Information Technology Research Page
Research Links:
Note: New additions will appear at the top of the page.
counterculture, the Jesus movement, and the "Plow Creek Fellowship" communal group. Power to the people
I am continuing research on the subject of my last article "Social Engineering For a Brave New World". You may find updates on the Reader Comments page.
The emerging paradox between individual and community
Public Journalism is a '90s phenomenon. Its first experiment can be pinpointed
to a newspaper in Columbus, Ga., (Rosen, 1991) that decided to abandon its role
of detached observer and jump into an activist mode to help improve the quality
of life in the community. While those in Columbus didn't call their work
"public journalism," and in fact, didn't even realize they were part of a coming
trend, similar ideas were being conceived around the country. The official
christening of public journalism can be traced to 1990, with Jay Rosen widely
considered the founding intellectual father and Davis Merritt as his
professional counterpart. Rosen and Merritt were not lone crusaders delivering
an unheard of message to the media masses; there was considerable consensus --
it seems all across the country, media academics and professionals were asking
themselves the same questions, debating the same concerns, and many were coming
up with the same answers. Thus, when public journalism came to be articulated,
it struck a chord. In the next five years, more than 200 public journalism
projects were undertaken. (Lambeth and Craig, 1995) The Intellectual Antecedents of Public Journalism
What follows is a find I made in a Google search concerning
"Place of the Skull" and the "Mystery of Golgotha". As you might know this pertains to the place where Jesus was crucified
Christ’s Discourse with the Pharisees
These families who control the temporal affairs of this world are hidden from the profane masses by carefully contrived obscurity, behind layers upon layers of secrecy, which only time, purpose and absolute wealth and power can secure. Another is Jewry, infused with Talmudic spirituality and personified by the Pharisees who hunted down Christ and plotted His human death, a spirituality arising from Ahriman that has caused the racial soul of Jewry to harbour a secret ceaseless rancour for all things not of it. And it was the Black Adepts who have led Jewry by the nose for centuries who plotted to infiltrate Freemasonry, ostensibly to promote Jewish interests, but in reality to further the Great Conspiracy against moral order, Christ and God.
A Great Conspiracy that did not favour one racial group per se but uses race as a powerful means of enlisting gullible fools into doing things out of hate in the misapprehension that their actions furthered their own parochial concerns. But in reality their actions merely empowered the Cult of Evil more and more until the grip on the temporal affairs of this world by this Evil cult is such that their final move for One World Government and One World Religion will destroy all things opposing it. Including the bigots and zealots that helped them get this power, such as Zionists, both Jew and non-Jew, Jesuits and Freemasons.
~ ... MORE...
http://discoursewiththepharisees.blogspot.com/2006/11/christs-discourse-with-pharisees.html
This is a huge file (335 KB), just posted a few days ago. If this is something you care about, it might be a good idea to save a copy before it disappears.
"Abstract
Virtual communities are discussed as expressions of the modern tension between individuality and community, emphasizing the role that counterculture and its values played in shaping the virtual community project. This article analyzes postings to the WELL conferences and the online groups that served as incubators and testing ground for the term "virtual community," revealing how this concept was culturally shaped by the countercultural ideals of WELL users and how the tension between individualism and communitarian ideals was dealt with. The overarching conclusion is that virtual communities act both as solvent and glue in modern society, being similar to the "small group" movement. ... The relationship between individuality, self-expression, and communitarianism is probably one of the thorniest issues of our day, and many scholars and activists are still struggling to find the right balance between individualism and communitarianism." ~ From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity
In the research source material, you will see the term "Rorschach test". Since it was a new term for me, I searched and found this:
Most people have heard of the Rorschach test (pronounced "ror-shock"), but few have ever seen a real Rorschach inkblot. The blots are kept secret. When you see an inkblot in a popular article on the test (as in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the Rorschach test), it's a fake: it's an an inkblot, but not one of the inkblots. There are only ten Rorschach inkblots. ~ The Rorschach Test
New Age Identifiers: Age of Aquarius, Networking Movement, Aquarian Conspiracy, Kingdom Age, Golden Age, Humanistic Psychology, Humanism, Secular Humanism. Christ Age, Age of Matreya, Third Force, Atomic Age, Solar Age, Latter Days, New Consciousness, New Church, New Spirituality, Space Age, New Thought Religion, Human Potential Movement, War of Armageddon, End Time, Purification Period and Transcendental Movement..
New Age Symbols: the pentagram, unicorn, rainbow, 666 triangle (or pyramid), Pegasus (winged horse), yin/yang, and the swastika..
New Agers communicate in "code" or "buzz" words.
