4,417 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2016
    1. the platform essentially bans access for academics who, for whatever reason, don’t have an Academia.edu account. It also shuts out non-academics.

      They must have changed this, as pretty much anyone with an email address (including non-academics) can create a free account and use the system.

    2. 35 million academics, independent scholars and graduate students as users, who collectively have uploaded some eight million texts

      35 million users is a lovely number, but their engagement must be spectacularly bad if only 8 million texts are available.

    1. We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that.

      Not only do schools not do that, traditionally they have "taught" creativity and curiosity out of students.

  2. annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. honours of her house

      "The duties of house." As the only female family in residence at Northanger Abbey, Miss Tilney would be expected to act as the hostess.

      This duty would normally be performed by the wife of the household, and in her absence, the eldest daughter or at times, the sister of the host.

  3. annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. They called each other by their Christian name

      This refers to their name given at birth, so Catherine and Isabel. Referring to someone by their Christian name portrayed extreme comfortability and familiarity. The prefix Mr., Mrs., and Miss were examples of comfortable terms of address when speaking of or with someone, and only selective characters throughout Jane Austen's novels are seen breaking this acceptable social norm (Susannah Fullerton, "What's in a Name?")

    1. Things stayed civil because the system aligned incentives correctly.

      Sounds like there were many other reasons that most Internet-based initiatives stayed civil in their early days. Some of them have to do with human diversity.

    1. I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.

      This is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I've felt sympathy for the downfall of traditional journalism. Social media as a kind of echo chamber is really scary and almost sounds like a science fiction story.

    2. As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter

      Fascinating to think about the simultaneously democratic and demagogic potential of social media from #ArabSpring to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

  4. Mar 2016
    1. Credentalism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past 40 years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it. "The United States has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world," write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. "A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."
  5. Feb 2016
    1. In summary, teams which are "fairer", in two senses, tend to be more effective:

      • Those where members speak and contribute in roughly the same proportion (albeit possibly in quite different ways)
      • Those where members have an above-average sensitivity to what others are thinking and feeling
    1. if we were to ask people whether clicking on a “like” button next to a short video clip is identical to leaving a detailed comment, the answer would probably be a clear “no.”

      Sequencing calls to action from liking to commenting.

    2. Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services.

      So social engagement increases brand loyalty.

      Seems like that could be a key to Medium's success.

    3. When the tasks that users were prompted to engage in were not presented in increasing order of effort level, users tended to donate and participate less than when tasks were ordered that way.

      Awareness of a user's lifecycle from exploring to adoption to megauser is key.

    4. “calls to action,” issued at different points in time
    1. narratives of emotional and social journeys from being at academic risk in high schools to being academically successful in universities academic experiences.

      These are indeed the stories we need to hear, and the data that needs to be collected -- how ever she drew data from narratives.

    1. At some dark day in the future, when considered versus the Google Caliphate, the NSA may even come to be seen by some as the “public option.” “At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits,” they will say, “rather than merely stockholder avarice and flimsy user agreements.”

      In the last few years I've come to understand that my tolerance for most forms of surveillance should be considered in terms of my confidence in the judiciary.

    1. This morning, the Urban Institute is announcing a grant from the Gates Foundation to establish a national Partnership on Mobility from Poverty. It is a non-partisan group of leaders, experts, and practitioners who will identify promising interventions to make real, lasting progress against persistent poverty in America.
  6. Jan 2016
    1. In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the viewing of TV programs at the time of their broadcast went up 20% with the advent of Twitter, indicating a desire to consume collaboratively. My ten year experience with social reading suggests that we might see a similar increase if long-form texts began appearing in platforms enabling people to gather in the margins with trusted friends and colleagues.
    1. convention collective nationale Judicial branch: Supreme Court of Appeals or Cour de Cassation, judges are appointed by the president from nominations of the High Council of the Judiciary; Constitutional Council or Conseil Constitutionnel, three members appointed by the president, three members appointed by the president of the National Assembly, and three appointed by the president of the Senate; Council of State or Conseil d'Etat.

    1. social benefits it might bring in terms of user autonomy and community-building

      There are contexts in which these things matter more. Maybe worthwhile to start from there. Not focusing on business models or “does it scale”. But on a plethora of initiatives and pilot projects.

    1. Alice Maz on communication failures due to different cultures of conversation and values.

      Most people value feelings, shared perspectives, and social status. They see correction as an attempt to knock them down a peg. Nerds value facts, logic, and the sharing of information. A genuine nerd shares information with no intention of knocking anyone down, and prefers being corrected to remaining misinformed.

    1. Twitter is rumored to be planning to increase maximum tweet length to 10,000 characters. They want to attract people who don't already use Twitter, and they want to keep users on Twitter for longer periods of time.

      If these extended tweets are hidden until clicked, this doesn't bother me. But other recent changes are obnoxious and insulting. Much more of this will make Twitter useless.

      • filtering your timeline
      • displaying tweets out of order
      • making a chain of replies hard to find
    1. not clear that researchers — who have proved reluctant in repeated trials to comment on published articles — will take to annotation, even if they can share their comments privately.

      Kathleen Fitzpatrick has recently addressed this issue, suggesting implicitly that scholarly societies can mobilize their extant communities in this regard.

    1. Meanwhile, in almost exactly the same decades that the Internet arose and eventually evolved social computing, literary scholarship followed similar principles of decentralization to evolve cultural criticism.7

      Wow. This is the most interesting statement that I've read in a while. Wish I could pin an annotation...

      Really helps me justify my career arc, turning from literary criticism as a career to software "development."

    1. Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths.

      There might be a better term than 'blind' for this. It seems like the content itself, and the users using it, are the things that are blinded. To be blind is to be disabled -- and Instagram and other corporate services are far from that.

      These corporate platforms are like walled gardens, or cult leaders, creating propaganda and structures that blind and bind behind closed doors. They are the oppressor, the users the oppressed. And all at the demise of the health of the Internet. By blocking external hyperlinks, they are actually committing a crime against the rest of the Internet, cutting off the very thing that makes the Internet powerful. Let's start calling it what it truly is, an externality, a cost on people who did not choose incur that cost.

  7. Dec 2015
    1. That’s how Isis is recruiting and growing.

      Wow. Blaming "the stream" of social media for ISIS! How does that square with the celebration of social media as democratizing force in the Arab Spring?...

    1. A shorter, cuter, and more appropriate distinguishing tag for hypothesis micro-blog-posts just occurred to me: "hyp" -- short for hypothesis, and reminiscent of both "hype" and "hip". :)

    2. Hypothesis might make a fine alternative to Twitter.

      • Is anyone using hypothesis in this way yet?
      • What would be a good tag to distinguish "tweet" Notes?<br> (I guess it would be cute to use "tweet" as the tag.)
      • When there's not a specific webpage involved, what would be the best URLs on which to attach such a Note?<br> (I suppose any page of your own on a social media site or blog would do. I also see that we can annotate pages on local servers.)
    1. notion that your identity comes from within you and not from someone else

      Not very interactionist, though. Sounds quite far from most ideas about identity in sociology and social psychology. But, hey, it makes sense in context.

