Search results for facebook

Back in April, we had a lively discussion here on Twitter and language.  I recently saw that the dictionary team at the Oxford University Press is on top of the sitch.  Here’s some of their observations::

“Since January OUP’s dictionary team has sorted through many random tweets.  Here are the basic numbers:

Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09”

Verbs in the gerund form are pretty popular, as well as informal slang like “OK” and “fuck.”  Most common word on Twitter & general English:: “the,” with #2 on Twitter being “I.”

The OED folks seem to just be reporting some of their analyses, which I have no problem with.  They’re not indicting anyone and even end the blurb with “Tweet on.”

Now, enter the shrill cassandras at HigherEdMorning who report on the above with a post, “The Hidden Problem with Twitter.” Talk about framing.  That title is priming the reader to be wary of Twitter, but there’s more.  The image used in the article decries the lament of every frustrated educator who has endured reading a crappy essay::

They report the OUP observations, but finalize their Twitterproblem trifecta with::

“So here’s the question: Is Twitter – along with instant messaging and texting – contributing to the destruction of language skills among college students?”

Twitterfail?  I actually have a big problem with this.  It’s taking observations and drawing inane conclusions that would pass muster in the most laxed ethnography course and would be a social science epic fail.

What gets really interesting is the discourse that follows in the comments.  I urge you to take a look {there were 69 as of 3:18a on 18 June}.  The interesting thing, to me, is how the social aspect of technological use creeps into the dialogue.

“Baloo559 Says:

Twitter, instant messaging and texting ARE contributing to, let’s call it degraded language skills, by providing a set of forums in which these degraded skills are accepted and encouraged. I believe acceptance is primarily a function of the youth of the majority of contributors. They lack experience with more formal language and don’t seem to grasp the subtly and nuance that come with its complexity. Degradation is encouraged by the fact that even the best texting phones or IM clients are poor writing instruments. 12 keys are inadequate as are one eighth scale, not quite QWERTY keyboards. Further encouragement comes from the satisfaction developing personalities take in expressing themselves in creatively alternative manners, especially if it tends to confuse authority figures.”

Not everyone is a naysayer::

“Catherine Politi Says:

Did the abbreviated wording used in telegrams destroy the English language? I don’t think so. Neither will Twitter, or texting in general – as long as schools continue to stress good language skills in the classroom. As an English teacher and student of linguistics, I realize that English and all other living languages are constantly evolving, so Twitter and its “siblings” will affect English, but not to necessarily destroy or devalue it. As for spelling, well, English is a terrible model for spelling, so maybe these mediums will improve it!”

and this comment makes an interesting link to dictation::

“Jill Lindsey Says:

I believe that Twitter, messaging and texting language is just like the dictation shorthand from the last century. My mother wrote in shorthand and it just looked like a bunch of symbols to me but she and others skilled in it decoded it with fluency. No one but Golden Agers know or use shorthand anymore, but now we text. It is simply a new shorthand for a new context in a new age. Formal language is constantly evolving too. Think of the transition from Olde English to American English. Change does not have to mean destruction of language- its just evolution. Just like shorthand was a symbol system for more formal language, so is texting- the meaning is conveyed through a symbol system and translated in our minds. Spelling is just agreed conventions- those have and will continue to change over time. The only problem of concern should be when the meaning one is trying to convey cannot be discerned by the reader. We have to have common understandings for any symbol system to work- formal or informal.”

Whenever I see criticisms of youth or youth culture, I tend to look for ad hominems and finger-waving.  Damn, fool kids.  The Cisco fatty meme brought out a bunch of such anger.  So, when it comes to Twitilliteracy, JRB offers his 2¢::

“jrb@msu Says:

As long as texting is treated like vocal dialects, I have no objection. Cajun, Cockney, etc. are fine but rarely get transcribed unless the accent is essential to the story. Likewise telegrams – they serve a purpose but we don’t ever see “telegram text” in written stories or formal correspondence.

But when this sort of “abbrev-speak” traverses the chasm into formal writing I think we risk losing a substantial chunk of our discreet and collective cultures, so much of which are recorded as written words (not wrds). Just as learning a second languange [sic] enhances the developing brain, so does an understanding of the colorful and deeply descriptive nature of the written word.

