“Children don’t go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the ‘traditional’ past-times of children and replaced…
“Because McLuhan saw the media as extensions of the human body — printed books as extensions of eyes, radios as extensions of ears — he believed that each new technological advance would reshape humanity and traumatize it, too. ‘We shape our tools and our tools shape us.’…. The tanks rolling into Iraq from the south…
A student writes: “I’m not quite sure how I could make the topic of ‘digital divide’ into something controversial that allows the reader to form their own opinion.” Digital Divide: Looking for ControversyLiteracy Weblog) I did a Google search: “digital divide” controversy and came up with a few good leads. While links from the first…
After my 1:00 class today I saw a colleague at the other end of a hall, struggling with a load of books that was about to drop. I momentarily interrupted a conversation with a student to try to pick up the items my colleague was dropping. The colleague looked at me with that familiar “I’ve-got-the-flu-please-kill-me-now”…
“On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy. The primary subject of the photo was a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. After publication, it was noticed that several civilians in the…
Technology may solve problems, but it also spawns new technology to solve the new problems caused by recently-spawned technology. While one group of upright entrepreneurs works to protect the privacy of victims targets of clothing-penetrating 3D holographic body scans (marketed for airport security), a group of hackers works just as hard to remove the digital…
“A teenager’s website hoax about a killer virus that is sweeping Hong Kong sparked panicked food buying and hit financial markets on Tuesday, forcing the government to deny it would isolate the entire territory.” —Website Hoax Fans Virus Panic Wired) Similar:NASA astronaut: Russians were ‘blindsided’ by reaction to yellow suitsI posted a while back about…
“The academic institutionalization of New Media Studies is happening in several disciplines simultaneously – you’ll find it in fine arts programs, communications programs, computer science programs, rhetoric programs, journalism programs, literature programs, and perhaps (finally) even creative writing programs. One of the milestones of the past year was Brown University’s announcement of a graduate fellowship…
“I have painted with their on-line robot a few times and like to check the gallery to see what others have paining with it. I sent an email suggestion to possibly improve the interface and complimented them on their site. It is sad to think that folks who put so much time and effort into…
“Last week, writer Glenn Fleishman offered his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, as a free download. | But instead of the few hundred downloads Fleishman expected, the book was downloaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he’s charged incrementally for bandwidth, Fleishman estimates he could be billed $15,000 at the end…
“Dubbed NewCode, the [programming] language promises to revolutionise software development, as the language makes it impossible to express a security vulnerability in a program’s source code. ‘We were inspired by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which there is a language called NewSpeak which made it impossible to express political dissent,’ says the group’s leader, Julia Jones….…
“Today’s on-the-go workers are sending e-mails and instant messages containing derogatory comments and jokes, risqué images or sensitive information in droves — to the wrong people…. One woman bad-mouthed a recent job candidate as a ‘suck up’ in an e-mail she then accidentally sent to that prospective employee. He was hired to be her boss.…
“At this writing, SARS appears to have killed 49 people out of 1323 afflicted according to the World Health Organization, a death rate of less than four percent. In Hong Kong, that alleged ‘worst medical disaster’ has killed ten people out of 316 known victims. But since this only takes into account those ill enough…
“Every day, tens of thousands of people turn to the Web seeking updates from a mysterious scribe whose detailed accounts of life in besieged Baghdad have made him a cyberspace celebrity. | Little is known for sure about Salam Pax, whose nom de plume means ‘peace’ in Arabic and Latin. But his Web journal —…
“Unfortunately, teaching well doesn’t mean that most kids will enjoy it, certainly not most of the time…. I describe the agony of Valley Forge. I show kids the simple genius of the Constitution. I let them test the principles in the Bill of Rights. I tell them about the Trail of Tears and Dred Scott.…
“I get a perverse pleasure out of being here. CNN dumped me, and I think unfairly. Tailwind was almost a deathblow to my career, no doubt about it. (In 1999 Arnett was fired by CNN after delivering a report that U.S. forces used nerve gas on U.S. defectors during the Vietnam War. The story, dubbed…
“Miss Dahl was one of numerous students in her class who chose to make speeches about abortion, and most took the anti-abortion side. | ‘I was shocked that there were that many students who felt strong enough and confident enough to speak about being pro-life,’ said Nina Verin, a parent of another student in the…
“Language bullying… advances a stuffy and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain wrong and cranky…. I suspect many of Bush’s critics would want to avoid…
“Perhaps [the] most accurate metaphor for this war occurs whenever the news runs a feed from an Arabic language station. Our crawl runs in one direction; theirs runs in the other. You almost expect the crawls to twine like DNA and start fighting – and in that case, the English language would lose. Arabic is…
“[T]he Civilization series is infused with an American ideology that is comforting insofar as it justifies genocidal practices and the stealing of land by positing an empty virgin continent….Among other ideological effects, Civilization III makes inevitable, natural and universal several Western-centered ideas of technological progress, the use of the land, and the opposition between ‘civilization’…