The Social Media Philosophy Project

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  thePuck 2:41 pm on April 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Academia, blogging (3), education, HASTAC, Social Media (32), Social Science, Twitter (8), US   

  Social Media in Academia Discussion at HASTAC 

  HASTAC – Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory

  I have been wanting to talk about HASTAC for some time, and this gives me an excuse. These guys are awesome and everyone who is interested in the larger implications of social media and online technologies should head over and give them a look.

  From their site:

  A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers, of leading researchers and nonprofit research institutions, HASTAC (“Haystack”) is committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology. Our primary members are universities, supercomputing centers, grid and teragrid associations, humanities institutes, museums, libraries, and other civic institutions. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects.

  In today’s society, technological advances and digital media are inextricably linked to most aspects of our lives. However, the historic barriers existing between the traditionally-defined disciplines of the humanities and the sciences still remain, regardless of the growing interdependence these domains have upon each other. With this in mind, HASTAC’s mission is two-fold: to ensure that humanistic and humane considerations are never far removed from technological advances; and to push education and learning to the forefront of digital innovation. Similarly, HASTAC is dedicated to the idea that this complex and world-changing digital environment requires all the lessons of history, introspection, theory, and equity that the modern humanities (broadly defined) have to offer. Our aim is to promote expansive models for research, teaching, and thinking.

  Many of the top innovators in the fields of science and technology share the necessity to draw centrally upon human and social developments and considerations as new digital possibilities are created. HASTAC has helped foster this exchange, working in complex and important partnerships with colleagues across varying domains and disciplines. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

  The HASTAC network consists of more than eighty institutions principally located in the US and reaches over 30,000 people worldwide. In reality, it is more a network of networks, located at the intersection of technology, engineering, and computing on one hand, and the humanities, arts and social sciences on the other. This profound interconnectivity has allowed HASTAC to develop its successful network, which in turn promotes greater interactive connections.

  These guys are serious academics and researchers, so while virality is definitely a fair topic for discussion, keep the LOLcats to a minimum. The discussion on Blogging & Tweeting Academia requires you to register to join in, but it’s just started getting attention. With some luck and help from the internet community (that’s right, I mean you!) it should be pretty interesting. Check them out.

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  thePuck 7:00 pm on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: education, geek, internet technologies, MC Chris, ReadWriteWeb, school shootings, Social Media (32), technology changes, virtual reality (2)   

  A Price to Raising Our Children In Cyberspace? 

  Saw this posted a bit ago on FriendFeed from our friends over at ReadWriteWeb and it raised some thoughts about how we are incorporating social media into our educational system.

  Since I was a kid, computers have been being emphasized in education. Early on, it was learning to program in BASIC and LOGO while playing ridiculous “educational” games. Later is was email lists. Most recently, classes have started using blogs to inspire course participation and professors have created Facebook profiles. All of this has contributed to many people, myself included, to get a great boost to our overall geekiness, and as we all know, the geek shall inherit the earth.

  But at what cost? There is a practical concern, that we are actually mis-educating our children because there is no way the education can keep up with the rate the technology changes. But I think there is also a social concern. So much of the world these children will come to inhabit will be conditioned by the internet, and so many of their possibilities for behavior will be bound up with internet technologies. By educating them in this way we might very well be conditioning them to a virtual reality more than the physical one, and that can in turn affect their expectations, relation with the world, and ethics.

  Every time there is a new school shooting, I ask myself, “Why now?”. My generation hated school as much as any other, and being geeks among the earliest members of Generation Y, we were certainly persecuted. Why didn’t we blow up the school or shoot the jocks?

  

  Could it be that, as we have become more and more virtual, we have come to expect reality to follow the rules of our virtual reality? Do we expect things to be so immediate and extreme (because let’s face it, that’s the way the net is) with no physical consequences? Could this be one of the causes for the overwhelming apathy of my own generation towards politics and world-events? After all, if politics is just another game or stream to watch and comment on, or world-events are just another article to digg or bury, then what can it really mean to us?

  I find this notion troubling. Thoughts?

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    shawal 7:12 pm on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Everything in this world comes with a +ve & -ve, its balance the nature…

    shawals last blog post..Yaro Starak Blog Mastermind Is Open – Get Early Bird Bonuses

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    timelady 1:08 am on August 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    The school shootings are a disturbing symptom, not of computers having prevalence, but of media publicity, violence portrayed as heroic, and isolation.

    My children have been raised around computers since an early age. As an interesting twist, I have 3 distinct generations of children (the way the dice rolled) – 1986, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2003. It gives me a great advantage in observing trends in technology around children.

    As my career and passion is technology based, as it is for so many of my friends, my children have experienced computers in depth most (for older ones) to all (later children) of their lives.

    However, we have worked hard to ensure they have had a broad range of experiences outside of technology, and use computers casually, as a natural tool, but also socially. We talk, we share what we find, we interact. I have a fantastic, close, informed relationship with all my children, and I am grateful as hell to be with them:)

    Let us not blame technology. It is no more to blame than television of my generation, or the phone, or even the waltz (once seen as iniquitous, dangerous, seductive leader to sin..) Itis how we as parents, and as a society, teach our children. There, I think, too many are failing. As a society, we are doing it wrong.

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    thePuck 1:56 am on August 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    @timelady

    This isn’t so much about trying to blame anything. Blame is a strange thing to do, an attempt to fulfill an emotional need for revenge by placing blame and then pretending like that solved something.

    What I am trying to say is that certain configurations give rise to certain possibilities for activity. You point out that you made sure that your children had a balanced set of possibilities, so their actions are thus balanced.

    But what of those people whose only way of gaining, say, control, or empathy, or any number of desired configurations of experience, is through cyberspace? If the “rules” for winning or losing, being loved or hated, or being moral or immoral are rules that are applicable to the virtual world only, and then applied to the physical world, then the results can be disastrous.

    Again, this is not about blame. I think part of the problem is not cyberspace itself but the notion of anonymity or “unreality” that some people seem to feel about it, that makes anything they do acceptable in their own eyes. This is reinforced by statements like “it’s only the internet”, even though most of the world’s knowledge and economic structure now exists in “just” the internet.

    As for the school shootings…your answer is the common one, and I have been hearing since the first one occurred. I just don’t find it compelling, because these things are a very simple pat answer. Violence has been glorified since before Homer, the media just panders to whatever excites people (whether it is the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s or school shootings), and emotional isolation is the chief complaint of every serious philosopher, poet, artist, and writer for millennia. We, as humans, get a kick out of violence and feel isolated when contemplating our own consciousness. These things are nothing new.

    But mass violence with no goal committed by young males in schools? This is either a new behavior, or a very, very old one.

    This is why I find it fascinating, because I think that we are in the midst of an evolutionary leap, and organisms have a tendency to revert to primordial behaviors at such periods. I believe that social media and the net are taking off with “normal” people now because the primordial urge to make tribes is coming to the fore, galvanizing old instincts that had been quieted by “civilization”. I think that a sort of spiral of development is taking place, where we are simultaneously stripped down and extended into new arenas. An initiation into the mysteries of the electron.

    My urge is not that we blame the technology, but that we actually take responsibility for it in an entirely new way…as more than just another toy, and instead something that can give us incredible new possibilities for existence.