Contech

Seeing as the last post on this blog was almost a year ago, we’ve decided to make it official and close Contech. We’ll keep the blog online for posterity’s sake, but there will be no new posts and we’ve turned off comments.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s a breakdown of free vs. paid apps in Apple’s App Store:

The thing that catches my eye: that the “Education” category has the highest proportion of paid apps. You might think—if you had no experience with the educational publishing industry in our country—that educational applications might be made freely available more frequently than games, financial or photography programs, just to name a few. Sadly, anyone that’s had to pay tuition and/or buy publications like textbooks, journals or (ahem…) magazines from educational institutions know that’s not the case: the educational publishing industry somehow manages to rip-off everyone in an age where content is becoming cheaper and cheaper in every other sector, and where you would think the primary creators and consumers of the content (educators and students) would be the most willing to freely share their knowledge. To be honest, I can imagine a bunch of explanations, but I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. This is just one more example of the trend though.

Tim O’Reilly saying interesting things about Twitter:

In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn’t do, and the way that its core services aren’t bound to a particular interface.

It strikes me that many of the programs that become enduring platforms have these same characteristics. Few people use the old TCP/IP-based applications like telnet and ftp any more, but TCP/IP itself is ubiquitous. No one uses the mail program any more, but all of us still use email. No one uses Tim Berners-Lee’s original web server and browser any more. Both were superseded by independent programs that used his core innovations: http and html.

What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database. And that’s the old secret of Web 2.0, Data is the Intel Inside. That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

O’Reilly also talks about how a large number of Twitter users use Twitter to update their Facebook status, which is exactly what I do. In fact, if you just look at my Facebook page, it looks like I’m fairly active on Facebook, until you realize that almost every thing in my profile is pulled into Facebook from other services like Twitter or this blog (via Wordbook). Thanks to the demise of Scrabulous, I pretty much only go to Facebook any more to approve friend requests and respond to people who comment on my Twitter status inside of Facebook instead of in Twitter.

I’m not sure what a Facebook that tried to untie its data from its interface like O’Reilly recommends would look like though. But an even more interesting thought experiment is this: what about a Facebook-like social networking system that works like laconi.ca, a Twitter-like piece of software where the data itself is decentralized on individual instances of the software but where the social networking & communication can occur across each instance. This gets around both the centralization of interface, but also the centralization of data, which is really a much bigger problem!

These articles from June’s Atlantic are a couple months old now, but they’re still interesting reads in the run-up to the election:

• The Amazing Money Machine: How Silicon Valley and the Internet shaped Obama’s campaign. The key argument:
  

  In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat.

• HisSpace: Previous communications technology revolutions have shaped how Presidents govern. Here’s a look at how the internet is influencing government today and, in particular, how this might matter in an Obama Presidency. The historical angle, in particular, is interesting food for thought:
  

  Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party

  [...]

  Abraham Lincoln became a national celebrity, according to the historian Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, when transcripts of those debates were reprinted nationwide in newspapers, which were just then reaching critical mass in distribution beyond the few Eastern cities where they had previously flourished

  [...]

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio to make his case for a dramatic redefinition of government itself, quickly mastering the informal tone best suited to the medium.

  [...]

  And of course John F. Kennedy famously rode into the White House thanks in part to the first televised presidential debate in U.S. history, in which his keen sense of the medium’s visual impact, plus a little makeup, enabled him to fashion the look of a winner (especially when compared with a pale and haggard Richard Nixon).

  [...]

  The communications revolution under way today involves the Internet, of course, and if Barack Obama eventually wins the presidency, it will be in no small part because he has understood the medium more fully than his opponents do.

I’m generally inclined to agree with Vint Cerf’s twist on the famous anarchist slogan: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

Nonetheless, many of us—myself included—end up using slides anyway. Done right, they can be a very good thing.

A fellow Minnesota grad student, Wes Longhofer, has developed a unique style of PowerPointing that really pushes the technology in a fun, creative way. I asked Wes if I could share one of his presentations here, and he said yes: Download the PDF here.

