Mashing up disciplines and cultures
{ Category Archives }
I just came across this little pearl: Rio - The Magnificent. A FitzPatrick Traveltalk.
Of course this shows only the nice sides of those times. But if one just look at the state, or the lack of State, that Rio is today…
Via: Rio em Disco
I just came accross this brilliant quote from George Bernard Shaw, Irish literary critic and playwright, literature Nobel laureate in 1925.
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
It verbalizes very simply — of course, and poetically — the whole issue about copyright vs. read-and-write culture, collaborative knowledge and the democratization of the means of intellectual production. I found this upon reading a text from Sérgio Amadeu, one of the champions of the free-software movement in Brazil. It’s a fierce defense of the values of cultural diversity through digital diversity. The text is here. (only in Brazilian Portuguese)
I just stumbled upon this video of a water balloon exploding shot with a high-speed camera, at 2,000 frames per second, just madness. Just to imagine how much beauty is out there that we just miss.
I came across an article from Paula Martini in iCommons, where she gives interesting insights about Overmundo, a web 2.0 platform that attempts to closes this gap in cultural coverage and diffusion within Brazil. If you live in Brazil and outside of what is there called the “eixo Rio-São Paulo” (the Rio-São Paulo axis), you mainly don’t get any cultural coverage in the media, and when so it is from the view of the center, not from the “periphery”. It is fully made by user-generated contributions and completely automated, drawing inspirations from many Web 2.0 platforms such as Digg and Slashdot.
In the video below Dr. Ronaldo Lemos, from the Center for Technology and Society of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Rio, one of the founders of Overmundo and chairman of iCommons, receives the Nica Prize for best community project in the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria. I know this is old news, but the video contains a very good explanation of what Overmundo is. Since I will use it as one of the case studies for my thesis, why not showing it again.
This is a very interesting documentary from Duch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen that further stirs the Web 2.0 controversy. It opposes, Tim O’Reilly (coiner of the term “Web 2.0″), Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, the founders of Wikipedia, to the author of The Cult of the Amateur Andrew Keen and Bob McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Via: Techcrunch
Within my research I stumbled upon a couple of different articles and there’s seem to be two streams of thought regarding the dissemination of knowledge: on one side are those who believe that certain “gatekeepers”, or “e-fluentials” on the web, are responsible for getting the knowledge ball rolling for everyone; on the other some who think that the process is a little more complex, and that no handful of luminaries can dictate what the mass of information consumers is supposed to read. The article “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” of Fast Company is very elucidating in this regard.
One of the key figures of the first group is Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker columnist, author of the best-seller The Tipping Point, where he attempts to explain how trends work. Representing the critics on the opposite side is Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Yahoo! and Professor at Columbia University in New York. Gladwell believes that people with higher social capital are able to sparkle interest on those in their networks, in a trickling down effect. Watts maintains that “… a rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power”, and has some solid scientific modeling to back up his arguments.
Since October 2007, when I started doing some exploratory research for my Master’s thesis, I have serendipitously come upon bloggers that seem to stand out among the crowd within the field of my interest, music on the so-called Web 2.0. Of all the RSS feeds that I have come to subscribe, some of them seem to turn up more consistent and knowledgeable information, as is the case with Net, Blogs & Rock’n'Roll, the blog of David Jennings, and the homonymous title of his book. Both his blog, and his book were found originally through a blog search. He has become one of my “gatekeepers”, not because he was already holding some special key to the gates of knowledge in the field, but through my readership of his work, which has turned out be fruitful within an relatively short period of time.
I subscribe to a RSS feed of Google Blog Search with the keyword “music 2.0″. Within a couple of weeks the beginning of the subscription, I was able to find interesting content, that I would not otherwise had been able to find within a single search. What I realized however, is that the rate of new discoveries seem to stagnate after a while, i.e. after subscribing to the “e-fluentials” in the field, you come by new entries less often. Jennings describes a sort of pyramid of influence on the blogosphere, divided according to his terminology in: a handful of “originators” at the top, followed by a small group of “synthesizers” in the middle, and a the base composed by mass of “lurkers”, who basically only consume what’s being handed down to them. Jennings seem to agree with Malcolm Gladwell in that regard.
I haven’t taken any sides yet, and have yet to read more in depth the work of both Gladwell and Duncan. I believe however there’s a sort of a middle way between those currents. Sure, there are people who can write authoritatively about their subjects of interest, being able to amass crowds around themselves, but they acquire knowledge in the same way that everybody else does: by deliberation and by accident.
