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The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide |
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| Topic: Society |
10:21 am EDT, Sep 28, 2003 |
Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, "Let me show you the slides from our trip!" Now, that dread has spread to every corner of the culture ... When the bullets are flying, no one is safe. ... "a virus, rather than a narrative form" ... The relentless and lazy use of the program as a replacement for real discourse continues to inspire attacks. The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide |
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The New Foreign Correspondence |
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| Topic: Society |
1:59 pm EDT, Sep 20, 2003 |
From news services to "blogs," the Internet has revolutionized the international news market -- opening it up to a broader and more active audience. Such technological innovations are rapidly changing the way people produce and consume news, making the traditional model of foreign correspondence obsolete. This article appears in the September/October 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs. You can read a free preview online. The New Foreign Correspondence |
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Keepers of the Magic Kingdom |
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| Topic: Society |
3:16 pm EDT, Sep 7, 2003 |
Watch closely among Disneylands tourists and you might spot the Disneyana people, protecting Walts vision and living most of their waking lives in the happiest place on Earth. If you thought that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was a work of science fiction ... well, you were half right. Keepers of the Magic Kingdom |
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New Encyclopedia Gives Cool-Hunters a Road Map for Ads |
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| Topic: Society |
11:33 am EDT, Jul 19, 2003 |
Within the last 150 years, for the first time in human history, it became widely possible to produce more than was demanded and to offer more than was needed. Advertising was a response to surplus. Mass consumption inspired "more social egalitarianism, more democratic participation and more political freedom." But there were still rampant social inequalities, and the increasing interest in selling products to "segmented" markets -- markets divided by age, income, race and interest -- eventually led to a segmented citizenry. We live in the fractured and privatized society that was a result. ... In 1897 the promise of an Oldsmobile ad was hardly reassuring: "Practically noiseless and impossible to explode." ... Advertisements are a form of communication, not mere manipulation: they help make sense of the world. ... Discerning knowledge amid the claims and images makes us all cool-hunters in training. New Encyclopedia Gives Cool-Hunters a Road Map for Ads |
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Where Have All the Lisas Gone? |
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| Topic: Society |
10:36 am EDT, Jul 5, 2003 |
It seems perched at a precarious point from which it could, without warning, rocket into overuse. I am not so smug as to think myself immune to first-name zeitgeist. Girls' names are both more interesting to track and more vulnerable to sounding passe. Even pros are occasionally blindsided by a name, as when Trinity leapfrogged to 74 after the release of "The Matrix." A closer look finds that Trinity was already on the upswing, from 951 in 1993 to 555 five years later. Madison? No. 2? How in the name of good taste did that happen? The next big trend will be word names. Colors, for example. The tipping point came when Christie Brinkley named her daughter Sailor. Where Have All the Lisas Gone? |
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Here's Your Vote; Liberty Can Wait |
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| Topic: Society |
5:51 pm EDT, Apr 10, 2003 |
Elections are not necessarily synonymous with constitutional liberalism. Democracy is flourishing; liberty is not. Fareed Zakaria has a new book entitled, "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad." I've linked here to the NYT review. This book has received praise from Peter Jennings, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Holbrooke, Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Nicholas Lemann, and others. Fareed's book tour will be in SF on April 21, LA on April 22, Boston on May 1, and elsewhere on other dates. Here's Your Vote; Liberty Can Wait |
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The evolution of altruistic punishment [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
12:21 am EST, Mar 27, 2003 |
Abstract: Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives. However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions. This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory. This article appears in the March 18, 2003 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It is provided here by the author with no subscription required. The evolution of altruistic punishment [PDF] |
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The Philosopher of Islamic Terror |
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| Topic: Society |
4:17 pm EST, Mar 23, 2003 |
Paul Berman writes for the New York Times Magazine on Sayyid Qutb. This is some rather deep reading for a Sunday afternoon. The Philosopher of Islamic Terror |
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Internet and autonomy building in the network society [RealMedia] |
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| Topic: Society |
1:16 am EST, Mar 18, 2003 |
Communication technology as material culture: Internet and autonomy building in the network society An Annenberg Colloquium with scholar Manuel Castells, author of The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on Internet, Business, and Society, and sociology professor at the University of California. An 80 minute lecture by Manuel Castells given in November 2002. Internet and autonomy building in the network society [RealMedia] |
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Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
4:27 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
We describe a methodology for the automatic identification of communities of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a betweeness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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