New Age Code words: are global village, global vision, planetary, new age, peace, one world government, consciousness, altered states, spaceship earth, manifestation, initiation, transformation, meditation, global thread, holistic, holistic, holism, oneness, interdependent, crowded planet, planetizaton, world citizenship, paradigm, transcendent, earth shift, spirit guides, world servers, transpersonal, redistribution, well-being, human potential, divinity of man, positive thinkers, light, emerging planetary culture, guided imagery, brotherhood, UFO's, ESP, cataclysm, mysticism, new world order, new culture, enlightenment, reappearance of the Christ, transition, Age of Pisces, Age of Aquarius, planetary citizen, Lucifer, right brain/left brain, metaphysics, life force, chi, prana, herbal remedies, and ecology...
New Age Philosophy Techniques: Acupuncture, Acupressure, Martial Arts (such as Karate, Judo, Aikido, etc.) Biofeedback, Positive Thinking, PMA Positive Mental Attitude, Holistic Heath, Transcendental Meditation TM, Reflexology, Visualization, Hypnosis, Silva Mind Control, Erhard Seminar Training (est), Zen, Yoga, and Relaxation. There is nothing wrong with taking a break and relaxing, but the New Agers use the word "RELAXATION" as a coverup for Meditation...
New Agers have been able to ensnare Christians into Occult Practices without the Christian being aware of what is actually involved.." (excerpts of Questions and Answers About the New Age Movement by Dr. Cathy Burns, Sharing, 212-S East Seventh Street, Mt. Carmel, PA 17851-2211) THE NEW AGE TREE WITH ALL IT'S BRANCHES
Cyber Warfare: An Analysis of the Means and Motivations of Selected Nation States
Cyber Warfare: Analysis Reports
UNDERSTANDING THE MOSCOW COUP OF AUGUST 1991
"Briefly put, Web 2.0 is a new conceptualization of the social conditions that most prolifically engender the cultivation of pragmatically endowed social knowledge. This intellectual transition consists of an abandonment of the social formalism and stasis associated with institutions, such as the Academy, in favor of an acceptance and an encouragement of an open and an inclusive field." While researching "Web 2.0, I came across the phrase, "World of Warcraft". A Google search produced over 20 million hits. It appears to be about computer interactive gaming, which given the definition of Web 2.0, would be a "pragmatically endowed social knowledge". Computer video games therefore are another phenomena of the "communitarianism philosophy.
Disruption & Opportunity
The Web 2.0 Summit focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway. But within the chaos of disruption lies the seeds of opportunity. ~ Third Annual Web 2.0 Summit
Google Search Results: "Information Age" "Open source" Communitarian Internet
WEBER: I discovered the open source community about four or five years ago. My original thinking was that this group of people was solving familiar governance problems in an unfamiliar way. I was interested in the question, how does the community govern itself? How do the members set up rules? How do they maintain norms? How do they sustain collaboration over time? And most important, why would individuals contribute to this joint product from which they don't get any directly controllable economic reward? That is the first question that many people ask. Why do programmers contribute their time and mind space and energy to this thing?
UBIQUITY: Let me read you a sentence from your book. It says, "People often see in the open-source software movement the politics that they would like to see — a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian 'gift culture' that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a 'virtual' or electronic existence of proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete 19th century capitalist structures with new 'relations of production' more suited to the information age."
WEBER: I'll say this carefully because it's important to put the right tone on it. When Eric Raymond wrote that very well known paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" he did something extremely important and he also did something misleading. The extremely important thing he did was to create a self-conscience statement to the open source developer community. "Here's what we are. Here's what we're doing collectively." That was important because it made explicit among this group a sense that they were doing something unusual.
UBIQUITY: What was misleading about Raymond's paper?
WEBER: What I think he did that was misleading was to use the image of a bazaar. If you read the paper carefully, he describes a magic bubbling cauldron that somehow comes together into a complex operating system called Linux. He didn't have a good powerful explanation for how the community holds itself together. People saw in that what they wanted to see. That's why it became a kind of Rorschach test. ~ Why Open Source Works, "Author Steven Weber looks beyond the hype on Open Source. More than a self-governing utopia, it's a practical, sustainable way of organizing and innovating. Its methods may soon be applied successfully in other sectors. Plus, a "crazy" idea for Microsoft."
The conclusions from this case-study are self-evident:
- The Plone CMS is worth consideration for IT teams trained to work globally .
- Extensible Web systems are part of the future of the global marketplace. Localization is now key to future development on this medium, the Web, as the enterprise becomes increasingly more global.
- As Parish's experience demonstrates, in order to build a rich Web experience and a more interactive approach toward its customers, the enterprise needs to move to the more communitarian approaches offered by new CMS platforms.
~ MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE
As open source has begun over the last several years to attract more public attention, it has taken on a peculiar mantle and become a kind of Internet era Rorschach test. People often see in the open source software movement the politics they would like to see—a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian gift culture that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a virtual or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete nineteenth-century capitalist structures with new “relations of production” more suited to the Information Age. ~ The Success of Open Source
George Por, a pioneer of "collective intelligence" research
George Pór is a social and innovation architect, executive mentor, techno-communitarian visionary, researcher of collective intelligence, entrepreneur, and cartographer of our Emerging Planetary Reality. He is the founder of Community Intelligence Ltd, a transformation agency dedicated to facilitate the transition of organizations to higher patterns of collective intelligence and performance. ~ Golden Candle Awards
Dr. Amitai Etzioni, Director, communitarian Network, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA,
Panalist on Digital Divide, Global Development and the Information Society
The "Digital Divide" is not about the haves (with computers) and the have nots (without computers).
The "Digital Divide" is about removing all social divisions and rendering us all equally subservient slaves to our commune-ity comrades.
Global Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century. By John Robb
To find the latest in system disruption and open source warfare, let's jet to the rural state of Assam in the northeast corner of India...
...
Gmoke: "Perhaps food, water, warmth, light, health, education can be provided by open source communitarian methods."
Gmoke, I think that's the key right there. Perhaps by open-source methods we can enlist marginalized classes in efforts that will make them more self-sufficient.
But first we need to do something about the juntas that don't want this to happen. Ceasing to bankroll them would be a great start. ~ JOURNAL: Exporting Disruption to India
Many people associate the idea of Open Source software with collectivism (socialism, communitarianism, or communism). This is understandable given the language and ideas of some of the movement's founders and prominent participants, and given the average political tendencies of college students (at least here in the US), who seem to form the core of the Open Source movement. That is of course no cause for concern. What troubles me is that I keep noticing an undercurrent of mistrust and even open hostility toward capitalism among Open Source fans. There is really no good reason for this, and I worry that it may grow into something truly dangerous to the movement. ~ Webliography on Open Source Software Development Problems
... we are witnessing the Web's second coming, and it's even got a name, "Web 2.0" - although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies - with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others. Archetypal Web 2.0 companies include Flickr, a photo sharing site; Bloglines, a blog reading service; and MySpace, a music and social networking site.
In other words, Batelle is pointing out that one way to "get it right" is not to sell content to users, but rather to give them the opportunity to create and search their own content. This is not only good business sense, he says, it's also more enlightened — the creators of social software such as Flickr are motivated equally by a desire to "do good in the world" and a desire to make money. "The culture of Web 2.0 is, in fact, decidedly missionary," Batelle writes, "from the communitarian ethos of Craigslist to Google's informal motto, 'don't be evil.'"
O.K. Doing good while making money. Reading this, I'm reminded of Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism and the larger sustainability movement — the optimistic philosophy that weaves together environmental ethics and profitability. But is that what's really going on here? Isn't the "missionary" culture of the internet a bit OLDER than Web 2.0? Batelle is suggesting that Internet capitalists have gotten all misty and utopian; isn't it the case that some of the folks who were already misty and utopian have just started making some money? ~ if:book, capitalism
I can imagine two possible points of resistance within traditional humanities scholars toward such a plan, points that originate in individualism and technophobia.
Individualism, first: it's been pointed out many times that scholars in the humanities have strikingly low rates of collaborative authorship. Politically speaking, this is strange. Even as many of us espouse communitarian (or even Marxist) ideological positions, and even as we work to break down long-held bits of thinking like the "great man" theory of history, or of literary production, we nonetheless cling to the notion that our ideas are our own, that scholarly work is the product of a singular brain. Of course, when we stop to think about it, we're willing to admit that it's not true -- that, of course, is what the acknowledgments and footnotes of our books are for -- but venturing into actual collaborations remains scary. Moreover, many of us seem to have the same kinds of nervousness about group projects that our students have: What if others don't pull their weight? Will we get stuck with all of the work, but have to share the credit?
I want to answer that latter concern by suggesting, as John has, that a collective publishing system might operate less like those kinds of group assignments than like food co-ops: in order to be a member of the co-op -- and membership should be required in order to publish through it -- everyone needs to put in a certain number of hours stocking the shelves and working the cash register. As to the first mode of this individualist anxiety, though, I'm not sure what to say, except that no scholar is an island, that we're all always working collectively, even when we think we're most alone. Hand off your manuscript to a traditional press, and somebody's got to edit it, and typeset it, and print it; why shouldn't that somebody be you?
