Archive for the 'culture' Tag

Merriam-Webster has named “W00t” the Word of the Year for 2007.

Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said “w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.
S3ri0usly?
Purists of “l33t speak” often substitute a “7″ for the final “t,” expressing a “w007″ of victory — an “in your face” of sorts — when they defeat an online gaming opponent.

December 11, 2007 | no comments | tags: , ,

Does Tolerance Require Ironic Consequences?

As has been made evident by numerous incidents in our world’s history, it can be difficult for members of society to peacefully tolerate viewpoints that are extremely different or at odds with their own, regardless of the provisions that society has made for free speech and thought.

In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma suggests that second generation immigrants become isolated and thus make extreme alliances because of an alienation from both Dutch culture and that of their parents. I have trouble accepting this line of thought. Conflicting cultures won’t necessarily result in a resort to extremism, though that is a definite possibility in the case of deliberate rejection by one’s peers. Beyond simply promoting assimilation, I think this issue is more a question of how we tolerate and respond to other cultures.

The question of how we should tolerate, like most interesting questions, brings up many more:

  • Should we be tolerant of concepts we know are incorrect? There is significant evidence backing the existence of global warming and evolution, yet our society continues to cultivate the unscientific opposing viewpoints. Maintaining this marketplace of ideas is critical in supporting free speech and general progress.
  • How do we compromise between the need to promote plurality of ideas versus the need to protect potentially dangerous information? The rapid production of knowledge and the Internet’s infinite capacity for storing it allows easy access of practically any idea to anyone (unless they’re in certain countries). If that information happens to be sensitive, offensive, or dangerous, what do we do?
  • Can we be tolerant of intolerant opinions? When extremists promote ideas of prejudice and or violence towards others, how should government arbitrate?
  • If the stakes change, can (and should) we violate our ideals of freedom in exchange for other protections? The USA PATRIOT Act comes to mind.

Thoughts? Answers?

April 30, 2007 | no comments | tags: , , ,

Questioning the Internet’s Social Implications

A large component of the trip to Amsterdam consists of social research in the region. We will be working with the Virtual Knowledge Studio, which is a relatively new Dutch think tank concerned with the evolving use of technology in research.

I’m particularly interested in how technology usage patterns differ in various regions of the world. For instance, the use of mobile phones differs greatly between most continents. These differences are especially evident when looking at their use in various regions of the developing world. While we’re not surprised to see a twelve-year-old carrying her own pink RAZR, it’s common for multiple families to share a phone and even a single email address in many parts of the world. Other ideas contrary to our usage patterns, such as airtime rental have created new markets for trade elsewhere and are allowing rural areas to connect with the rest of the world.

Ideas

The very advances in connectivity that are brought through new developments in communication technology carry the potential of modifying the way societies operate. People’s online behavior generally mirrors and extends their offline concerns, as is visible at any community website or forum. Online social networks have struggled with appealing to more than a small subset of the global population, as these concerns vary greatly between regions. For this very reason, Google’s Orkut has seen great success in developing regions such as Brazil and India, while Facebook is ingrained in the everyday lives of American college students.

Leading off of this issue is the fact that people have begun spending a significant amount of their social energy in online interactions – this means that people no longer have a need to connect with their neighbors for social stimulation. I suppose that this could make it more difficult for a tolerant society like ours or Amsterdam’s to promote assimilation and intercultural understanding, as individuals would be less likely to interact with others who have differing interests and value systems if they can find people similar to themselves online.

Questions

  • How do cultural differences in interpersonal interaction affect the way people use and expect technology to function?
  • Has the Internet’s emergence reduced cultural tolerance in Amsterdam due to the ease of long-distance communication?

Evidence

In order to study the effects of technology, it would be necessary to first determine the usage patterns applied in a region. These could be determined through surveys and interviews of end-users, as well as discussions with people who teach the use of technology, such as librarians. Interviews of the general population could be used to determine what is expected of technology, and how it is used on a day-to-day basis. To answer the second question, the above methods could be extended to gauge the general sentiment regarding Internet use and its consequences.

April 2, 2007 | 4 comments | tags: , , , , ,

Sunil’s got a blog

In the past few years, the blogosphere has gone from zero to sixty million. My goal for this blog is not to simply add more noise to the deafening crowd, but to publish something relevant to a significant portion of the general public.

As Lawrence Lessig writes in Free Culture, an internet created and moderated by users like ourselves carries the potential to revolutionize the way we seek and value information:

The Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation.

I strongly believe in the Internet’s potential as a resource for humanity, through the proliferation of useful user-created content. We’ve already seen this through numerous blogs or, more notably, Wikipedia.

This is my try.

I hope that you’re able to get something out of this. Thanks for reading.

March 27, 2007 | 1 comment | tags: , ,