Hello!

Welcome to Meaningful Connections, which will become a semantic web of studies, articles about and examples of things that interest me about the social life of information technologies, particularly

Free-dum 2.0

Is stuff really free on the Internet?

The Internet features networking, cultural performances, and metaphysical speculation about it.   Notions from informational machine to digital democracy to being digital, virtual communities, and many many more are the registers of metaphysical speculation.  Metaphysical speculation typically registers the experiences of first encounters, when newness is marked as difference and often with a sense of infinitude.  A recent entry is Free (Hyperion Press, 2009) by the editor of Wired magazine.   It follows the founding editor’s very similar  New Rules for the New Economy (1999) just a decade ago now updated for the Web 2.0 generation. 

Cyperspace Generation Gap – Google is So Yesterday, Everybody is on Facebook

I don’t twitter.  The concept does not grab me like it does my students.  Some brag about, more just aver to, micro-blogging their activities and observations 140 characters at a time.  Being constantly “in touch” seems to occupy for them some of the functional space that punctuality does for earlier generations, those of a “certain age” older than some of their parents.  When I tell them that part of the invisible curriculum in college is to learn to make appointments and to be on time, they just shrug,  say “whatever,” and ask why, if they’re constantly available (with those who matter to them) instead.  Instead of points of contact, they seem to think in terms of degrees or modulations of contact.[1]

I can see

Cyberspace, Civil Society & Internet Biographies in the Middle East

From a talk delivered at ‘Focus Asia: Media Cultures and Politics in Asia and Beyond’ at Lund University (26-27 February 2009)

We all seem to be grappling with the new millennium through lists. So, for this part of the conference on Democracy, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in Old and New Media, I want to add Cyberspace and Internet Biographies in the Middle East. My goal is to tie tie these topics to what kind of social contract is emerging with networked communications. Since all of these concepts, and the data assembled around them, are problematic, let me begin with

The Internet’s Two Histories in the Middle East: Narratives & Networks of IT Implantation in Four Arab Countries

The Internet is a strong attractor of other stories, almost from its beginnings and almost everywhere it spreads.  For engineers seeking support to develop the Internet (Hart et al., 1992; Abbate 1999), it was democratic access to information; for politicians, the information superhighway.  This is also true in the Middle East, a late comer and slow

What to read about the Internet today, and how

Sometimes people ask me what to read about the Internet, about IT & Society, maybe about my own research area on the Internet in the Middle East. I usually recommend books not on the Internet but on Silicon Valley. Not for the usual reasons that it’s Everest, Mecca or Ground Zero for the Internet or IT, or for hero stories, but for 

Cybernauts of the South Pacific

Some anthropologists tell students that the most famous ethnography to have unraveled a whole society, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), starts at the beach. It doesn’t actually, but that’s too good a story not to be part of professional socialization. The book describes a vast scheme of relationships and meanings that are gathered up in a system of interisland trading at the pinnacle of which are mystical ritual objects, each laden with a history of previous holders that become part of the identities of new recipients. “I kula, therefore I am” could be their Cartesian rule that gives meaning to all other exchanges there – kind of like email for today’s cybernauts? Is the Internet cafe the new beach? This one’s in Fare, on Huahine,

Connected 2

What connection looks like on…

Quay Branly, Paris

“Social Software” as Institutions in On-Line Life?

Debate once flourished over whether ‘cyberspace’ – and more particularly social life on-line – was embedded within, an extension of, or apart from surrounding social, political, economic, cultural organization. Part of the argument was girdled by technological determinism, a strong form of ‘medium theory’, so called in a bow to the media studies guru Marshall McLuhan. Behind his quip that the medium is the message was a serious theory of communication built on the observation that

Missing the social in on-line social life

Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, provides a useful comparison for thinking about social life on-line. It’s a scale, essentially of ever denser interaction and commitment from sharing to conversation to collaborating to collective action. Pretty good sociology for media studies, but not quite good enough as sociology. His scale of involvement is more about connections between persons that may be transferred or forged on-line than about connections of persons to an on-line environment. Shirky seems to recognise this in framing IT as permitting people to do things they couldn’t do before – what some call “affordance.”

But the problem is deeper and

Connected!

It was irresistable, a hut  with a satellite dish in the lagoon around Huahine, one of the leeward islands of Tahiti. With apologies to Rogers & Hammerstein, this was my South Pacific moment:  Bali Hai, calling you!

I’ ve been taking pictures like this for years: photographic evidence – documentation? – of the worldwide spread of