From the Monkey Cage: Charles Blow empirically debunks the cocktail party anecdote that Republicans are more likely to engage in illicit behavior (have affairs, get divorced, watch pornography) than Democrats. At that same time, he reminds us of the perils of ecological inference.
Using GSS data, he finds no statistical relationship between political ideology and divorce or infidelity. What’s more interesting to me is why those of us on the left like to grab on to this narrative. There seems to be a trenchant meme in popular culture about the repressed puritan who longs to “let loose.”
My wife and I recently saw Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. An otherwise funny movie except for the tired stereotype of the repressed Southern evangelicals that get enticed by the “big city’s” charms. In this image, a good Christian woman played by Patricia Clarkson is seduced by a philosophy professor and encouraged to indulge her animal spirits.
We also discover that the upstanding southern father, played by Ed Begley, is a repressed homosexual. He only discovers this in New York, of course.
Don’t get me wrong, we can go on for days about the level of hypocrisy present among the “family values crowd.” Republican politicians are having affairs so often that it’s not even news anymore. But it strikes me as interesting that we on the left so readily accept the narrative of conservatives being more sinful than liberals. It reinforces our sense of rectitude. In the same way, I imagine, that conservatives think all of us in academia are a bunch of un-reflective radicals.
“Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as ‘nice’ in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It’s only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.” [Emphasis added]
I chose to show the full comment, not just the last sentences in bold that many are quoting, since I wanted to provide context and show that it wasn’t just a two-line virulent jab. Some might call this churlish, but I saw it as a writer showing he has the chops as a writer to defend his book against criticism.
I do understand why Williams offers her advice of being careful about ranting at critics. Such angry behaviour can make can one seem shrill and immature, although I do enjoy the sheer drama of it all. Publishing, as it stands today, is hypercompetitive and there are influential gatekeepers like critics. I wonder if these interactions in social media are showing how the “authority” of the critic is being decentered. Social media allow for dialogues and will expectations shift, in that critics will have to justify their reviews to authors and audiences alike. Interestingly, Caleb Crain chose not to respond to Alain de Botton’s comment, only offering an unsatisfying::
“Folks: Thanks for all your comments. A broad range of opinions have been expressed, and I’m going to close comments on this post now. all best wishes, Caleb”
That said, I wonder what the future of publishing and criticism are, given Web 2.0 and beyond. The critic serves a winnowing function, granting {or taking away} legitimacy and status. Will this function be replaced by an increasingly intelligent Web 3.0 with “crowdsourced” reviews? What are the implications for acadème and peer-review journals? Will the “wisdom of the crowd” topple the institutional fiefdoms controlling knowledge?
I know critiquing work can be tough. While not that in-depth, the act of reviewing Soderburgh’s The Girlfriend Experience was illuminating for me, particularly after seeing how many reviewers were taking the easy road. I’ve done peer-review for over 15 years now and have been through the double-blind review process, as well. I’ve always tried to be constructive with my reviews, even with what I see is a flawed manuscript, offering citations and {hopefully} theoretical or methodological insights. I’ve read that Will Ferrell is very constructive as a colleague, often taking the time to help others work through something not working with their comedy, and I’m trying to pattern myself after this. My take is that if you can’t be constructive and if you tear something down without backing it up, you better be prepared to fight it out and social media is the perfect venue for this.
Twitterversion:: Authors using #socialmedia to lash out at negative reviews. #Fail or #Web2.0 decentering of critics as #gatekeepers in publishing? @Prof_K
Bryant & Stratton College Second Life Commencement
A few months ago, I blogged on how no-frills universities were catching on and have been reading on how higher education may be in a state of impending crisis. Plus, I saw how one university was offering commencement in the online virtual realm of Second Life. All of this had made me think about the future of the university::
Will the traditional “university” setting give way to the “business park” mode?
Will online degrees become increasingly prevalent?
How will the functions {research, teaching, community engagement, etc.} of the university change in society over time?
Should the university be treated like any other business and at what price?
