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05 Dec 08

Great Power, Great Responsibility - Ross Douthat

  • But they also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this elite, and this time and place. Flaws like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success
    ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a
    self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd
    expect from a to-the-manor-born elite - without the sense of proportion and limits, of the
    possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that
    a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life
    at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (as opposed to the
    upper-middle class, where most meritocrats starts) ... and without, as well, the sense of history,
    duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to.
24 Mar 08

The Mass-Customization of Places: Peer Production, Data-mining, and the Experience of Place « Remixing Anthropology

  • new power inequalities in online media impact the representation of people and places. Aggregation and data-mining algorithms relating to search and recommendation services tend shift power toward centralized providers (Google, Amazon). Such services derive from opaque processes, but are increasingly taken-for-granted starting points for understanding and experiencing places.
  • Thus, many communities, be they popular or academic, now discuss, experience, and understand “culture” via online social mechanisms (collaboration, review, and ranking) and machine services (data mining techniques and ranking algorithms). Taken together, the new media landscape of tourism offers a fascinating zone for anthropological inquiry.
04 Sep 07

No. Really. It's not *about* the technology.

  • A more philosophical and political bent on Web 2.0.
     - forestfortrees on 2007-09-04
  • The point isn't the features, it's the underlying philosophy of relinquishing control.
07 Jun 07

Science Musings Blog - Starting at square one -- Part 2

  • In addition to the "naive physics" and "naive psychology" of children, the authors offer another reason for adult resistance to science: the authority that people ascribe to sources of information.

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 76, 2003 - Table of Contents

  • Check Out "Outcome-Based Tyranny: Teaching Compliance While Testing Like A State" - forestfortrees on 2006-05-19
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