Miguel Lozano's List: Trece treinta y siete

While some have argued that computing via the Internet offers a vision of freedom and a shared humanity, others have claimed with equal vehemence that it may become the instrument of global surveillance and personal alienation. Foucault's notion of self-fashioning (souci de soi) exemplifies both sides of this debate, since fashions may both be imposed and freely chosen. To present a Foucauldian perspective on fashioning of self online I use instances of recent postings to the Usenet news group rec.games.chess. Key aspects of self-fashioning that I identify include romantic and modernist images of interior experience, the importance of keeping your "cool," the discussion of techniques designed to improve skill or strength, and the purchase and use of chess computers as icons of mastery. Finally, I consider some implications of this Foucauldian approach for future research on Internet self-constructions.

"Is there a way for e-mail addresses to be openly available, if their owners so desire, on the Net, yet preventing the current practice of harvesting email-addresses by the thousands for unsolicited email advertisements? I propose a solution, and examine the phenomenology of mass e-mail in a somewhat broader context."

This study assessed the degree to which emotion management factors constrain hostile types of communication withinelectronic chat room settings. It further examined whether gender and social psychological variables such as sociability and locus of control moderate the sending of such messages. Since understanding how users define this virtual social landscape is pertinent to analyzing online communication, the study also investigated whether users believe that normative standards of behavior extend to online interactions.

A thesis, presented to the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

What happens to writing when texts in "a world on paper" are replaced by messages in "virtual space?"

"To this purpose, in the present article we intend to review some of the social implications of computerized communication. We start by discussing some important events in the history of computer conferencing systems and we give a short presentation of the main communication services on the world-wide computer network of the Internet. Subsequently, focusing on computer-mediated communication we review the main social and psychological implications resulting from the fact that the computer medium deprives communicants of social, physical, and contextual cues. In addition, computerized communication creates a social information processing environment, where a variety of relational and socioemotional interpersonal interactions may flourish. Next we examine the behavioral role of naming via pseudonyms or hiding personal information by anonymity and the creation and recreation of identities in the computer-mediated social space. Finally, we discuss some topics related to gender differences in computerized communications."

"This paper will explore the way in which a userís Internet presence is facilitated through email and email addresses. An email address can serve as both an identifier, a name, and as an address ‚ linking the user to a specific ìrealî geographic location. But this domain can also be ìfakeî or fictional. Similarly, the ìnickî or name can be deliberately misleading. The focus of this paper is on how email and email addresses serve as a (mis)representation of Internet identity, and how users write themselves onto the web. The dialectic tensions between, on the one hand, presence and identity and on the other hand, writing and representation, are explored. I will also ask how email, as a vehicle for of online presence, affects offline film."

By John Markoff

Comic

El proyecto Mindpixel

Contiene un artículo de Chris McKinstry

Entrevista con Chris McKinstry

Página oficial de Pushpinder Singh en el MIT. Un investigador de inteligencia artificial suicida.

To build systems as resourceful and adaptive as people, we must develop cognitive architectures that support great procedural and representational diversity. No single technique is by itself powerful enough to deal with the broad range of domains every ordinary person can understand—even as children, we can effortlessly think about complex problems involving temporal, spatial, physical, bodily, psychological, and social dimensions. In this chapter we describe a multiagent cognitive architecture that aims for such flexibility. Rather than seeking a best way to organize agents, our architecture supports multiple ‘ways to think’, each a different architectural configuration of agents. Each agent may use a different way to represent and reason with knowledge, and there are special ‘panalogy’ mechanisms that link agents that represent similar ideas in different ways. At the highest level, the architecture is arranged as a matrix of agents: Vertically the architecture divides into a tower of reflection including the reactive, deliberative, reflective, self-reflective, and self-conscious levels; Horizontally the architecture divides along ‘mental realms’ including the temporal, spatial, physical, bodily, social, and psychological realms. Our goal is to build an AI system resourceful enough to combine the advantages of many different ways to think about things, by making use of many types of mechanisms for reasoning, representation, and reflection.

"Family and friends of Pushpinder Singh ’98 gathered in MIT chapel yesterday for his memorial service, filling all the seats and crowding against the back and side walls. The service was informal and did not follow a schedule, as Singh would have liked, according to Media Lab director Frank Moss PhD ’77. Friends, mentors, and students came up to the microphone to share memories of the MIT post-doctoral associate, who will be remembered as brilliant and enthusiastic about learning, yet humble and kind. The mood swung as speakers shared funny anecdotes, and sometimes lost their composure as they described the loss of an individual who had been part of the MIT community for over a decade. "

Diapositivas utilizadas por Push Singh en la clase "the society of mind"