The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Selection d'extraits des Cahiers de Prison d'Antonio Gramsci, theoricien italien de la pensee marxiste, mort en prison en 1937 et qui proposa une reflexion sur l'education dans les regimes totalitaires, et plus generalement sur les systemes des gouvernements modernes, ou la priorite donnee a l'organisation economique et a l'efficacite de la production industrielle etouffe les valeurs humaines et historiques.

狱中札记 = The prison notebooks

This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.

/pdf/ethnographic-approaches-to-digital-media-16vbyb6fx5.pdf

Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lawrence Lessig. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 230 pp. $21 hbk. Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is perhaps the most original book yet written about cyberspace law. With an accessible style that is rich in anecdotes and metaphors and surprisingly low on legal and technical jargon, Lessig, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard and a consultant on the Microsoft antitrust case, writes for a wide scholarly audience. Even more than the recent The Control Revolution (New York: Century Foundation, 1999) by Andrew Shapiro, Lessig has managed to write about a rapidly evolving subject at a level of abstraction and theoretical sophistication that ensures that his contribution will long remain relevant. Central to Lessig's theoretical framework is his breakdown of four modalities of regulation: law, economic markets, norms, and an intriguing category he calls "architecture." Architecture includes constraints that the natural world imposes or that people construct-for example, speed bumps on roads. The architecture in cyberspace is computer code: code constructs the cyber-world. Consider the example of pornography regulation. Lessig contrasts how these four modalities of regulation control access to pornography in "real space" and in cyberspace, vividly demonstrating why a simple translation of existing law from "real space" to cyberspace is often impossible. In real space, pornography is extensively regulated through all four modalities, in ways that limit children's access to it. Laws require that vendors sell pornography only to adults. Markets prevent children from accessing pornography because it costs money. Norms help limit children's access to pornography, both by stigmatizing pornography and stigmatizing dealers who would sell it to children. In the category of real space "architecture," there is the simple matter of how a child is: even if a child attempted to disguise himself as an adult, he would probably notbe successful at fooling a salesperson. These four kinds of constraints may be imperfect, but are reasonably effective in limiting children's access to pornography in real space, Lessig contends. In cyberspace, however, the modalities of regulation of pornography operate differently and less effectively. Law is unsettled. Markets are different in at least two ways: distribution of digital files is much cheaper than distribution of printed material or videos, and though there are plenty of commercial pornography sites, much pornography can be accessed at no cost through newsgroups. Differences in the "architecture" of cyberspace are crucial because they allow faceless transactions. Faceless transactions may make disguising identity and age simple, therefore allowing a child to avoid the restrictions of law and norms. Thus the "real space" regulatory regime is upset, making pornography generally more available to children in cyberspace. Ways of filtering content or zoning the Internet are now extensively debated, but no simple transfer of the offline constraints to cyberspace seems possible. As he applies his theory to pornography regulation and the regulation of intellectual property and privacy, Lessig emphasizes that not only the codes of law but computer codethe "architecture" of cyberspace-an "embed" values and enable government and private actors to control behavior. …

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

Recently, the margins between gaming and feminism have become increasingly contentious (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). This article addresses a cultural moment where masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars by analyzing GamerGate conspiracy documents and social media discussions related to the now infamous “DiGRA fishbowl.” Worries about the opacity of academic practices and a disparaging of feminist knowledge-making practices dominate these documents. By looking at these discussions and practices through the lens of conspiracy theories (Fenster, 2008; Hofstadter, 1952) and counterknowledge (Fiske, 1994) we consider the broader meaning of GamerGate's attention to academia.

A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity

Ethnomathematics is the study of mathematical ideas and practices situated in their cultural context. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) are web-based software applications that allow students to create simulations of cultural arts—Native American beadwork, African American cornrow hairstyles, urban graffiti, and so forth—using these underlying mathematical principles. This article is a review of the anthropological issues raised in the CSDT project: negotiating the representations of cultural knowledge during the design process with community members, negotiating pedagogical features with math teachers and their students, and reflecting on the software development itself as a cultural construction. The move from ethnomathematics to ethnocomputing results in an expressive computational medium that affords new opportunities to explore the relationships between youth identity and culture, the cultural construction of mathematics and computing, and the formation of cultural and technological hybridity.

Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom

Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O'Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on our understanding of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that shape (and are shaped by) media industries. O'Donnell shows that the ability to play with the underlying systems -- technical, conceptual, and social -- is at the core of creative and collaborative practice, which is central to the New Economy. When access to underlying systems is undermined, so too is creative collaborative process. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in game studios in the United States and India, O'Donnell stakes out new territory empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. Mimicking the structure of videogames, the book is divided into worlds, within which are levels; and each world ends with a boss fight, a "rant" about lessons learned and tools mastered. O'Donnell describes the process of videogame development from pre-production through production, considering such aspects as experimental systems, "socially mandatory" overtime, and the perpetual startup machine that exhausts young, initially enthusiastic workers. He links work practice to broader systems of publishing, manufacturing, and distribution; introduces the concept of a privileged "actor-intra-internetwork"; and describes patent and copyright enforcement by industry and the state.