SS I think you miss a key point with using text speak for formal communications – sometimes, like it or not, we _have_ to adhere to a minimal level of decorum, and frankly students who cannot adopt such probably have an issue with authority which suggests ther are not the best candidates for a good old fashioned college experience (where the instructor still wields authority) – perhaps they are better suited to informal cloud-based learning, just before they step out to that job at Burger Queen.“

Bitter, much?  Clearly, this gets people into a lather, but what plays out is a culture war of sorts, where technology and the social collide with a normative vengeance.  What strikes me is a reduction of the “other” to a stereotype and having no interest in contextualizing what’s going on here with Twitter.  There are also a lot of assumptions about an ideal orthodoxy, in terms of psychological information processing, learning, and expression, let alone the hegemony of English usage online.  Going back to the OUP report, what about non-English tweets or tweets by non-native speakers?  So many questions, but I’m a social science geek.

So, is this no big thing?  While many think this is just a tempest in a teapot, I think these debates are just a tip of the iceberg in an increasingly globalized world.  I think Novia in the first pic. will do just fine despite Twitterish communication.  Oh, for all the n00bs, BFF 4 realz=Ben Folds Five.

Twitterversion::  #newblogpost #Twitter kllng English lang-still! SmOnePlsThinkoftheChildren‽ HighrEdMorn takes OxUnivPress stry&stirs pot. http://url.ie/1qqo  @Prof_K

Song:: Battle of Who Could Care Less – Ben Folds Five

Video::

What Nick Carr thinks of Twitter:

The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self’s bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that I’m real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I’m walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

I’d buy his argument if the majority of the activity in the blogosphere was taking place among atomized, yearning individuals lost in the anomie of consumer culture. But in my experience, on-line communities augment, rather than replace off-line interaction. Facebook research is still in its infancy, but what’s emerging is that Facebook uses extend their existing off-line networks on-line (see Danah Boyd’s work on this question).

We are “symbol(s) speaking of symbols to other symbols:”

Ken has an intriguing post below exploring issues relating to technologies like Twitter and their impact upon communication competence and media ecology. While many of these technologies are here to stay, I think that we’re all going to see many of them peak soon. Just as the car gave us traffic jams, Twitter and Facebook are probably going to hit their points of maximum capacity in the not-too-distant future, given their rapid diffusion. Yet I’m also not that concerned, at least for now, about these technologies being “minimalist” forms of communication. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues, “I love you” is a sound bite. This isn’t to denigrate developed analysis; I’m a big fan of book-length manuscripts and all the fruits of the printing press. But we might need to move the discussion more to one of “meaning” rather than linear quantity, to better understand the limits and potentials of new forms of social media.

There may be one trend to celebrate for now. Twitter appears to be opening up a space for more direct democracy (or at least a strengthened representative democracy) between elected officials and their constituents (see “Twitter and its Impact on American Governance,” www.communicationcurrents.com/index.asp?bid=15&issuepage=157&False). There is some evidence that, despite the limits of the channel, it is being used by officials to bypass mainstream media filters and framings. If this development continues, we’re going to have to rethink entire theoretical edifices created in the last few decades (such as McCombs & Shaw’s “agenda-setting theory”—which describes how the media sets the public and political agenda).

 How this will all work out remains to be seen. I’d like to know how much of a one-way or two-way communication channel Twitter will likely become. Right now it seems more of a one-way blast of advocacy than a considered interaction. Or, more troublingly, perhaps the form of this technology will foster a new age of assertion, rather than argument. On the other hand, it’s now well-known that the move from typewriting to word processing freed us all up to “overwrite,” being less careful about sentence by sentence constructions or the constraints of white-out and laborious re-drafting. Maybe Twitter is a countertrend to these developments—forcing writers to work within a tightly bounded channel where communicative impact, rather than spewing, becomes more of a norm again.

So, as we become “scanners” of content in this Web 2.0 world, what will happen to language?  As we use SMS and Twitter, bound by 140 characters, will the use of h@x0r and L33t-style words go beyond these contexts and into other modes of communications {such as e-mails and reports}?  

Already, there’s a shorthand one needs to “decode” on the TV tickers for news, finance {above}, weather, and sports.  Will technology reduce our written language to a lowest-common denominator?  Will a linguistic Idiocracy set in, where those with good written communication skills die off, leaving the rest of us thumbing abbreviations and smileys on handhelds :-P?

