It’s that time again: I have to clear out my bloglines account some. Some interesting reads I want to remember and link others to:
• Related to my Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Talk on the way people talk about Ann Coulter, Jim Aune at the Blogora links to Maxim’s take on “Mann Coulter”.
• Henry Jenkins discusses What is Civic Media?
• Alex Reid discusses reframing technology in education. Excerpt:
So when we reframe technology and subjectivity in this way, what happens?
First, we recognize that the subjectivity we had “before” was equally technological, only differently so. Perhaps we are acutely aware of the effects of emerging technology because of the rate of change, but modern humans (and by modern I mean the last 50K years) have always experienced conscious thought as technological. I think the debate sounds very different when we see ourselves as in the midst of shifting from one technology to another rather than shifting from some “natural” internalized mind to a technological externalized cognitive process. We modern humans have always participated in the latter.
Second, we can recognize that our communities, our ethics, and our morals have also always been part of technological relations. My suburban neighbors and I certainly have relations mediated by technologies. Our living conditions are products of an automobile culture, for example. We all know these things. Emerging technologies shape new communities and are shaped by existing communities, often in unpredictable ways. The designers of cell phones had no idea that a texting culture would emerge among the world’s youth. There was no determinism there. And if it is the case that some of the ethics and morals that shaped agricultural societies and industrial societies are reformed in a networked culture, we can recognize that these things have always been intertwined with technologies.
• Jill Walker Rettberg reviews Michael Keren’s Blogosphere: The News Political Arena.
• John Walter provides a humorous understanding of the relationship between infixes and stressed syllables. It made me giggle and amused for a while.
• As I’m thinking about applying to PhD programs, Metaspencer’s post about his ideal exam structure is interesting:
• read extensively in the field(s) for a year or so
• write somewhere between one to three articles for publication based on and using that reading
• have committee member read said article(s), providing revision suggestions
• meet for oral examination
• move on to diss, integrating written materials in some way
And, guess what, I still haven’t cleared my bloglines account. Egads. I’m off to the gym.
