With luck and diligence, this will be my last quarter in the program. The only difficulty I see with that is balancing being a good team member for this project with giving enough time to complete my capstone project.
I am really interested in the issue of community whether online or not. I contemplate the conflicting American myths of the lone cowboy or mountain man and the settlers circling the wagons or raising the barn together. The New Deal was a settlers barn raising era. Since Reagan, the cowboys have been on the ascendancy. How do we create community online, when the computer seems to be one of the tools that facilitates cocooning and shutting ourselves away. But when we shut ourselves carefully into our houses away from interaction with our neighbors, we rush to our computers to see what's happening on our FaceBook pages. (Seems a little odd, no?)
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One of the most interesting aspects of these new "connectivities" is that they do undermine fossilized institutional control structures that have often strangled spontaneously emergent social organization. The structures and traditions of Western political cultures are pretty top down. Whatever threatens that has always been dealt with decisively, beginning with the Federalist Papers and on from there. This may change soon. Pandora seems to have returned in digital form and I don't think that the powers will be able to shut the box again. Neither will planners be able to anticipate what may happen. Seymor Papert has done interesting work on swarming behavior that may have a direct corollary in digital communications.
ReplyDeleteI think you could make the same argument for building a nationwide raidroad system or establishing international travel - each new advance brings with it a dissolution of existing communities but also introduces the ability to establish new ones.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right Chris. Developments in the infrastructure, however, are usually centrally managed in order to re-enforce or extend existing power structures benefiting those who own and control society's wealth and resources. Illich uses the example of the interstate highway system, built at massive public expense. This, he argues, did did not fill any need other than that of the auto manufactures to sell bigger and faster cars in ever rising quantities - the the demonstrable detriment of ordinary people, most of whom could not use these roads anyway.
ReplyDeleteRailroads are another case in point. Unlike these two, the Internet escaped from the box. Conceived by military strategists, university researchers found another use for it, and soon it spread beyond the Ivory Tower. From there it morphed into other things, constantly challenging central power caught in its old contradictions: how to promote "free speech" while curtailing the ability of people to assemble and redress?
Now, an important strategic area of research is how to shut down the Internet, or selected portions of it, on demand. Uncontrolled communication among people has always presented a threat to centralized authority.
Mark
After many lectures from our librarian about the dangers of wikipedia and the importance of peer reviewed sources, I came across a contrary opinion -- and I don't remember where -- that the peer review process stifles innovation, and rejects theory that is too far away from the accepted norm. Copernicus might not have been published in a peer-reviewed journal/
ReplyDeleteThe Internet allows those unorthodox opinions to find a hearing.
Recently I saw a reference to a research article that allegedly rated the reliability of Wikipedia equal to if not superior to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
ReplyDeleteThe objections I have seen raised to Wikipedia, though, did not focus on reliability so much as they cited Wikipedia's own rule - "no original ideas". It is, essentially, a paraphrase and summation site. Nothing that is not directly supported by a published source can be included - so no analysis, no synthesis, no theory, no ideas, basically.
This means that whenever you cite Wiki, you simply cite an aggregating source. It is not that much different than citing Google, another aggregating source.
I tell students to use Wikipedia as a first stop, and then to investigate the sources it cites. Nothing said on it is without a source. It is an annotated search engine.
This is not to say that ideology does not color it. Look at the publishing history of anything touching the Palestinian - Israeli conflict and ideology will be clear. This is to be expected. Everything is political
The peer review process is very complex and one of its functions is to enforce established intellectual orthodoxies. This is described in great detail by Donaldo Macedo in his preface to Paulo Freire's book "Pedagogy of Freedom". Here, Macedo, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, talks at great length about the Harvard Graduate School of Education's decision to cancel an seminar on Freire immediately following Freire's sudden death in 1997.
ReplyDeleteDescribing the construction of graduate curricula, a process not unlike that of the peer review, Macedo says, "[this] process that prioritizes certain bodies of knowledge while discouraging or suffocating other discourses is linked to something beyond education: ideology".
Pure science, he argues, is a fantasy built on the illusion of objectivity. Ideologues hide behind this fig leaf of supposed objectivity to impose their own constructions of the world onto the "ignorant" mass of humanity. The peculiar quality of ideology is that it can vanish behind itself. Or, almost: like the Cheshire Cat, it usually leaves at least a mocking grin.
Mark, I have also suggested that the bibliography at the end of a wikipedia article can be a great starting point for a student's research paper on a particular topic. (I try not to let the school's librarian hear me make that suggestion.)
ReplyDeleteThere was an instance when French composer Marc Jarre died last year, an Irish student quickly posted a quotation to the Jarre wikipedia entry.Wikipedia caught it and asked for the citation in hours, but not before it had been used in the Jarre obituary in papers including the Guardian and the London Independent. Also picked up by the BBC. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0506/1224245992919.html