Additionally, are we losing our capacity to read, in an “educated” citizen of society sense?  Linguist, Naomi Baron studies technology as it relates to the evolution of language.  She warns of the implications of this and offered this observation in a 2005 LA Times article::

“Has written culture recently taken a nose drive? These are the students who grew up on Spark Notes, the popular study guides. Many of this generation are aliterate — they know how to read but don’t choose to. And abridgment of texts is now taken to extremes, with episodes from micro-novels being sent as text messages on cell phones…

Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.

If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society. “–“Killing the written word by snippets” (11/28/05) {Emphasis added}

What about those emoticons?  Used to clarify meanings in text-based environments, are these shorthand shortcuts impoverishing our language?  

Or, are they just transforming how we communicate?  For example, you can be as blunt or brutal as possible, but if you follow it with a wink or a “smiley,” it plants tongue firmly in cheek.  You get your digs in, but soften the blow.  Is this playing in to the development of a passive-aggressive culture or at least a passive-aggressive written culture?  F*** you! 😉

So, in order to be understood, will be be relying more and more on communication shortcuts {text shorthand, graphics, and/or even sound} not just in SMS texting and microblogging Tweets, but in other forms of everyday communication?  I’ve seen people get frustrated with others because their irony or sarcasm wasn’t coming through.  Allow me to reintroduce the irony mark, which has been around since the late 1800s::

Just in case someone might be overly-literal and might not get the fact that you’re being snarky, your bases are covered.  Looking back on Baron’s quote, the big question for me has to do with the thinking process.  I linger on terms like “logical” and “linear,” as I wonder how much of our communications are moving towards the “emotional” and “hypertextual.”  The emoticon {or other shorthand symbol} and a jumbled mass of linked stream-of-consciousness utterances may be where we’re heading.  I think the thought processes may be increasingly non-linear for more and more people and logic is taking a back seat to perlocutionary acts that try to elicit a response or some kind of action/reaction from others.  This sounds a lot like advertising.  

I offer this.  Will everyday communication be a pastiche of a myriad of verbal/visual snippets?  We scan through incredible amounts of information and gain meaning from “decoding” communications and constructing gestalts.    The linear thought process of decoding and encoding meanings is subsumed by thought processes that cut and mix ideas. 

Using Twitter as an example, take this Tweet by Clay Shirky.  

In under 140 characters he communicates several key points and offers a hyperlink to the source, but without proper sentence structure.  Nevertheless, we can get meaning from his Tweet::  (1) 3% of newspaper reading is done online, (2) cite of blog post on newspaper impressions for print/online, (3) assumption is that readers see 1/2 of the pages, (4) another assumption is that they read all articles, & (5) Clay’s quick analysis.  We combine this information with other information {bricolage} for whatever purpose at hand.  We can use web searches to get this information,  On Twitter, we can look for other information on “newspapers,” using the hashtag:: #newspapers.

Walter Ong in his Orality & Literacy (1982) makes the distinctions between orality {spoken word} and literacy {print}.  Part of me feels that SMS/texting and microblogging {Facebook “graffiti” & Tweeting} represent a hybrid mode, betwixt and between both orality and literacy.  Literacy is assumed, but communications are taking on more of the characteristics of the spoken word.  So, where is all of this heading?  We will communicate in ways where we try to be understood, given the technological and temporal parameters.  I think this will be increasingly distilled.  The technology will evolve towards allowing people to cut and mix text, images, multimedia, sound, etc.  Our use of language and how language enters our consciousness will evolve into new patterns.

These are musings and I welcome rebuttals.  If you use harsh language, I’d prefer you soften the blow with an emoticon or two.  😉 🙂

This will be the first installment of a multi-part series.  José, in a recent blog, brought up some excellent points regarding policy, power, and capital.  So, who are these villainous characters populating the halls of places like AIG, Lehman, and Merrill-Lynch?  A bunch of capitalist MBAs, who may never have read a word of Ayn Rand prose, but act out all sorts of wild, objectivist fantasies, right?

Well, there’s been a recent battle brewing on the Harvard Business blogs on the topic of the recent financial crisis and How to Fix Business Schools.   The editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review wanted to start a dialogue on the very topic::

“Are our business schools up to the job? Many critics have charged that the values imparted in MBA programs contributed significantly to the ethical and strategic lapses that led to the current economic crisis. Is that fair? And if so, what needs to change? How can business schools regain popular trust?”–Adi Ignatius

Joel Podolny, a Sociologist, notes in his blog post that “Business schools provide students with many technical skills, but they appear to do little, or nothing, to foster responsibility and accountability.”  Bob Sutton, an organizational sociologist, also brings up some interesting points on the Harvard blog, as well as his own::

• “One of the root problems with business schools is that too many are infected with assumptions that reinforce and bring out the worst in human-beings. In particular, the logic and discipline of economics usually rules the roost at business schools.”
• “I have had Stanford students tell me for decades that Merrill is (or was) fundamentally dog eat dog world to live in and there is no incentive for helping coworkers and you get ahead by ignoring them, doing your work, and occasionally sticking a knife in their back.”