I’ll mostly let the slides speak for themselves, but a few notes:

• This is for an introductory Political Sociology class. As you’ll see, the readings for this class were Domhoff’s Who Rules America?, John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness, and Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”¹
• All frames within each slide are displayed at once in the PDF, though you can easily picture how the various arrows, highlights and questions on each slide appear one-at-a-time during the presentation. Because of all the crazy fonts & images Wes uses, distributing the original PowerPoint file isn’t really an option.
• There are four movie clips embedded in the presentation (obviously they’re not included in the PDF—you’ll just see a placeholder image). In order, they are:
  1. A clip from the film “Wag the Dog” about political spin.
  2. A clip from “Century of Self” on the role of psychoanalysts and the CIA in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
  3. A Reagan campaign ad from 1984.
  4. An anti-Howard Dean ad from 2004 about “latte-drinking” liberal “freak shows.”
• This particular class meets only once a week in 2.5 hour sessions, in case you were wondering how so much material could possibly be covered in one class.

And Wes puts this kind of care into every lecture he prepares. (Is anyone surprised he won our department’s Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award this year?)

Footnotes

1. Of special value to Wes & I as we are both native Kansans. [↩]

Contexts just wrapped up the first phase of an online roundtable titled, “The Social Significance of Barack Obama.” We solicited short statements from six sociologists on the significance of Obama’s candidacy and potential Presidency, published them online & then held a group discussion about the statements in the comments.

The roundtable is now public & open for comments. One of the topics that hasn’t been discussed much so far has been the role of technology & the internet in Obama’s campaign and in modern politics generally. In fact, I might just head over over there and chime in about this myself… Come join us & encourage others to join in as well!

Last night I watched the DNC live online and I had a very odd thought: the politics of watching this online was getting in the way of my enjoyment…of a political convention? Well, given the fact that conventions focus more on personalities & life stories than political issues, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of my political thoughts had to do with two technology issues surrounding the online broadcast: Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (being used to stream the video online) and high speed internet policies in the US.

(more…)

Since starting Contexts Blogs, I’ve had the chance to talk to lots of blogging sociologists. I’ve also had the chance to have a lot of non-blogging sociologists firmly say “No!” to my attempts to turn them into blogging sociologists. So over the last year or so I’ve given a lot of thought to why more sociologists don’t blog, and of course the related question of what drives those who do. Here’s my current take on the topic:

(more…)

As you might have noticed from the new (temporary) banner, changes are afoot here at Contech.

I started this blog as a primarily internal resource for people blogging at thesocietypages.org. Whenever people asked me questions about things like blogging clients or adding images to posts, I’d write up a post on Contech instead of just replying individually. However, I always secretly wanted to do a little more with this blog as well…

So from now on, all the “how-to” posts will now live at thesocietypages.org/howto. Contech is, as the blog description says, now about putting “social media in social contexts.”

What does that mean? Technology and the internet are obviously huge factors in our lives today. Most importantly, in our opinion, they are huge factors in our social lives. New “social media” and technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking sites have the potential to radically impact and transform the way we communicate, the relationships we form, and the knowledge we have about the world. The web is full of sites filled with daydreaming and speculation about the social causes and consequences of new technologies. Our aim is to bring social science research and theory to bear on these new developments. What does empirical data about social media technologies tell us? And in the absence of hard data, we think we can offer at least slightly more informed daydreaming and speculation.

I’m going to have company! Jessie Daniels and Chris Toulouse will both be writing for Contech. Chris specializes in teaching with technology & Jessie studies the convergence of race, gender and digital media. Over time, we hope to have others join in as well!¹

So pardon the mess for a little bit, but the new Contech will be up and running very soon!

Footnotes

1. Take that as an invitation, social scientists interested in blogging about technology! Email contech (at) thesocietypages.org for more information! [↩]