Here's where the technophobia comes in, or perhaps it's just a desire to have someone else do the production work masquerading as a kind of technophobia, because many of the responses to that last question seem to revolve around either not knowing how to do this kind of publishing work or not wanting to take on the burden of figuring it out. But I strongly suspect that there will come a day in the not too distant future when we look back on those of us who have handed our manuscripts over to presses for editing, typesetting, printing, and dissemination in much the same way that I currently look back on those emeriti who had their secretaries -- or better still, their wives -- type their manuscripts for them. For better or for worse, word processing has become part of the job; with the advent of the web and various easily learned authoring tools, editing and publishing are becoming part of the job as well.
I'm strongly of the opinion that, if academic publishing is going to survive into the next decades, we need to stop thinking about how it's going to be saved, and instead start thinking about how we are going to save it. And a business model that relies heavily on the collective -- particularly, on labor that is shared for everyone's benefit -- seems to me absolutely crucial to such a plan. ~ if:book, open_source
In relation to the open source community, the utopian position is best represented by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which seeks to carve out a social space for the production, circulation, and use of knowledge independent of the logic of capital. The FSF has a moral and philosophical vision based on freedom for producers and users to develop, use, and circulate knowledge that challenges existing legal and cultural structures of intellectual property rights. This philosophy is also based on the communitarian values and practices of sharing historically viewed as emanating from a hacker sub-culture (Levy 1984). Furthermore, the FSF not only draws upon communitarian values but seeks to promulgate them as they were seen to be declining in use and importance among hackers themsleves. On the other hand, the ideological position of the movement is best represented by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which has largely discarded the language of freedom and individual rights in order to promote open source production and philosophy as a revolutionary and potentially very profitable business model, especially for Fortune 500 technology companies. Open source production and philosophy is not meant to challenge any fundamental aspect of the existing economic order but to integrate itself within it. Typical of the ideological strain of the open source community is the rhetoric of the profit-making capabilities of technology: "Our guess is that Linux and open-source software related companies are and will be the hot investment through the end of the millennium" (Dibona et al. 1999:14). Despite this line of reasoning, the proponents of open source as a business model still draw upon utopian imagery and language in which the good of the community is the central image, although the "good" and "community" are usually ambiguous and ill-defined categories. As I will elaborate, this position is not just advocating a link between hacker culture as-it-is and the larger economic sphere, but is an active attempt to re-define and re-represent hacker culture as acceptable and useful in the hopes to bring "hackererdom" from the "ghetto" into mainstream culture (Raymond 1999a). ~ The Politics of Survival and Prestige: Hacker Identity and the Global Production of an Operating System
The free software social ethic also has an important positive component that goes beyond Raymond's weak or liberal emphasis on rights and access. Though these are an important part of the free software ethic - Stallman maintains that the freedoms his licenses guarantee are a human right (Berry, 2004, p.70) 6 - it also emphasises values such as cooperation and communication in productive communities. "The conception of the social good is strongly communitarian and privileges both a vision of a social order that assigns rights and obligations, and one that is fair and equitable" (Berry, 2004, p.73). The rights and obligations that this position implies are taken as a Kantian categorical imperative and should be scrupulously followed by all hackers. ~ Dissertation on the Hacker Ethic and Meaningful Work
The purpose of Sociology of Web 2.0 is to build upon current criticisms of American sociopolitical institutions and networks that are associated with the counter-discourse generated from the cultural field of proponents of direct democracy and its implementation for the democratic reform of America. Its intent is to enhance direct democratic theory with insights derived from the current paradigmatic transformation occurring within technological communities referred to as instances of Web 2.0. Briefly put, Web 2.0 is a new conceptualization of the social conditions that most prolifically engender the cultivation of pragmatically endowed social knowledge. This intellectual transition consists of an abandonment of the social formalism and stasis associated with institutions, such as the Academy, in favor of an acceptance and an encouragement of an open and an inclusive field. It ignores status symbol requisites, which are required of the institution belonging to the Academy, in favor of fostering communities of epistemic agents, who voluntarily contribute to knowledge building communities
Transitioning into the Communications Age: the initial descriptions of the social conditionsd that appear to be emerging. An Extract from the Introduction
"there appears to be a tendency to assess the impact of information technology’s adoption to an organization according to either structural alterations that are engendered by the new resources or by the elevation in the organization’ performance, resulting from the transition to computer based information management" - Information Technology and the Socialogy of Organizations
"The reason I feel compelled to annotate in a modest form the contents of the polemic is the opposition within social theory to conceptualizations of power in Modern society that conceives of this dynamic in a manner opposed to the established Foucauldian paradigm." - Decentralization of Polity Amplifies the Political Influence of Many Unique Walks of Life
