Recently in Technology and Culture Category

The Merchants of Cool (Frontline)

Merchants of Cool Frontline Documentary

The Merchants of Cool is a powerful Frontline documentary film on marketing popular culture to teens now available to view online. Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff takes the viewer inside the world of "cool" and takes a hard look at pop culture, media and society. This report on marketing popular culture to teens Ad executives and PR insiders go "cool hunting" in the underground world of teen trends and what they find and exploit creates a powerful media tool for the merchants of cool. This insightful look at how media, culture and adolescent entitlement collide was made at the cusp of the millenium, but is still relevant in today's face paced and converging world of social media and pop culture.

Growing Up Online

Fontline January 22, 2008

In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

In addition to the PBS film, visitors to this site will find other readings and links as well as teachers' guides.

The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites

Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University 2007

This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one's ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital.

College Students 'Addicted' to Social Media, Study Finds

By Rick Nauert, PhD, Senior News Editor, PsychCentral.com

American college students are "addicted" to the instant connections and information afforded by social media, a new study suggests.

According to researchers, students describe their feelings when they have to abstain from using media in literally the same terms associated with drug and alcohol addictions: in withdrawal, frantically craving, very anxious, extremely antsy, miserable, jittery, and crazy.

Bring Clarity to Writing | ThinkSimpleNow.com

Have you ever read an email from someone that was too wordy, lacked focus, and left you confused? How can we learn from reading such emails to improve our own communication? How do we compose emails and writings that others will actually want to read?

The ability to write clearly is crucial to getting your message across no matter what you're writing, whether it's an email, a blog post, a magazine article, or a letter to a friend. Clear and concise writing is vital to having your words read and understood.

The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - NYTimes.com

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers' scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading -- diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Toward a Type 1 civilization By Michael Shermer -LA Times
Along with energy policy, political and economic systems must also evolve.

Our civilization is fast approaching a tipping point. Humans will need to make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make that transformation will doom us to the endless political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for the last half-millennium.

We need new technologies to be sure, but without evolved political and economic systems, we cannot become what we must. And what is that? A Type 1 civilization. Let me explain.

The Periodic Table of Videos - University of Nottingham

Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version has a short video about each one.

Is online college exam site ethical? - CNN.com

A Web site developed this year that allows students to share old exams online is causing debate among professors about its ethical implications. PostYourTest.com is an educational tool that lets students anonymously upload materials and tests from their previous and current classes, said Demir Oral, creator of the site.

The 411 to avoid boredom- Los Angeles Times

Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information?

Human-motivation studies traditionally stress well-established needs: food, water, sex, avoidance of pain. In a culture like ours, most of these needs can be satisfied easily. Just open the refrigerator door, or blow on that spoonful of hot soup. (Satisfying the need for sex may require a bit more doing.)

What's been missing from this scientific research is humans' nonstop need for more information.

Corporate media colludes with democracy's demise.
by: Bill Moyers, In These Times | truthout.org

I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf won?"

The old Cherokee replied simply, "The one I feed."

Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our society, media provides the fodder.

Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

---
This article was adapted from Bill Moyers' keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis on June 7. [pdf]

Free speech is thorny online - CNN.com

Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

CAUTION: Childen at Play - The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games
Thanks to the current media frenzy and barrage of lawsuits surrounding violent video games, I can't tell people what I do for a living without getting a lecture on the current plague of youth violence and the scourge that is Grand Theft Auto. I decided it was time for a rebuttal more effective than shrugging and saying, "Well, I think you're wrong."

So I sat down to write this article, and started doing some research. What I discovered startled me. I'm not sure I have the ability to write a totally serious piece - it is not in my nature to be serious, nor the nature of GR - but the issues are very serious indeed and the evidence is very real.

I am even going to use charts. With words on 'em. We spare no expense.

First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein - Los Angeles Times

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers - Chronicle.com

College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to steal music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.

100+ Resources for Teaching Without Textbooks | Teaching Tips

What would your classroom be like without your students cracking open their oversized textbooks everyday? Probably a lot more interesting, especially for the kiddies. There are so many other resources out there for teachers to use, online and off, that teaching without textbooks is becoming more and more acceptable. If you don't believe us, scroll down this list of over 100 different resources -- including websites, iPod lectures and field trips -- that will encourage you to toss out your textbooks.

Higher Education: From Craft-Production to Capitalist Enterprise?