Sutton points a finger squarely at economics, which is a dominant mode of thinking in business schools (more on this later).  On the other side of the fence, Steve Kaplan, an economist, offers up “The Economists Have It Right,” where he notes the positives of economic thinking and how not following good economics leads to bad results::

“The tools economists give to students better equip them to understand the business world they will experience. In fact, one of the ways CEOs of financial services firms (e.g., Lehman’s Dick Fuld, Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal and Citigroup’s Charles Prince) failed was in not understanding the agency theory and economics taught in business school. In particular, it is a simple economic point that it is a bad idea to pay up front fees and bonuses for investments or loans that have long-term payoffs.”

He goes on to state that efficiency advances due to economics has increased world GDP and well-being through businesses and capitalism.

First off, I have three degrees from AACSB business schools, but I’ve always been interdisciplinary and my training was steeped in the social sciences, as well as having exposure to the humanities at the graduate level.  My take is that many business schools have created a received-view, dare I say the hackneyed term paradigm, of solving problems.  I’ve seen and heard arguments about adding rigor through quantitative logics or a emphasis on ethics in the curriculum as solutions.  Given this, I have often wondered what type of students are we creating.  Critical problem solvers or disciples of a rational economics worldview (tempered with business ethics)?  It’s not just about how many economics courses are taken, but rather which paradigms are being used to build knowledge.  Which normative logics are being taught?

I think students pick up from business schools and the workplace HOW work gets done and how to get ahead.  There needs to be no smoking gun memo issued by a manager or a PowerPoint slide by a professor stating this.  How is this so?  It’s all about habitus (i.e., our actions are guided by our learned dispositions within a context) and doxa (i.e., what is taken-for-granted in a given context), borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu.  Business schools teach “the game.”  Pop culture depicts the habitus and doxa of the business game with overkill, but the examples are nevertheless instructive.

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) {left} has Gordon Gekko state a declaration of principles, seeming to echo the very spirit of Adam Smith himself.  “Greed is good” is declared with almost religious fervor, a manifestation of the final trajectory of Max Weber’s take on Martin Luther’s “quiet revolution.”  Boiler Room (2000) {right} has Jim Young indoctrinate the noobs* to the culture.  Now, imagine these images of hyperbole toned down and couched in lectures, cases, and war stories.  This is not to say that it’s all bad and that all that is being taught is that opportunism and guile are justly rewarded.  I will say that there are patterns based upon dominant ways of thinking about business and organizations, often based upon assumptions of rationality and certain logics (but not others).  One might just say it’s simple pragmatics.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Sutton, in a comment response to Kaplan, notes what is being done at Stanford::

“…The bulk of the class is getting the students out and spreading ideas — they have spread (or tried to spread — failure happens!): Firefox (by building real browsers); practices for making Wal-Mart employees more aware of the environmental impact of the products they sell; hip-hop music; financial responsibility among younger people; and Facebook. In all cases, they have done these things by working among real customers and employees, and their work was judged by real executives from this companies. In other classes, we have done stuff like redesign and change an all-hands meeting in a real company.

So although the image of practical education most business schools present is the telling of war stories, our approach (which is expensive and inefficient) is to start with and weave in some general principles (including design thinking), some stories about how it works, and then to require the students to actually implement some change. This is a different model of management education than most business school professors imagine.”

Exactly.  I know that this type of approach is likely only at top-tier schools and niche programs.

I’d like to see business schools move towards giving students concepts and tools to re-think processes and practices that go beyond how things are currently done.  I’d like to see programs as incubators of ideas.  Places where students can try things and fail, learning from their mistakes.  I’d like to see business schools get students to think in terms of social systems and to incorporate practical solutions to dealing with the interface of different forms of capital (i.e., financial, social, political, cultural, natural, etc.).  In other words, stop trying to boil everything down to financial capital or over-rely upon particular disciplinary thinking.

