makers of the Democracy Player).

The problem with music, redux.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:16:20 -0800

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.

"Distance Learning"

MarkO — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:12:55 -0800

Distance Learning by Eric Morin. Background on the short film. (QT instead of IFilm)

Habermas and MeFi

TheRoach — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:25:30 -0800

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?

Today's fear, uncertainty, and doubt brought to you by the internets.

rzklkng — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 08:55:14 -0800

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?

After all, it's the wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future, ...

kliuless — Mon, 23 May 2005 04:17:45 -0800

Steven Levy and Mark Pesce on the future of television. Oh and Conan O'brien! :D [via]

Not just for Trekkies anymore...

FunkyHelix — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 08:15:35 -0800

Fandom is, at the core, neither good or bad. It simply is. [+]

Japan is crazy on the internet!

Kleptophoria! — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 18:34:25 -0800

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.

Digital Journalist

plep — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 02:14:59 -0800

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).

Tracking language evolution through Internet

anathema — Fri, 07 Mar 2003 09:08:27 -0800

Hot, or Not? (via Corante)

mattpfeff — Tue, 08 Oct 2002 09:28:18 -0800

"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.

tbc — Fri, 27 Sep 2002 10:17:25 -0800

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:

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."

sudama — Fri, 22 Mar 2002 00:09:06 -0800

"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?

blackbeltjones — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 06:37:28 -0800

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.

andrewraff — Fri, 16 Mar 2001 09:31:30 -0800

Digital Divide or Dividend? Is the Internet killing unique local cultures or strengthening them?

holgate — Tue, 27 Feb 2001 19:00:40 -0800

"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."

lockecito — Wed, 16 Aug 2000 06:02:29 -0800

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?

Steven Den Beste — Sun, 28 May 2000 22:52:52 -0800

Flame Warriors! (Recognize yourself? I did...)