    1. If you've ever felt bad about working a very low-status job, or looked down on someone else for it, this might change your attitude.

      • It's ironic that many low-wage jobs are jobs that many people couldn't tolerate.
      • These days, one should be embarrassed to admit working for Wall Street, the NSA, or Congress.
      • Our government is full of people who should be mopping floors and wiping tables instead.
      • The military shouldn't be the only obvious opportunity for working-class kids.
    1. Huge follower counts on YouTube and social media DO NOT easily translate to income. And those followers expect you to be "real" -- so they are hostile to advertising and sponsored content.

      Do you own a business? It might pay to offer a salary to the producers of a YouTube channel that reaches your target audience -- in exchange for low-profile "brought to you by" links and mentions that won't offend that audience.

      https://twitter.com/JBUshow<br> https://twitter.com/gabydunn

    1. My solution to the problem posed by the incompatibility of depression and social media didn’t aim to change anyone’s life but my own. Yet maybe it was no less radical: Ruthlessly dispose of all fake intimacy and superficial interactions and focus what little energy I had on real connection. Take my feeble attention span and put it into the equivalent of an incubator. Learn to consider myself a worthy human being without the positive reinforcement of Twitter favs.
    2. Professor Heuser thought for a moment. “That’s only indirectly related to social media,” she finally said. “People suffering from depression are incredibly creative at convincing themselves they are losers. But we live in a world that’s hyper-communicative — not really communicative, but narcissistic. Everybody is always ‘sharing’ something, only that it isn’t really sharing, it’s posting something to a wall in the hope that as many people as possible will come past and ‘like’ it. The purpose is to feed our narcissism. It is a many-voiced monologue, a cacophony. Everybody is posting something, but we aren’t talking to each other.”

      During depression, you are likely to find your own past happiness hard to tolerate. It may be worse if that "happiness" was a put-on.

    3. However, the positive feeling that usually follows — your organism can’t mount that response anymore. That’s a classic symptom of depression. You can’t feel joy or connection to others anymore.” And because my brain knows what joy used to feel like, she explained, its absence, that emptiness, is experienced subconsciously as painful. The fact that I found it so hard to resist the lure of said dopamine release was also easy to explain, she said: “Will has to do with energy. And depression is characterised precisely by a lack of energy.”

      Social media may or may not be a contributing cause of depression. But it is generally not good for someone who is already depressed.

    1. Specifically, the study’s authors found two types of information skills that correlated with maximum ideation power: idea scouting and idea connecting. Idea scouts are good at identifying external ideas from diverse experts and resources on Twitter, and they convert weak ties to strong ties, including in offline face to face conversations. Idea connectors are good at identifying business opportunities from the Twitter ideas they discover; they curate and direct those ideas to the best business stakeholders across their organizations.
    2. The more diverse your network of friends on Twitter, the more innovative your ideas tend to be. That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of hundreds of people across five companies, in industries ranging from technology to food production to higher education.
    1. Hiding the names of universities during the hiring process is just part of a larger strategy by Deloitte to seek a more diverse workforce. They have teamed up with the UK-based consulting company Rare to incorporate a new screening process called “contextualisation” that seeks to judge an applicant’s performance in the context in which they achieved it.
    2. One of Britain’s largest companies no longer wants its recruiters and hiring managers to know where its applicants went to college, school or university. “We are calling it school and university-blind interviewing,” Deloitte’s Head of UK Resourcing Victoria Lawes, said in an interview with LinkedIn. “What we really want to do is ensure that, whoever is recruiting isn’t consciously or unconsciously favoring a person who attended a certain school or university.”
    1. share their thoughts about a site with friends or colleagues

      A description of both social bookmarking in particular and most social media practices generally.

    2. organize and remember useful sites on the Web

      Bookmarking still isn’t a solved issue.

    1. Go out and see the birds along the building, singing, because, [therewas] no snow! Everybody be standing over the pipes, talking because it’s warm,standing out all winter long.’

      I visit my family in Chicago every winter.. I can assure you all it's nothing like this anymore. It's cold outside. Whether there is snow or not (due to storm variations every year) it's cold.. very cold.

  8. Nov 2015
    1. Receiving encouragement from others also seems to maximize happiness. In one study, people who read bogus testimonials from peers saying an activity worked saw greater increases in happiness than those who did not.
    1. In one version of this experiment, if we gave participants synthetic oxytocin (in the nose, that will reach the brain in an hour), they donated to 57 percent more of the featured charities and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Those who received oxytocin also reported more emotional transportation into the world depicted in the ad. Most importantly, these people said they were less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors shown in the ads. So, go see a movie and laugh and cry. It’s good for your brain, and just might motivate you to make positive changes in your life and in others’ lives as well.
    2. When we adults unite play, love, and work in our lives, we set an example that our children can follow. That just might be the best way to bring play back into the lives of our children—and build a more playful culture.
    3. Finally children do as we do, not as we say. That gives us incentive to bring play back into our adult lives. We can shut off the TVs and take our children with us on outdoor adventures. We should get less exercise in the gym and more on hiking trails and basketball courts. We can also make work more playful: Businesses that do this are among the most successful. Seattle’s Pike Fish Market is a case in point. Workers throw fish to one another, engage the customers in repartee, and appear to have a grand time. Some companies, such as Google, have made play an important part of their corporate culture. Study after study has shown that when workers enjoy what they do and are well-rewarded and recognized for their contributions, they like and respect their employers and produce higher quality work. For example, when the Rohm and Hass Chemical company in Kentucky reorganized its workplace into self- regulating and self-rewarding teams, one study found that worker grievances and turnover declined, while plant safety and productivity improved.
    4. it’s not hard to understand how, in any highly social species, natural selection might favor those who laugh. Laughter may help some animals avert an attack, and according to Panksepp, animals may be attracted to others who laugh, seeing their laughter as a sign that they have a positive temperament and can get along well with others—and some of those positive interactions could lead to reproduction. “Laughter indicates emotional health, just as a peacock’s tail indicates physical health,” he says. Indeed, just as humans like to spend time with their funny friends, Panksepp has found that rats gravitate towards those who “chirp” the most.
    5. Importantly, humor is also great for our social relationships. People list having a sense of humor as one of the most important traits in a mate. In classrooms, a humorous teacher makes learning more enjoyable and increases a student’s motivation to learn.
    6. laughter is not only about jokes, butis just part of human speech. In fact, most forms of laugh occur in conversations whenwe’re not necessarily telling jokes but we’re trying to signal playfulness and cooperativenessto other individuals.
    1. spiritually-orientedpeople are less likely to experience depression. Nowthose findings beg the question of why: what is it about feeling like you have a spiritualpractice? One hypothesis is, it’s really community.

