Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people. This is how they and their designers survive and perpetuate themselves. If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don't want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging--and enjoy it, to boot.

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What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

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

The configuration of developed countries has become today diverse and multiethnic due to international migration. A single coherent theoretical explanation for international migration is lacking. The aim of this discussion was the generation and integration of current theories that clarify basic assumptions and hypotheses of the various models. Theories were differentiated as explaining the initiation of migration and the perpetuation of international movement. Initiation theories discussed were 1) macro theories of neoclassical economics; 2) micro theories of neoclassical economics; 3) the new economics with examples for crop insurance markets futures markets unemployment insurance and capital markets; 4) dual labor market theory and structural inflation motivational problems economic dualism and the demography of labor supply; and 5) world systems theory and the impacts of land raw materials labor material links ideological links and global cities. Perpetuation theories were indicated as network theories of declining risks and costs; institutional theory cumulative causation through distribution of income and land organization of agrarian production culture of migration regional distribution of human capital and social labeling factors; and migration systems theory. The assumptions and propositions of these theories although divergent were not inherently contradictory but had very different implications for policy formulation. The policy decisions over the next decades will be very important and carry with them the potential for misunderstanding and conflict. Policy options based on the explicated models range from regulation by changing wages and employment conditions in destination countries or promoting development in countries of origin to changing structural market economic relations.

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Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal.

The field of information systems is premised on the centrality of information technology in everyday socio-economic life. Yet, drawing on a review of the full set of articles published inInformation Systems Research ( ISR) over the past ten years, we argue that the field has not deeply engaged its core subject matter--the information technology (IT) artifact. Instead, we find that IS researchers tend to give central theoretical significance to the context (within which some usually unspecified technology is seen to operate), the discrete processing capabilities of the artifact (as separable from its context or use), or the dependent variable (that which is posited to be affected or changed as technology is developed, implemented, and used). The IT artifact itself tends to disappear from view, be taken for granted, or is presumed to be unproblematic once it is built and installed. After discussing the implications of our findings, we propose a research direction for the IS field that begins to take technology as seriously as its effects, context, and capabilities. In particular, we propose that IS researchers begin to theorize specifically about IT artifacts, and then incorporate these theories explicitly into their studies. We believe that such a research direction is critical if IS research is to make a significant contribution to the understanding of a world increasingly suffused with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent information technologies.

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Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the IT in IT Research--A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.

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Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Changer la Ville: A Rejoinder

Social inequality is the most obvious expression of any class society in so far as the place occupied in the system of production determines the distribution of the product among social groups, for, from the moment that we deny the inherent connection between the system of social stratification (related to the economic and symbolic distribution of the product) and the system of social classes (based on the system of production and, hence, on the power relationships between the classes), and make the former depend on the latter, it becomes necessary to spell out the specific form of this social inequality according to the phases of a mode of production and the historical formation of a social system. Thus the history of eternal disparity between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’, based on a fatalism with perfect results for the dominant classes, gives way to the precise analysis of the social production of differentiation at the level of consumption and to the study of the basic logic of a certain type of social relations which are experienced in the form of oppressive daily life.

Collective Consumption and Urban Contradictions in Advanced Capitalism

Internet es el tejido de nuestras vidas en este momento. No es futuro. Es presente. Internet es un medio para todo, que interactua con el conjunto de la sociedad y, de hecho, a pesar de ser tan reciente, en su forma societal (aunque como sabemos, Internet se construye, mas o menos, en los ultimos treinta y un anos, a partir de 1969; aunque realmente, tal y como la gente lo entiende ahora, se constituye en 1994, a partir de la existencia de un browser, del world wide web) no hace falta explicarlo, porque ya sabemos que es Internet. Simplemente les recuerdo, para la coherencia de la exposicion, que se trata de una red de redes de ordenadores capaces de comunicarse entre ellos. No es otra cosa. Sin embargo, esa tecnologia es mucho mas que una tecnologia. Es un medio de comunicacion, de interaccion y de organizacion social. Hace poco tiempo, cuando todavia Internet era una novedad, la gente consideraba que, aunque interesante, en el fondo era minoritario, algo para una elite de internautas, de digerati, como se dice internacionalmente. Esto ha cambiado radicalmente en estos momentos. Para recordarles brevemente la progresion, les dire que la primera encuesta seria sobre usuarios de Internet que yo conozco, de finales del noventa y cinco senalaba que habia unos nueve millones de usuarios de Internet. En este momento estamos en torno a los trescientos cincuenta millones de usuarios en el mundo. Las previsiones conservadoras preven que, para mediados del ano 2001, llegaremos a setecientos millones, y en torno a 2005-2007, a dos mil millones como minimo. Es verdad que constituye solo una tercera parte de la poblacion del planeta, pero esto quiere decir, ponderando en terminos de las sociedades mas desarrolladas, que en las sociedades de nuestro contexto las tasas de penetracion estaran en torno al 75% u 80%.

Internet y la sociedad red

Defence Expenditure and Regional Development

The Internet has so entirely transformed virtually all aspects of everyday life that it seems almost impossible to assess its impact. Here, 19 esteemed scholars from around the world tackle the topic from different angles. Manuel Castells, David Gelernter, Juan Ignacio Vzquez, Evgeni Morozov, Mikko Hyppnen, Yochai Benkler, Federico Casalegno, David Crystal, Lucien Engelen, Patrik Wikstrm, Peter Hirshberg, Paul DiMaggio and Edward Castronova address such matters as the "Internet of things"; the sociology of the Internet; cybercrime and Internet security; the future of work; the Internet and urban-rural sustainability; the "Worldstream and the Cybersphere"; gaming and society; the Internet's influence on languages and new economic systems; the massive changes wrought by the net in the music industry; and other aspects of its many cultural, social and political ramifications.

Manuel Castells

Papers

Changer la Ville: A Rejoinder

Collective Consumption and Urban Contradictions in Advanced Capitalism

Internet y la sociedad red

Defence Expenditure and Regional Development

Change: 19 Key Essays on How Internet Is Changing our Lives