Hey guys. Seems like Marianna was kind enough to let the 1MA/4s know that both of my 1MA classes (along with group 3) are having mock oral exams next week. As I mentioned to group 3, it is not obligatory but suggested if you've never done an exam at IFA (WA) or have had trouble in the past. If you want to make a schedule among yourselves as to what time everybody will be examined, go ahead, give each person about 10-15 minutes. Otherwise, see you at the regular class time and we'll just put everybody through one at a time. Below I'm copying and pasting the questions I've received from students and some I've done until now. If noted the questions are for one group or the other it's because there are questions that may have to do with a student presentation the other group didn't have or didn't receive any questions from one of the presenters. See you.
Technology
1. What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2. Do you agree/disagree with hacktivists' actions?
3. Do you know any controversial cases involving hacktivism?
4. Should information be completely free?
5. How technology can be used to improve/alternate our bodies?
6. Would you ever consider putting implants in your body (if yes, what kind of implants)?
7. Discuss pros and cons of smartphones.
8. In what ways can smartphones improve our lives?
Politics and Society
1. Elections, democratic or oppressive?
2. How is the president elected in the US?
3. What is bipartisanship and how does it relate to American politics?
4. What are some of the arguments presented in favor of the legalization of marijuana?
5. Discuss some of the protest movements and root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
6. Discuss some of the different protest movements and similarities between them.
7. What are the some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
8. What was the Maple Spring and how was it different than movements such as Occupy Wall Street?
9. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
10. What is neoliberalism and what part has it played in the protest movements?
11. Is there a relationship between the social contract and protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street?
Personal Relations (group 4)
Discuss benefits of choosing polyamorous relationships over monogamous ones.
How do relationships affect children?
What should be done to stop sexual harassment?
What are the different forms that sexual harassment may take?
What are the ways of sexual harassment that may be noticed in workplaces?
What are the different reactions of victims of sexual harassment in workplaces?
What are the benefits of relationships with convicts and ex-convicts?
What can people do to help convicts to reenter the society?
Lifestyle (group 3)
Consumerism:
1.Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertiser and media to influence our behavior?
2.Do things and money bring us happiness? If not what do?
3.Can consumerism be seen as a method of social control?
4.How does consumerism affect children?
5.What impact does consumerism have on holiday?
Feminism:
6.What should feminists be fighting for or against nowadays?
7.Why do you think the term ‘feminist’ has negative connotation? OR Why do you think being labeled as feminist has negative meaning?
8.Why are most feminists extremists?
9.What are some of the means feminists use to attract attention? Justify their choice?
(Are men and women equal in 21st century society and is equality possible?)
Travel & Tourism
1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
2. Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. How do cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Discuss couch-surfing. Would you participate in it?
5. Why is extreme tourism growing in popularity?
6. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why?
7. How does tourism affect people's traditions and customs?
8. Is it ethical to travel to war affected areas?
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Media
Hey there. Here's your articles for Media and Journalism. Don't forget about final exam questions for technology and to remind me about mock exams next week:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/obama-the-puppet-master-87764.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/msnbc-axelrod-gibbs-obama
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/obama-the-puppet-master-87764.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/msnbc-axelrod-gibbs-obama
Obama, the puppet master
President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”
McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?
At the same time, this White House has greatly curtailed impromptu moments where reporters can ask tough questions after a staged event — or snap a picture of the president that was not shot by government-paid photographers.
The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.
Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.
“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”
McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?
At the same time, this White House has greatly curtailed impromptu moments where reporters can ask tough questions after a staged event — or snap a picture of the president that was not shot by government-paid photographers.
The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.
Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.
“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”
One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White
House is extensive government creation of content (photos of the
president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama
aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through
social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.
Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to Time, said White House officials “have a willing and able and hungry press that eats this stuff up, partly because the news organizations are cash-strapped.”
“There’s no question that technology has significantly altered the playing field of competitive journalism,” said Josh Earnest, principal deputy White House press secretary — and the voice of “West Wing Week,” produced by the administration.
“Our ongoing challenge is to engage media outlets with audiences large and small — occasionally harnessing technology to find new ways to do so.”
By no means does Obama escape tough scrutiny or altogether avoid improvisational moments. And by no means is Obama unique in wanting to control his public image and message — every president pushes this to the outer limits. His 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, was equally adept at substance-free encounters with reporters.