      (paraphrase) it could also be awe

    1. Emmons proposes a series of questions to help people recover from difficult experiences, which I’ve adapted for the workplace: What lessons did the experience teach us? Can we find ways to be thankful for what happened to us now, even though we were not at the time it happened? What ability did the experience draw out of us that surprised us? Are there ways we have become a better workplace because of it? Has the experience removed an obstacle that previously prevented us from feeling grateful?
    2. Research points to the notion that gratitude might have positive effects on transforming conflicts, which can benefit the organization and working relationships. How do you do that? It starts with the one charged with mediating the conflict: For example, a supervisor with two bickering employees might open a meeting by expressing sincere appreciation of both parties. Throughout the process, that person should never miss an opportunity to say “thank you.” The research says this attitude of gratitude will have a positive feedback effect, even if results aren’t obvious right away.
    3. Giving creates gratitude, but giving can also be a good way to express gratitude, especially if the person in question is shy. You can say “thanks” by taking on scut work, lending a parking space, or giving a day off. These kinds of non-monetary gifts can lead to more trust in working relationships, if it’s reciprocal, sincere, and altruistically motivated.
    4. Employees need to hear “thank you” from the boss first. That’s because expressing gratitude can make some people feel unsafe, particularly in a workplace with a history of ingratitude.
    5. The benefits of gratitude go beyond a sense of self-worth, self-efficacy, and trust between employees. When Greater Good Science Center Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas analyzed data from our interactive gratitude journal Thnx4.org, she found the greater the number of gratitude experiences people had on a given day, the better they felt. People who kept at it for at least two weeks showed significantly increased happiness, greater satisfaction with life, and higher resilience to stress; this group even reported fewer headaches and illnesses.
    6. Gratitude is a non-monetary way to support those non-monetary motivations. “Thank you” doesn’t cost a dime, and it has measurably beneficial effects. In a series of four experiments, psychologists Adam Grant and Francesca Gino found that “thank you” from a supervisor gave people a strong sense of both self-worth and self-efficacy. The Grant and Gino study also reveals that the expression of gratitude has a spillover effect: Individuals become more trusting with each other, and more likely to help each other out.
    7. gratitude motivates us and it helps us to make gestures that bind us more closelywith our romantic partner, and actually with other social partners in our lives.
    1. most blogs have a feature called “pingbacks,”

      Annotations should have “pingbacks”, too. But the most important thing is how to process those later on. We do get into the Activity Streams behind much Learning Analytics.

    1. In Jakarta, for example, largechunks of the urban core were cleared of itspoorer residents, replaced with new commer-cial and residential buildings that now, after adecade or so, are being deemed obsolete orstructurally deficient even when they wereimplanted as an instrument of completionor permanence.

      Trends? Realization of how they got rid of the poorer residents?

    2. Curated social waste dumps and increasesin involuntary infrastructural inequality runrampant, as demonstrated in Chelcea andPulay’s depiction on Bucharest

      What is social waste?

    3. Normative understandings of infra-structure usually are organized around theways in which materiality is a platformupon which social differences are created,recognized and sustained

      Materiality causes differentiation in social classes.. the want of materialistic objects and those who have the ability (money) to get them will be higher. Can money buy happiness?

    1. 1. Gratitude leads to complacency I’ve often heard the claim that if you’re grateful, you’re not going to be motivated to challenge the status quo or improve your lot in life. You’ll just be satisfied, complacent, lazy and lethargic, perhaps passively resigned to an injustice or bad situation. You’ll give up trying to change something. In fact, studies suggest that the opposite is true: Gratitude not only doesn’t lead to complacency, it drives a sense of purpose and a desire to do more.

      Gratitude myth, debunked:

      ...Yet they don’t report feeling more satisfied with their progress toward their goals than other people do. They don’t become complacent or satisfied to the point that they stop making an effort.

    1. Those in the gratitude condition showed avery strong preference for working with a partner, whereas those who were in the controlcondition actually preferred to work alone. So, one of the things we see about the socialbenefits of gratitude is that it enhances our desire to affiliate with others. Gratitudealso enhances our communal orientation toward others
    1. If this were true for modern society, it has multiplied in ourage of social media, in which control and value are indissolubly linked to the machine ensemblesthat comprise contemporary digital infrastructures.

      I have studied in my International Marketing course here how social media is a cultural institution in society and has an extremely powerful influence on societal structures regarding preferences, levels of acceptance of products/technology, and how consumers are influenced to use them.

    1. people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits: Psychological Higher levels of positive emotions More alert, alive, and awake More joy and pleasure More optimism and happiness Physical Stronger immune systems Less bothered by aches and pains Lower blood pressure Exercise more and take better care of their health Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking Social More helpful, generous, and compassionate More forgiving More outgoing Feel less lonely and isolated.
  9. Oct 2015
    1. other scientists are finding when you really sortof focus our attention on these sort of intrinsic goals like being connected to others as opposedto making more money as you might imagine, those lead to more boosts in happiness andthen this other focus on making money and achieving fame really doesn't sort of boosthappiness in the same fashion.
    2. people who set goals to really find greater autonomy or freedom who feel greater confidenceand in particular, again as you might intuit, to be more connected to other people, theyactually had rises in happiness over that 6 month period.
    3. when we set goals that are reallynon-zero that have to do with not only honoring our own interests, but also advancing thewelfare and interests of others, friends, family members, and social groups, that kindof a goal, that non-zero goal that really incorporates others interests with the greatergood is associated with greater success, career, and happiness.
    1. "self-compassion (unlike self-esteem) helps buffer against anxiety" when confronted with threats to one's self-image; it also found that increases in self-compassion are associated with increased feelings of social connectedness and decreased depression, among other indicators of psychological well-being.

      I wonder if the ability to laugh at oneself is subsumed by self-compassion; at least, they seem related.

    1. . Human interactional intelligence is, so far as we know, predicated upon five qualities

      So this is basically the through process of analysis/division of how humans take in stimuli in the environment?

    2. and disaster flooding in from the media that have generated a pervasive fear of catastrophe but also a more deep-seated sense of misanthropy which urban commentators have been loath to acknow- ledge, a sense of misanthropy too often treated as though it were a dirty secre

      Interesting thesis.. Media is known as one of the most influential institutions in society today... is he blaming media?

    1. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average.

      These are some intense statistics.. It'd be interesting to compare them to other cities in the area..

    1. a web-wide ‘Like’ feature could just be implemented as a special kind of annotation

      Unlike some other approaches to development, this acknowledgment that usage can push innovation could help expand Hypothesis beyond a core base of “annotation geeks”. Document-level annotations can serve to classify or evaluate, like social bookmarking. What’s wrong with that?

