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"Is the participant-level even the right perspective from which to try to identify an explanation? I don't think so. Were conditions in this factory harsh because this owner was hostile or cruel towards these particular workers? No, rather because the competitive environment of profitability and accumulation created an inexorable race to the bottom. So we can't explain this factory's working conditions by referring to specific features of this factory and its owner. This logic is spelled out very clearly in Capital, and it is a system-level characteristic."
"But the thing about this moment that I am trying to get at is that one doesn't need the right temperament in order to be carried along with the mass upheaval. To say, I'm sorry, this just isn't really my thing, is really nothing other than to say, I am an asshole, a wretch. And furthermore, fuck you. To say that this is just not one's thing would be morally the same as that puerile gesture of the Chicago stock traders who announced with a sign in the window of their skyscraper, We Are the 1%. To not acknowledge that the various Occupations are good and right is to side with those cretins. There's really no other choice. "
"My main point, though, is that the Occupyers are, potentially at least, a force for democracy in the best sense. And insofar as there is a tension between them and parliamentary democracy, so much the worse for the latter. "
"These people will not own cell phones. They will not run blogs or update statuses on social networks. "
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They will speak to their friends face to face or not at all. They will carry paper and pencil and know only what their eyes and ears tell them.
Mark my words.
Eventually, there will be a subculture of ghosts.
"In a world of increasing demands for biodiversity information, participatory biodiversity assessment and monitoring is becoming more significant. Whilst other books have focused on methods, or links to conservation or development, this book is written particularly for policy makers and planners. Introductory chapters analyze the challenges of the approach, the global legislation context, and the significance of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Specially commissioned case studies provide evidence from 17 countries, by 50 authors with expertise in both biological and social sciences. Ranging from community conservation projects in developing countries to amateur birdwatching in the UK, they describe the context, objectives, stakeholders and processes, and reflect on the success of outcomes. Rather than advocating any particular approach, the book takes a constructively critical look at the motives, experiences and outcomes of such approaches, with cross-cutting lessons to inform planning and interpretation of future participatory projects and their contribution to policy objectives."
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Author of "The first cuckoo in winter: British phenology recording, credibility and meaning"
"Polletta traces the history of democracy in early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, in the civil rights, new left, and women's liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, and in today's faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic inspiration—Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting registration workers, among them—as well as practical strategies of social protest. But Freedom Is an Endless Meeting also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. Doing so has brought into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter to democracy, such as exclusivity and an aversion to rules, and these have been the fault lines around which participatory democracies have often splintered. "
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The Presencing Institute (PI) is a global action research community that applies Theory U and presencing to the transformation of capitalism by shifting the social field of individual and collective action from habitual patterns to co-creating from the emerging whole. The presencing process is a journey that connects us more deeply both to what wants to emerge in the world and to our highest future possibility—our emerging authentic self.
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Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fans were emblematic of audience resistance (Jenkins,1992; Fiske, 1989), understood as actively appropriating and transforming mass media content as raw materials for their own cultural productions. Mass media depicted fans as living in the shadows of mass culture (if not the basements of their parent's suburban split-level houses), and media companies saw their tastes and concerns as "unrepresentative" of the general population. By the early 21st century, fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued, if still imperfectly understood, by media companies interested in adopting Web 2.0 strategies of user-generated content, social networks, and "harness[ing] collective intelligence." (O'Reilly 2005)
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Mass media are increasingly operating in a context of participatory culture, but there is considerable anxiety about the terms of participation. Some media producers adopt what we are calling a collaborative approach, embracing audience participation, mobilizing fans as grassroots advocates, and capitalizing on user-generated content. Others adopt a prohibitionist posture. Frightened by a loss of control over the channels of media production and distribution and threatened by increasingly visible and vocal audience behavior, some companies tighten control over intellectual property, trying to reign in the disruptive and destabilizing impact of technological and cultural change. Most companies are torn between the two extremes, seeking a new relationship with their audiences which gives only as much ground as needed to maintain consumer loyalty.
This essay focuses on the resulting reworking of the "moral economy" that shapes the relations between producers and consumers. "Moral economy" refers to the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions which create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange. The moral economy which governed old media companies has broken down and there are conflicting expectations about what new relationships should look like. The risks for companies are high, since alienated consumers have other options for accessing media content. The risks for consumers are equally high, since legal sanctions can stifle the emerging participatory culture.
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Where in particular do you see resistance in the humanities around the idea of participatory learning?
I think it butts up against a number of issues. One is hierarchy and credentialing. If we’re going to be thinking about participatory or social learning, what does that do to the idea of expertise? I personally don’t think it really undermines it it, but many of the formal ways that we evaluate good work--mainly peer review--will undergo a significant transformation, at least expansion.
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The movement to reinvigorate citizenship had roots in academia. Harvard's Robert Putnam identified the decline in political participation as a symptom of a broader collapse in civic organizations. In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, he drew on survey data showing declines in membership in local organizations like the Elks lodges to argue that "social capital" -- the resources that enable trust and cooperation -- was drying up. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers and later the University of Maryland was among many who advocated for efforts to strengthen civil society, the realm of life between government and the market. James Fishkin, now at Stanford, sought to construct models of informed deliberative democracy. Harry Boyte of the University of Minnesota argued for expanding opportunities for public involvement in community decisions. Putnam's Harvard colleague Theda Skocpol described the shift from political organizations based on active local participation toward large and distant direct-mail membership groups, dubbing this shift "diminished democracy" in a book of the same name.
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Technology and partisanship aren't only increasing participation. They're also leading to a burgeoning of public debate, albeit not the kind that Fishkin and other academics imagined. Political blogs don't fit well with deliberation theory. They are rough, raucous, and vigorously partisan. Yet they have been far more successful than any deliberative experiment in encouraging wide-scale political participation and involving large numbers of people in real and lively democratic debate. Successful deliberative experiments have typically been small-scale, leading to real doubts about whether they can be scaled up to even the level of a state. The distributed conversation of the blogs, in contrast, involves millions of people, arguing vehemently about politics and other issues in interconnected forums of debate.
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Public intellectuals interested in American politics have spent much of the last two decades agonizing over low participation and the poor state of public debate among Americans. Their arguments have been transformed by the advent of the Internet. Some – such as Yochai Benkler – have argued that the Internet offers the potential to transform participation and debate in America, by creating a ‘networked public sphere’ of civic argument and activity. Others – most prominently Cass Sunstein – have been more skeptical, claiming that new forms of debate on the Internet are liable to problems such as erroneous information cascades and balkanization of different groups into separate universes of discourse.
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