Developer's Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators

Game jams are events that allow game designers to develop innovative games in a time-constrained environment, typically within a 48-hour period during a weekend. Jams provide participants an opportunity to improve their skills, collaborate with their peers, and advance research and creativity in the field of game design. Having coordinated numerous jams locally and as one of the largest venues in the world for GGJ 2011, the authors present learned lessons on how to make these events into amazing collaborative opportunities and their results from research in surveying game jam participants before and after the authors’ most recent jam weekend. DOI: 10.4018/ijgbl.2012070104 52 International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 2(3), 51-70, July-September 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. an analytical comparison of game jam participation to academic performance – concluding that there is indeed a correlation between engaging in community-driven game design and development events such as game jams and academic success in first and second year courses. Our results indicate that while successfully implementing collaborative game jam events requires much diligence and preparation, the rewards in building students’ skills and contributing to their academic success is significant to a game design and development program. History of Game Jams Chris Hecker and a group of 13 other game developers/designers captured the philosophy of open, independent game innovation when establishing one of the first game jams a decade ago in Indie Jam 2002; he states, “Participants can work on their own game, team up with others, do multiple games, do a new game every hour [...], or any combination of thereof” (Hecker, 2001). The modern Global Game Jam (GGJ) was inspired by and modeled itself after the Nordic Game Jam and has roots going back to the Indie Jam in 2002. The Global Game Jam was formed by the IGDA Education SIG director, Susan Gold, in collaboration with Gorm Lai and Ian Schreiber (Gold, 2009). GGJ’s intent was to broaden the outreach of the IGDA’s game education goals of Curriculum Framework and to create games in the world’s largest game jam. The GGJ focuses on collaboration in organizing and in teams making of games at each site. The growth of the GGJ and our local game jam events is an amazing testimony to the efforts of the organizers and the insatiable desire of participants to create. The first GGJ (2009) had over 1600 participants in 23 countries and resulted in 370 games. In 2010, this more than doubled to 4300 participants and 900 games; in 2011, there were 6500 jammers from 44 countries, and over 1500 games were created. In 2009, we began with 14 jammers from two universities at our local site; this has grown to over 150 participants representing seven universities in 2011. Characteristics of a Game Jam As stated by the keynote for GGJ 2010, “gaming is this giant creative space, surrounded by a frontier, and beyond that frontier there are so many countries left to explore” (Curran, 2010). Game jams serve as a means to explore the frontier of game development in a rapidfire, supportive, and entertaining environment. Knowing that thousands of other game designers and developers are collaborating all around the world alongside you is a rich experience that captures the hearts and minds of participants across cultures. The game jams are communitarian events that support creativity and learning and establish spaces that support the indie game development ecosystem (Guevara-Villalobos, 2011). Additionally, game jams support the creative experimentation and prototyping of game ideas in a rapid, cyclic process of 48 hours. The immediacy of other participants at the jam event foster a culture of sharing ideas, play testing, and collaboration in an immediate setting. This rapid prototype model has been adopted elsewhere with success in allowing the best ideas to effervesce to the top by embracing the possibility of failure to encourage risk taking and by inducing creativity through constraint (Shodhan, 2005). Game jam events support the process of learning by using (Rosenberg, 1982); this process of using a hands-on, learning-by-doing approach is a way for participants to explore new technology and refine their current knowledge of tools. Since jam events are intentionally rapid and short-lived, there is little “cost” associated with doing something wrong. This environment is liberating in allowing participants to dedicate a weekend with something new without feeling like they are wasting precious time. Participants have indicated in the past that they are willing to explore new technologies and techniques within a short, constrained weekend event such as a game jam because the jam weekend is an “extra” event and doesn’t take away from their existing projects or work. This leads to more risk taking, exploration, and innovation in a 18 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/article/game-jams-communitymotivations-learning/69785?camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Journals, InfoSci-Journal Disciplines Library Science, Information Studies, and Education, InfoSci-Select, InfoSci-Select, InfoSciCommunications, Online Engagement, and Media eJournal Collection, InfoSci-Educational Leadership, Administration, and Technologies eJournal Collection, InfoSci-Select, InfoSci-Select, InfoSci-Journal Disciplines Communications and Social Science. Recommend this product to your

Game jams: Community, motivations, and learning among jammers

Gamification, the idea that game mechanics can be integrated into assumed "non-game" circumstances has gained ascendance amongst champions of marketing, behavior change and efficiency. Ironically, some of the most heated critique to gamification has been the broader community of "traditional" videogame developers. Connecting broadly to projects surrounding "big data" and algorithmic surveillance, the project of gamification continues to expand and intensify. This paper examines the complex relationship between game designers and the rise of arguments in support of gamification. The essay presents an analysis of the various actors and interests mobilizing arguments, deconstructing their underlying assumptions about the relationship between games and social phenomena. Turning to an analytic framework rooted in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1999) and work in Game Studies on the Assemblage of Play (Taylor, 2009) and emergent forms of (played) control (Taylor, 2006) the essay critiques assumptions on either side of the debate on the role of games and play. The strained connections between debates on gamification and broader interest in serious games offers an important moment to explore algorithmic surveillance.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/played/player

Getting Played: Gamification and the Rise of Algorithmic Surveillance

This essay examines how tensions between work and play for video game developers shape the worlds they create. The worlds of game developers, whose daily activity is linked to larger systems of experimentation and technoscientific practice, provide insights that transcend video game development work. The essay draws on ethnographic material from over 3 years of fieldwork with video game developers in the United States and India. It develops the notion of creative collaborative practice based on work in the fields of science and technology studies, game studies, and media studies. The importance of, the desire for, or the drive to understand underlying systems and structures has become fundamental to creative collaborative practice. I argue that the daily activity of game development embodies skills fundamental to creative collaborative practice and that these capabilities represent fundamental aspects of critical thought. Simultaneously, numerous interests have begun to intervene in ways that endanger these foundations of creative collaborative practice.

Casey O'Donnell

Papers

Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom

Developer's Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators

Game jams: Community, motivations, and learning among jammers

Getting Played: Gamification and the Rise of Algorithmic Surveillance

The everyday lives of video game developers: Experimentally understanding underlying systems/structures