    1. Although in this case Sally worked on her own, she and others often collabo-rated on short- and long-term projects or simply consulted with peers for explicithelp. For instance, people often knew the experienced members of the commu-nity, and they might have requested their assistance when they stumbled upon anydifficulties. In addition, because individuals had scopes of different magnification,practitioners often knew whose scope was capable of resolving object featuresthat others’ might not have. So participants often traded viewpoints on theirobservations.

      This is a nice example of multiple resources. The CoP was available when Sally needed help and she had access but could engage with them or work alone when she wanted. The group shared material resources as well as ideas about their observations. There was support for learning but Sally was able to choose when and how she wanted that support.

    1. he first asked the great logician Bertrand Russell to write the notes

      Could just imagine how that went. And how it might have gone, had Russell complied.

    1. The easiest way—by far—to demonstrate interest in others is to ask questions. The most socially successful people ask not just factual questions (“What do you do for work?”) but questions that are a little more personal (“How do you like what you do?”). These two types of questions, used in conjunction, accelerate feelings of connectedness.
    2. Introverts may have a hard time feeling as socially connected as extroverts. But the most extroverted person in the room may not be the most socially connected. They may receive attention, but if an extrovert does not learn a bit about those around them—by quietly listening to them—those other people will hardly feel closer to them. Listening to others makes people want to be around you, and wanting to be around each other is the essence of feeling connected.
    1. a web so conceptually consistent, socially relevant and technically expandable

      We've done relatively well with the first two. "Technically expandable" is the one in danger.

      If we continue to build "social networks" as singular dead end cul-de-sacs, we leave no exit available to those who follow.

      The Web we want is expandable beyond the reaches of what we currently know, the economies we operate within, and the future we can currently conceive.

    1. Over time, they have created massive communi-ties with millions of inhabitants, complex lifeworlds, economic arrange-ments, cultural practices and life-styles

      The people will find a way to survive.. they always do.. but we should be able to find easier ways to make that happen that will provide better situations for them.

    1. This research shows there are low- and high-trust regions of the United States. Nevada is a very low-trust region. (Nobody seems to be very surprised by that.) Minnesota is a very high-trust region. The Deep South is a very low-trust region. We see similar disparities internationally. In Brazil, two percent of people say they trust other people. In Norway, 65 percent say they trust other people. So what are the characteristics of low-trust regions? Few people vote, parents and schools are less active. There’s less philanthropy in low-trust regions, greater crime of all kinds, lower longevity, worse health, lower academic achievement in schools.
    2. Interestingly, the investors’ expectations about the back-transfer from the trustee did not differ between the oxytocin and placebo recipients. Oxytocin increased the participants’ willingness to trust others, but it did not make them more optimistic about another person’s trustworthiness.

      The Trust Game; however, there was no difference in groups when the trustee was a computer, showing oxytocin affects social connections but not risk-behavior itself.

    1. we’ll see higher rates of forgiveness under those conditions that made forgiving adaptive in our ancestral environments. This means we’ll see more forgiveness in places where people are highly dependent on complex networks of cooperative relationships, policing is reliable, the system of justice is efficient and trustworthy, and social institutions are up to the task of helping truly contrite offenders make amends with the people they’ve harmed.
    2. Why might evolution have outfitted us with such an ability? Biologists have offered several hypotheses. I’m especially fond of the “valuable relationship” hypothesis, espoused by de Waal and many other primatologists. It goes like this: Animals reconcile because it repairs important relationships that have been damaged by aggression. By forgiving and repairing relationships, our ancestors were in a better position to glean the benefits of cooperation between group members—which, in turn, increased their evolutionary fitness.
    3. when two men have an argument on the street, the mere presence of a third person doubles the likelihood that the encounter will escalate from an exchange of words to an exchange of blows.
    1. This view might make sense for solitary species, like the golden hamster, which flees upon being attacked, or territorial species, like many birds, that rely upon territorial arrangements to avoid deadly conflicts. But many mammals, and in particular primates, need each other to survive. Ostracism and marginalization are tickets to shortened lives. Among humans, individuals who have fewer and less healthy social bonds have been shown to live shorter lives, have compromised immune function, and be more vulnerable to disease. Our sociality, and that of many nonhuman primates, requires a mechanism that brings individuals together in the midst of conflict and aggression.
    2. This offers us insight into the true nature of embarrassment: I have discovered that this subtle display—the averted gaze, the pressed lips—is a sign of our respect for others, our appreciation of their view of things, and our commitment to the moral and social order. Far from reflecting confusion, it turns out that embarrassment can be a peacemaking force that brings people together—both during conflict and after breeches of the social contract, when there’s otherwise great potential for violence and disorder. I’ve even found evidence that facial displays of embarrassment have deep evolutionary roots, and that this seemingly inconsequential emotion provides us with a window into the ethical brain.
    1. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

      Is this just becoming more of a competition between who ends up with control? I thought we were working towards beneficial social and urban reform here..

  10. Sep 2015
    1. The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the 17th century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.
    1. So one of the principles of the talk, heroes are most effective not alone, not the, thesoldier in, in battle who takes a bullet for his buddy, but forming a network.
    2. Narratives of the lives of Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, and other inspiring figures are full of stories of people who, upon meeting the saintly figure, dropped their former materialistic pursuits and devoted themselves to advancing the mission of the one who elevated them. Indeed, a hallmark of elevation is that, like disgust, it is contagious.
    1. Who was happiest by the end of the day? The people who used the gift card to benefit someone else and spent time with that person at Starbucks. Investing and connecting provided the most happiness.
    2. How did their purchases affect them? By the end of the day, individuals who spent money on others—who engaged in what we call “prosocial spending”—were measurably happier than those who spent money on themselves, even though there were no differences between the two groups at the beginning of the day. The amount of money people found in their envelopes—five dollars or 20—had no effect on their happiness. How people spent the money mattered much more than how much of it they got. This experiment suggests that spending as little as five dollars to help someone else can increase your own happiness.
    1. The dispersal of these people in Brady's is not random, and where people choose to sit or stand in Brady's is closely related to their sex and status in the Brady social hierarchy.

      Clearly, Brady's Bar is only for a select group of people who enjoy being in that atmosphere that focuses on "social hierarchy".. If we're still forming perceptions and making judgments on how we serve customers (and treat co-workers) based off of gender and status.. are we really doing our jobs as socially responsible citizens to improve our society for everyone's benefit?

    2. Sandy, as well as the other girls, adapt to ritual displays such as these while most female customers would find it intimidating to find themselves in the midst of such male-oriented talk.

      I get that Brady's Bar is typically a place for men or college football players to go which I think is acceptable, but there should still be a line (non-physical) of what is and isn't respectable behavior customers should adhere to.