I’ve always seen universities as communities, rare places where one interacts with others about ideas and knowledge. In the mid-1990s, I had the chance to be a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and remember it being a place open to inderdisciplinary perspectives, where interesting research was being done and intelligent conversations could be had. I read somewhere that a few decades ago, the Stanford University Faculty Club was once a vibrant place where professors from the various schools and departments would kick around ideas. I was talking to a recently retired computer science professor who was at my alma-mater, UC Irvine, in the 1970s, recalling conversations and debates with post-Marxist historians and scholars in the humanities. From my perspective, it’s the community that a university creates that matters and I feel that uses of technology should be working not only on online instruction but on helping to foster a virtual intellectual community. In terms of non-traditional settings and online instruction, I think there are challenges of legitimacy. Online and “business park” universities taught primarily by adjuncts need to address the quality issue and ensure that the pedagogy is not just having students jump through hoops. Students also need to adjust to learning in these environments. I used synchronous chat in a recent class. I heard from students I never heard from in the face-to-face discussions and it became clear who prepared and who didn’t. Some students were quite candid in confessing this in front of everyone, virtually.
The “crisis” that universities face in my book is not just a financial one, but also one of relevance. Relevance to individuals and to society. While there is a business aspect to running a university, treating it too much like a business by focusing on efficiency metrics and revenue opportunities, rather than how it fits into a community structure, is a sure-fire way to balkanize faculty. I think it will be challenging for universities to keep an infrastructure in place and deliver value that students want. I do expect a shakeout, especially in a globalized world connected to the Internet, unless universities adapt to being more competitive and rethink pricing.
Finally, I think universities can learn from the writer Ray Bradbury, who thinks libraries are more important than universities and a staunch library advocate::
“Libraries raised me…I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
It makes me wonder how ideas like Chris Anderson’s “free-conomics” could be applied to universities, an idea I’m mulling over and would love my colleagues to chime in on. Can a university business model be created that offers up free education, but brings in revenues through non-tuition means, begging the question, what business is the university really in? Is a degree the “product” or is “lifelong learning,” as in the building cultural capital? I leave with this Anderson quote, with my mind on how free knowledge, rather than free electricity, could transform society and improve democracy::
“What if electricity had in fact become virtually free? The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we’d use electricity for as many things as we could — we’d waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.”
Twitterversion:: What’s the future of higher ed? Can it be #Free: #ChrisAnderson #freeconomy ideas? Peddling degrees or lifelong learning? http://url.ie/1xzu @Prof_K
Despite the plethora of podcasts out there, there are few that do a thoughtful, yet entertaining job of addressing issues in the social sciences. I want to draw your attention to one of these podcasts. BBC radio four’s Analysis is a great resource for social scientists. The last two episodes in particular have dealt with the question of how norms, in their various forms, affect behavior. Though Experiments does an amazing job of synthesizing the emerging research in moral psychology and experimental philosophy (how the latter is different from social science, I’m not sure). The episode “doesn’t everyone” does a nice job of discussing the role of institutional norms in affecting behavior. Both are a must have on your Ipod…right next to the Contexts podcast.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the concept of nation, of late. In summers past, the 4th. of July, Independence Day in the United States, meant being in northern California and perhaps heading to Point Reyes and seeing the tug-of-war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach. The past three years, I have observed Canada Day, celebrating when Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, and Ontario became a federation, a dominion with ties to the UK. Two adjacent countries, which appear to have similarities, but have key differences. Population is one differentiator. At confederation in 1867, the US population was around over 10 times that of Canada, 38,558,371 to 3,625,000 {1870}. The twentieth century would see the rise of American dominance, not only in terms of economics, but also in terms of media and culture.
American culture is readily evident in Canada. On television and in major cities like Toronto, with the prevalence of brands like Starbuck’s, McDonald’s, and Subway. A quick scan of the TV listings shows how popular US television content is in anglophone Canada. Canada is aware of this and requires broadcasters to show Canadian content {Can con}. The CBC, the Canadian national public broadcaster, is a flagship network of the nation, where, through its mandate, the network’s goal is to be a cultural touchstone for the nation. I’ve blogged about the future of the CBC television on this post::Will Globalization Kill or Make the CBC Relevant Again?, which touches on how the CBC is struggling to remain viable and relevant in the shadow of big media players in the United States and fending off challengers within Canada. Unlike the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster, which is funded through household television licences, the CBC gets funding from the government, but also is subject to market forces through selling ad time, both sources being historically uneven.