But something is different with this White House. Obama’s aides are better at using technology and exploiting the president’s “brand.” They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don’t like. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forums, not just for campaigns, but governing.
“They use every technique anyone has ever thought of, and some no one ever had,” New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told us. “They can be very responsive and very helpful at pulling back the curtain at times while keeping you at bay at others. And they’re not at all shy about making clear when they don’t like your stories, which is quite often.”
Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to Time, said White House officials “have a willing and able and hungry press that eats this stuff up, partly because the news organizations are cash-strapped.”
“White House handout photos used to be reserved for
historically important events — 9/11, or deliberations about war,” Kraft
said. “This White House regularly releases [day-in-the-life] images of
the president … a nice picture of the president looking pensive … from
events that could have been covered by the press pool. But I don’t blame
the White House for doing it, because networks and newspapers use them.
So the White House has built its own content distribution network.”
When Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she gave one interview — to White House TV, produced by Obama aides.“There’s no question that technology has significantly altered the playing field of competitive journalism,” said Josh Earnest, principal deputy White House press secretary — and the voice of “West Wing Week,” produced by the administration.
“Our ongoing challenge is to engage media outlets with audiences large and small — occasionally harnessing technology to find new ways to do so.”
By no means does Obama escape tough scrutiny or altogether avoid improvisational moments. And by no means is Obama unique in wanting to control his public image and message — every president pushes this to the outer limits. His 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, was equally adept at substance-free encounters with reporters.
But something is different with this White House. Obama’s aides are better at using technology and exploiting the president’s “brand.” They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don’t like. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forums, not just for campaigns, but governing.
“They use every technique anyone has ever thought of, and some no one ever had,” New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told us. “They can be very responsive and very helpful at pulling back the curtain at times while keeping you at bay at others. And they’re not at all shy about making clear when they don’t like your stories, which is quite often.”
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Tech 3
Hi everyone. Hope you had a restful break and are ready to get back to class! 1MA/4 your articles are at this hyperlink. Here's the article for this week's class for 1MA/3:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/technology/personaltech/09PHONES.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
I’d come out of a subway and walk for blocks in the wrong direction, searching as my appointment neared for a public map only to find the “You Are Here” X blotted out by the thousands of lost souls before me who pressed their fingers to the same spot in hopes of somehow getting reoriented.
I’d stand drumming my fingers in a long checkout line full of people who believed that the best time to pull out a checkbook was after the last item had been scanned and the bill totaled.
I’d begin worrying about memory loss when I could no longer remember important facts like what Longfellow tavern Henry Ford had bought and restored.
Now I’m sunny and carefree, and it’s not because of some pharmacological miracle. It’s all because of a bundle of plastic, glass, microchips and loads of software: my smartphone.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the device is changing our lives. Historians will remember the advent of the smartphone as something as important as the elevator, air-conditioner and automobile. Those inventions reshaped our external lives with tall buildings in sprawling cities in previously inhospitable places. The smartphone has changed our internal lives.
Some people see those inventions as ruining our world. And judging by the hand wringing of any number of social critics, like Jaron Lanier or Nicholas Carr, who had the attention span to write whole books on the subject, the smartphone is changing their world for the worse.
One of the more accessible takes on what these critics think will happen is in “Super Sad True Love Story,” the dystopian novel by Gary Shteyngart. The hero, like nearly everyone else, wears a smartphonelike device, an äppärät, around his neck that gives him all the information he needs and tracks his bank accounts as well as his popularity. Despite the device, the hero is a quivering ball of anxiety.
But for most people — and as the technology gets cheaper, billions more people will have access to the machines — a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for the better. The little improvements in life will matter. How? Don’t get me started.
1. I am never lost.
It is more than the Google Maps on a smartphone that keep me from going in the wrong direction. Transit maps like Pocket MUNI for when I am in San Francisco or NYC Mate and iTrans NYC for when I am in New York help prevent me from getting lost underground. NextBus, a wonderful Web site that monitors the arrival of city buses in many big cities, is a godsend.
As is SitOrSquat, an app for finding public restrooms.
And it is not just the maps. The translation software on a smartphone like Google Translate with its ability to “hear” foreign languages is good enough that I could ask a stranger in a strange land how to find a bathroom without resorting to the desperate use of pantomime.
