They claim that becoming an OfficePOD user will “bring a positive change to life.” So this is probably my first ever link to a company website. But I can feel the mojo baby. I need one of these! Though I’m sure my wife will say this is exactly the last thing I need, an isolated capsule where I can indulge my endless daydreaming while I slip ever deeper down the rabbit hole.
Naomi Klein’s most recent article, appearing in Rolling Stone.
Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.
This new project by Rayvon Fouche looks fascinating.
David Nye introduced Rayvon Fouche’s work to me via a great article, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” His concept of “Black Vernacular Technological Creativity” and his analysis of “Black Technological Agency” as; “redeployment, reconception, and re-creation” provides an interesting framework for any analysis of social constructions of technology. Granted, Fouche explores the unique cultural productions within African American communities. Fouche suggested, for example, that had Blacks invented the typewriter it would have been far more percussionist in design, reflecting African drum culture. I look forward to Fouche’s analysis of turntablism as “Black Vernacular Technological Creativity” which he only briefly develops in the above mentioned article. I see further possibilities for exploring turntablism as postmodern cultural production. Technological agency aside, “mixing, scratching and re-mixing” are distinctly postmodern modes of mentally filtering data. Early Hip-Hop culture was well ahead of what would later become mainstream modes of comprehending music and information with the advent of personal computing and the internet.
AbstractThe phonograph was never intended to be a musical instrument. Yet this technology is now at the center of a thriving, global performance art known as turntablism. This proposal requests funding to support research examining the cultural and technological transformation of the phonograph into a vehicle for musical expression within hip hop culture. This transformation, which began in New York City’s African American community in the late 1970s, is unique since a marginalized community reappropriated and redefined an existing and popular technology according to its own distinctive cultural aesthetics. This project will document how turntables as technological artifacts of hip hop have produced musical genres with loyal devotees, mediated multiple cultural relationships, and contributed to the global dissemination of black cultural aesthetics. Given the transformation of the turntable, this project will examine: how national, cultural, ethnic, and racial politics of identity influence technological design, choice, and use. The PIs will seek to understand how ideas of race, ethnicity, and culture have influenced the technological design of turntables and associated turntablist equipment, and to understand the influence of developing turntablist technology on musical originality. It will entail comparative work examining how turntablist communities in the United States and Japan contribute to the production of a hybrid global technological movement by defining, appropriating, and reconstituting the racial, cultural, and technological aesthetics of turntablism. It will produce a study that will move beyond turntables and provide insights into technological transitions from analog to digital affect a variety of cultural communities. Intellectual Merit: This project will contribute to work on music in STS and on technology within musicology, and produce new ways to think about the race in relation to technology. This comparative study will augment the understanding of race and technology. The study will also consider the effects that the larger transition from analog to digital technologies will have on our society. Broader Impacts: This research will show the connections between music, race, and technology. It will show that music can be an important avenue for marginalized peoples to engage technology in a proactive way. This project will facilitate the coalescing of faculty members and students interested in investigating how music, race, and technology interact.
This should be a gooding starting point for thinking about how we can utilize Facebook within our academic environment. Here’s an earlier article I link to which makes a similar case.
For the upcoming Free Online Conference – Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations we wanted to have a way for participants to get to know other participants and hold discussions. While we are going to use Q2 Learning’s platform, we could have created a group in Facebook and used the threaded discussion capability there. The advantage of that is that likely a sizable portion of the audience is already on Facebook and thus wouldn’t have to upload profile information. This also would allow the relation(friend)ships created during the process to exist beyond the conference.
from The Nation
Google is far more than the digital incarnation of Madison Avenue in the twenty-first century. It is the engine driving us into a new communications era, in which interactive marketing will significantly shape our lives.
Google’s message to Madison Avenue, as expressed at the OMMA Expo in New York this week is that its technology can leverage tremendous insights about global consumers of products and information, and can deliver the right interactive marketing messages to consumers at precisely the right moment.
Epic 2015?
I came across this JFK speech and wanted to share it here. Here he makes his argument that America should lead in space exploration and be the first to the moon. What’s also interesting is that Kennedy maps out Western and American technological history which is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s “Lectures on Discoveries and Inventions.” He also echoes Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” talking about the difficulties of information overload. This is a truly great speech.
Kennedy was also a skillful politician. In response to critics who ask, “why the moon?” Kennedy poses the rhetorical question, “Why does Rice play Texas?” (The University of Texas). This gets a huge roar from the crowd. Rice is a small, elite private university in Houston, and UT is and was one of the powerhouses of Texas football.
This is the part 1 of the speach
Part 2