-
We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link.
-
National surveys show a steady decrease of trust in almost every area of American life. How do we decide who we can trust? And how good are we at judging the trustworthiness of our politicians? We examine the latest psychological research on trust.
-
Wikipedia's standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.
-
We are social creatures who must interact for mutual benefit, and — the negative version — who harbor grudges when we feel we’ve been treated unfairly. Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust, without a system of reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat — one good turn deserves another, and so does one bad turn — no one would ever lend anything, as there would be no expectation of being paid back. And people would lie, cheat and steal with abandon, as there would be no punishments for such behavior.
-
It seems fair to ask how long accessibility of this info is likely to continue. I do not mean that it may be lost from the Internet but, that we may lose the ability to interpret it. Even if we have skirted this problem in the past by rendering info into printed form or microfilm the complexity of digital objects is increasing so it won't be adequate simply to print information.
-
John Seely Brown was a computer enthusiast since before most people knew what personal computers were. HIs work as former director of the Xerox Corporation’s famed Palo Alto Research Center landed him in the computer Industry Hall of Fame. I sat down with Mr. Brown at a recent event celebrating the history of NSFNet, a precursor of today’s Internet, and recorded this podcast interview, in which he talks about how computer networks — and now Web 2.0 — are radically changing education.
-
“We are in a fragmenting culture,” she wrote, “where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
-
Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, argues that Google’s library-scanning project could cause a copyright catastrophe by casting doubt on fair-use doctrine. Fair use is typically threshed out on a case-by-case basis, the scholar says, but Google is asking courts to issue broad rulings on the doctrine
-
Blogging offers then the type of solution to the private/public dichotomy that Arendt dreads. It does not release the passion of private life into the public, but deprives the private of its fascination and invests the public with a continuous repetition of identical personal experiences.
-
Media Predict amounts to a virtual stock market for manuscripts, television pilots, rock bands and the like. Traders with the equivalent of $5,000 in fantasy cash buy shares in the material they believe in. Whatever rises on this prediction market ought in theory to be the things entertainment moguls should buy and back.
RSS for user "katiebda: commentary"
We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link.
discuss this
email this
When an Edtags member saves something that piques your interest,
click their photo or username to read their profile.