Some thoughtful development of a powerful meme in cyberculture studies, from Henry Jenkins: Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences,…
Great satire from The Onion. Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot
Lauren Collins (The New Yorker) Teen-age identities mutate so quickly online, and can be masked so easily, that by the morning after Megan was pronounced dead Josh Evans had vanished from MySpace. It wasn’t until a month after her death that a neighbor named Michele Mulford told the Meiers that Curt and Lori Drew, who…
On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld — a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined “winning” outcome. A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player…
FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies,…
It’s always hard for the kids to make the transition to “Daddy is working” when, from their perspective, it looks like I’m just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time. When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just…
The New Statesman: With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months. But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No. The fact is that…
A student sent me an e-mail asking for advice on how to write a letter to the editor. I found plenty of web resources that are designed to help volunteers write letters designed to get a particular message out — that is, Citizens for the Defense of Rutebegas offer specialized tips for how to write…
The American Scholar: One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next…
Doris Lessing doesn’t like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica: Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn’t believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. “And…
After watching the children until about 2pm today, I rousted my wife from the bedroom so she could give them a late lunch. While I was fiddling with my blogging templates and sort of puttering around until it was time to go to campus (I’m volunteering to serve dinner to the students during the big…
Uh, no, it doesn’t. Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida. The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people…
On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn’t translate into more money for game companies. When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their…
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Stanford last June: Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure–humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who…
Clive Thompson, from Wired: I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor. Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone…
From Inside Higher Ed: An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogs A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs
Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands. The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international…
In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention: In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities’ Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with…
Via Bloomberg: James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, said he plans to retire immediately as chancellor of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks. The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a…
Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first. But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At…