a thaumaturgical compendium

Don’t have time to tag your own walls? Outsource it!

Send a Message is an interesting site that allows you to dictate a message to be spray-painted on the Palestinian wall. Full employment for Palestinian graffiti artists. Besides, remember back when the Berlin Wall came down and Bloomingdale’s was selling chunks? Maybe in a few hundred years, when they knock down this one, it some part of your message can sit in someone’s living room.

Regardless of which side of the wall you sit on, it is hard not to appreciate this as an interesting way to call global attention to an issue on a person-to-person basis.

(Via Josh Spear.)

The USA Today has an article today on the “blurring of social circles online.” It doesn’t quote danah, so I think it’s suspect from the outset (kidding!). Really, I want to note a couple of things.

First, the author (Janet Kornblum) did something kind of interesting: set up a Facebook group to gather opinions. She could have taken it a step further, and opened up the text to the group before publication, though history shows that this can open up a can of worms. I was tickled enough by the idea of a Facebook group for the purpose of an article that I actually drew up a logo. Of course, Facebook groups are not ideal locations for conversations—it’s difficult sometimes to keep up with what is happening. But it is a step toward transparency in the newsgathering process, and a cool experiment.

Now, the article unfortunately feeds into the kinds of moral panic that social networking already encourages. It’s not hard to find people who have been burned by unexpected group barrier crossings; if it hasn’t happened to you, it’s probably happened to someone you know. And it’s important that people recognize the possibility that this can happen and that they take appropriate steps to avoid embarrassing or otherwise harmful situations. But the article focuses on these superficial elements to the exclusion of the larger social changes that might be underway.

Like many such social and technological changes, the blurring of boundaries is a double-edged sword. Yes, it may be harder to keep clear lines between personal and professional groups, or between parents and friends, or whatever. But there is also a new intimacy among ego-centric networks that hasn’t existed to the same extent in the past. Given the way social networking sites are often covered, you have to ask why people would engage in them. The answer is that they allow for a new kind of transparency among social relationships. Yes, they may open up new (and separate) spaces for social experimentation and socializing, but they also open up commons that are accessible to a cross-section of your traditionally divided social circles.

There is no good reason the people that I knew in Seattle should not know the people I know in New York or in Buffalo or in Japan. Until now, they might only meet if I had a visitor crashing on my sofa. Instead, they can peruse my social network and find out more about my “other lives.” After a long period of “metropolizing” technologies, social networking is reintroducing the importance of networked villages, and making transparent the process by which our connections to others shapes who we are.

I started to assemble a list of candidates’ positions on Guantánamo and indefinite detention, but then found that Shayana Kadidal had already done it over at the Huffington Post:

Clinton: Consistent advocate of Gtmo closure; co-sponsored Feinstein bill to close it down. A bit ambiguous at times on coercive interrogation; had wanted more detail on existing practices, later stated torture “cannot be American policy. Period.”

Edwards: says “We are not the country of Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo…. We are Americans and we’re better than that.” Would prohibit torture and rendition, and close Gtmo.

Giuliani: “[N]ot inclined to agree right now [with Colin Powell] that we should necessarily close Guantánamo.” Better on torture; like most former prosecutors, understands how the professionals work conspiracy cases: “You know how I put hundreds of Mafia people in jail? ... we arrested them, we got very significant charges on them, and we questioned them for long periods of time. With very aggressive techniques. Never ever tortured anybody.” [But hasn’t explicitly said that he considers waterboarding more than “aggressive techniques.” – AH]

Huckabee: “I visited Guantánamo just about a year ago. ...I [have] visited every single prison in the Arkansas prison system, and I can tell you most of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantánamo….” Denounces torture and states that waterboarding is torture.

McCain: Wants Guantánamo closed because it damages U.S. credibility abroad; would move the prisoners to Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas (which would make judicial review of detentions inevitable), and is against indefinite detention without charge. Knows torture firsthand; is against it.

Obama: spokesman says: “supports Guantánamo closing and is still working to find the best possible solution for the prisoners who are there right now.” On torture: “The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. ... Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.”

