A Structural Demythologizing of Facebook
By Rosie Perera | October 9, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Sorina Higgins wrote a wonderful essay on Facebook for her literary theory class and posted it on her blog and (ironically) on Facebook. She writes about how Facebook has its own mythological language in which it perpetuates fictions, but some of its fictions spill over into the physical world and become reality. The article ends with this intriguingly provocative summary: “In essence, Facebook is a tool for suppressing revolution. It keeps the middle class from rising by convincing them that they are more important than they are. What feels like free speech and the freedom of assembly is actually a form of class repression: keeping us in our sphere by giving us a little room in which to shout and prance. We fancy we can make a difference. All we can really do is waste time.”
The full article can be found here.
While I agree with much of her analysis, I disagree when she says that we can’t make a difference on Facebook. Armchair activism is notoriously ineffective in the old technology of email chain letters and e-petitions. However because of the power of Facebook’s myth to spill over into reality, people really are donating real funds to real causes and volunteering their offline time for real social justice because of Facebook and Twitter. This article about the outpouring of love and tangible help in the wake of the recent Phillipine disaster, unexpected in a “culture of apathy,” corroborates this trend: Volunteerism in the age of Facebook, Twitter. Another success story is the microlending website Kiva, which I first found out about through social networking.
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How to Deal with Technology Overload
By Rosie Perera | October 8, 2009 at 6:10 pm
PBS MediaShift’s 5Across videocast (October 2009 episode) presents a discussion between Leif Hanson (a Regent alum friend of mine, founder of Spark Interaction, and presenter of SoulTech workshops), Dom Sagolla (one of the creators of Twitter), other technology/media experts and a psychologist. Great stuff.
Credits and guest bios can be found here.
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CBC Archives: Internet - a “modulated anarchy” (1993)
By Rosie Perera | September 19, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Here’s a fascinating and quaint look at the Internet back in 1993, when it was a bit more civil. CBC interviews playwright and Internet enthusiast John Allen. Some choice quotes:
“It feels a bit like everyday human fellowship, but it’s bigger and more precise.”
As if “everyday human fellowship” needed improving upon? The imprecision is part of what makes it so wonderfully human. The interesting thing is that the Internet has pretty much become our major medium for “everyday human fellowship.” Is it really any more “precise” than face-to-face communication? I think the reality is the other way around. Because of missing cues (tone of voice and body language), online communication is less clear. Maybe in a sense it is more precise, because words mean exactly what they mean, but perhaps not necessarily what they were intended to mean. You need the imprecision of person-to-person conversation to avoid unintentionally offending someone.
“There’s an interesting kind of restraint that you find. I mean there’s not a lot of cursing or swearing….there’s not a lot of put-downs…there’s not screenfuls of ‘Go to hell!’”
WTF? Things sure have changed in 16 years! I wonder if that’s more a factor of society in general changing or people getting more used to the medium. The anarchy is not so modulated anymore, eh?
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Google Books and the Espresso Book Machine: the bookstore of the future!
By Rosie Perera | September 19, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I came across this article today:
Google Books and the Espresso Book Machine: Instant Paperbacks from Digital Books
This is cool, but I also hear the death knell of small independent bookstores which can’t afford a machine like this. They were already dying anyway, but this puts another nail in the coffin. There’s little room for nostalgia in the future. Sniff! I’m a hopelessly conflicted romantic with über-geek tendencies.
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Ben Stiller on Twitter
By Rosie Perera | September 10, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Stiller discusses Twitter with Mickey Rooney (a voice of wisdom)
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Does God tweet?
By Rosie Perera | August 11, 2009 at 8:41 pm
There’s an interesting panel discussion on social media in today’s Washington Post “On Faith” column.
Thanks to new digital technologies, you can ‘tweet’ prayers via Twitter to the Western Wall or prayer requests to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You can pray the rosary or pray the hours from your laptop. You can participate in worship services and discuss holy texts via Facebook. You can create and join faith communities on Second Life. Are social media tools a blessing or a curse for people of faith? Should we use digital technology to commune with the divine? Does God tweet?
Panelists responding to these questions include Robert Parham, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Mathew N. Schmalz, Richard Mouw, Bob Edgar, Randall Balmer, Brad Hirschfield, Ramdas Lamb, David Wolpe, Herb Silverman, and Susan Jacoby.
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The God of technology, or the god of Technology?
By Rosie Perera | August 10, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Dave Evans has a good article on faith and technology in the latest issue of Comment. Some key quotes:
The key is not just the technology’s availability, but how available it makes us. The purpose of technology is to buy us more time to be available to other things, or to makes us more effective in some endeavour (and so allow us a greater avail upon the world). Good technology is all about availability.
…
Technology is attractive because of the God-given allure of the new new thing—but it’s also “sticky,” in that for many of us, it entraps our attention, making us so focused on it that we become less, not more, available.
…
Ever so subtly, technology becomes the object of our attention, rather than the tool of it. Developing an availability consciousness will help us guard against accidentally slipping into making a god of Technology, rather than responding to the God of technology.
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Faith to move mountains, or just ingenuity?
By Rosie Perera | July 22, 2009 at 10:37 pm
A retired Michigan carpenter named Wally Wallington has figured out how to move rocks weighing 22,000 lbs. using only his own strength, gravity, and extraordinarily simple ancient technology. Pretty amazing! Archaeologists and engineers have been mystified as to how prehistorical people could have erected the huge pillars of Stonehenge (according to Wikipedia, “various authors have suggested that supernatural or anachronistic methods were used, usually asserting that the stones were impossible to move otherwise”). But Wally might just have figured it out!
Here’s his website where he explains the physics of how he does this (click through to Page 2 and beyond for the details):
Forgotten Technology
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Humorous commentary on how we take technology for granted
By Rosie Perera | July 8, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy
How quickly we become incapable of living without things that so recently were amazing new inventions. Our sense of wonder is replaced by an attitude of entitlement. I agree with comedian Louis CK. Perhaps we should spend some time every now and then going back to the “old ways” of doing things, in order to renew our appreciation for the technology we use.
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Flutter: spoof of Twitter
By Rosie Perera | June 18, 2009 at 6:10 pm
This is really funny!
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