Archive for January, 2008
« Previous Entries Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Last native speaker of the Eyak language dies
Marie Smith Jones was believed to be the last native speaker of her language. Losing this language to extinction is a good opportunity to think about language in terms of cultural identity. It seems as though the process of language extinction has much more to do with changing cultural values than aging native speakers. One of [...]
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008Real Life, Real News, Real Fame, and Second Life
In a world where many kinds of interactions, from commerce to social life to education, take place on line the question of what constitutes “real” life becomes difficult to discern. It is easy to identify what interactions take place in a virtual environment and which occur outside of it but because one can clearly have [...]
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008Music and the Web
Here are a couple articles about the future of music on the Internet. This first article, ‘More Music Dealers Offering Downloads With Sound Quality That Rivals CD’s’, talks about online companies that are selling music in high quality sounding uncompressed wav. files as opposed to the compressed MP3′s sold by companies like i-tunes . The [...]
Sunday, January 27th, 2008A Bibliography for digital cultural studies
So I’ve been trying to develop a really good bibliography that could possibly serve as a comp list in this field. Here’s the list…I’d appreciate suggestions to add, specifically additions a la Leo Marx and David Nye that would make the list more American Studies-ish. If you’re a grad student in AMS/cultural studies/STS, please feel [...]
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008The MPAA is trying to get the government to do its dirty work.
As universities are pressured to punish students for illegally swapping music and movies, the MPAA and RIAA are currently lobbying the federal government to impose failed copyright practices on education institutions. “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention,” a bill that is part of H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, is language that would force [...]
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Teleshopping
I’m really quite fascinated by the technological antecedents of certain digital technologies that now pervade 21st century life. Take online shopping. In times past, it would have been quite a challenge to buy size 11.5 ladies shoes for myself and size 17 ones for my s.o. Now, such statiscally irrelevant sizes are just a click [...]
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Come for Ted Kennedy, Stay for Tim Datig: BigThink.com
One of the important issues brought up by Mark Poster’s book Information Please is the ways in which Networked Information Machines, particularly computers and the internet, bring up the issue of who has the opportunity to speak and whether these technologies could expand these opportunities. What is less carefully examined in his work is the [...]
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Social Networking and Big Brother
There is no question, whether positive or negative, that social networking tools will have an important place in cultural analysis and education but it does bring up a host of problems. How will we maintain and preserve this part of our culture? Many social networks are walled gardens that have incredibly rich materials for study [...]
Monday, January 21st, 2008Facebook and Digital Social Networking
This past week I reactivated my Facebook account, after about 3 years away, so I have decided to dedicate this post to a consideration of online social networking. To begin with, I can understand the argument in favor of Facebook as it does help a person keep in touch with people from their past. Recently, [...]
Monday, January 21st, 2008Rival blog!
I found a great WordPress blog called “Electronic Museum: Thoughts on Museums and the Social Web.” You should check it out. http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/category/social-networks/
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