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

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

It made it possible to improve people's lives. Now it prevents all forms of discrimination in the world. It helps to improve our world.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

As one of the largest social media platforms, the meaning and role of Facebook is widely contested, where many argue that Facebook’s cultural importance especially for younger generations, is decli...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305118803895

Domesticating Facebook: The Shift From Compulsive Connection to Personal Service Platform:

Many kinds of social, participatory and citizen oriented platforms make up today's media landscape. Many claim that open source and collaborative media change the ways we think about citizenship (Jenkins). Tim O'Reilly claims that Web 2.0 applications "have a natural architecture of participation" (2005). Yet social constructionists, feminists and sceptics caution against attributing new technologies with these kinds of natural characteristics. Drawing from the cultural history of early internet and mobile technologies, this research asks what, is meaningful about technologically specific ideas of citizenship. In order to answer this question, I draw from theories of standard and cultural citizenship; analyze a sample of technologically specific ideas of citizenship (e.g. netizenship, e-citizenship, technological citizenship, cyber citizenship); and conduct in depth empirical analysis of two case studies. Theoretically, this research synthesizes and builds upon citizenship theories beginning with T. H. Marshall and followed by cultural citizenship (e.g. Pakulski 1997; Isin and Wood 1999; Stevenson 2001; 2003). From this conceptual frame, the empirical patterns of connection are analyzed along three primary axes: membership systems; rights and obligations; and participatory strategies. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship fit well with theories of cultural citizenship and cultural rights closely resemble most of those rights that are also technologically specific such as rights to: participate, ideational and symbolic spheres, voice, to representation and to innovate. The cases are of two citizenship initiatives using internet or mobile platforms: the BBC's iCan project and Proboscis' Urban Tapestries project. While these projects emerged on the cusp of social media, both cases are early iterations of participatory media. Both cases provide insights into articulations of changing ideas of citizenship and participatory practices. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship are conditional. Project users engage different kinds of membership than producers and there is an uneven distribution of cultural rights which favours producers. As a result, users engage different and mostly shallow patterns of public participation. In contrast, producers have broader membership networks, stronger protection of rights and show more variation in deeper more collectively oriented participatory strategies. In the case of limited or partial forms of participation, findings suggest that citizenship language is used as an active manipulative strategy to centralize media organizations as dominant public sites. I argue that the characteristics of technologically specific ideas of citizenship mark a distinct moment in the history of media and citizenship; a moment characterized by the emergence of "public citizenship." The idea of public citizenship attempts to capture the ways in which technologically specific ideas of citizenship, at least in practice, involve making space for ordinary people in cultural institutions.

New technologies and the idea of citizenship: Patterns of public participation in two cases.

Urban tapestries (UT) is an exploration into the potential costs and benefits of public authoring, that is, mapping and sharing local knowledge, memories, stories, sensed information, and experiences. It aims to reveal the potential of pervasive computing to create and support relationships that surpass established social and cultural boundaries and enable new practices around place, identity, and community. This paper discusses the objective and rationale behind UT, its construction and development and lessons that can be learned from UT.

Urban Social Tapestries

Datafication, algorithms, social media and their various assemblages enable massive connective processes, enriching personal interaction and amplifying the scope and scale of public networks. At th...

/pdf/understanding-the-social-in-a-digital-age-2dsurkji82.pdf

Understanding the social in a digital age

Current scholarship positions privacy as something that is networked and complex, shifting away from ideas of privacy as individualized and control oriented. Drawing from a small sample of in-depth research using media diaries, interviews, and a small survey ( N = 270) of London, United Kingdom, residents 18–37 years of age, this research examines the tensions between privacy and sharing culture as lived experiences, revealing three themes. First, privacy matters, and second, respondents identify their experiences of sharing and understandings of privacy in more traditional privacy terms: as an individualized right focused on control, pointing to a disconnect between sharing culture and concepts of privacy. Third, respondents describe their sharing behaviors as clearly shaped by privacy logics, almost entirely driven by social rather than institutional privacy. These social privacy logics are made visible through “private sharing,” “public friends,” and the depersonalization of shared public content. These evolving ways of navigating sharing culture point to the apparent triumph of social privacy over institutional privacy, but they also reveal a platform failure to make institutional privacy coherent in respondents’ lives.

Zoetanya Sujon

Papers

Domesticating Facebook: The Shift From Compulsive Connection to Personal Service Platform:

New technologies and the idea of citizenship: Patterns of public participation in two cases.

Urban Social Tapestries

Understanding the social in a digital age

The Triumph of Social Privacy: Understanding the Privacy Logics of Sharing Behaviors Across Social Media