Colleague, researcher, and great guy Tere Vadén (with Juha Suoranta) have new work available:
WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory MediaJuha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland
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Wikiworld: Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media
Posted: March 19th, 2008, 9:07am PDT by paulbhartzog
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Fear of Small Numbers
Posted: March 17th, 2008, 6:58am PDT by paulbhartzog
Recently, I absorbed Arjun Appadurai's little book "Fear of Small Numbers" (http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3863-7) which he frames as a deliberate contrast to the "Huntington model" from Clash of Civilizations.
There are some good concepts in here:
1. The notion of "predatory identities" which is to say identities that cannot exist without eliminating other identities. I would extend this concept to "parasitic identities" as well, with obvious implications.
2. The idea that the respect of minority groups in liberalism has always been tied to the fear of "dissent" and not the respect for difference.
3. The need for a shift in thinking from the "clash of civilizations" (Huntington) to a "civilization of clashes." I think this has important and useful implications related to agonism in general.
It dovetails nicely with Laclau and Mouffe's articulations in "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy," as well as Hardt and Negri's "Multitude."
It's pretty clear he's talking about panarchy:
"The new transnational activisms... build their actual solidarities in a more ad hoc, inductive and context-sensitive manner.... coordinating without massive centralization, reproducing without a clear-cut mandate, working occasionally in the larger public eye but often outside it, leveraging resources from state and market to their own ends, and pursuing visions of equity an daccess that do not fit many twentieth century models either of development or of democracy." (p136-7)
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Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Extortion through Systems Disruption
Posted: March 11th, 2008, 8:53am PDT by paulbhartzog
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Novelty and collective attention -- Wu and Huberman
Posted: March 11th, 2008, 8:22am PDT by paulbhartzog
Novelty and collective attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.
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Purse Lip Square Jaw: Representing the political agency of technological devices
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 9:09pm PST by paulbhartzog
The "pan" in panarchy is not anthropomorphic. Thinking panarchically means recognizing the political relations of all entities and environments, their overlaps, their mutual exclusions, their interpenetrations....
A great Peruvian archaeologist once told me that Western scholars always misunderstand the sun in Inka culture. Inti, he explained, has a face not because the Inka anthropomorphised him but because the Europeans had no words to describe humans and non-humans as if they were the same.
Purse Lip Square Jaw: Representing the political agency of technological devices
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Kevin Kelly "gets" P2P Economics
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 8:14pm PST by paulbhartzog
The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
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New Mobilities: Ce-more about what's happening in the mobile world: Are we shifting towards a psycho–civilised society?
Posted: March 4th, 2008, 8:06pm PST by paulbhartzog
Internet journal First Monday has just published a new paper by Kingsley Dennis that takes a look at the possible detrimental effects of wireless technologies; especially how they might affect neuronal functions - in military, industrial, and social terms.
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Notional Slurry » There are exactly two ways: one, and many
Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 7:03am PST by paulbhartzog
There are two ways to succeed in the complicated, burdensome flowless interrupting world we’ve made. Two ways to Get Things Done; anybody telling you there’s only one is selling something. Two ways to satisfice and maybe even to excel.
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Arendt, Connectivity, and Transformation
Posted: March 1st, 2008, 10:58am PST by paulbhartzog
I am working on a paper about Hannah Arendt and it reminded me that I was going to blog a brief realization....
First we have Arendt's point that the political emerges whenever people come together to begin something new in the world.
Second, we have Reed's Law which says the value of group-forming-networks scales NOT as n^2, i.e. as each new member enters the network, but rather as 2^n because we are interested in the number of new groups made possible by the new member's presence.
Third, we have the obvious fact of global technological connectivity in general, i.e. what Howard Rheingold calls "technologies of cooperation." For example, there is the recently announced fact that the cell-phone is the fastest spreading technology in the history of the world, because it basically does the one thing humanity is based on, which is make possible human coming together.
Fourth, complex systems shows us that highly interconnected systems cross transformational thresholds, called phase shifts, where they suddenly reconfigure into some new form.
If we accept Arendt, and we apply Reed's Law to the world around us, then we can only conclude that we are in the midst of an explosion in the realm of political activity (and social/economic, if you feel a need to separate those out).
Then the key question now is: is there any way we can tell what the threshold is? And what would we do if we knew it?