I can also navigate nearly any menu — although I am still waiting for an app that can read handwritten Chinese characters on a menu. (If an app like Leafsnap can distinguish a mulberry leaf from a sycamore leaf, why can’t a phone translate the specials written on the walls?)
The anxiety that I felt traveling has nearly disappeared. Best of all, I never look like a tourist anymore because instead of a map signaling “Mug me” or “Fleece me,” I am just one more person staring into the phone.
(The corollary to this is that I am never late. Actually, I suspect that I am late a lot more than I ever was. But now the guilt is gone. I figure I keep no one waiting by calling ahead.)
2. I never pay too much.
Speaking of getting fleeced, the phone relieves the anxiety of thinking — no, knowing — that somewhere you could have bought it for less. There are apps like SnapTell, which gives you the price of books online when you snap a picture of the cover, and Hipmunk for airfares. Going to price comparison sites is nothing new, but having them available in the store is.
3. I am never bored or wasting time.
The slow checkout line? The delayed flight? These are no longer sources of distress. They are opportunities to relax by playing games, listening to the soundtrack of your life that is always with you or reading.
It gives me a chance to catch up on all the online articles that I saved using Instapaper, which automatically downloads them to my phone in readable format. I’ve started buying books and magazine subscriptions because it is so handy to carry my bookshelf with me on the phone.
There is a downside to all this information all the time. It aggravates another disorder — a short attention span. It’s not wasting time to flit from one thing to another, often stopping at Google or in-phone reference guides. That’s just the price I pay for the next benefit.
4. I am never without an answer.
Not to sound like a know-it-all, but it is now easy to be a know-it-all. How many times in a conversation have you been stumped by a question? You used to drop the topic and move on. Now when you hit a wall, you have the answer no matter where you are. The conversation, refreshed, moves to the next point.
5. I never forget anything.
Well, hardly anything. O.K., not as much as I used to. Of course, Google begins to substitute for my memory of that useless trivia. That may be changing our inner lives by making us all a little bit dumber. But if the smartphone can help us recall events in our own lives, it has yet another purpose that makes us, if not smarter, at least wiser. The smartphone gives me the ability to record my life and becomes an auxiliary memory of everything I do. Granted, most of it is trivial. I use Evernote to record the wine I drink or the names of restaurants — because I have no memory for that sort of thing. It captures and organizes all my business cards. But it also holds snatches of conversation, ideas for articles and things I research.
So I’d like to think that it frees my mind for more important things and helps me make connections. Now what was my next point?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/technology/personaltech/09PHONES.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
How I Learned to Stop Worrying by Loving the Smartphone
Angelica Rogers
By DAMON DARLIN
Published: June 8, 2011
WHEN I think back to what I was like before the advent of the smartphone, I realize I must have been a quivering ball of anxiety.I’d come out of a subway and walk for blocks in the wrong direction, searching as my appointment neared for a public map only to find the “You Are Here” X blotted out by the thousands of lost souls before me who pressed their fingers to the same spot in hopes of somehow getting reoriented.
I’d stand drumming my fingers in a long checkout line full of people who believed that the best time to pull out a checkbook was after the last item had been scanned and the bill totaled.
I’d begin worrying about memory loss when I could no longer remember important facts like what Longfellow tavern Henry Ford had bought and restored.
Now I’m sunny and carefree, and it’s not because of some pharmacological miracle. It’s all because of a bundle of plastic, glass, microchips and loads of software: my smartphone.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the device is changing our lives. Historians will remember the advent of the smartphone as something as important as the elevator, air-conditioner and automobile. Those inventions reshaped our external lives with tall buildings in sprawling cities in previously inhospitable places. The smartphone has changed our internal lives.
Some people see those inventions as ruining our world. And judging by the hand wringing of any number of social critics, like Jaron Lanier or Nicholas Carr, who had the attention span to write whole books on the subject, the smartphone is changing their world for the worse.
One of the more accessible takes on what these critics think will happen is in “Super Sad True Love Story,” the dystopian novel by Gary Shteyngart. The hero, like nearly everyone else, wears a smartphonelike device, an äppärät, around his neck that gives him all the information he needs and tracks his bank accounts as well as his popularity. Despite the device, the hero is a quivering ball of anxiety.
But for most people — and as the technology gets cheaper, billions more people will have access to the machines — a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for the better. The little improvements in life will matter. How? Don’t get me started.