One may well ask: why shouldn't higher education be produced more efficiently? When the power loom displaced hand-loom weaving, society gained cheaper cloth. The success of capitalism in revolutionizing the means of production was even praised in several oft-quoted paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto. And 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw the ever-cheaper commodity as capitalism's major accomplishment...

The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence. "This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind."

Free Online Courses from Great Universities | Open Culture

Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture - Chronicle.com

"Some traditional lectures are 50 minutes just because lectures always tended to be 50 minutes -- but there's not 50 minutes worth of material in there," he says. "When I'm done, I'm done. I'm not just going to keep talking just fill up the time."

'Rage against the machines' by Tom Chatfield | Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147

Within the virtual worlds we have begun to construct, players can experience the kind of deep, lasting satisfactions that only come from the performance of a complex, sociable and challenging task. Yet such satisfactions will always remain, in a crucial sense, unreal. Whatever skills it teaches and friendships it creates, an eight-hour World of Warcraft session is nevertheless solipsistic like few other activities.

Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool -- Physorg.com

Writing for Wikipedia "seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge," than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city...

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called "Murder, Madness and Mayhem," accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article." In May, three entries created by nine students in the course became the first student works to reach Wikipedia's top rank. Their articles, about the book "El Señor Presidente" by Nobel prize-winning Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, ran May 5 on Wikipedia's home page.

Community College Open Textbook Project Gets Under Way - Chronicle.com

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California.

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for "quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability," according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California's UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.

What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

Link here to the TED site to see more information and discussions related to this video.

A Nation of Wimps -- Psychology Today

The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, "they're constantly referring to their parents for guidance," reports Kramer. They're not learning how to manage for themselves.

Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"

Scientists create machine that knows what you are thinking | the Daily Mail

The device's possibilities can, however, be extended and the team envisage a time when it will be used to conduct infallible lie detector tests, while the accurate interpretation of a person's intentions could allow police to arrest criminals before they break the law, as seen in the film Minority Report.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

Direct link to this video

Are Health, Wealth and Happiness Linked Worldwide?
By Melissa Lafsky

Levitt and Dubner have blogged quite a bit about the growing literature on happiness studies. Meanwhile, the media has been abuzz recently over the relationship (or possible lack thereof) between happiness and wealth.

Enter Angus Deaton, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton. Deaton has a published new paper, "Income, Aging, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll," that analyzes the results of a 2006 poll in which participants from 132 countries were asked identical questions on topics including standard of living, personal health, and their country's healthcare system.

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom

In one Boston College professor's classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students. The wiki is even used to let students submit possible questions for examinations, many of which actually appear on tests.

Gerald Kane, assistant professor of information systems at the Chestnut Hill, Mass., school, has been using a wiki from SocialText Inc. as the primary teaching tool in his classroom since October, relying on the technology to integrate content from other Web 2.0 technologies like social book-making tools, RSS systems, and Google for his "Computers in Management" courses.

best.online.docus - Best Online Documentaries

Why We Teach Digital Writing -- Texas Tech University

Computers are not “just tools” for writing. Networked computers create a new kind of writing space that changes the writing process and the basic rhetorical dynamic between writers and readers. Computer technologies have changed the processes, products, and contexts for writing in dramatic ways—and rhetoric theory, composition practice, and writing instruction all need to change to suit how writing is produced in digital spaces.

Comment is free: Andrew Keen v Emily Bell

So is today's internet killing our culture? Let me begin this exchange with three simple questions:

1) Is the internet good or bad for consumers of culture (the audience)?

2) Is the internet good or bad for creators of culture (writers, film makers, musicians, journalists)?

3) Is the internet good or bad for the cultural economy?

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2291/educators-debate-voice-in-second-life

Last week Linden Lab, the operator of Second Life, unveiled a much-anticipated voice-chat feature that allows avatars to communicate using the voices of their operators. Many educators have hailed the move. Andy Powell, of Britain’s Eduserv, a nonprofit group that promotes information technology in research and teaching, has even made a YouTube video about how to activate the voice feature.

Internet Smackdown: The Amateur vs. the Professional

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture bemoans the rise of amateurism in all spheres of professional life, specifically as facilitated by the internet's long reach. It bemoans a lot of other serious problems raised by something as insidiously intrusive as the web, but we'll confine the focus here to the question of the amateur vs. the professional.

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud - Chirag Mehta : chir.ag

This is the first I've seen of Tag Clouds. Interesting way to get a visual sense of prominent ideas in speeches.

See Tagcloud.com