The question I have is whether the role of a national broadcaster is even important. I don’t see the United States as having the equivalent of the CBC, let alone the BBC. PBS and NPR are, in my opinion, a loose confederation of programming, as opposed to a network with a strong identity, let alone an entity fostering a conceptualization of the United States as a culture or a nation.
The ideas of Arjun Appadurai and Benedict Anderson come to mind. Appadurai speaks of globalization in terms of flows. Flows of finance, ideologies, technologies, people and media, each with the suffix scapes. Mediascapes have two components::
The flows of capacity to produce and disseminate electronic information
The images of the world created by these media
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communitiesdiscusses nation as an abstract entity, where meaning is shared within and the mass media address its citizens as a public.
Borders are often permeable under globalization and Canada has seen flows of media flood across its southern border, but what has this done to Canadians’ notion of nation? Can Canadian content policy and the CBC help to reinforce the imagined community of Canada? Does nation even matter? Is Canada to Canadians “our home and disparate land,” as stated in today’s Vancouver Sun? What about shared Canadian experiences such as Hinterland’s Who’s Who::
I think we need to remember that the context here is capitalism. Media is flowing, media full of American meanings and ideals, as entertainment content to generate revenues. In light of this onslaught, I think it is important for Canada to preserve its identity by creating content that increases Canadian cultural knowledge and awareness. Why? Without a national identity, i.e., an imagined community of Canada, meaning becomes increasingly derived from imagined communities of brands. If our Diderot unitiesreduce to the constellation of brands we surround ourselves with, can we be citizens or are we just consumers?
I think nation does and should matter. In Benedict Anderson’s words, nation::
“…is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the inequality of that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep. horizontal kinship.”–p.7
I feel that the CBC should be a symbol of Canadian community, one that communicates and is interactive with all electronic media. I see it as a part of the cultural infrastructure and one of the few entities that can actively bridge the country’s east-west divide, but I’m an idealist.
Crosspost:: A shorter version is available on Rhizomicomm.
When I was a senior in college, I must admit thought quite highly of economics and its rationality. It was the early 1990s and I was contemplating law school and doctoral programs in environmental economics, with interests in law and economics and public choice. I was given The Gift Economy by David Cheal to read, altering my worldview forever. A close second was Jean Baudrillard’s Selected Writings, but that’s another post.
Cheal’s book focuses on the tensions between market relationships {political economy} and social ones {moral economy}, as a distinctive characteristic of the social milieu in capitalist societies. While gifts may be given for instrumentalist means, they often are not, hence being representative of a wide array of behaviors firmly in the realm of the symbolic and the relational. Cheal talks about the interplay between the market and social realms, which could easily be superimposed on a Pierre Bourdieu framework of fields, habitus, doxa, and forms of capital. In the past, gift-giving was often marginalized and thought to be subsumed in a capitalist exchange model. Recent thinking considers gifts to be a social process, one that has a significant economic impact.
So, how is this interplay affected by social media? In my current work, I’ve been thinking of the use of Facebook by organizations, particularly in the realm of philanthropy. Organizations have been embracing the idea of creating relationships with constituents, rather than focusing on transactions. Health non-profits often provide information and advocate on behalf of their constituents. By doing so, this creates a person-organization relationship and ideally leads to greater levels of philanthropy {economic resources for the non-profit}. The key is that the relationship must have salient meanings for the constituents, i.e., the brand meaning system. Depending on the context, this is often tied to outcomes, e.g., cures for diseases, social change, identity, etc.
Social media and social networking sites like Facebook not only foster person-organizational relationships via information disemmination and services, but also peer-to-peer relationships. These relationships are social, but are within a capitalist market context. Hence, we return to the gift. We manage relationships through gift-giving and other behaviours, through the management of symbols::
Facebook gifts:: Sentiment for a $1
Social media has the ability to move constituents from this model::
Organizational Activities -> Communities of practice -> Outcomes
The latter being facilitated by the Internet and with the possibility of a richer set of outcomes stemming from an engaged community. We want gifts to be expressive of our relational ties, hence full of meanings, within a given social context, e.g., a community of practice.
