The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Confronting the challenges of participatory cultures (media education for the 21st century)

The End of History and the Last Man

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures -- joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention.This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play.The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

/pdf/confronting-the-challenges-of-participatory-culture-media-2orxv8dza7.pdf

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914

This chapter contains sections titled: From Mechanics to Quantification: The Analogy Machine, Definitions, Tables, and Accounting Measurement: From Defining “Capital” to Scrubbing Data, Conclusions

From Measuring Desire to Quantifying Expectations: A Late Nineteenth-Century Effort to Marry Economic Theory and Data

“I see you’ve got the pumpkin,” Cary Grant says to Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), just before they scramble over the brows and necklines of Mt. Rushmore, made out of concrete and stagecraft on the MGM back lot. But Saint’s character is carrying an antique figurine, not a squash. Hitchcock is alluding to the so-called Pumpkin Papers, microfilmed state secrets that Whittaker Chambers hid inside a pumpkin and then produced as evidence in making his charges against Alger Hiss a decade or so before the filming of this sequence. Hitchcock’s antique figurine is stuffed with microfilm, tiny pictures of national importance, now handed and dragged across those giant faces of national heroes. The chase over Mt. Rushmore offers a neat conflation of what Siegried Kracauer identified as two particularly “cinematic” subjects (41): “the small and the big” (46), which “seem to exert a peculiar attraction on the medium” (41): the camera loves them. As Kracauer explains, “the small is conveyed in the form of close-ups” (46), whereas the big includes “vast plains or panoramas of any kind” (50). Hitchcock puts these two together. His conflation of cinematic subjects depends upon as well as corrupts the spectator’s intuitive sense of scale. There is a vertiginous effect, as the spectator must experience the intuitive small and intuitive big as counterintuitive filmic effects in the very same sequence that reveals (in a true close-up) the tiny rolls of microfilm (now huge up on the screen) inside the broken figurine. With the rolls exposed (the case cracked, literally), the movie draws to a close in a manner typical of Hitchcock Cold War productions: the hero rescues and marries/

Microfilm, Containment, and the Cold War

Digital resources are helping to change the ways scholars and students work, but they must also be helping to shape the work that gets done. Taking JSTOR as an example, we might ask about the discursive power of the database. How is using an online resource for research acceding to unnoticed assumptions that underlie the construction of that resource?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1525/rep.2014.127.1.73

Searching and Thinking About Searching JSTOR

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion) Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every "like" stored somewhere for something This book reminds us that data is anything but "raw," that we shouldn't think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted The book's essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously "cooked" in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can -- or can't -- be "reduced" to data Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary "dataveillance" of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation Essay authors:Geoffrey C Bowker, Kevin R Brine, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Steven J Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, Rita Raley, David Ribes, Daniel Rosenberg, Matthew Stanley, Travis D Williams

Lisa Gitelman

Papers

Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914

From Measuring Desire to Quantifying Expectations: A Late Nineteenth-Century Effort to Marry Economic Theory and Data

Microfilm, Containment, and the Cold War

Searching and Thinking About Searching JSTOR

Procrustean Marxism and Subjective Rigor: Early Modern Arithmetic and Its Readers