1. I am never lost.
It is more than the Google Maps on a smartphone that keep me from going in the wrong direction. Transit maps like Pocket MUNI for when I am in San Francisco or NYC Mate and iTrans NYC for when I am in New York help prevent me from getting lost underground. NextBus, a wonderful Web site that monitors the arrival of city buses in many big cities, is a godsend.
As is SitOrSquat, an app for finding public restrooms.
And it is not just the maps. The translation software on a smartphone like Google Translate with its ability to “hear” foreign languages is good enough that I could ask a stranger in a strange land how to find a bathroom without resorting to the desperate use of pantomime.
I can also navigate nearly any menu — although I am still waiting for an app that can read handwritten Chinese characters on a menu. (If an app like Leafsnap can distinguish a mulberry leaf from a sycamore leaf, why can’t a phone translate the specials written on the walls?)
The anxiety that I felt traveling has nearly disappeared. Best of all, I never look like a tourist anymore because instead of a map signaling “Mug me” or “Fleece me,” I am just one more person staring into the phone.
(The corollary to this is that I am never late. Actually, I suspect that I am late a lot more than I ever was. But now the guilt is gone. I figure I keep no one waiting by calling ahead.)
2. I never pay too much.
Speaking of getting fleeced, the phone relieves the anxiety of thinking — no, knowing — that somewhere you could have bought it for less. There are apps like SnapTell, which gives you the price of books online when you snap a picture of the cover, and Hipmunk for airfares. Going to price comparison sites is nothing new, but having them available in the store is.
3. I am never bored or wasting time.
The slow checkout line? The delayed flight? These are no longer sources of distress. They are opportunities to relax by playing games, listening to the soundtrack of your life that is always with you or reading.
It gives me a chance to catch up on all the online articles that I saved using Instapaper, which automatically downloads them to my phone in readable format. I’ve started buying books and magazine subscriptions because it is so handy to carry my bookshelf with me on the phone.
There is a downside to all this information all the time. It aggravates another disorder — a short attention span. It’s not wasting time to flit from one thing to another, often stopping at Google or in-phone reference guides. That’s just the price I pay for the next benefit.
4. I am never without an answer.
Not to sound like a know-it-all, but it is now easy to be a know-it-all. How many times in a conversation have you been stumped by a question? You used to drop the topic and move on. Now when you hit a wall, you have the answer no matter where you are. The conversation, refreshed, moves to the next point.
5. I never forget anything.
Well, hardly anything. O.K., not as much as I used to. Of course, Google begins to substitute for my memory of that useless trivia. That may be changing our inner lives by making us all a little bit dumber. But if the smartphone can help us recall events in our own lives, it has yet another purpose that makes us, if not smarter, at least wiser. The smartphone gives me the ability to record my life and becomes an auxiliary memory of everything I do. Granted, most of it is trivial. I use Evernote to record the wine I drink or the names of restaurants — because I have no memory for that sort of thing. It captures and organizes all my business cards. But it also holds snatches of conversation, ideas for articles and things I research.
So I’d like to think that it frees my mind for more important things and helps me make connections. Now what was my next point?
Monday, January 21, 2013
Technology II
Hey there. This post is for 1 MA/3. If you're in 1 MA/4 please see this link for this week's class.
