Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Preface Introduction: Traditions of Nationhood in France and Germany I. The Institution of Citizenship 1. Citizenship as Social Closure 2. The French Revolution and the Invention of National Citizenship 3. State, State-System, and Citizenship in Germany II. Defining The Citizenry: The Bounds of Belonging 4. Citizenship and Naturalization in France and Germany 5. Migrants into Citizens: The Crystallization of Jus Soli in Late-Nineteenth-Century France 6. The Citizenry as Community of Descent: The Nationalization of Citizenship in Wilhelmine Germany 7. \"Etre Francais, Cela se Merite\": Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in France in the 1980s 8. Continuities in the German Politics of Citizenship Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

/pdf/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class-3tq7b7h7fg.pdf

The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia's persistent smallholder

In this article, we discuss procedures for comparing the cultural salience of semantic domains and their constitutive signifiers between groups of respondents based on free list data. These methods...

Comparative Cultural Salience: Measures Using Free-List Data:

Transnational mobility affects both high-status and low-income workers, disrupting traditional assumptions of the boundedness of communities. There is a need to reconfigure our most basic theoretical and analytical constructs. In this article I engage in this task by illustrating a complex set of distinctions (as well as connections) between 'communities' as ideationally constituted through cultural practices and 'social networks' constituted through interaction and exchange. I have grounded the analysis ethnographically in the experiences of foreign workers in Singapore, focusing on domestic and construction workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. I examine the cultural, social and communi- cative role that mobile phones play in the lives of workers who are otherwise constrained in terms of mobility, living patterns and activities. Mobile phones are constituted as symbol status markers in relationship to foreign workers. Local representations construct foreign workers as users and consumers of mobile telephony, reinscribing ideas of transnational identities as well as foreignness within the context of Singapore. Migrant workers demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the various telephony options available, but the desire to use phones to communicate can overwhelm their self-control and lead to very high expenditures. The research highlights the constraints - as well as possibilities - individuals experience as subjects and agents within both social and cultural systems, and the ways in which those constraints and possibilities are mediated by a particular technology - in this case, mobile phones.

/pdf/mobile-phones-communities-and-social-networks-among-foreign-2s1fkfdx7p.pdf

Mobile phones, communities and social networks among foreign workers in Singapore

Synopsis Blogshops, online sites in which young women model and sell apparel via social media, have exploded onto the Singapore Internet scene. As an extremely popular form of e-commerce, blogshops have catapulted their owners and blogshop models to wealth and fame. The success of blogshops trades on commercial intimacies cultivated by blogshop models and the involvement of blogshop consumers in practices which economic anthropologist Robert Foster identifies as “value (co-)creation.” Whereas Foster and others have examined the creation of mass-mediated product intimacy around items such as detergents and soft drinks, we argue that in blogshops the micro-mediated (co-)creation of value rests on persona intimacy . Value (co-)creation does not focus on products per se. Rather it takes place around the online “micro-celebrity” of blogshop models and senses of homo-social intimacy between the persona of models and their audience of readers-cum-consumers. This focus on blogshop models' persona implicates both models and consumers in a homo-social discourse around emphasized femininities, in which women's bodies are subjected to a refracted male gaze carried out by women in the absence of men. This discourse within the commercial sphere produces powerful and disciplining effects for both blogshop consumers and the models themselves, thus highlighting deeply gendered intersections of femininity and commerce in online processes of value (co-)creation.

Buymylife.com: Cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops

Summary. In Malaysia, Malay kampung or villages are modernity’s significant other in contemporary discourse. In contrast to this rhetoric, which reinforces a sense of rural–urban difference, this paper argues that Malay kampung are socially urban spaces, in so far as the lived experience of their residents largely conforms to characteristics of social life typically figured as ‘urban’. These include socioeconomic relationships characterised by occupational stratification, consumption and production based on commodification rather than subsistence, and social interactions marked by formal and attenuated social ties as much as informal and intimate relationships. Simultaneously nostalgic and derogatory narratives of modernity and urbanism fix kampung in social memory as sites marginal to and outside urban modernity. By contrast, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that the lives of kampung residents in contemporary Malaysia are substantially and qualitatively urban.

/pdf/rural-villages-as-socially-urban-spaces-in-malaysia-2y53eyzn7g.pdf

Eric C. Thompson

Papers

The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia's persistent smallholder

Comparative Cultural Salience: Measures Using Free-List Data:

Mobile phones, communities and social networks among foreign workers in Singapore

Buymylife.com: Cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops

Rural Villages as Socially Urban Spaces in Malaysia