media - Howard Rheingold on Diigo

05 Dec 09

"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

"Consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media and you will see where Web2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful. Living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being in flow with information is different than Csikszentmihalyi's sense, as it's not about perfect attention, but it is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.

As of late, we've been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you're living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.

Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools.

For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination, of accessing information as a process, of producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes? While things are certainly clunky at best, this is the promise land of the technologies we're creating. This is all happening because of how our information society is changing. But before we talk more about flow, we need to step back and talks about shifts in the media landscape."

www.danah.org/...Web2Expo.html - Preview

attention media infotention social_media

21 Nov 09

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

"There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers."

www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/...iif-you-happened-to-being.html - Preview

journalism media public_sphere

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line
11 more annotations...
- I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
- There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
- There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
- The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
- The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
  I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
- In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
  But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve.
- So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce.
- So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the re
- Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now.
- The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
  This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:
- we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
  So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things

29 Oct 09

History of print=technology+culture abreast: Reflections on revolution in mass media+advent of minute media @CShirky @Pierre @JohnBattelle @tropology - esh.it that matters

"The invention Gutenberg's printing press is dated to about 555 years ago -- repeated innovations have spread in waves to popularize mass media in bursts over the following 5 centuries
The initial burst was most directly felt in the Protestant Reformation. Note that it was not alone Gutenberg, but primarily Martin Luther who was responsible for inventing the written language which is today known as German. Therefore, this initial revolution took a very long time to spread throughout the population -- indeed: several generations. The fact that most of Europe was in turmoil for most of this time complicated the adoption of literacy as a technology. Fifty years after the first press, presses could be found in many European cities. Two centuries after the invention of the press, a quite small but nonetheless significant portion of the population could read. Three centuries after the invention of the printing press, the literate portion of the population was large enough such that when Tom Paine wrote "In America, law is king" people understood what that meant: the basis for democracy was (and is) written laws. By the beginning of the 19th Century, the literate portion of the population was quite sizable in most industrialized countries -- and what is more: public schools further promoted literacy."

esh.it/ttechnologyculture-abreast-ref - Preview

literacy technology media

25 Oct 09

PopTech: blog

"There are 20,000 videos addressed to the YouTube community uploaded every day. Why? Wesch and his students got online and started trying to understand the phenomenon. It’s a community created through webcams and screens – he shows us a young woman talking to a webcam explaining that she’s talking to the cam, not to you – she doesn’t know who you are. It’s awkward to talk to an unknown audience – Wesch shows us his own awkwardness talking to the camera. One student points to the camera and says, “it would be so much better if this thing blinked and smiled.”

The students felt awkward about the ability to watch themselves after the fact. McLuhan talked about the world of instant replay – the replay offers the ability to recall, recognition.

YouTube isn’t always a pleasant place. He quotes Lev Grossman: “Some of the comments on YouTube make you week for the future of humanity, just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.” Anonymity leads to a particularly hateful dialog. Anonymity plus physical distance and ephemeral dialog can lead to hatred as public performance.

But for others, it can lead towards a freedom to have new kinds of conversations. Sometimes this distance allows us to connect more deeply than ever before – Wesch tells us that the camera allows people to confess things to the camera that they wouldn’t say to their close friends. We see this creating new forms of community and of social understanding. "

www.poptech.org/..._taking_youtube_seriously.html - Preview

media

22 Oct 09

But I Don't Want to Teach My Students How to Use Technology -- Campus Technology

"For some teachers, the technology revolution of the last 30 years was and is an epiphany, but for most faculty it remains an enigma, at best a fad and at worst a threat. A person responding to one of my recent articles in Web 2.0 told me that, "Come on!, I don’t want to teach my students how to use the technology but just do pure teaching." He missed the point: Adapting to information technology does not necessarily mean using technology at all, but it does require an understanding of how education has been irreversibly altered.

The technology in itself is fascinating, but the fundamental cultural and human truth underlying information technology as a medium is that it is the super-medium, the third medium after spoken language and writing that has most fundamentally molded humanity."

campustechnology.com/...nts-How-to-Use-Technology.aspx - Preview

media educational_technology pedagogy

14 Oct 09

Wiley InterScience :: JOURNALS :: Sociology Compass

"The media landscape has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one predominated by traditional mass communication formats to today's more personalized network environment. Mobile communication plays a central role in this transition, with adoption rates that surpass even those of the Internet. This essay argues that the widespread diffusion and use of mobile telephony is iconic of a shift toward a new 'personal communication society', evidenced by several key areas of social change, including symbolic meaning of the technology, new forms of coordination and social networking, personalization of public spaces, and the mobile youth culture. The conclusion speculates on future trends in the sociotechnological climate."

www3.interscience.wiley.com/...abstract - Preview

networks social_networks mobile_devices digital_natives media

17 Aug 09

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: New Media Literacies -- A Syllabus