So, this Thursday I'd like to do a class looking at internet freedom and activism or so-called "hacktivism". The easiest starting point is to have you read this:
www.propublica.org/article/hacktivism-civil-disobedience-or-cyber-crime
In addition, I'd like youou may not have heard of him to read something about Aaaron Swartz. You may not have heard of him but he was the inventor of RSS, helped to start Reddit and was one of the driving forces against SOPA legislation (similar to ACTA here) in the US last year among many other things. Anyway, he committed suicide almost two weeks ago and there's so much material online it's hard to pick the best. The easiest is probably this:
http://gawker.com/5975889/the-death-of-aaron-swartz-and-the-new-hacker-crackdown
This is Aaron's manifesto, definitely worth a read:
http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy
This is probably my favorite piece but it's pretty long and heavy on politics:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html
This is a great piece from a Harvard law professor:
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
More on the legal justification of the DOJ (department of justice):
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/doj-invoked-aaron-swartz-manifesto-to-justify-investigative-methods/
More on how this effects the legal rights of us all:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html
A decent article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/aaron-swartz-government-abuses-gilmor
Like I say, there's tons more. Pick and choose as time allows. See you Thursday
So, this Thursday I'd like to do a class looking at internet freedom and activism or so-called "hacktivism". The easiest starting point is to have you read this:
www.propublica.org/article/hacktivism-civil-disobedience-or-cyber-crime
In addition, I'd like youou may not have heard of him to read something about Aaaron Swartz. You may not have heard of him but he was the inventor of RSS, helped to start Reddit and was one of the driving forces against SOPA legislation (similar to ACTA here) in the US last year among many other things. Anyway, he committed suicide almost two weeks ago and there's so much material online it's hard to pick the best. The easiest is probably this:
http://gawker.com/5975889/the-death-of-aaron-swartz-and-the-new-hacker-crackdown
This is Aaron's manifesto, definitely worth a read:
http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy
This is probably my favorite piece but it's pretty long and heavy on politics:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html
This is a great piece from a Harvard law professor:
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
More on the legal justification of the DOJ (department of justice):
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/doj-invoked-aaron-swartz-manifesto-to-justify-investigative-methods/
More on how this effects the legal rights of us all:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html
A decent article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/aaron-swartz-government-abuses-gilmor
Like I say, there's tons more. Pick and choose as time allows. See you Thursday
Friday, January 18, 2013
Technology Presentation
Hey there, here's the two articles for next week's presentation in 1MA/4:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/fashion/02sabbath.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The reason for this change was a natural and predictable
back-breaking straw. Flying home from Europe a few months ago, I swiped a
credit card through the slot of the in-seat phone, checked my e-mail
and robbed myself of one of my two last sanctuaries.
At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.
In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.
Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?
Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?
As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we’ve always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.
Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. “What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)
“Who,” he then asked, “would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?”
THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.
For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.
“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”
Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like “the voice of the new,” I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.
On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.
I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.
GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.
But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can’t run five miles if you’ve never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.
Now it’s up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there’s little encouragement. “One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy,” he said.
But what’s wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn’t seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn’t get it all done in either, it certainly wasn’t because I was taking too much time off.
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.
I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/fashion/02sabbath.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.
I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off. I was fully disconnected for 24 hours.At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.
In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.
Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?
Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?
As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we’ve always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.
Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. “What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)
“Who,” he then asked, “would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?”
THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.
For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.
“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”
Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like “the voice of the new,” I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.
On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.
I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.
GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.
But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can’t run five miles if you’ve never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.
Now it’s up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there’s little encouragement. “One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy,” he said.
But what’s wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn’t seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn’t get it all done in either, it certainly wasn’t because I was taking too much time off.
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.
I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
Antisocial Networking?
By HILARY STOUT
Published: April 30, 2010
“HEY, you’re a dork,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
Monday, January 14, 2013
Technology
Hey gang. Next up is technology, so here's the article for Thursday:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers?src=longreads
I'll try to copy and paste later, but it's much better to go to the site to read it as there's videos and stuff you might want to watch. Enjoy!
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers?src=longreads
I'll try to copy and paste later, but it's much better to go to the site to read it as there's videos and stuff you might want to watch. Enjoy!
Friday, January 11, 2013
Bureaucracy
Hey guys,
I just got an email from a fellow teacher who was kind enough to translate an email we teachers were sent this week. Why would he have to translate an email sent to teachers of the Faculty of English. Simple. All email in the Faculty of English are sent in Polish only. Yep, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, I'm copying and pasting what I'm supposed to ask:
"Dear students,
I have been asked to remind all students that they need to be registered for this class (and all others) on USOS in order to receive a grade in the course.
If you have any further questions, please contact USOS coordinator mgr. Piotr Augustyniak at <august@wa.amu.edu.pl>."
Talk to you all next week,
Shane
I just got an email from a fellow teacher who was kind enough to translate an email we teachers were sent this week. Why would he have to translate an email sent to teachers of the Faculty of English. Simple. All email in the Faculty of English are sent in Polish only. Yep, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, I'm copying and pasting what I'm supposed to ask:
"Dear students,
I have been asked to remind all students that they need to be registered for this class (and all others) on USOS in order to receive a grade in the course.
If you have any further questions, please contact USOS coordinator mgr. Piotr Augustyniak at <august@wa.amu.edu.pl>."
Talk to you all next week,
Shane
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