    3. Territorial displace­ment is often found in primate societies such as baboon troops.

      It's clear to see that being "territorial" is a natural way of expressing one's position in society whether it be an animal based group or a human based society. Baboon troops actually have very complex social structures within their groups including more characteristics than just being territorial.

    4. The girls unanimously agree that this is a constant problem in their work and they feel helpless to combat it.

      But they're okay with it...... ??? They seem to just accept the fact that these are the working conditions and it's "a part of the job"..

    5. the customer won't leave her alone and she must do her best to ignore him....

      This is interesting because it counteracts the original problem presented about the waitress being ignored. It seems because of the way the social structure influences the atmosphere of the bar, the waitress is essentially in a losing position each time..

    6. emphasizes the importance of the use of space in social interaction and posits a relationship between social status and space.

      Refers to how we are making use of the "built environment" when interacting with our peers or people from different social classes

    1. A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees—from person to person to person to person. “As a result,” they write, “each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.”
    2. Giving evokes gratitude. Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a gift, that gift can elicit feelings of gratitude—it can be a way of expressing gratitude or instilling gratitude in the recipient. And research has found that gratitude is integral to happiness, health, and social bonds.
    1. If nothing else, you can remind yourself that you are both members of the human species.

      A nice sentiment, but if we look at the bottom 1%, this isn't necessarily something to be proud of in my opinion.

    1. The 20th century was the Age of Introspection, when self-help and therapy culture encouraged us to believe that the best way to understand who we are and how to live was to look inside ourselves. But it left us gazing at our own navels. The 21st century should become the Age of Empathy, when we discover ourselves not simply through self-reflection, but by becoming interested in the lives of others. We need empathy to create a new kind of revolution. Not an old-fashioned revolution built on new laws, institutions, or policies, but a radical revolution in human relationships.
    2. Organizations, too, should be ambitious with their empathic thinking. Bill Drayton, the renowned “father of social entrepreneurship,” believes that in an era of rapid technological change, mastering empathy is the key business survival skill because it underpins successful teamwork and leadership. His influential Ashoka Foundation has launched the Start Empathy initiative, which is taking its ideas to business leaders, politicians and educators worldwide.

      Empathy Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination

      Link

    3. A final trait of HEPs is that they do far more than empathize with the usual suspects. We tend to believe empathy should be reserved for those living on the social margins or who are suffering. This is necessary, but it is hardly enough. We also need to empathize with people whose beliefs we don’t share or who may be “enemies” in some way. If you are a campaigner on global warming, for instance, it may be worth trying to step into the shoes of oil company executives—understanding their thinking and motivations—if you want to devise effective strategies to shift them towards developing renewable energy. A little of this “instrumental empathy” (sometimes known as “impact anthropology”) can go a long way.

      Empathy Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination

    4. Beyond education, the big challenge is figuring out how social networking technology can harness the power of empathy to create mass political action. Twitter may have gotten people onto the streets for Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but can it convince us to care deeply about the suffering of distant strangers, whether they are drought-stricken farmers in Africa or future generations who will bear the brunt of our carbon-junkie lifestyles? This will only happen if social networks learn to spread not just information, but empathic connection.

      Empathy Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change

    5. Adam Hochschild reminds us, “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts but human empathy,”

      Empathy Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change

    6. Empathy is a two-way street that, at its best, is built upon mutual understanding—an exchange of our most important beliefs and experiences. Organizations such as the Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle put it all into practice by bringing together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict to meet, listen, and talk. Sharing stories about how their loved ones died enables families to realize that they share the same pain and the same blood, despite being on opposite sides of a political fence, and has helped to create one of the world’s most powerful grassroots peace-building movements.

      Empathy Habit 4: Listen hard—and open up

    7. George Orwell is an inspiring model.  After several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma in the 1920s, Orwell returned to Britain determined to discover what life was like for those living on the social margins. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed,” he wrote. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat, and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result, recorded in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, was a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. He not only realized that homeless people are not “drunken scoundrels”—Orwell developed new friendships, shifted his views on inequality, and gathered some superb literary material. It was the greatest travel experience of his life. He realised that empathy doesn’t just make you good—it’s good for you, too.

      Empathy Habit 3: Try another person’s life

    8. We all have assumptions about others and use collective labels—e.g., “Muslim fundamentalist,” “welfare mom”—that prevent us from appreciating their individuality.

      Empathy Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities

    9. Curiosity expands our empathy when we talk to people outside our usual social circle, encountering lives and worldviews very different from our own. Curiosity is good for us too: Happiness guru Martin Seligman identifies it as a key character strength that can enhance life satisfaction. And it is a useful cure for the chronic loneliness afflicting around one in three Americans. Cultivating curiosity requires more than having a brief chat about the weather. Crucially, it tries to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day, like the heavily tattooed woman who delivers your mail or the new employee who always eats his lunch alone. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with one stranger every week. All it requires is courage.

