Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog Wrap Up
On Gnovis:
A sermon in her family’s church, frames an ethical and moral
wrestling match in Sarah Thompson’s first (hopefully of many) blog for gnovis. She
asks:“Rights…how do we draw a line between what constitutes a
right and what does not, while respecting peoples’ differences? ….When is culture
itself a right, and when does culture stand in the way of rights?”Category: The Gnovis Blog
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War Veterans, the American Bureaucratic Machine, and the Continuing Cultural Exclusion of Affect
Watching CNN yesterday morning I got very sad and angry thinking about the affectless, bureaucratic nightmare that physically and psychologically injured or disabled living American vets frequently have to endure, in return for having put their lives on the line; or that surviving dependent families of veterans who have to endure on top of having lost their loved one. While there is a decent amount of visibility about the challenges of the return and transition home for the visibly or invisibly injured veterans, the inadequacy in care is glaring.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Culture and Social Media: The Issue of Privacy
This morning at the ICCT intercultural coffee hour, the Yahoo! Fellows presented some interesting data and analysis about how users in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries are using social networking. A significant aspect of their research is on privacy, both how users choose exercise their privacy online, but also how it is used by social network sites to market to new users (e.g . Facebook with stricter privacy settings, MySpace with looser ones.)
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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When Wrestling With Rights, Thanks Be To Blogs!
In a session of Adult Sunday School in the church of a Midwestern town, a local leader of the Lakota Sioux Tribe passed around slips of paper. He told those in attendance to write down, in ranking order, the things in life that were most important. Once the lists were complete, the leader asked participants to name the items that topped their lists, and share why these items were so meaningful. After some minutes of discussion, the leader instructed that all must tear off one of the items, and relinquish those scraps of paper to him.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog wrapup: Election!, online behavior, and justifications
at gnovis, election!
Before November 4th @ 8PM PST:
The election left us netizens awash with technical ways in which to observe, participate and predict the outcomes of this election. I wrote about a grass-roots initiative to detect voting problems via Twitter at TwitterVote. Ashley, talked about the proliferation of poll-watching websites, but reminded "everyone that no matter what all the projection polls say, the only poll that really matters is the last one… Isn’t it time for us to get to call elections like the talking heads on TV? Yes. It. Is."
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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“What, then, is the American, this new man?”
Like Brad’s blog posted this morning, I could not discuss anything other then this week’s historic election and I will also start with a question. Unlike Brad, I can not promise to avoid all emotional gushing. Please excuse me this once.
“What, then, is the American, this new man?”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Obama Moment – Making and Documenting Historical Memory
Yesterday was the first Wednesday of the month, which means I was supposed to be continuing my thesis series, focusing this time on the writing of the thesis proposal — but, even after taking an extra day, I can’t bring myself to write about anything other than what I saw on the streets of DC on Tuesday night. Since this is gnovis, though, I’ll try to turn off my emotional gushing and say something of academic worth, by focusing on digital media and collective memory.
I’ll begin with a question. The pivotal moments in American history are, in our collective memory, linked most vividly to specific images, soundbites, and quotes, which act as a common reference point for summoning forth all of the complexity of that moment – "Four score and seven years ago…," "Ask not what your country…," "One small step for man…," and so on.
So in 2008, in a hyper-mediated era, what will be the media-bites that come to define this moment, in our collective memory? How will we choose from all this stuff?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Don't forget to cast your TwitterVote!
It’s election day – you struggling yet? 49 minutes until the majority of East Coast polling locations close, and until then, all of those pretty Flash interfaces on CNN, MSNBC, and even BBC remain completely empty, waiting for streaming data to make them come alive. If you are like me, you have followed the polls, listened to the pundits, and watched more Meet the Press than might be healthy. If you are like me, this is the no man’s land between speculation and confirmation.
Well, here is a site that is trying to capture the voting experience via twitter: TwitterVote !
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Testing Your Poll Knowledge
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog wrapup: Competition, Technological Pragmatics, and Personal Politics
at gnovis, competition!
"Resistance has here become a game." Brad considers the what friendly competition might look like when it comes to capitalism.
Category: The Gnovis Blog