Facebook is a global player, but still needs a solid revenue model. Apple’s success with “apps” show the power of a platform to deliver value, often at a low price-point. The Facebook platform should be developed in line with how people, how a large number ofpeople, actually engage in symbolic relationship management, tied to other strategies, such as::
Bling gifts that are expressive of sentiments {various media}
Donations and sponsorships
Online events to engage community members
Free/Low-cost personalized apps that add value, e.g., health monitoring, reminders, alerts, etc.
Organizations are still figuring out how to use social media and Facebook is still figuring out how to deliver value. All I can say its future isn’t online ads and organizations just paying lip service to their constituencies with social media is as transparent as this::
McLuhan Way is just down the street from me, so perhaps it’s my inspiration. I remember reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media over 14 years ago in a seminar on the Internet. The hot/cool media continuum perplexed many of us and some say technology has rendered the concept obsolete. In terms of hot/cool, where does the Internet stand?
Hot media are high-definition. Media that fully-engages one sense of the audience member:: print {visual}, radio {sound}, film {visual}, & the photograph {visual}.
Cool media are low-definition. Media that require more active participation from the audience member to interpret:: Television {visual with limitations in the 1960s}, telephone {sound of a relatively poor quality in the 1960s}, and comic strips {cheaply reproduced mass-entertainment}. The video game as a hyperreal construct, where the audience/player must fill in gaps of this representation of the real.
Reading is engaging in hot media and is a solitary experience. Reading, contrasted with speech, forces an isolating consciousness, perhaps one overly-immersed in the individual.
How does Web 2.0 fit into all of this? Well, new technologies trend towards the hot. The iPod engages us, bathes us in a bubble of sound of our choosing. What about this paradox? New technologies are higher-definition, engaging us more and more, but also allowing us to be interactive with others {social media}. Moreover, there is convergence of the technologies. The smartphone {MP3 player, telephony, Internet web surfing} is a stunning example of multisensory engagement that also allows us to communicate and share with others.
What happened? Is the singularity of media, where all media is converging,making it all lukewarm? The continuum is shrinking to a singular point, as in the multimedia experiences of the smartphone. Has technology sped up our communications, so that there is the appearance that time has folded upon itself. We read text or see a video and now we can immediately respond to others. We read a tweet from Twitter and immediately respond to it.
So, bear with me as I think out loud here. Let’s assume that media are approaching singularity. As you go up the cone, technologies converge and the user is collapsing hot/cold, engaging both simultaneously.
McLuhan Conic:: Rough ideas for understanding trajectories for social media. ~Kambara
Let’s assume that at the circular base of the cone, along the diameter is the continuum from hot to cold. Perpendicular to that diameter is another continuum, the institutional semistructures, rigid {controlling} versus chaotic {open}. The base would have 4 quadrants, each with prototypical examples::
Hot & Rigid- Old “big media” {print, radio, film, etc.)
Hot & Chaotic- Engaging content in unstructured/uncontrolled databases
Cool & Rigid- Newsgroups
Cool & Chaotic- Synchronous unmoderated chat
The origin will be “lukewarm” and semi-structured. The origin is somewhat of a normative assumption. Individual user experiences may vary and may not even be contiguous. I know I need to refine these ideas and construct a better diagram. Nevertheless, I think this concept might be valuable in thinking about how people’s use of technologies is likely to evolve. Where would you put the following::
Facebook {social networking site}
Twitter {microblogging}
YouTube {video filesharing}
Hulu {long-form professional videos}
Google {all things data}
Where are they moving towards -or- how could they better provide value? Of course, despite McLuhan being gone for quite a while, I half-expect this to happen to me::
The conservative French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has expressed concern that the burqa is subjugating women in France. Addressing both parliamentary houses in the Palace of Versailles::
“The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience…It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”
The BBC clarified the different types of Islamic headscarves {below}. Sarkozy emphasized that this isn’t about disrespecting Islam and a group of cross-party French legislators are interested in examining whether women wearing the burqa is undermining French secularism and also whether womem wearing the veil are doing so voluntarily.