What does it mean to be "literate" and how has this changed as a consequence of the introduction of new communication technologies? What social skills and cultural competencies do young people need to acquire if they are going to be able to fully participate in the digital future? What are the ethical choices young people face as participants in online communities and as producers of media? What can Wikipedia and Facebook teach us about the future of democratic citizenship? How effective is Youtube at promoting cultural diversity? What relationship exists between participatory culture and participatory democracy?

henryjenkins.org/...edia_literacies_--_a_syll.html - Preview

literacy media syllabi

14 Aug 09

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen - cartoon Recombinant Records

Great cartoon about Huxley vs Orwell

www.recombinantrecords.net/...musing-Ourselves-to-Death.html - Preview

media public_sphere

13 Aug 09

Will Barack Obama's Media Ubiquity Be the Most Significant Aspect of His Presidency? -- New York Magazine

Sound bites, says Clay Shirky, the NYU new-media philosopher and recent author of Here Comes Everybody, were a product of media scarcity, when public figures had a finite amount of time and space to make their points. Now we live in a world of “Publish, then filter,” he points out, rather than “Filter, then publish,” a time when the question is “Why not film this?” rather than “Why film this?”

nymag.com/...index2.html - Preview

media filter

05 Aug 09

Don't Buy It . Teacher's Guide | PBS KIDS GO!

Teachers have the ability to engage students in media literacy — the ability to access, evaluate, analyze and produce both electronic and print media — by dissecting pop culture and advertisements. Media literacy education can help students build critical thinking and analytic skills, become more discriminating in the use of mass media, distinguish between reality and fantasy, and consider whether media values are their values

pbskids.org/...teachersguide.html - Preview

literacy media media_literacy

29 Jul 09

Media literacies and media as cultural techniques

While quite a few scholars would deny or at least doubt that electronic mass media culture needs literacy, all of them would agree that the ongoing processes of digital culture demand learning new techniques. A short search under the keyword “digital literacy” shows a huge amount of publications only from the last 5 years. An obvious indication for the importance of this new form of literacy is also the fact that both elementary and secondary schools focus heavily on education for the digital age, both by informing about ICT and by doing digital education, in terms of for example e-learning.11 Curricula are more and more based on digital competences; some talk about learning as the learning of the ITC-ABC.

Some might claim that digital literacy is not a really new proficiency since it is heavily based on the old techniques of reading and writing. Textual expressions are thus only remediated. Others claim that digital literacy is (far) more than the combination or sum of previous forms of literacy. Søby calls it the fourth basic literacy (Søby, 2003).

74.125.155.132/search - Preview

literacy media media_literacy

Outline « Mediactive

Here’s my working list of likely chapters:

1. Principles of Media Consumption: We lay out the principles discussed above in depth, explaining why they matter and how they can be applied. This is a long chapter with subsections on each principle, accompanied with anecdotes to illustrate.

2. Tools and techniques for exercising skeptcism, using judgement and following the principles listed in Chapter 1. We look at everything from basic techniques to specific technologies that can help.

mediactive.com/outline - Preview

credibility literacy media media_literacy

22 May 09

open thinking » 80+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy

Over the past few years, I have been collecting interesting Internet videos that would be appropriate for lessons and presentations, or personal research, related to technological and media literacy. Here are 70+ videos organized into various sub-categories. These videos are of varying quality, cross several genres, and are of varied suitability for classroom use.

educationaltechnology.ca/...1480 - Preview

literacy media_literacy media educational_technology

Over the past few years, I have been collecting interesting Internet videos that would be appropriate for lessons and presentations, or personal research, related to technological and media literacy. Here are 70+ videos organized into various sub-categories. These videos are of varying quality, cross several genres, and are of varied suitability for classroom use.

17 May 09

Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Deluded Dragon Slayers: Why We Need a Better Debate About the Net

This is really important stuff, but I think that we are wrong to see this as simply about the effects of the Internet. I think that ‘whim and self-actualisation’ were coming along quite nicely before the Internet. Education, capitalism and Western philosophy combined with market individualism were producing the circumstances for the Internet, not the other way around. The Internet is itself a remarkable new form of institution or networked entity. It is incredibly efficient and powerful and yet does not have the standard form of ownership or regulatory body.

www.charliebeckett.org/?p=1437 - Preview

technology media

This is really important stuff, but I think that we are wrong to see this as simply about the effects of the Internet. I think that ‘whim and self-actualisation’ were coming along quite nicely before the Internet. Education, capitalism and Western philosophy combined with market individualism were producing the circumstances for the Internet, not the other way around. The Internet is itself a remarkable new form of institution or networked entity. It is incredibly efficient and powerful and yet does not have the standard form of ownership or regulatory body.

