Jeremy Price's Library tagged politics → View Popular

And the answer to that question, "Is science progress?"?

Yes, you'll have to read the book. But in brief, I can say that Americans began to equate the two once they built scientific practices that benefited their deeper goals of cultural progress. Put another way, science did not equal agricultural progress until scientific practices fit a dual improvement ethic that sought moral and material improvement together.

Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress « Generation Bubble

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social technology web history critique critical theory politics

Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.
a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially
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- What’s more, we face a very McLuhanesque danger in which the medium quite literally becomes the message; all these romantic imaginings of spontaneous uprising are projected onto the technology, which consequently acquires a sort of messianic aura in the process and turns reportage into gospel. Perception management thus becomes more a bottom-up that a top-down affair purely as a consequence of situational constraints: a handful of tech-enabled eyewitnesses tweet their observations, which provokes a frenzy of re-tweets from which reporters, barred access to the scene of the action, cherry-pick with nothing to guide them but their intuitions as to the information’s reliability. The net effect is, then, that rather than offering immediacy, events like Twitter Revolutions introduce added layers of mediation, such that it is incredibly difficult to evaluate information sources. Call it crowd-sourced propaganda; it’s certainly not objective reportage.
- Prophets of social-media enhanced news reporting also tend to overlook the class element of their rosy prognostications. A trip to any library serving poor inner-city neighborhoods quickly reveals what social media’s revolutionary potential means to large portions of the citizenry. It means waiting an hour for a half-hour turn on a computer that was obsolete four years ago. This, I think, the dialectical image of the Twitter Revolution, which is really just an internecine power struggle between a monied superclass and its tech-savvy auxiliary. The former seek to preserve oligarchy; the latter to establish technocracy.

21 Sep 09

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" 1994

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evolution science theory philosophy politics belief

05 Sep 09

From Social Media to Democratic Participation? | Snurblog

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technology media politics critical theory

29 Aug 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Look to the Rainbow - NYTimes.com

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community politics justice economics

The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”
Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.
“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.