Tag Archive: Social network
I experience the social network as both an expression of my need to stay connected and a symbol of my isolation from the ‘real world’.
In November 2010, Zadie Smith wrote about the movie Social Network for the New York Review of Books.
This was not just a review, but a brilliant critique of the whole communicative, ‘let’s share everything’ propaganda machine which Facebook epitomizes.
Reading it again, makes me think how on the nose she was. Here’s an extract:
“With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos”.
You can read the whole article here.
Scholars can no longer seek refuge in an ivory tower.
Today, to mark Open Education week, I began looking at the readings for the Open University’s h817 Open Education course .
I started with an article by Martin Weller entitled ‘The openness-creativity cycle in education’ and published in the Journal of Interactive Media Education (JiME).
In this paper, Weller notes that the concept of openness in education is now taken for granted and that few talk in terms of resources being ‘closed’ or limited solely to an elite (paying) group of users.
He quotes from Gideon Burton’s article on the ‘Open Scholar’ : “In the digital age, the traditional barriers to accessing scholars and scholarships are unnecessary, but persist for institutional reasons”.
This begs the question as to how long these institutionalised barriers can resist to pressure from the digital networks in which Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming the norm.
With sharing being the default position the million dollar question as to how this actually improves the learning process. Continue reading
You will see that Animal My Soul proudly displays a new widget to link to a recently created Twitter account.
Those who like or follow this blog are cordially invited to follow my tweets too.
If you follow me, I’ll follow you…..deal?
Of course, the concept of ‘following’ is based on the notion that the person in front knows where he or she is going.
I can’t pretend I will lead to to some new found wisdom but perhaps if we all head in the same direction, together we’ll find a path that will help make some sense of this mad world!
King Canute sets an example to the French.
Adopting words or phrases from other languages seems a natural process in which neither party to the exchange is harmed.
The government in France would, of course, argue otherwise and say death to ‘La différence’.
For example, the French establishment prefer ‘ordinateur’ to ‘computer and in 2003, it was decreed that ‘courriel’ should be used instead of the English ‘e-mail’.
Now we learn that Facebook and Twitter should not be mentioned by name on radio or TV unless used directly in relation to a news story.
The official reason given is that using these terms constitutes an act of advertising and as such contravenes the 1992 decree which legislates against the promotion of commercial enterprises.
The F-word can no longer be used and Tweeting broadcasters can now only plug their sites only by a broad reference to the social networks.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of either of these new web-based institutions but both have become so ubiquitous that I find it hard to believe that such a ban of referring to them by name is logical or even workable.
I wonder how much this decision by France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel is motivated by linguistic questions rather than an attack on so-called ‘clandestine advertising’.
Those who approve of the French action are those who are irritated by hearing media folk asking to be ‘liked’ or ‘followed’ on these two infotainment hubs. I have some sympathy for this position but making only a veiled reference to Facebook and Twitter is not going to make them go away. Like it or not they are here to stay.
Frankly, the French policy that is as likely of success as King Canute’s attempt to turn back the ocean’s tide.