I think there is creative work ahead for business schools, particularly given the current scrutiny, as well as the fact that the market for programs is increasingly global.  I’ll leave this installment with a Goethe quote::

“To refashion the fashioned, lest it harden into iron, is work of an endless vital activity/Und umzuschaffen das Geschaffne,  Damit sichs nicht zum Starren waffne,  Wirkt ewiges lebendiges Tun.”–Eins und Alles 

One of my students blogged about not being able to watch ABC’s Lost while studying abroad:

 “Interestingly enough, ABC was the first network to set up a deal with iTunes ‘to seek out alterative distribution venues for its show…’ I personally love that you can watch shows on online form ABC.com. Sometimes, I think its even better than watching it when it originally airs because the commercials are only 30 seconds and I can conveniently watch on Mac while I’m cozy in my bed. iTunes is also great though because when I was studying abroad in South Africa I had no television and ABC.com wouldn’t work outside the country, so I had to resort to buying shows online. I loved the fact that after I bought each show they were saved in my library and I could watch them whenever I liked, without any commercials.”

I’ve run into not being able to watch US content in Canada and was really frustrated when there was no legal way to watch shows like season 3 of The Venture Brothers, as they were being aired in the summer of 2008.  {There’s a possible workaround that I mention in my blog comment above.}  Canadian content in the US, such as the Trailer Park Boys (above) is a thornier problem, as one will need a Canadian web proxy for viewing.  Neither of these shows were available for purchase on iTunes when I was wanting to watch them.

I’m often asked, why is web content being geographically restricted?  A big issue has to do with intellectual property (IP) rights.  Here’s an exchange I saw on CBC about why the Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) and the Stanley Cup cannot be available online to overseas web surfers:

“O: I have to ask becuase I have a [l]ot of friends who live overseas…

Every time I talk to them they ask me why they can’t watch the Stanley Cup online

AL: One of our most common complaints, for sure.

O: Oh really?

AL: Sure. Our agreement with the NHL is for Canada only. NBC and Versus wouldn’t like it if someone in Boise was watching an HNIC broadcast online, eating into their customer base. Ditto for someone in Sweden (although I don’t know who’s broadcasting competitively there).

I understand the frust[r]ation, though. We’re sending this online to a population that can watch it on main net and in HD.. why give them online? But it’s the way of the future and our numbers were, I’d say, solid for a first-time, and for games that were played in the evening (not online’s prime time by any means).”

The Balkanized Web

So, if you’re in Sweden & want to watch HNIC, you’re out of luck, despite the fact that you{and hundreds of others} watching in Sweden may have effect on revenues, since there’s nobody broadcasting it.

The contractual obligations are keeping the web content geographically bound, despite the web being decentralized and global.   The marketing limitations are keeping content from being legitimately purchased on iTunes {and sites like it} or through pay-per-view/video-on-demand via the web or cable/satellite means.  Geographic restrictions are frustrating audiences, leaving revenues on the table, and limiting the building of global audiences.

It’s clear that broadcasters are keenly interested in revenue streams, but still don’t get it, in many respects.  This Globe & Mail article really shows a lack of creativity in terms of addressing the “what should be online?” question.

“Even in the U.S., where NBC and Fox launched Hulu.com to showcase their programs online, the ad revenue generated from that business is still a mere fraction of network TV revenues, Mr. Eiley said.

In Canada last year, online advertising revenue from TV shows was about 1.6 per cent of total TV advertising revenue. The trend is troubling for broadcasters, since audiences are increasingly demanding online programming. Mr. Eiley said the networks are left with unattractive options for online content – either pack more commercials into Internet shows or charge for content.”

There are several issues going on.  Content as IP is being treated as an asset that must generate revenues, but what about trying to get more people interested in that asset in order to foster future revenue streams.  The networks aren’t always being creative about using Web 2.0 to help build buzz and audience.  They should be trying to leverage Web 2.0 to build audience, but how can you really do this when so much of what is being produced and aired is pure, mind-numbing kife.  

Over the holidays, I saw CBC really hyping Being Erica {see trailer below}, which {to me}, when I saw it in February was like watching a slightly less neurotic Ally McBeal being inserted in a sort of Coen Brothers-esque time-traveling world of suspended quirky disbelief.  Sort of.  The network used a prequel blog and Facebook, making it seem like they were really pushing to not just get the word out, but to get people hooked on the idea of Erica, because they know her.  Plus, even if you couldn’t watch the shows on CBC online, you could purchase episodes of the entire season on iTunes {above}.  

