Reading

Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.

A literacy of appropriation

 Posted by (Visited 21684 times)  Game talk, Reading
Aug 162006
 

A couple of responses to the Harper’s Forum have popped up on the blogosphere, one at The Aspidistra and another at ideant. This latter one prompts a reply, as it comments,

the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:

KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)

Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation.

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Jul 122006
 

I went too long without doing a book review post, so here we are with the latest from Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Jacqueline Carey, and Susan Matthews. I also have some thoughts on Julian Dibbell’s new book about Real Money Trade in MMORPGs, a comic series that caught my eye, and my (so far) favorite SF novel this year — and no, it’s not up for the Hugo.

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Wikipedia and Wisdom of Crowds

 Posted by (Visited 19660 times)  Misc, Reading
Jul 122006
 

There’s some debate these days about Wikipedia and the wisdom of crowds. Then again, there always seems to be debate about it. The thing that I keep noticing, though, is people using a generic definition of “wisdom of crowds” that is quite different from my reading of the empirically verifiable parts of Surowiecki’s book.

Technically, Surowiecki’s conception of “wisdom of crowds” is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. The very loosey-goosey way of using it to discuss any sort of collective discussion and opinion generation is a misrepresentation of the actual (and very interesting) phenomenon.

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