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Jeremy Price's List: Possible Independent Study Readings

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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google technology media article opinion thinking philosophy reading critique on 2008-12-30 and saved by 598 people
study of online research habits

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research technology critique on 2008-12-30 and saved by 26 people
Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science

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science research technology critique epistemology on 2008-12-30 and saved by 4 people
Research + Web = More Consensus, Less Diversity (At Least, So Far) | Britannica Blog

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research internet technology critique on 2008-08-14 and saved by 6 people
- But did faster and easier really mean better and smarter?
From Shared Databases to Communities of Practice: A Taxonomy of Collaboratories

jcmc.indiana.edu/...bos.html - Preview

technology science communities_of_practice collaboration community taxonomy research knowledgemanagement classification on 2008-06-09 and saved by 21 people
The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism

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identity social community culture network research technology web on 2008-12-30 and saved by 33 people
Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook | Snurblog

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social networks critique concept technology facebook on 2008-06-25 and saved by 2 people
- The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook handles what should be its central asset - the social networks that its users belong to. Social networks are defined in the first place by the term 'friend', but being friends with someone on the site is no more than a binary decision: you either are, or you're not. There's no opportunity to do what we do in our lives outside of Facebook every day - to distinguish between different types and levels of friendship: work colleagues, old school friends, family members, neighbours, ex-lovers, casual acquaintances must all be classified simply as either 'friend' or 'non-friend'. What's the use of that?
- This fundamentally ignores some of the basics of how we as humans understand the social networks we're embedded in. We don't just see everyone as our 'friends', but instead have social ties with others that are more or less strong - and for most of us, there's a pretty low upper limit on the maximum number of really close friends we have.
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- - Facebook's enforced flattening of the complexities of social relationships into a binary yes/no choice dilutes the salience of its social network to the point of uselessness. This is further exacerbated by the limited role of groups as a means of defining and developing much more closely connected clusters of users.
  - (As Cory Doctorow recently put it, "for every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy".)
  - Perhaps it's just poor or lazy design; perhaps the flatness of the site's social structure is somehow driven by the deeply entrenched neo-con views that some claim exist amongst Facebook's founders - a libertarian vision of sociality centred around highly independent individuals rather than around strong communities bound by consensually developed, ever-evolving social protocols?
  - Happily, while Facebook is an increasingly transparent attempt to hijack the hive - to capture and commercialise user activity -, more sensible alternatives are also readily available. As far as I'm concerned, a core aspect of such sites must be that they allow for the development and self-organisation of strongly connected social communities whose members retain their power over when, where, and how they interact. Many researchers have pointed to the ways in which online communities collaboratively develop protocols (rules, value systems, mechanisms) for their interaction; these protocols are always directly related to the shared object of interest in the community (whether that's software development, intellectual or recreational pursuits, or sociality itself) - but they're not bound to a specific technology or space of interaction in the way that Facebook attempts to bind participants to its site.
  - protocols to facilitate sometimes controversial discussion on the merits of various cultural texts while maintaining a shared sense of common purpose and a strong understanding of what it is that unites them as fans; the communities of open source developers working on specific projects have protocols to evaluate individual contributions to the project while maintaining an overall development roadmap. Wherever they are, they collaboratively shape their own spaces; they make use of whatever technologies are at hand and useful for the job. Michel Bauwens describes this as "a new form of protocollary power"
  - the genius of the protocols devised in peer to peer initiatives is that they avoid the creation of a collective individual with agency. Instead, it is the communion of the collective which filters value. ... Not having given anything up of their full power, the participants in fact voluntarily take up the concern not only for the whole in terms of the project, but for the social field in which its operates.
  - Ning can be described in short, therefore, as a kind of 'Facebook done right'. On Facebook, social capital in the network is measured mainly on a quantitative basis: the more friends you have, the more of a network hub you are. Qualitative aspects - strong or weak ties, and the context of your connection with another person in the network - hardly get a look in: all links in the network are virtually equal, and thus ultimately equally meaningless. On Ning, the balance is reversed: it's the communities you belong to, and the meaningful contributions you make to those communities, that indicate your place in the network - not the friendship scores you rack up on your profile page.
  - community interaction doesn't have to stop where Ning stops. (That said, Ning sites can be set to 'private', though.) Ning can be just one element - a central hub, aggregator, forum, perhaps - in a federated network of personal and collective blogs, wikis, collaborative project sites, and there's no requirement for all members of that federation to commit to it.
  - Frankly, in my view, Facebook's walled garden approach ultimately perverts the idea of social networking, of social interaction, of sociality itself; however popular it may be today, I fear that as its inner workings become more and more obvious, we'll find that that Facebook is giving social networking a bad name. Ning, and other sites like it, go some way towards reclaiming the idea of social networking by providing a more sensible, sustainable, and indeed social alternative. No doubt some of them have their own flaws - but overall, good luck to them!
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

jcmc.indiana.edu/...boyd.ellison.html - Preview

academic article community definition ethnography journal social technology research web2.0 on 2008-12-30 and saved by 254 people
- We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.
- "Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC).
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- - they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network
Document-centered Peer Collaborations: An Exploration of the Educational uses of Networked Communication Technologies

jcmc.indiana.edu/...gay.html - Preview

education learning technology on 2008-12-30
Technological Determinism

www.aber.ac.uk/...tecdet.html - Preview

technology media philosophy on 2009-01-02 and saved by 4 people
Networked Publics

networkedpublics.org - Preview

technology media culture on 2009-01-02 and saved by 5 people
January 2009 | Academic Commons

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media technology teaching learning on 2009-01-08 and saved by 40 people
Annotating a Text

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annotation learning teaching on 2009-02-19 and saved by 2 people
Collaborative Annotation Strategy

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Annolighting a Text

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annotation learning teaching on 2009-02-19
Reading Strategies

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Jeremy Price

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Updated on 2009-02-19
Created on 2008-12-30

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Jeremy Price's List: Possible Independent Study Readings

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