Blog Roundup: Crowdsourcing, Product Placement and, of course, Barack Obama
Posted in The Gnovis Blog
The highlight of this past week at gnovis was our first post from Jason Turcotte, calling out the significance of Obama’s Web 2.0 presidency: “From his presidency on, Americans will come to expect superior communication and a more inclusive approach to governance.”
Jason joins us from the Media, Culture & Communication program at NYU, and will be contributing biweekly posts. We’re very excited to have him on board!
More from gnovis
- Jed kicked off the week by reorienting the arrow of blame on the familiar old topic of privacy on Facebook: “As far as privacy goes, did Facebook screw up? Yes. Should they do better? Yes. Did we all ignore their terms of service? … Uh, yes.”
- Margarita pondered crowdsourcing of the natural sciences and how this model of data gathering might alter our relationship to nature in the urban space.
- Gladys, also from NYU, chipped in an analysis of TV product displacements: “Product displacements have the opportunity to flatter the intelligence of viewers, especially if they are parodic and satirical in nature.”
Around CCT and Georgetown
- Dr. Garcia’s Networked Economy class had several interesting posts on James Beniger’s “The Control Revolution,” including Rebecca Jakob’s discussion of the visually similar Obama and Pepsi logos.
- Undergrad Molly Redden pointed out Georgetown’s sketchy (but probably legal) speech codes.
- Following up on his fantastic post last week on Twitter and the news cycle, Gaurav this week teased out some of the subtleties of mobile citizen reporting, particularly the challenges of a high noise-to-signal ratio.
Beyond the Beltway
- We saw some new stats on old media vs new media, but I have to wonder how the numbers were impacted by the election cycle.
- My favorite museum blogger, Nina Simon, explored existential questions about the museum’s relationship with games, play, and human happiness: “Are museums fundamentally in the business of promoting human happiness?”