The ratings are so-so for Canada, high 500Ks down to 511K, and it looks like it will get another season, albeit with fewer episodes.  This type of support is a luxury that wasn’t afforded to Douglas Coupland’s jPod.  Not that I’m bitter, CBC.  Not at all.

1. What are your thoughts on TV content on the web?
2. What are some creative ways to use Web 2.0 to deal with IP issues and revenues?

There seems to be a consensus emerging that California’s initiative process is broken.   Access to the ballot is too easy (you need the signatures of 5% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election to get on the ballot).  The initiative process is vulnerable to unreflective emotional appeals (initiatives dealing with children do particularly well).  Many people blame the initiative process for initiating an era of ballot box budgeting where citizens appropriate public funds to specific policy areas through the initiative process.  Proposition 98, passed in 1988, calls for 40% o the state’s budget to go towards education.

At the same time, California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 which reduces property taxes and significantly raises the bar on the legislature’s ability to raise new revenue.  As a result of Proposition 13, the legislature requires 2/3ds of the California voters to agree on most tax increases.  The result, some would argue, is a state that has no restrictions on spending, but serious limits on the ability to raise revenue.

It’s easy to fault an “ignorant” electorate who doesn’t understand the broader implications of increasing spending but lowering taxes.  But recently I’ve been interested in the ideas of deliberation scholars like Diana Mutz and Cass Sunstien who argue the need for cross-cutting social networks in Democratic societies.    Cross-cutting networks allow people to engage in discussions where they are able to vet ideas and develop a broader sense of the possible unintended consequences of their policy positions.  The more we retreat to homogeneous ideological networks, the less likely we are to get this necessary check on our world view.

Sunstien argues that the Internet, particularly blogs and social networks, reinforce homogeneous groups that reinforce their pre-existing world view.  As we move our public conversations to what Anthony Downs refers to as “sought for” mediums of information like political blogs, listserves, and Facebook groups, we get less of our information from:

“unchosen serendipitous, sometimes disliked encounters with diverse ideas and topics,” as well as “shared communications experiences that unify people across differences.” Public spaces such as city parks and sidewalks provide the “architecture of serendipity” that fosters chance encounters with a “teeming diversity” of ideas.

So let me throw out a preliminary discussion question: functioning deliberative democratic systems are more likely to occur in places with a vibrant “architecture of serendipity.” In other words, the key to a vibrant functioning California is more places where people of different political orientations can have “accidental” conversations about politics.   Is our problem that the Interned allows up to retreat to our “warm corners of rectitude” where the correctness of our views can be mutually reinforced? If this is true, how to we encourage more “serendipitous” conversations about politics? Or should we just sit back and enjoy the polarization?  How do we encourage “serendipity” online?  StumbleUpon for everyone!

Discuss.

Many of us post to Facebook, perhaps unaware of what can happen to that content and who has rights to it.  All of this came to a head a few days ago, as Facebook’s new terms of service (TOS) came to light and were met with a range of reactions from dismay to outrage.  

I’ve been reading Convergence Culture and being in Jane Jacob’s adopted home, I couldn’t help but think of how the social space of Facebook relates to how social interactions are shaped by governance and polity in online realms, as well as the idea of a commons that is a privatized space, as opposed to a public one.

While I’m resigned to the fact that there is no privacy online and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that Facebook is being used by collections departments to locate unstealthy credit defaulters (true story), I do bristle at the idea of content being appropriated by companies hosting these web commons.

Why?  I’m using the private space of Facebook, why should I feel that what I post is still my intellectual property?  Am I being unreasonable?  After all, I push the boundaries of fair use quite a bit.

Can social network sites really be sites of democratic action, when they can ultimately be censored, not as a matter of public policy, but rather corporate TOS?  On the other side of the Web 2.0 fence, how much freedom should an organization grant users?

I feel that what any site engaging in Web 2.0 should do if they want to use content posted by users is…to simply ask them for permission.  It’s simple good manners and building of social capital.  I do think privatized social spaces or commons can be used for civic engagement, but I find emerging technologies being developed up here in Canada that allow content to be fed from multiple sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) into one location to be rather interesting.  More on this in a future post.  I feel the overlap of Web 2.0 with open source will make us all rethink ownership and privacy and force organizations to ponder what intellectual property really means, what the risks are in terms of what the courts are stating, and how to implement processes.  Or not.  That devil inertia.

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

Deep Throat Meets Data Mining – Miller McCune

Symposium on “The Good Life” – Human Affairs

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!