Archive: The Gnovis Blog

  • Perhaps Lessig is Right

    “Our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.”
    Lawrence Lessig
    Which means my professor is maybe not so right.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • Social Categories of Identity: Should We Scrap Them?

    "Stereotypes Are a Real Timesaver."
    The Onion

    Historian Joan Scott speaks of the role of experience in constituting one’s sense of self. In her 1992 essay, "Experience," she addresses the use of personal accounts as evidence in historical practice, and cautions against what she sees as a lack of scrutiny on the part of investigators.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • Youtube Video: The Machine is Us/ing Us

    This video may be a bit old, in “Web 2.0 Time,” but I felt that it was an important piece to share with readers of the gnovis blog, because it relates to a concept that so many people in media studies are talking about, but which is often poorly understood: Web 2.0.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • A Discussion with David Bollier

    David Bollier’s first book, Silent Theft, explored the historical development of commons and how the concept of commons can be used to approach contemporary policy and economic issues. In Silent Theft, Bollier asserts that commons are both tangible assets (like land, minerals, etc.) and intangible wealth (like copyrights and cultural resources). By reaffirming our collective ownership of these common resources we can alter the discourse surrounding property rights and ultimately create a more complex understanding of the market.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • GOOG-411: another way automation is replacing annoying human interaction

    Sometimes I wonder if I am just slow to pick up on tech trends or if Google really is slowly taking over the world. Today I came across this story, courtesy of Boing Boing, on one of Google’s latest steps in world domination, GOOG-411.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • Craigslist Missed Connections: Anonymously ISO Experience

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    Craigslist Pictures“I’ve missed the connection with DC.”
    It was a simple statement – concise, to the point and honest. It was posted anonymously on Craigslist Missed Connections, addressed to a city that, for this writer, made anonymity more than possible.
    “Sometime last year,” he wrote, “I thought it would be a rockin’ fun-zone idea to move somewhere new… Washington, DC… I’ll bet I find some great folks there–maybe a boyfriend, too. Flash forward to the present… I simply find myself disinterested… in most of the people here.”

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • Reflections on the OAS youth symposium and a presentation on Education and IT

    On October 16 — two weeks from now — I turn twenty-six years old. So it is awkward to think that just a month earlier I participated in a youth symposium on “Empowering the Future Leaders of the Americas.” The symposium was sponsored and hosted by the Organization of American States (OAS) and brought 200-plus students from around the Western Hemisphere together in Washington, DC, to start a dialogue with our elected government leaders and appointed foreign ambassadors. The dialogue focused on five key themes, those being:

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • Harvard bookstore confused about intellectual property rights

    Just a quick note to draw attention to a very curious intellectual property issue that has come up at Harvard recently.
    In a collaborative op-ed posted today in the Harvard Crimson, I read about a student who was asked to leave the Coop, Harvard’s bookstore. His offense? Writing down the values of price tags for his textbooks. The bookstore claimed that he was violating their intellectual property rights.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • The Final Countdown? Is Barack Obama Sending the Right Message?

    The high number of viable presidential candidates and the exceedingly early, and fervent din of election chatter, have made it difficult to focus on any single figure in the primary races.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog

  • The Hermetic Reality of "Higher Learning"

    I need to begin my discussion by responding to the allegation that the first quote that Brad cites, in his post “Are Bloggers the new Public Intellectuals?“, which hints at the specter of the critique of the *irrelevance* of cultural studies or critical work.

    Category: The Gnovis Blog