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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Gamers

As Fred noted, there is a new, excellent-as-always report out from the Pew Internet & American Life Project - “Teens, Video Games, and Civics.” [PDF] To get it out of the way up top - no, not really, there’s not much positive correlation in terms of civics and game-playing. Nor negative. This is in part [...]

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Media Lab!

Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to join the rest of the Berkman summer interns on a tour of MIT Media Lab, and hang out with some of the Scratch team. It’s pretty hard not to be a total fanboy about this place (my heavily-laden bag from MIT Press’ bookstore [{amazing} clearance rack!] being an [...]

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Google Book Search has inspired passionate feelings and responses from many people since Google announced the project. Some, like Larry Lessig, view its scanning and indexing of copyrighted books as a legitimate activity under Fair Use. Others, like Siva Vaidhyanathan, are more skeptical of Google Book Search (and in Siva’s case, Google generally).
Either way, there’s [...]

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Clay Shirky, in discussing his new book at TPM Café, concludes with the following question(s):
I can imagine that however unjust it may be to be relegate to the status of a despised cubicle rat, it’s gotta be worse to be a d.c.r. who doesn’t kick ass at WoW. The question it leaves me with is [...]

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Technology

Jan Chipchase:
If technology is everything that was invented after you were born, then technologies that have been superseded are historical artifacts. Except here in this time warp of a courtyard – where the ancient typewriter continues to be nothing less than a computer with a built in printer and an unlimited power supply. Oh, and [...]

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Moments of Connection

Reading the following passage from this paper brought me back to the lobby of a hostel in Thessaloniki :

The Finnish network in Figure 7 is qualitatively different. It continues the trend observed in the Portuguese network in that it is smaller and looser, but unlike the previous networks, it lacks an apparent center. Rather, each [...]

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The Stories We Tell

In my ongoing studies of identity, a thread that comes up again and again is the importance of narrative in determining who we say we are. Demographic groupings are useful for looking at differentials within a society, but showing that Jews disproportionately vote Democratic - even and especially after controlling for income - only really [...]

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One of my favorite phrases! And danah’s taken it up,  which gets me to thinking: architecture isn’t deterministic of behavior, but it does create the context in which behavior occurs. If everyone could look in their neighbors’ windows without fear of being seen, a lot more people would do so than currently do. People don’t [...]

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Questions of Lifestreaming

Warren Ellis has some thoughts on lifestreaming, via coffee and jerky; I deal with the foodie bits over here. Mostly, he frames it as a series of questions about the efficacy of lifestreaming; the key ones are:
Right now, I’m eating jerky and drinking a cup of coffee. Neither of these came from objects with a [...]

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