Romney: “I believe that Guantánamo plays an important role in protecting our nation from violent, heinous terrorists.” “Guantánamo is a symbol of our resolve.” “The food down there is unbelievable. This is not this gulag; this is a modern prison which treats people with dignity and respect.” Said during June debate: “We ought to double Guantánamo.” (Spokesman later clarified that Romney meant he wanted “to go out and catch more terrorists and doesn’t want to import them [to the U.S.]”) Also supports “enhanced” interrogation techniques; won’t rule out waterboarding.

And to save the Ron Paul Army some time, Paul is the only other Republican candidate who wants to close it.

Of course, when it does close, we’ll just detain them elsewhere, as we are already doing.

Audio: Close Guantánamo

I was a big fan of the Wire, on HBO, from its first season, but didn’t keep up with it, and decided to wait and watch it on DVD instead. It’s a complex soap opera of a plot—one of the creator’s former colleagues referred to him as the “Balzac of the newsroom” in a conversation on the excellent Bryant Park Project, a complement guaranteed to induce snickering—and if you miss an episode, it’s easy to get lost. The characters are complex, engaging, and believable. The structure of crime, the police, and the politics certainly feels real, and although I don’t have enough experience to judge, those who do have suggested that it provides a good portrayal of the real operation of drug gangs.

Which makes me all the more excited about the new season, which tracks how the drug trade plays in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. Obviously, this is of more than merely entertainment interest to me, since we train journalists at my school. Others have already noted that the series is a great way to explain economic models (one of the characters attends econ classes at night, and deploys his new knowledge in his trade), I suspect that the upcoming season would make for a great organizing text on crime reporting. The question is always how much you can ask students to watch, depending on the density of teachable scenes. Perhaps a better way to go would be to teach a class on the Wire and on drugs in the community. Either way, I think it would be fun.

For now, I am watching the previous seasons to catch up—no spoilers in the comments please!

Audio: The Wire as Teaching Tool

Update: I suppose I could just watch all four seasons in four minutes, but I’m not sure that’s any less confusing, and I’m sure it’s not as fun.

Although the number of subscribers to my blog has dropped off considerably (I grow tiresome), I know that there are still some active faculty who read it; so, a quick question for you: how many pages of reading do you assign to your grad classes each week? My rough limits are 100 pages a week for undergrad and 200 for grad, which is less than I had for most of my courses as a student, but more than the students seem comfortable with. I know: through the snow, uphill both ways.

I know this differs significantly from field-to-field, but what do you consider an upper limit for page-counts? What do you do to help students who say this is too much? Thanks!

Audio: Question: How much reading?

This is a bit late in coming, but I hope you will submitting a paper to present at the Internet Research 9.0 conference, which is being held in Copenhagen this October. It’s a great conference with a fairly unique collection of papers and people. While there are a lot of small conferences that deal with issues related to social computing, few of this size draw in such a diversity of fields and perspectives. More information about the conference can be found at http://conferences.aoir.org and I’ve copied the Call for Papers after the jump. Deadline for submitting abstracts is coming up quickly (February 8).

Audio: IR9.0 (Copenhagen) CFP

This semester, my two distance courses will be centered around recorded audio lectures. Since this blog went a bit dark during the last semester, I’m resurrecting the earlier practice of copying everything here (as well as to the course blogs, etc.). One change will be a bit of an increase in updates. Another will be a shift more to audio. And since so much of it will be in audio, I am toying with the idea of making more of it—maybe all of it—in audio, by reading even short posts like this one. It means a bit more complexity in writing and getting my stuff up, and I’m not sure anyone will want to here uber-short entries like this in audio, but it might be fun. It might even force me to write shorter entries.

Why not video? I’d planned on focusing on video, but have decided not to for now. I think audio may be easier, in terms of sourcing materials, and production. I know that radio people out there will be aghast by such a claim, but I think it’s true. We’ll see.

More importantly, though, for students who already have a pretty busy life, I think audio may allow them to “double up” by listening in the car or at the gym. I’m all about efficiency (except when I’m not), and so this appeals to me.

Audio: Going Pod