      Empathy Habit 1: Cultivate curiosity about strangers

    10. Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to care for each other, just like our primate cousins. And psychologists have revealed that we are primed for empathy by strong attachment relationships in the first two years of life.  But empathy doesn’t stop developing in childhood. We can nurture its growth throughout our lives—and we can use it as a radical force for social transformation.
    1. You can “bank” positivity resonance and draw on it later because momentary experiences of love and other positive emotions build resources. In other words, the small investments you deposit in the so- called bank don’t just sit there. They accumulate, earn interest, and pay out dividends in the form of durable resources that you can later draw on to face a new adversity. Moreover, just as money earned in one arena can be spent in other arenas, the positivity resonance that you create within certain relationships can build personal resources in you—values, beliefs, and skills—that help you navigate all manner of social upsets and difficulties. Having a loving marriage, then, can help you be more resilient within your work team.
    2. dancing or canoeing could be better bets for first-date bonding than simply catching a movie or sharing a meal. But the glue that positivity resonance offers isn’t just for connecting once-strangers at the start of new relationships. It also further cements long-standing ties, making them even more secure and satisfying.
    3. We were surprised and quite pleasedto learn that people develop friendships across group boundaries pretty easily. However, theirstress levels continued to be high during these periods.It was only after the third 45-minute session that this friendship manipulation happened,that people's stress levels began to go down, but afterwards, two weeks later, a month later,after the experiment was over, people reported that they felt more comfortable, and moreat ease, interacting with members from other groups. Furthermore, they sought out interactionswith members from other groups.
    4. but it turns out that they have a physiologicalcost to the person who is prejudiced. Why? Quite simply because being prejudiced canbe very stressful when one is interacting with members from the outgroup.
    5. As important as close relationships are, weaker ties also have their place. Research suggests that people who have a broad range of different kinds of social roles tend to be healthier and more likely to attain professional success.
    6. Since support can often become unequal, thus creating ingratitude and resentment, sometimes the most effective support is invisible—meaning that it is not experienced as support per se, but rather as a gesture of caring that is not costly or burdensome to the giver. For example, a person might choose to sacrifice work time to spend a romantic evening with their partner who has had a rough week, but this form of support will likely be better received if the person does not emphasize their sacrifice, but rather communicates a genuine desire to spend time with their partner. At the same time, however, Greater Good contributor Amie Gordon’s research shows that appreciation is a critical ingredient in healthy relationships, so it’s not always a bad thing to notice your partner’s sacrifices or to make sure that they know that you’re putting them first.
    7. Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History has argued that the best way to maintain a strong, healthy marriage is to have a strong network of friends with whom we share common interests and can turn to when in need. While it might be tempting to be jealous of time your partner spends with friends, or possessive of his or her time, it’s healthier to see your partner’s friends as an asset to your relationship. They provide critical psychological support to your partner and an outlet for interests that you might not share. But your partner’s friendships are also a form of social capital for you—and it will pay to help your partner keep those networks going.
    8. Significant others can deepen and broaden our social worlds, but they also carry the risk of creating a sense of insularity and disconnection from other parts of our social life. Staying in and watching a movie with our significant other can seem a lot more relaxing after a long week of work than attending a social event, but if we do this week after week, our other relationships may start to erode, decreasing our overall social capital. No matter how much we love our significant others, it’s unlikely that they alone can meet all of our social needs, and expecting them to do so can be damaging to the relationship over time.
    9. Beyond the benefits we receive directly from our significant others in the form of support and comfort, our significant others also have the potential to introduce us to a whole new social network, the friendships and other connections that our partner has developed over the years. When we enter a partnership our networks double—our partner’s connections become ours as well, and vice versa.
    10. Support in times of need is one of the major benefits of what researchers call bonding capital. Bonding capital may not give us the breadth and diversity of looser bridging-focused ties, but it gives us the closeness and intimacy that even 10,000 Twitter followers might not provide.
    11. For many people, there is one special person to whom they feel closest—often a romantic partner, but sometimes a best friend or family member. Significant others are the first people we turn to when we’re suffering, and their support can benefit not only our mental health but also our physical health:
    12. At times, however, friendship can be a source of jealousy and competition. According to a psychological theory called the self-evaluation maintenance model, we tend to be happy for our friends' success, but only if the success is not in a domain that is also important to us, and only if the friend is not too close. If our friends' successes threaten our own self-esteem, we may distance ourselves from them or even try to sabotage them. Friendship can also be a liability if we base our self-worth on our friends’ approval: For individuals high in friendship-contingent self-esteem, depending too much on friends can make our self-esteem unstable and increase symptoms of depression. Building social capital with friends. How can we make the most of our friendships? One approach is to be mindful of the subtle ways that jealousy can erode friendship and to find ways to reframe friends’ potentially threatening successes in a way that highlights shared benefits (e.g., your friend might be able to help you improve and reach your own goals) and that involves taking your friends’ perspective. Friends need our support and encouragement just as much when they are up as when they are down, according to research.
    13. friendships that cross ethnic group boundaries can help reduce anxiety and potentially even improve physical health among people who tend to feel anxious in intergroup settings
    14. What are they good for? Friendship helps us meet our needs for belonging and our need to feel known and appreciated for who we are. It also allows us to know and understand others more deeply than we can know strangers: Research suggests that our friends bring out the best in us when it comes to empathic accuracy, or the ability to know and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings.
    15. studies show that people with a large amount of bridging capital have a greater sense of connection to the broader community, a more open-minded attitude, and a greater ability to mobilize support for a cause.
    16. Professional contacts can play an integral role in helping us launch or advance our careers. You might learn that your dream employer is hiring through a post from a seemingly random LinkedIn contact, or meet your future business partner through a colleague at a conference. Researchers have referred to these kinds of ties, as well as other types of looser connections such as neighborhood acquaintances, as bridging capital. Bridging capital may involve weaker ties, but the breadth and diversity of these ties can expose us to new ideas and opportunities beyond what is available in our narrower inner circles.
    17. In short, it pays to be a giver on social media, not just a lurker or a taker.
    18. What are their limitations? Facebook is no cure for loneliness, and the positive feelings gained may be short-lived. Though online contacts can be great when it comes to sharing everyday joys and challenges, there are times when no sympathetic emoticons can replace the comfort of a loved one’s physical presence. Using social media effectively requires knowing its limitations, and, as with a flaky friend, not expecting more from it than it can give.
    19.  Studies suggest that online communication may especially benefit less extraverted individuals by giving them opportunities to provide support to others in a non-threatening environment, an experience that can in turn increase self-esteem and reduce depression. Contrary to popular opinion, research also shows that using Facebook can help satisfy our need for connection.
    20. found time andtime again if I have really rich patterns of friendships I feel less stress on a dailybasis I have lower levels of he stress hormone cortisol so its starting to affect ourstress profiles
    21. and what we know is tight connections tofriends are one of the great determinants of happiness and health. The strongerthe networks of friends that we have the greater the happiness and well being weenjoy in just about every part of the world. We know that strong friendships areassociated with better health profiles.
    22. influential theorizing that I want you to be mindful of of Shelley Taylor, showing thatour tendencies toward friendship and connection activate oxytocin and counteractthe responses of stress so we start to get a picture of why friendships matter.
    23. Research suggests that the number of close friends people report having has declined by one-third over the past generation (at least in the United States).
    1. The spatial order, including the built environment, is not only the product of classificatory collective representations based on social forms but also a model for reproducing the social forms themselve

      Are we allowing the technology we use to build around us reform the way society interacts with itself and its surroundings?

    2. regarding the interactions of the built environment with social organization and spatial behavior

      "social organization and spatial behavior"

      how we structure our society and interact with our built surroundings

    3. A system of relationships among the physical attributes is often shown to imitate or represent-by their configuration, content, and associations-conscious and unconscious aspects of social life.

      What are some of these "physical attributes" and what "aspects of social life" are they representing?

    1. In recent years, a wave of studies has documented some incredible emotional and physical health benefits that come from touch.

