culture - Taryn . on Diigo

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What Is Art For? - Lewis Hyde - Profile - NYTimes.com

Tags: art, creativity, society, copy_left, culture, literature, poetry, education, school, anthropology, creative_commons, shakespeare, emerson on 2008-11-17 -All Annotations (10) -About

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For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways.
Illich, an Austrian priest-cum-social-critic who drew wide public attention for his book “Deschooling Society” (1971) — a polemic against modern public education.
Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.
For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.
C.T.E.A. was not only unfortunate but also unconstitutional. For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law. As he sets out to show in his book, copyright was enshrined in the Constitution for civic rather than commercial purposes. For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.
“All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.”
“Shakespeare’s plays,” he writes, “will never collapse, no matter how many people read them — and such commons therefore serve as a kind of limiting case for the argument that the market will serve us well in every sphere of life.”
There’s a line of Emerson’s from ‘Self-Reliance,’ ” Hyde told me one day in his office, “where he says of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? Every great man is a unique.’ Well, it’s crazy! There’s a long list of masters who taught Franklin! And yet the Emersonian song is the one that sticks in everyone’s head.”
The point of all this is not to prove that Franklin wasn’t a genius but to show that his genius didn’t burst out of thin air. “It takes a capacious mind to play host to … others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer,” Hyde writes, “but not a mind for whom there are no masters, not a ‘unique.’ Quite the opposite — this is a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons.”
In other words, “Walden,” the premier document of American individualism, was in a sense born out of the generosity of the American prophet of self-reliance.

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The latest research on the correlation between religion and niceness. - By Paul Bloom - Slate Magazine

Tags: religion, psychology, culture, sociology, sweden, denmark, united_states, community on 2008-11-16 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (14) -About

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Change - How Political Eras End and Begin - Ron Suskind - NYTimes.com

wow

Tags: politics, government, president_obama, baby_boomer, culture, leadership on 2008-11-16 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Stilgherrian · Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up

follow link to TechCrunch and outgoing links from there and 37Signals' response:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics

Tags: silicon_valley, culture, technology, entrepreneur on 2008-11-15 -All Annotations (1) -About

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if:book: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material: A Manifesto, By Rick Prelinger

Tags: art, culture, copyright, history, film on 2008-11-05 -All Annotations (11) -About

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One of the most provocative legacies of conceptual art was de-commodification — departing from object-oriented artmaking and from the tyranny of the art market. And yet it struck me that de-commodification had actually created its opposite. Conceptual works tended to exist primarily in their documentation, in physical traces of the work that had been created by someone so that the work would not disappear from consciousness. Documentation creates objects that are always someone’s property. The value of art documentation rests in whose work it documents and in who made the documents. We are therefore almost back where we started.
how much of the history of working people was contained in films made by corporations. In order to extract it you’ve got to engage in selective appropriation, but it’s there, often eloquently so. There’s a 1936 film called Master Hands which you can download from the Internet Archive; it’s a tribute to mass production at Chevrolet. But what it really shows is how elemental, dangerous and mind-numbing the work at Flint was. It’s a film no one else seems to have, and it’s now on the National Film Registry, but it was dregs — on a cold day in 1983, I paid a man not to throw it away.
Some writers, like John Updike and not like Jonathan Lethem, fear the emerging mashed-up book. They hope their texts won’t be scrambled or altered, that they’ll always retain the same identity and continuity, and follow the same course. But rivers, like information, route themselves around obstacles, and the bends in rivers are where adventures happen. We’ll find new ways to experience and value old works as a consequence of mixing them into newer ones.
We believe in storytelling because we’ve naturalized the consensus that causes us to believe in it. There is no reason for this consensus not to change as the world changes. Storytelling as we know it is not an absolute, and it may slow the courses of culture and history. We value storytelling for its ability to wrap new skins on old skeletons, but even bones don’t last forever.
I collected old educational and industrial films. They were made to instruct and socialize young people with the objective of turning them into dependable workers, good citizens and avid consumers. 1980s audiences became fascinated with these films and a cult following developed.
these films didn’t just describe a lost past, but might also be tracing the contours of possible futures. In other words, we could see them not simply as antiquated, but as predictive.
Everything anyone does to bring archives online is now going to be measured against YouTube’s ambiguous legacy. It presents a massive collection of older and newer material, from video of Malcolm X’s complete speeches to clips of the moose I saw wandering in front yards in Anchorage. It sticks to preview mode, presenting visually degraded Flash video, so it will still get sued, but most rightsholders will rightfully regard what it does as promotion. Best of all, it allows users to upload almost anything and annotate with relative freedom. It is not an archives, but it’s outclassed archives at their own game.

