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Currents - Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade - NYTimes.com
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Perhaps the biggest big idea that gathered speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.
What was really meant in most places was that we would elect people to govern us and sporadically renew or revoke their contracts. It was enough. There was no practicable way to involve all of us, all the time......
Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a collective decision making systems perspective
Marko A. Rodriguez, Jennifer H. Watkins
First Monday, Volume 14, Number 8 - 3 August 2009
The ideals of the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment are the foundation of modern democracies. The era was characterized by thinkers who promoted progressive social reforms that opposed the long-established aristocracies and monarchies of the time. Prominent examples of such reforms include the establishment of inalienable human rights, self-governing republics, and market capitalism. Twenty-first century democratic nations can benefit from revisiting the systems developed during the Enlightenment and reframing them within the techno-social context of the Information Age. This article explores the application of social algorithms that make use of Thomas Paine's (English: 1737-1809) representatives, Adam Smith's (Scottish: 1723-1790) self-interested actors, and Marquis de Condorcet's (French: 1743-1794) optimal decision making groups. It is posited that technology-enabled social algorithms can better realize the ideals articulated during the Enlightenment.
Reinventing academic publishing online. Part I: Rigor, relevance and practice
First Monday, Volume 14, Number 8 - 3 August 2009
Brian Whitworth, Rob Friedman
While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding “top” academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many. The technology trigger is socio-technical advances. The drive will be that only democratic knowledge exchange can scale up to support the breadth, speed and flexibility modern cross-disciplinary research needs. Part II suggests the sort of socio-technical design needed to bring this transformation about.
Community Informatics: Integrating action, research and learning
B U L L E T I N of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Vol. 31, No. 6 August/September 2005
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Yet the world seems engulfed in divides – of age,
race, culture, language, beliefs, income, gender, knowledge and
nationality – which are creating classes and identities that
threaten the basic fabric of community life. -
Community
informatics (CI) - 22 more annotations...
Everyday Politics and Civic Engagement - Harry C. Boyte
The problems with electoral, partisan politics, from soundbites to attack ads, made “being political” an epithet of choice in the 2002 election. Politics’ bad reputation means that theorists of organizational change often see it as a negative. For instance, Peter Senge, Director of Organizational Learning at MIT, famous for developing the concept of the “learning organization,” in which people “expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire,” sees politics as the obstacle. As Senge put it in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization “a political environment is one in which . . . there are always ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ people who are building their power and people who are losing power.”.....
Dialogic democracy
Giddens’s call for a “dialogic democracy,” for a strong public sphere where differences are displayed and consensus is not the goal, points to a new politics of representation, and to the end of the nation as a homogeneous order:
“The potential for dialogic democracy is... carried in the spread of social reflexivity as a condition both of day-to-day activities and the persistence of larger forms of collective organization. Second, dialogic democracy is not necessarily oriented to the achieving of consensus. Just as the theorists of deliberative democracy argue, the most 'political' of issues, inside and outside the formal political sphere, are precisely those which are likely to remain essentially contested. Dialogic democracy presumes only that dialogue in a public space provides a means of living along with the other in a relation of mutual tolerance—whether that 'other' be an individual or a global community of religious believers” (1994, 115).
Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos -- Van Dijck and Nieborg 11 (5): 855 -- New Media & Society
Abstract
‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear
to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic
and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production
models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding
to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the
shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified
users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams,
2006) and ‘We-Think’ (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective
culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes
the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels
how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a
democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly
endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely
inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and
‘We-Think’ urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since
it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital
culture.
Key words
co-creation • manifestos • participatory culture • user-generated
content • Wikipedia
P. John Williams - Technological literacy: a multliteracies approach for democracy
Throughout history various grand narratives have impacted on technology education. In the current post modern era of globalization, technology education continues to struggle for relevance and definition, and takes various forms in different countries, but none seem resoundingly successful. The current development of what some have termed a digital democracy (Web 2.0)—the explosion of a new type of information technology which has become an integral characteristic of young people’s lives, is the starting point for this paper. Mainstream literacy theory was reconceptualised in the 1990’s with the foresight of anticipating the significance of a range of literacies. Broad conceptions of Technological Literacy have always accommodated multiple literacies, but must now essentially do so in a dynamic way through the pre-existing pedagogy of design.
A NEW WAY OF THINKING? TOWARDS A VISION OF SOCIAL INCLUSION: Social Inclusion, Citizenship and Diversity by Professor Anver Saloojee
Good literature review - go back to
The utility of the concept social inclusion will depend on the extent and degree to which it successfully deals with social exclusion and the extent to which it promotes social cohesion in a society that is fractured along numerous fault lines.