      To summarize:

      1. Sense emotions by touch only (though some difficulties with gender barriers for angered women and compassionate men).
      2. Much healthier (even granting survival) children in orphanages who are held.
      3. Differences in culture for cafe convo, # of touches: England, 0; USA, 2; France, 110; Puerto Rico, 180.
      4. NBA teams that touch more are more likely to win.
      5. A pat on the back by researcher heavily sways prisoner's dilemma participants.
    2. If we have evidence that someone is deceiving us, we can withdraw trust and resources no matter how high we are on oxytocin. If we think someone doesn’t have our best interests at heart, we can end the relationship with a person or a group. But the effects go beyond self-interest. We may like being part of a group so much that we’re willing to hurt others just to stay in it. The desire to belong can compromise our ethical and empathic instincts. That’s when the conscious mind needs to come online and put the brakes on the pleasures of social affliliation.
    3. increased oxytocin did not predict where they donated their money. But there are some caveats. The more marginalized a group felt on campus, the more likely they were to circle their wagons and favor their own in-group (presumably, the band nerds weren’t as generous as frat boys to other groups). The effects of oxytocin could also change depending on what else was happening in the body: If Zak’s lab induced stress or acted to jack up testosterone, participants could, in fact, become more aggressive toward out-groups.
    4. oxytocin is involved with attachment and social bonding, but that neural system can get tangled up in fear and anxiety—it gives us a visceral memory of those who have harmed us, as well as those who have cared for us.
    5. Each group watched a series of images and the individuals in the group voted for which ones they found most attractive. The results: The oxytocin-influenced participants tended to go with the flow of their group, while the placebo-dosed participants hewed to their own individualistic path. The implication: Oxytocin is great when you’re out with friends or solving a problem with coworkers. It might not be so great when you need to pick a leader or make some other big decision that requires independence, not conformity.
    6. oxytocin doesn’t just bond us to mothers, lovers, and friends—it also seems to play a role in excluding others from that bond. (And perhaps, as one scientist has argued, wanting what other people have.) This just makes oxytocin more interesting—and it points to a fundamental, constantly recurring fact about human beings: Many of the same biological and psychological mechanisms that bond us together can also tear us apart. It all depends on the social and emotional context.
    1. It’s important to keep in mind as well that secure attachment in intimate relationships doesn’t just make those relationships more fulfilling; there’s evidence that it can enhance interactions even with those with whom you’re not close. Research indicates that “boosting” one’s security in any fashion (“security priming” in psychology circles) makes people more generous and compassionate overall. This study by leading attachment researchers indicates that “the sense of attachment security, whether established in a person’s long-term relationship history or nudged upwards by subliminal or supraliminal priming, makes altruistic caregiving more likely.”
    2. For instance, insecurely attached people generally display less kind, helpful (or "pro-social") behavior toward others. But when Mikulincer and Shaver had insecurely attached people think of someone who made them feel safe and secure, those research participants demonstrated more care and compassion toward people in need.
    1. We found that measures of family socioeconomic status had no significant correlation at all with later success in any of these areas. Alcoholism and depression in family histories proved irrelevant to flourishing at 80, as did longevity. The sociability and extraversion that were so highly valued in the initial process of selecting the men did not correlate with later flourishing either. In contrast with the weak and scattershot correlations among the biological and socioeconomic variables, a loving childhood—and other factors like empathic capacity and warm relationships as a young adult—predicted later success in all ten categories of the Decathlon. What’s more, success in relationships was very highly correlated with both economic success and strong mental and physical health, the other two broad areas of the Decathlon.

      From the Grant Study.

    1. When we’re feeling down, the instinct is often to vent to friends. It’s good to have a support system, but if that’s all there is, it’s hard to get distance from what’s bothering you. Doing things for other people, thinking about other people, is like giving your brain a break from despair.”

      This reminds of a quote from George Pólya's book, How to Solve It, in which he states that if you don't know how to solve a problem, try to solve a smaller problem.

      Not exactly the same thing, but indirectly solving problems in other peoples lives may give you a sense of accomplishment, or meaning, that you need.

    2. “The narrow thinking that medications are the only way to control persistent pain,” Dr. Arnstein concluded, “has resulted in a lot of suffering.” Researchers have discovered a physiological basis for the warm glow that often seems to accompany giving. “The benefits of giving back are definitely biological,” says bioethicist Stephen G. Post, co-author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People. “Contemporary neuroscience has confirmed the connection between the physiological and psychological. We know now that the stress response, hormones, and even the immune system are impacted by, and impact, the pathways in the brain. MRI studies of the participants’ brains revealed that making a donation activated the mesolimbic pathway—the brain’s reward center.”
    3. People who were in better physical and mental health were more likely to volunteer,” reported the study’s leader, Peggy Thoits, a Vanderbilt University sociologist. “And conversely, volunteer work was good for both mental and physical health. People of all ages who volunteered were happier and experienced better physical health and less depression.
    4. Philosopher-physician Albert Schweitzer once said, “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

      Another Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) reference: the most esteemed organization of an ancient, advanced civilization was the Hall of the Servants).

    1. A lifelong friendship usually feels different than a casual acquaintance you make at a networking event or a friend you acquire on Facebook. Yet according to research, we need both weak ties and strong ties in order to build “social capital,” which researchers define as the web of relationships in our life and the tangible and intangible benefits we derive from them.
    1. Along these lines, they go on to propose the development of a “social curriculum” with programs and activities that “enhance social inclusion and connection.” For ideas and techniques to make that happen, please see Greater Good’s education channel!
    2. from the time kids were 15 or 18, being more outgoing, kind, independent, good at sports, and having lots of hobbies—in other words, being more socially connected—was more significant than academic success in predicting later happiness.
    3. experiences that were most highly associated with positive emotion was number one intimaterelations but number two socializing
    4. what they found you know overall was that very happy people tended to haverich and satisfying relationships and the spend little time alonerelative to people with average levels of happinessand what they sort of claim is a social relationships form a necessarybut not sufficient condition for high happiness in other wordsyou can't only have social relationships but if you don't havestrong social relationships you're not likely to end upa person who would be characterized as very happy
    1. In our highly connected working world, we are hyper-exposed to other people. This means negative emotions and stress become even more contagious as we have high exposure to negative comments on news articles and social media; stressed body language of financial news shows; stressed out people on our subways and planes; and open office plans where you can see everyone’s nonverbals.
    1. That "us" refers to the array of oligarchs, billionaires and chief executives Rupert was speaking to.
  11. Aug 2015
    1. Connoisseurscallforthecontemplationofcomplexityalmostforitsownsake,orremindeveryonethatthingsaremoresubtlethantheyseem,orthanyoujustsaid.eattractivethingaboutthismoveisthatitisliterallyalwaysavailabletothepersonwhowantstomakeit.eoryisfoundedonabstraction,abstractionmeansthrowingawaydetailforthesakeofabitofgenerality,andsothingsarealways“morecomplicatedthanthat”—foranyvalueof“that”.

      Saying that reality is more complicated than an abstract theory accounts for is tautological.

    1. Shared information

      The “social”, with an embedded emphasis on the data part of knowledge building and a nod to solidarity. Cloud computing does go well with collaboration and spelling out the difference can help lift some confusion.

  12. Jul 2015
    1. I have used the bibliographies to conduct my own research in the area of cataloging assessment, and the social justice bibliography has helped me with a project I’m working on to examine video classification practices.

      A lot of my research involves digital library/digital repository assessment, and the assessment literature in that area also relies heavily on quantitative measurements of assessment. I'm very interested in seeing the cataloging + social justice bibliography and if it can help my digital library assessment research.

