Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination…Facebook’s growing dominance suggests that the platform may very well represent the third major evolution of the network age. First the Internet popularized the crucial organizing principles of peer-to-peer architecture and packet-switched data. Then the web ushered in a new set of governing metaphors that were fundamentally literary in nature: a network of “pages” and footnote-like links. Powerful as they were, though, both those platforms were organized around data, not people….no one owns the web—or in some strange way we all own it. But with Facebook we are ultimately just tenant farmers on the land; we make it more productive with our labor, but the ground belongs to someone else….The problem is that for all his talk of connectedness, Zuckerberg and his company have displayed an increasingly reluctant attitude toward connecting with the rest of the web.
Can Anything Take Down the Facebook Juggernaut?
An Unconsumable Object
Most publishers had Web development departments: let the nerds build the apps.
Publishers hoped that the old print advertising economy could be revived. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the industry organization that audits circulation and audience information for magazines and newspapers around the world, promised it would consider the replicas inside apps in calculating “rate base,” the measure of publications’ total circulation, including subscription and newsstand sales. Rate base had been the metric for setting advertising rates in publishing before the emergence of keyword and banner advertising, which measures click-throughs and ad impressions. Advertising is the real business of media, but traditional publishers couldn’t compete with Google and new-media companies for selling digital ads. Apps would interrupt that decline, returning media to its proper, historical structure: publishers could sell digital versions of the same ads that appeared in their print publications (perhaps with a markup if they had interactive elements), valued with the old measurement of rate base.
Jason Pontin Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps
Librarians routinely collaborate with classroom faculty to integrate information literacy assessment into course assignments. For students, authentic assessment is meaningful because it replicates information behaviors they will employ after graduation, in the workplace, and in life. The underlying philosophy is that the more students can observe evaluation of information as a key component of their biology curriculum, the more chance there is
that critical information-seeking and analysis will be permanently integrated into their future actions as professional biologists. As an added bonus, incorporating authentic assessment of information literacy into assignments can assist faculty in limiting plagiarism. When students are asked to explain their research process, to evaluate their sources for quality, or to compare/contrast a peer-reviewed article with a periodical article, they are more likely to do original work. Therefore, assessing the thought process behind the research paper, rather than limiting the focus to a final product, benefits faculty by reducing plagiarism and, perhaps more importantly, helping students learn process skills that are transferable to other learning contexts.
— P. 11
Essential Partners: The Librarian’s Role in Student Learning Assessment
Debra Gilchrist and Meagan Oakleaf
“First, the diversity of texts and technologies now flowing into the average classroom made possible in part by these new devices makes the group study of a specific text considerably more difficult than it was in the 1980s. For those fields such as literature, history, cultural studies, and other humanities disciplines in which close reading of texts is foundational, the authority and integrity of the text certainly matters. Some texts available at no cost on the Web are simply wrong: For example, the public domain versions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are marked by the removal of dashes and other “corrections” made to her work in its first publication, which was subsequently replaced by editions that restored the poet’s original syntax. These more authentic editions are still under copyright and are not available for free download. As it turns out, the student who studies the freely accessible Dickinson is not actually reading Dickinson and may not be aware of it. This definitely poses an information literacy issue that any librarian will recognize.”
P. 69-70
Janelle M Zauha Teaching Matters: Is there a Text in this Class? E-Readers, E-Books, and Information Literacy
“…for me, to be cosmopolitan is to live your life by the ancient science fiction maxims: “All laws are local” and “No law knows how local it is.”…One of science fiction’s greatest tricks is playing “vast,cool intelligence” and peering through a Martian telescope aimed Earthwards and noticing how weird and irrational we all are.”
p. 67-68 Context Cory Doctorow
Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power. And the first to be thrown overboard tend to be the elderly, the disabled, and anyone not integrated tightly into the global supply-chain. This phenomenon, coupled with the growing powers of automation and artificial intelligence which promises to make replacing human beings even cheaper, means there is a very important conversation we need to be having — but that conversation is not about the effects of social media.
That might not have been apparent to those who picked up their Sunday New York Times to find Sherry Turkle’s latest essay arguing that social media are driving us apart. If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with *each other* in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on our lives: suburbanization that isolates us from each other, long working-hours and commutes that are required to make ends meet, the global migration that scatters families across the globe, the military-industrial-consumption machine that drives so many key decisions, and, last but not least, the television — the ultimate alienation machine — which remains the dominant form of media. (For most people, the choice is not leisurely walks on Cape Cod versus social media. It’s television versus social media).
As a social media researcher and a user, every time I read one of these “let’s panic” articles about social media (and there are many), I want to shout: Look at TV! Look at commutes! Look at suburbs! Look at long work hours! That is, essentially, my response to Stephen Marche’s “Facebook Is Making Us Lonely,” which ran in The Atlantic magazine.
And then, please, look at the extensive amount of data that show that social-media users are having more conversations with people — online and off!
— Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships
Zeynep Tufekci
Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media’s tendency toward overwrought speculation has been increasingly married to the rhetoric of apocalypse. Today, nearly any event can be explained through apocalyptic language, from birds falling out of the sky (the Birdocalypse?) to a major nor’easter (Snowmageddon!) to a double-dip recession (Barackalypse! Obamageddon!). Armageddon is here at last — and your local news team is live on the scene! We’ve seen the equivalent of grade inflation (A for Apocalypse!) for every social, political, or ecological challenge before us, an escalating game of one-upmanship to gain the public’s attention. Why worry about global warming and rising sea levels when the collapse of the housing bubble has already put your mortgage underwater? Why worry that increasing droughts will threaten the supply of drinking water in America’s major cities when a far greater threat lies in the possibility of an Arab terrorist poisoning that drinking supply, resulting in millions of casualties?
— The Perils of Apocalyptic Thinking - Mathew Barrett Gross & Mel Gilles - Politics - The Atlantic (via ayjay)
“I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?…The term “the culture of fear” refers to the ways in which fear is employed by marketers, politicians, technology designers and the media to regulate the public and shape their worldviews….We have seen upticks in fearfulness with previous genres of media. Indeed, communication scholar George Gerbner noticed that mainstream media coverage of violent content makes people believe that the world is more dangerous than it really is. He called this phenomenon the “mean world syndrome”. The more people are exposed to negative content about what’s happening in the world, the more they believe the world to be a negative place. Yet, what happens when they are exposed to meanness, cruelty, fear, and anxiety through people that they know?
Networked media connects people to their friends and loved ones, but it also creates an infrastructure through which information can flow rapidly. Baby pictures and celebratory notices spread like wildfire, but so does misinformation and fear. How does such fearmongering affect society? Who is responsible for curbing fear? Is this a design issue? An individual responsibility issue? A societal issue?”
danah boyd Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that’s us
“Sommerville observes “Universities are not giving us much practice at formulating worldviews in [their] haste to fit us for our jobs.”…Sommerville repeats the lament of Clark Kerr,former president of the California university system who says that universities have “no great vision to lure them on, only need for survival.” P. 19 The Gospel and the Life of the Mind Bradley Green
