Leave me alone! I know I should be working 🙂
(That’s me BTW)
To make your own, go here
HT: King Politics
For those of you who can’t get enough of one political scientist blogger (me), here are two more political science bloggers on which to keep an eye. King Politics is run by Marvin King, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. The blog provides an interesting and unique take on American Politics. King also has a podcast where he interviews other bloggers and researchers. Worth a listen!
The other worthwhile blog is ImmigrationNow by Gustavo Cano, a Ph.D. political scientist from Columbia who runs the Transnationalism Research Project at the Mexcio-North Research Network and specializes in immigration issues. He has also created a site called Immigration Research Now that serves as a compendium of current research on the subject. Both are worth a look.
Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉
On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog
From Andrew – The Obama Effect?
and please indulge my soccer geekdom:
Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)
In Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas considers the ongoing question of how public, democratic deliberation might be moved from peripheral points in society to the very core of governance. That is, how might citizen opinions, social movements, and all manner of individuals and groups working outside the loci of decision-making push their diverse issues to the center of political institutions?
Obama’s change.gov is making headway on this question, and has thus far received high levels of citizen input via their online invitations for issue feedback. As I briefly mentioned in one of our last podcasts, though, it would seem equally productive to move some of the online discussion at change.gov to reflexive matters about the very “procedure” by which this mechanism hopes to best advance their democratic goals. Other bloggers are now picking up on this need too (see www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/33538/, “Open for Questions Round II: A Video Response”).
Many argumentation scholars have different ways of conceptualizing public deliberation. One traditional, useful scheme is to consider arguments as products (i.e. content), as processes (i.e. as human interaction), and as procedures (i.e. as rules or reasons that call into question such matters as forum, structure, etc.). My recommendation for change.gov and any similar online environments the Obama team is about to create is to not only make transparent the issues (argument as products) that might be debated over online, but the most useful processes and procedures that might be put in place to do so. Better yet, the administration should have a period where these considerations are also open to feedback from a public eager for change and full of innovative ideas—as we strive toward a good, albeit imperfect, new media system that decreases the deliberative distance between those with and without access to political resources and power. – Don Waisanen
Bookforum is the greatest aggregator of quality web content I’ve ever come across. The only problem is that it fills me with anxiety to know that there is so much good content out there I’ll never be able to read. This is my filter of their filter of the best of the web today….or those aspects of the web which most closely adhere to what I’m interested in today.
When Groups Don’t Think – Utne Reader
Vote for me Not my Facebook Account – Slate
Three Maps that Get People Worked up – Mental Floss
Winter illness has impeded my blog posting for the past few days….
For anyone who’s interested in what I actually do for a paycheck, here’s my Internet and Politics syllabus for the fall (feel free to pick apart). As befits a political scientist who blogs for a Sociology journal, the syllabus has a decidedly interdiscipinary bent. If anyone has some reading suggestions…serve ’em up.
My hope is to incorporate the blog into the course discussion and vice versa. I welcome the community to take part in our ongoing conversations. I’ve used blogs in the classroom the past two semesters and I’ve found that the students learn a great deal from comments posted by faculty or students from other institutions. It’s a great way to extend the conversation beyond the walls of the classroom.
Last semester, a student of mine wrote a paper which followed none of the requirements of the assignment, but was fascinating nonetheless. As the result of a group project requiring students to do a content analysis of a show, he was describing the dominant values portrayed on the long-running and mediocre at best sitcom, Friends. In his paper, he quoted a 2004 reconsideration of Friends in Time magazine:
Back in 1994–that Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain year–the show wanted to explain people in their 20s to themselves: the aimlessness, the cappuccino drinking, the feeling that you were, you know, “always stuck in second gear.” It soon wisely toned down its voice-of-a-generation aspirations and became a comedy about pals and lovers who suffered comic misunderstandings and got pet monkeys. But it stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged you.
This quote particularly resonated with me, despite the fact that I was 13 in 1994 and not a late 20-something. Ever since, the concept of generations has been gnawing at me. According to Strauss and Howe’s Generations, Generation Xers were born between 1961 and 1981. Defined by being the first post-Baby Boom generation, Gen X has lived in the shadow of the 60s generation and, in general, has seen less success and prosperity than their parents despite coming of age in the generally prosperous 80s and 90s. For many children of divorce in Gen. X, like the characters on Friends, they were reluctant to marry at a young age. I was born in the final year of Gen X and the cultural stuff of coffee shops, goatees, and grunge rock were aspirational — not lived experiences — for me and my peers. If Generation X’s quintessential movie is Reality Bites, Lost in Translation spoke more to people my age.
The supposed next generation, Generation Y, the Millennials, or the Net Generation, according to the wisdom of Wikipedia, were born “anywhere between the second half of the 1970s … to around the year 2000.” This huge window includes both me and my students (many of whom were born in 1990) and is not a generation to which I feel particular attachment. While I can remember life before the Internet, most of them cannot. While I was molded politically in the Clinton era (free from major foreign threat), they have come of age during Bush’s War on Terror. By most survey indicators, they are relatively more conservative and more eager to get married and reproduce than Gen. Xers.
My own relative confusion about which generation I fit into is, I think, more broadly revealing. Does anyone ever feel completely attached to the constructed identity of a generation? Is “generation” even an intellectually useful concept or should social scientists limit ourselves to the empirical measure of “age cohorts”? If, indeed, the notion of generations is useful, what might be some useful parameters for defining them?
Ben Smith at Politico has a fascinating little tidbit about Obama’s release of photos from his daughters’ first day of school. While Smith suggests that at first glance the release of these photos might seem invasive, he links to Garance Franke-Ruta at the Washington Post who offers up this keen observation:
It may sound counterintuitive, but the best way for Barack Obama to keep any of his life private in this era of cell phone-snaps, Facebook goofs and long-lensed paparazzi is to do exactly this: reliably and regularly release pictures of newsworthy intimate family moments in a manner that he can control.
That’s because online, the only way to control your own image is to drown outsiders’ takes in media stream of your own creation — and there is no news agency or paparazzo in the world with better access to inner workings of Obamaland and the Obama family than Obama himself.
If Obama’s active Flickr account means the end of the paparratzi, then I’m all for it!
Stuff I’d read right now if I wasn’t about to watch Baby Mama….
From Bookforum: The first chapter from Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations by Hayagreeva Rao.
Edge.org’s annual question for 2009 – What will change everything?
IT Conversations interview with Jeff Jonas – IBM Entity Analytics.
From National Journal by way of Bookforum – Hacking the Hill: How the Chinese — or someone — hacked into House of Representatives computers in 2006.
From BusinessWeek via Planetizen – Bringing Broadband to the Urban Poor.
Also, if your NetFlix queue is not piling up, check our the Contexts podcast where Jon Smajda and I talk about blogging in academia.
Until I’m back from vacation and my four year old gets over her Spore addiction, here are community development based links for 1-2-09….. buen provecho 🙂
From Cultural Survival Voices: A primer on Community Radio.
From the Seattle Post Intelligencier (via Planetizen) Obama’s Food Politics
From UChannel – Transforming Mexico City
From ICTologist – Creating Community Knowledge
and