It was quite clear from the one focus group I attended, that while social inclusion mattered, what matted more to the participants was to engage in a dialogue about the various manifestations of racism as important expressions of social exclusion. For the participants a discussion of social inclusion had to await a more fulsome discussion of racism, sexism and poverty. Thus for social inclusion to matter, for it to resonate, it must provide space for a discussion of oppression and discrimination. Social inclusion has to take its rightful place not along a continuum (from exclusion to inclusion), but as emerging out of a thorough analysis of exclusion. It has to simultaneously transcending the limits of essentialism, critique hierarchies of oppression and promote a transformative agenda that links together the various, often disparate struggles against oppression, inequality and injustices. And the glue that would bind these social movements together is a kind of inclusion that would lead to the creation of a more just and equitable society. In this conceptualization, social inclusion can provide a coherent critique of the multiple forms of social injustices and the concomitant institutional policies and practices....
Learning from the LDC's by Michael Gurstein
The Journal of Community Informatics, Vol 2 No 3 (2006) Special Issue: Telecentres\n\nAs developed countries are retreating from the implicit commitment to their citizens that universal Internet access will be available even to those without in-home Internet access, so such a commitment appears to be emerging within Less Developed Countries, particularly in Asia. Funding programs facilitating widespread public access have recently been cut back or cut completely in Canada, the US, Australia, and France among others. Meanwhile, programs to support widespread public access have been announced recently in India, Sri Lanka, Bangla Desh and the Philippines.\n\nOn the one hand, some are saying that the recent cuts are simply policy responses in the developed countries to "mission accomplished"-the Divide Divide has been defeated (everyone who wants it can get affordable individual in-home access on low cost computers). While on the other hand, the parallel development in the Less Developed Countries (LDC's) would seem to be a sign that those countries are willing to make a considerable financial investment in "catching up"....
The Public Domain by James Boyle
Our music, our culture, our science and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license.
Boyle’s book is a clarion call. In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the “information environment.”
With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the “range wars of the information age”: today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance. The “enclosure of the commons of the mind” matters and it matters to all of us. “Boyle has been the godfather of the Free Culture Movement since his extraordinary book, Shamans, Software, a
MIT announces a new Center for Future Civic Media | Center for Future Civic Media
Bridging two established programs at MIT—one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change—the Center for Future Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. It has been made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation....
Democratizing technology: Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology - By Tyler J. Veak
Democratizing technology: Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology
By Tyler J. Veak
Published by SUNY Press, 2006
ISBN 0791469174, 9780791469170
229 pages
Largely because of the Internet and the new economy, technology has become the buzzword of our culture. But what is it, and how does it affect our lives? More importantly, can we control and shape it, or does it control us? In short, can we make technology more democratic? Using the work of Andrew Feenberg, one of the most important and original figures in the field of philosophy of technology, as a foundation, the contributors to this volume explore these important questions and Feenberg responds. In the 1990s, Feenberg authored three books that established him as one of the leading scholars in a rapidly developing field, and he is one of the few to delineate a theory for democratizing technological design. He has demonstrated the shortcomings of traditional theories of technology and argued for what he calls "democratic rationalization" where actors intervene in the technological design process to shape it toward their own ends. In this book, the contributors analyze foundational issues in Feenberg's work, including questions of human nature, biotechnology, gender, and his readings of Heidegger, and they also examine practical issues, including democratizing technology, moral evaluation, and environmentalism.
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Part One)
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"Web 2.0" has become increasingly institutionalized as the definitive account of the business plans and cultural practices defining the digital realm in the early 21st century.
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surprisingly few attempts to seriously understand its core assumptions or propose other models for describing the shifting relations between media producers and consumers
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Between Production and Consumption: Spaces of Knowledge within the New York City Subway.
....Toward this end, he proposed taking unused or "vestigial" subway platforms within currently operating stations and transforming them into spaces of knowledge production and consumption in a new kind of public library that would leverage the existing culture of reading on the subway, provide places of interaction among people and artifacts, and further the democratization of knowledge....
BackTalk: Can Libraries Save Democracy? - 10/15/2002 - Library Journal
"No nation can remain both ignorant and free." This quotation from Thomas Jefferson should be the mantra of all public librarians. The freedoms we enjoy through democracy are currently endangered by popular ignorance and political apathy. Public librarians can be a big part of the solution if we will accept the responsibility. Otherwise, ours will be among the first institutions to be destroyed when democracy collapses.
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Barry,
It's a little more complicated than this. The old model of resistance in cultural studies did include the possibility of resistant subcultures. My early work on fandom in Textual Poachers would have framed fans in this way. But the assumption was that whatever meanings, or culture, were produced largely stayed within that community. The public lacked the means of cultural distribution which was even more crippling than the lack of the means of cultural production.