The French government banned the Islamic headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in 2004 although within the government, there is no consensus on the issue. In the US, somehow I think that no matter how hard the polygamy and abuse angles are pushed, there won’t be any bans onFLDS garb.
Last year, the Urban Affairs minister, Fadela Amara, born in France to Algerian parents, has been a harsh critic of the burqa. A feminist who has fought racism for decades, Amara grew up in one of the rough banlieuesof Paris, knowing the often ugly intersections of race, culture, and gender. After a 2008 court case case denying a Moroccan woman citizenship was upheld, Amara said she supported the ruling, in the hopes that it would dissuade fanatical Islamic followers from imposing the burka on their wives. In an interview with Le Parisien, she said::
“The burka is a prison, it’s a straitjacket”
“It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy.”
This brings up an interesting issue, since banning clothing has been associated with anti-immigration politics throughout Europe. The fact of the matter is that if France decides to move towards a banning of the burqa, some argue this is likely to limit radical Islamic women’s freedom even more, as men may not allow them out at all.
Barring the possibility of some celebrity starting a burqa trend, i.e., secularizing it, such a ruling would be in conflict with the French concept of laïcité , a variant of the concept of the separation of church and state. More subtle is an idea that banning the burqa does symbolic violence to the “other.” Pierre Bourdieu notes in Distinctionhow subjugation and control are manifested in the everyday::
“…the social relations objectified in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum.”
The Islamic veil has been isolated and socially categorized. The attention given it has stigmatized it. Ironically, within extreme Islam, it has its own symbolic baggage, particularly as it crosses national borders. While scrutiny of the Islamic veil can foster a political agenda by conservatives and a feminist agenda, is doing so through such symbolic violence the best way to institute social change?
Twitterversion:: #Burka under fire in #France. #Sarkozy and #feminists meeting in anti-extreme Islam common ground? #feminism #Bourdieu http://url.ie/1wt4 #feminism @Prof_K
Niqab/Burqa:: niqab is a veil for the face that leaves the area around the eyes clear. However, it may be worn with a separate eye veil. burka is the most concealing of all Islamic veils. It covers the entire face and body, leaving just a mesh screen to see through.
Hijab:: regarded by many Muslims as a symbol of both religion and womanhood, come in a myriad of styles and colours.
Al-Amira/Shayla:: al-amira is a two-piece veil. shayla is a long, rectangular scarf popular in the Gulf region. It is wrapped around the head and tucked or pinned in place at the shoulders.
Khimar/Shador:: khimar is a long, cape-like veil that hangs down to just above the waist. It covers the hair, neck and shoulders completely, but leaves the face clear. The chador, worn by many Iranian women when outside the house, is a full-body cloak. It is often accompanied by a smaller headscarf underneath.
"A different kind of company. A different kind of car"? ~Apologies to Saturn tagline of the 1990s
Notes from North of 49ºN
It’s not often I agree with Tom Friedman, but last fall when I was preoccupied with the US general election, teaching, and associate directing a center, he was advocating not just a bailout, but a green buildup. He quoted Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy::
“It’s time to stop borrowing and start building. America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America. … You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.”
Friedman was in favour of attaching green strings to bailouts, an idea I think warranted further study, at the very least. Fast forward 9 months and focus on the province of Ontario, where at the federal level, the Conservatives {Stephen Harper}, and at the provincial level, the Liberals {Dalton McGuinty}, jumped on the US bailout bandwagon to a tune of $9.5B or $10.9B Canadian. This is in addition to the Obama administration’s $49.8B. The combined US and Canadian bailouts are worth 130 times the present value of GM. Here’s what both Harper and McGuinty had to say about this::
“We had to save it all or have zero forever,”
–Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
“The alternative would have been a devastating blow to Ontario families and communities.”