    1. Twitter is an "argument machine"

      Maybe annotation could put "tweet" sized things into context and thereby avoid the "argument machine."

      Rashly assuming anyone will actually take time to read the context and the comment...

    1. . By choosing to live in Athens, a citizen is implicitly endorsing the Laws, and is willing to abide by them. Socrates, more than most, should be in accord with this contract, as he has lived a happy seventy years fully content with the Athenian way of life.
    1. Censorship has never contributed to the cause of social justice; throughout history it has invariably been on the side of totalitarianism and repression.
    2. But what we all know about social media is that it’s designed to keep you safe from the things you don’t want to see. In real life, if you see somebody and you don’t care for them, you still have to somehow engage with them. Online, there’s a whole series of algorithms that keep it from coming to you, even on the level of advertising you’re not interested in. In many ways we’re very happy about that. We love that. We also love the little antagonisms that come up, the pile-on that will happen, the call-outs that will happen. That gets into a really interesting thing in social media which I think is new. Now, you have to say something in order to be seen. You have to like or you have to affirmatively make a comment. And if you don’t, then that can be looked at.

      If the academy rejects Place I'd advise social media companies to hire her. Damn. Understanding: so high!

    3. “[GWTW] is in part about social media, and the way social media works,” says Place. “And social media is an aesthetic medium. What happens when you have overt antagonism or antagonistic content, on social media? On the surface, it’s so much based on affinity, and liking, and following, and a sense of community. But at the same token, the only way to consistently affirm your community is by having something to rally against. And then we can find out who our friends really are. It’s predicated on [the fact that] we all think the same thing. We don’t go to social media to be confronted by things we don’t understand or don’t agree with, which is maybe why we go to museums, or conferences, or universities. Do we really want museums and galleries, especially museums, to be curating based upon what people know they already like?”

      I would hire Place as a social media product designer. This paragraph reflects deeper thinking about social media than most people I know who create the platforms.

    4. It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.

      It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

      I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

      • 140 character limit
      • Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
      • Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

      I'm sure that's only the surface.

    5. “AWP has removed Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee. We did so after taking into consideration the controversy her Twitter feed has generated. Place has been tweeting the text of Gone with the Wind and using a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. The context of this and similar work is explained by a few literary theorists and advocates of conceptual poetry, such as Jacob Edmond and Brian M. Reed. AWP believes in freedom of expression. We also understand that many readers find Vanessa Place’s unmediated quotes of Margaret Mitchell’s novel to be unacceptable provocations, along with the images on her Twitter page. AWP must protect the efficacy of the conference subcommittee’s work. The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee. Perpetuating the controversy would not be fair to the many writers who have submitted the proposals.”

      "Unmediated"?

      That depends on where you're looking. Here we have a poet, with their own history and an established dialogue with race, transcribing in a completely different medium than the original text, surrounded by controversy. How in hell can this be said to be "unmediated"?

    1. Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.
  13. Jun 2015
    1. But the marriage equality movement has been curiously hostile to polygamy, and for a particularly unsatisfying reason: short-term political need.

      I hope that the focus on prohibition by the drug policy reform movement helps sidestep a similar effect happening with cannabis.

    1. This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context.

      A very important point!

    1. Leveraging the capabilities of interactive technology to create an educational experience that isn’t possible in a physical, paper - based world

      leveraging social media, making annotation social

    1. Although it currently shows Google AdSense ads and Taboola’s content marketing, Ottman said those will soon go away. Point-selling will be the main revenue source.

      I find Taboola to be so awful that I question the judgment of these people for ever having used it.

    2. Users earn points by doing things on the network — uploading, voting, referring, posting, or commenting about content. Users vote on whether they like content or not by swiping, with the most-liked content driven to the top of charts. You can post content to your entire Channel, which is Minds’ term for your fans. To post outside your Channel, you need to use points, like offering 10 of your points to another user for 10 views of your post on their Channel. Points can be also be exchanged with Minds for site-wide sharing.

      The absolute worst incentives. Engagement generates reach? This network is going to amplify the people who already participate the most. This is absolutely upside down. This is rewarding the powerful with more power.

    1. the social media narrative recalled Cold War ideas that capitalist technology would triumph over communist inefficiency, as if people in the Middle East couldn’t have rebelled on their own without the gifts of American entrepreneurs. In the end, whatever was tweeted, there was no Twitter revolution in Iran.

      Would like to know more about the Cold War ideas referenced above.

    1. just when the outlines of the social order were becoming blurred. Smell, in particular, the sense of transitions (Howes 1987), of thresholds and margins, which reveals the processes by which beings and things are transformed, fascinated at this period of confusion, whilst the sense of sight was no longer able to read the hierarchies with the same assurance

      Heather Brook Adams: something in the language here caught my attention

  14. May 2015
    1. I’m intrigued by the notion that social networks could eventually replace our currency. If economic growth lives up to the hype, we’ll all live like the rich someday, so why not print our own money, too?

      I've often thought that my ideal currency would actually be a multitude of currencies, each person minting their own (or even multiple), but I don't see at all what this has to do especially with art.

      I think the point being made is that art has valued tied to the reputation of the artist. Mostly true, perhaps, but probably not unique to art. Credit scores seem not dissimilar except that individuals aren't lenders. Familiar social dynamics like "friendship" and "trust" might capture what we're talking about, though.

    1. Or more plainly: attention on social media both compensates for and is the logical endpoint of commoditized care work.

      I don't fully understand this but it was the most intriguing sentence in the piece for me. Are our social media services doing the care work of attending to our need for in-control socialization? Are they our new safe spaces that replace the therapist's office? I also wonder about whether people who work in a caring capacity have a unique relationship with social media.

    1. it slows the reader down,

      It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.

    1. The world wondered whether this self-imposed isolation was idiosyncrasy, or something more serious.

      This is baffling! An adult can choose for himself. There is nothing remotely wrong in living with your family!

  15. www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu
    1. Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

      Finally an open-source, open access option for sharing research!

  16. Feb 2015
    1. The researchers examined social media patterns for 1.2 million Facebook users and found that nearly 92 percent of those who engage with Italian conspiracy theory pages interact almost exclusively with conspiracy theory pages.

      Oh, no. No. Noooooo.

  17. Jan 2015
    1. How interesting! It's the same in my family. Certain members will take as gospel, the opinions of the people they deem to have credibility, but eschew - and even satirically cauterize - the wisdom and factual evidence of people with the authority and knowledge.

      It's most frustrating. As for me, I try not to read comments. They just make me so angry!

    1. "Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence."

      I get the click of recognition with this particular quote. The world isn't so much flat as that Pharisee Friedman asserts as it has been leveled like the top of a mountain, all the energy goodies ripped out and the overburden midden gravity fed below, holler fill.