14 May 09

The Center for Internet Research - ignorance of how to use new ideas stockpiles exponentially • marshall mcluhan

The Center for Internet Research (TCFIR) is a transdisciplinary research organization created with the purpose of systematically investigating the vast intersection of Internet technology and the human experience. This exploration is taking place from a variety of perspectives including information technology, computer science, humanities, ethics, psychology, commerce, politics, public policy, anthropology, semiotics, sociology, andragogy, and pedagogy with projects that span the industrial, government, scientific and academic domains.

tcfir-blog.ning.com - Preview

online_community technology media cyberculture

The Center for Internet Research (TCFIR) is a transdisciplinary research organization created with the purpose of systematically investigating the vast intersection of Internet technology and the human experience. This exploration is taking place from a variety of perspectives including information technology, computer science, humanities, ethics, psychology, commerce, politics, public policy, anthropology, semiotics, sociology, andragogy, and pedagogy with projects that span the industrial, government, scientific and academic domains.

30 Apr 09

MediaShift . Building the Ideal Community Information Hub | PBS

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.

www.pbs.org/...munity-information-hub120.html - Preview

community media comm217 journalism digital_journalism

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.
8 Steps to Build the Ideal Community Information Hub

1) Crack open government data and access.
7 more annotations...
- 2) Bring together all stake-holders in the community for face-to-face discussions.
- 3) Teach digital media literacy as a basic course for all. Bridge the digital divide.
- 4) Create an online hub that aggregates local information.
- 5) Boost community radio with local reports, roundtable discussions, deeper looks at issues.
- 6) Disseminate information with smaller run print publications.
- 7) Rethink public access TV with online hooks.
- 8) Make libraries an important real-world hub.

26 Apr 09

Letter from Japan: I ♥ Novels: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

www.newyorker.com/...081222fa_fact_goodyear - Preview

mobile_devices texting sms media digital_natives

The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.
In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail. “I suppose you can say keitai shosetsu are a source of data or information—the way they use words, how they speak, how they depict scenes,” Kensuke Suzuki, a sociologist, told me. “We need these stories so we can learn how young women in Japan commonly feel.”
One novelist I met, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who lives in the countryside around Kyoto, told me that she thinks up her stories while affixing labels to beauty products at her factory job, and sometimes writes them down on her cell phone while commuting by train to her other job, at a spa in Osaka.
1 more annotations...
- Mone’s withholding is consistent with the ethos of the Japanese Internet, which is dominated by false names and forged identities. “Net transvestites,” the most extreme playactors are called. Match.com doesn’t work well here, because a majority of people won’t post photographs, and blogs—a recent study found that there are more of them in Japanese than in any other language—are often pseudonymous. Several years ago on 2Channel, a Japanese bulletin-board site that does not require registration, a user started a thread about his unexpected romance with a woman he met on a train. The story, a ballad of Japanese otaku (nerd) culture, became “Train Man”—a book, a movie, manga, a television series, and a play—but the author’s identity, now hopelessly confused with anonymous collaborators who took the narrative in their own directions, has still not come to light. He is known only as Nakano Hitori: One of Those People. Roland Kelts, a half-Japanese writer born in the United States and the author of “Japanamerica,” sees the Internet as an escape valve for a society that can be oppressive in its expectation of normative, group-minded behavior. “In Japan, conflict is not celebrated—consensus is celebrated,” he said. “The Internet lets you speak your mind without upsetting the social apple cart.” For confessional writers, it is a safe forum for candid self-expression and a magic cloak that makes it easy to disappear into the crowd. “The cell-phone writers have found a pretty clever strategy, through technology, for being part of the culture—participating in that interdependency—and also having a voice,” Kelts said.

14 Apr 09

Fear of Twitter: technophobia part 2 « Neuroanthropology

Recent fears about the negative cognitive consequences of the social networking site Twitter, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?, led me to recall Steve and Pete’s battle for high FQR. In both cases, concerned observers might wonder whether patterns of mental activity can lead to long-term neural degeneration; I haven’t checked in on Steve or Pete in more than 20 years, but I suspect they’re both locked in institutions living out a cruel Chevy Chase imitation from which they can no longer escape.

Twitter, even more than other Internet-based social networking applications, seems to provoke apocalyptic fears of mass mental degradation.

neuroanthropology.net/...of-twitter-technophobia-part-2 - Preview

attention technology media privacy

Recent fears about the negative cognitive consequences of the social networking site Twitter, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?, led me to recall Steve and Pete’s battle for high FQR. In both cases, concerned observers might wonder whether patterns of mental activity can lead to long-term neural degeneration; I haven’t checked in on Steve or Pete in more than 20 years, but I suspect they’re both locked in institutions living out a cruel Chevy Chase imitation from which they can no longer escape.