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The art of competitiveness | The San Diego Union-Tribune

In his book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” Daniel Pink makes the case that we have entered the Conceptual Age and that certain right-brain skills are essential to economic success

Tags: economy, technology, industry, education, design, culture, art, brain, emotion, intelligence, creativity, book_review on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About

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A Generational Statement by a New Generation

Tags: gen_y, gen_we, video, culture, baby_boomer, united_states, social_change on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Mind Hacks: Towards a neuropsychology of religion

follow links, see Amy Tan's TED talk on creativity - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity.html

Tags: religion, atheism, psychology, neuro, brain, evolution, culture, anthropology, philosophy, video on 2008-10-23 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (1) -About

in list: religion

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Maya Jaggi on Colombia's contemporary art scene | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Tags: art, colombia, south_america, drugs, war, terrorism, culture, history on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Brendan Nyhan: The coming mandate debate

this is the next conversation to watch

Tags: politics, election, 2008, culture, opinion on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Greg Laden's Blog : When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think.

This is 1981, and everybody in this neighborhood speaks Italian, because they are Italian. Second and third generation, yes, but Italian is the language of the home and the workplace. This is a neighborhood with zero unemployment, zero unorganized crime, and that serves the city in which it is ensconced as a major international tourist destination. And it is pretty much true that the Italian immigrants that moved to this neighborhood starting more than a century ago are still working on the English Only thing. (and another fine example of why I despise commentary)

Tags: italy, siciliy, boston, germany, wisconsin, immigrant, community, language, culture on 2008-10-21 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Seed: Cultural Evolution - Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do?

A careful look at culture shows that any attempt to determine what is "advanced" is hopeless. Instead, Joseph Tainter and Robert Edgerton have established standards by which some societies may be considered "sick"—they follow cultural practices leading to their own destruction.

Tags: culture, evolution, history, human, polynesia, complexity, anthropology on 2008-10-20 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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Models of cultural change clearly need a large Lamarckian component.
no Mendel has appeared to postulate exactly what is changing as culture evolves. Richard Dawkins's brave conjecture about "memes" (gene analogs) being discrete units of cultural inheritance has not proved entirely fruitful—and the analogy is in retrospect far-fetched. Genes are passed unidirectionally between parent and offspring, and the recipients must accept them. Memes could be passed hundreds of generations at a leap (Aristotle to you), horizontally among peers (gang member to gang member), backwards in generations (learning from your grandkids), and so on. And, unlike genes, not only can cultural inheritances be rejected but they can also be purposefully modified.
We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.
Natural selection in this case appears to have favored gradual changes in structural design rather than rapid adoption of novelties. Presumably, selection slowed down the change in structural features because time-tested designs enhanced success and survival in migrations, fishing, and warfare more than the accidental variants in canoe construction.

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Seed: How We Evolve

Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Tags: human, genome, evolution, map, HapMap, model, intelligence, culture, complexity, climate_crisis on 2008-10-12 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (7) -About

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The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.
Fisher, a Brit, argued that, in fact, a large population was required, because only a large population can produce large numbers of mutations. Because most mutations are neutral, he reasoned, it takes a large number of mutations to produce one beneficial allele. American biologists were most influenced by Wright, but Fisher's work is where Hawks and Harpending find their support.
HapMap is a leaner and in some ways more powerful version of the Human Genome Project, as it compiles only those regions of the human genome — less than 1 percent — that have the potential to differ from person to person. In comparing different populations' genetic information, it's possible to tease out patterns of gene inheritance, how certain genes correlate with certain diseases, and even the likely geographic origin of some mutations.
Is intelligence still being selected for? Parsimony and uniformitarianism would compel one to answer yes; things in the present are, by and large, as they were in the past. But the way evolution works, whereby mutations arise in one person and slowly spread throughout a population, makes such a question difficult to frame, for if intelligence is still under selection, that could mean that some populations at this very moment are slightly smarter than others — that, perhaps, even certain ethnicities are slightly smarter than others. In the West, speculation on the subject almost automatically tars the speculator as a eugenicist or a racialist.
"Intelligence builds on top of intelligence," says Lahn. "[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think." Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.
"The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species," says Ehrlich, "may be determined by the next five generations. So I don't really give a shit what's happening to our genetic evolution." The global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, and so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb. If any of these nightmare scenarios comes to pass, Ehrlich fears, evolution will be unable to help us. It may be operating faster than we thought, but it's not that fast. Problems like smog and acid rain seem almost quaint, and even to be longed for.

Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged culture → View Popular

What Is Art For? - Lewis Hyde - Profile - NYTimes.com

The latest research on the correlation between religion and niceness. - By Paul Bloom - Slate Magazine

Change - How Political Eras End and Begin - Ron Suskind - NYTimes.com

Stilgherrian · Jason Calacanis and the Evil Cult of the Internet Start-up

if:book: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material: A Manifesto, By Rick Prelinger

The art of competitiveness | The San Diego Union-Tribune

A Generational Statement by a New Generation

Mind Hacks: Towards a neuropsychology of religion

Maya Jaggi on Colombia's contemporary art scene | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Brendan Nyhan: The coming mandate debate

Greg Laden's Blog : When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think.

Seed: Cultural Evolution - Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do?

Seed: How We Evolve

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