A History of the Social Web

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This is a cross-cultural, critical history of social life on the Internet. It captures technical, cultural, and political events that influenced the evolution of computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net. In difference to other historical accounts, this essay acknowledges the role of grassroots movements and does not solely focus on mainstream culture with all its mergers, acquisitions, sales and markets, and the (mostly male) geeks, engineers, scientists, and garage entrepreneurs who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. This is a critical history as it traces the changing nature of labor and typologies of those who create value online as much as it searches for changing approaches toward control, privacy, and intellectual property. It shows strategies for direct social change based on the technologies and practices which already exist.

Scholz, Trebor. “A History of the Social Web (draft).”

Some mornings I just have nothing to say, so I’ll let this piece stand in for me. It’s an exhaustive and detailed study and for some reason it reminded me that more and more of my spam seems to be coming from Germany and China. The Chinese spam is short, usually only a brief sentence and a link. Most of the German spam I get is for furniture, which I find particularly strange.

These new kinds of spam don’t yet outnumber the pharmacy or Viagra ads– all of which seem to come from (American) English sources– but they are at least as common as the African/Nigerian email letters asking for my help processing money. This has got to be at least some measure of the increasing internationality of the web, if a less happy one than what Trebor suggests.

Posted in: Composition, Miscellaneous, Online Places, Professional, Writing

Peter Sacks: The Sordid History of Human Intelligence Goes On

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While the American educational establishment now shudders at the impolitic utterances of a Watson or Summers, the fact is that mainstream educators remain wedded to intelligence tests and their close cousins to designate intellectual talent and to sort academic stars from the also-rans, whether the arena is admitting toddlers to a private pre-school in Manhattan or freshmen to an elite college or university.

The testing industry, keenly aware of the sad history of intelligence testing and the tendency of its test users to draw their universal conclusions based on the tests, steers clear of marketing their exams as IQ tests, aptitude tests, or intelligence tests. Once known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, for instance, the SAT is now simply the SAT. Long forgotten is the test’s troubling kinship to the same IQ tests that once labeled Italians and Jews as feeble minded.

The Sordid History of Human Intelligence Goes On, Peter Sacks

What’s good for corporate globalization is good for Chicago and the rest of the nation – unless you live on the Black side of town. As the Color-Blind Curtain descends on American discourse, it has become taboo to even mention that map color-codes designating affluence or poverty coincide almost perfectly with the race of neighborhood residents. In the corporate celebration of Chicago’s “global” status, it becomes ever more necessary to gloss over the true facts of urban life in an industry-robbed nation. For every leap into hi-tech, hi-finance, and hi-living among the gentrifying rich, the places we once called “ghettos” fall deeper into misery and marginality.

White Washing Global Chicago, Paul Street

We’re not just trying to fight racism, of course, we are haunted by earlier, historical racisms. And racism shapes how we distribute economic and cultural capital. So the school system is shaped by the eugenicists of the first two or three decades of the century and the neighborhoods by the waves of migration driven by the end of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Posted in: Economics, Uncategorized, Writing