Twitter, even more than other Internet-based social networking applications, seems to provoke apocalyptic fears of mass mental degradation.
Can Twitter make you stupid?
14 more annotations...
- The dangers of mangled grammar, in speaking, for example
- If one looks at Twittering or texting, not as a degenerate form of written language, but rather in relation to spoken conversation, one gets a very different picture of its inadequacies.
- Linguistic innovation: is texting a new pidgin?
- the more people Tweet, the more likely Tweeting (or texting more generally) will develop stable grammars of their own with rules for use not included in the ‘trunk’ language.
- he pictographs evidence a kind of open innovation and visual intelligence whereas the abbreviated formulaic phrases, to me at least, look like an insiders’ code, a kind of specialized argot that only the Twittagentsia will understand
- Living online: cognitive consequences of interruption
- Keim’s article is based on an interview Maggie Jackson about her recent book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, in which she cautions of the effects of our ‘high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society.’ Jackson warns that a ‘never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively’ (from Keim’s article). The effect could undermine civilization as we know it:
- In this post, Vaughan is being particularly ‘neuroanthropological,’ using the tried and tested techniques of cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison to denaturalize our own condition, pointing out that what we might assume to be the ‘natural state’ of humans is, in fact, a bit of an aberration. (Check out the comments on Vaughan’s post as well.)
  
  As Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009) suggest in a recent article in First Monday, ‘attention is the scarce resource in the age of the Web.’ Although social networks may look vast and distracting, most people do not actually interact or pay much attention to the majority of people in their ostensible ‘networks.’
- To assume that a technology is inherently distracting and so pervasive that it cannot be turned off or tuned out is an odd kind of technological determinism, a sense of powerlessness in the face of our own creation. A
- s, the boundary between what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ varies widely across societies.
- Goffman felt that urban life was only possible through civil inattention as we are forced by close proximity and restricted living space to avoid deep engagement with everyone we encounter.
- Privacy concerns often arise when individuals don’t adhere to the same standards we have for public inattention, for politely ignoring interactions that are only partially public.
- If you’re interested in Lady Susan Greenfield’s issues with Twitter, Facebook and computer technology in general, surf your short attention span over to the ABC All in the Mind website for Computers and your head - Susan Greenfield on All in the Mind.
- Another take-down on the pseudo-psychology of anti-Twitter technophobia is provided by Dominik Lukeš in Twitter backlash exposes shallowness of modern psychology. I suppose the title sort of says it all…

04 Apr 09

FRONTLINE: digital nation | PBS

So far on this blog, my posts have explored larger themes, such as Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants and the media's treatment of stories about technological dangers. But our blog here at Digital Nation also aims to take you behind the scenes and into the process of making a documentary film for FRONTLINE. We want you to see what we're working on, read what we're thinking about, and learn how our reporting is shaping our opinions on a daily basis.

www.pbs.org/...digitalnation - Preview

rheingold video media technology

So far on this blog, my posts have explored larger themes, such as Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants and the media's treatment of stories about technological dangers. But our blog here at Digital Nation also aims to take you behind the scenes and into the process of making a documentary film for FRONTLINE. We want you to see what we're working on, read what we're thinking about, and learn how our reporting is shaping our opinions on a daily basis.

21 Mar 09

How the Kindle will change the world. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

Kindle making books obsolescent?

slate.com/2214243 - Preview

literacy media

Until now, Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best available technology for reading at length or for pleasure.
The notion that physical books are ending their lifecycle is upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with literature and terrifying to those who make their living within the existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever crappier paper with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.

Howard Rheingold's Library tagged media → View Popular

"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

History of print=technology+culture abreast: Reflections on revolution in mass media+advent of minute media @CShirky @Pierre @JohnBattelle @tropology - esh.it that matters

PopTech: blog

But I Don't Want to Teach My Students How to Use Technology -- Campus Technology

Wiley InterScience :: JOURNALS :: Sociology Compass

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: New Media Literacies -- A Syllabus

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen - cartoon Recombinant Records

Will Barack Obama's Media Ubiquity Be the Most Significant Aspect of His Presidency? -- New York Magazine

Don't Buy It . Teacher's Guide | PBS KIDS GO!

Media literacies and media as cultural techniques

Outline « Mediactive

open thinking » 80+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy

Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Deluded Dragon Slayers: Why We Need a Better Debate About the Net

The Center for Internet Research - ignorance of how to use new ideas stockpiles exponentially • marshall mcluhan

MediaShift . Building the Ideal Community Information Hub | PBS

8 Steps to Build the Ideal Community Information Hub

Letter from Japan: I ♥ Novels: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Fear of Twitter: technophobia part 2 « Neuroanthropology

FRONTLINE: digital nation | PBS

How the Kindle will change the world. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Top Contributors

Groups interested in media

Cartoons

Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

Media & Culture @ HM

Blog World Expo -Sponsors

Credibility in the New News

Blog World Expo - Exhibitors