“At present GM Canada has 12,000 hourly and salaried employees, but that number is expected to shrink to about 5,500 over the next couple of years. About 1,100 of the new total is expected to be salaried jobs, which are unrelated to assembly operations. That means Ottawa and the Ontario government are together spending an unprecedented $2.1 million for each assembly job at GM Canada they hope to save.”–Time, 1 June 2009
It’s likely that GM suppliers will also be affected, a $7.2B industry employing 45,000 workers, but it is unlikely that all these jobs are at risk. While Canada accounts for about 19.4% of North American production, Canadian cost advantages have been eroded by a stronger Canadian dollar, a weakened US union in the UAW, and strong and strategic bargaining by the Canadian Auto Workers union.
While the situation looks gloomy for manufacturing in Ontario, quite a few are banking on green jobs. So much so that St. Clair College has a 2-year green jobs programme and the province has a commitment to clean energy. Currently, the province gets 25% of its electricity from coal, but wants to shut down all of its coal plants by 2014. The province is hoping to convert some of the plants to carbon-neutral biomass, although the yields will be lower. The slack will need to be picked up by alternatives, with greener options being wind and solar. Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan calls for greenhouse gas emission reduction to 6% under 1990 levelsand the newGreen Energy Act is meant to protect the environment, regulate, and spur investment in green technologies.
Policy & Innovation:: The California Example
The PPIC has a report on the effects of California’s Zero-Emissions Vehicle {ZEV} mandate, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time, the California government, through the Air Resources Board {CARB} initially set in 1990 requirements that by 1998 that 2% and by 2003 that 10% vehicles sold in California would be ZEV. Suffice it to say, concessions were made over time, but the original mandate set the wheels in motion for innovation. The effects of the program were::
The policy spurred patents in near-term technologies
CARB arguably responded to technological changes when revising the program
Technological spillovers resulted in a greater number of indirect innovations
Increased market development for emerging technologies
Broadened design parameters
Lower emissions in California
The program, albeit complex and not without politics and controversy, shows how policy can help to shape market-based activity in ways that would not occur otherwise.
Ontario:: Good Money After Bad
While not surprising, Canada and Ontario should have considered asserting themselves more, rather than caving to bailout pressure. Why not move forward to develop policies that help transition away from declining industries and in-line with over provincial objectives?, e.g., environmental and energy. How I see it is that the US and Canada are bailing out a company the capital markets have little faith in and now face the daunting task of rebuilding with a new CEO, “Big Ed,” who has a reputation for being an empire-builder. I question having an empire-builder in charge of a company needing to be leaner, a company needing to reinvent itself overnight. Let’s hope he indeed “learns something about cars,”and doesn’t make mistakes like this one, the old CEO Rick Wagoner copped to:: “axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. It didn’t affect profitability, but it did affect image.”
While there have been debates on whether or not the US needs an auto industry {NY Times} and criticisms abound, such as this one on how GM betrayed out trust, Canada is nevertheless a 12% equity shareholder. This creation of a capitalist-state joint venture opens up a huge can of worms, as which interests will prevail and how to balance autonomous management and control versus paternalism? I think the answers are in economic sociology, a topic for a future post.
I’m currently working on a project exploring Facebook and public deliberation. In this project, I’m asking questions like: What does Facebook portend for deliberative democracy? When, where, and how do Facebook and its users invite or obstruct the development of public argument/s? How does Facebook’s very form and content promote or impede opportunities for argumentation? Rosen (2007) asks some parallel questions:
What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world? (p. 23)
We know very little about the potential for social networking sites to help or hinder public deliberation, and what kinds of norms are involved in these processes. As the site draws an increasingly large user base, this would appear to be a critical subject for argument studies. Overall, I’m exploring the idea that Facebook has created civic spaces for a new kind of networked argumentation, which leverages the trust of anchored online identity and offline friendship toward social issues. Subsequently, I’m wondering if some of the communication that occurs on Facebook could be viewed within the framework of what I term diasporic-virtual publics. Users create a diasporic-virtual public on Facebook by threading together central and peripheral friendships from the past and present. Despite the wide geographical dispersion of these friends/acquaintances, each is moored in a past/present relationship that carries implications for arguments and arguing online. At the same time, my current analysis is trying to figure out whether various facets of Facebook are anti-deliberative, in both content and form. I invite your critiques or extensions on this subject. . . . – Don
