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Friday, May 23, 2003 |
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Another Harvard weblog --- the Center's Weblog.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development.
I like this introductory description of The Digital Divide, an issue detined to become a key issue as Churches and Theological Communication agencies increasingly adopt Web-based technologies, and experience the relational benefits of it; the ones who would fail to reap those benefits are often the ones most likely to need those benefits in order to "make a go" and level the playing field just a bit.
Conceptualizing the “Digital Divide” |from BOLD series intro page at Harvard
Knowledge and Information are key drivers of human freedom, growth, well-being and progress. The Internet and other networked information technologies are capable of delivering this potential widely and effectively. They can help people listen, but can also help them speak and be heard.
Regardless of how “neutral” we may consider information technology networks to be, their ability to deliver the benefits of knowledge and information are cabined by the social, political and economic milieu they operate within. The benefits will likely be shared unequally – some countries will gain more than others; some individuals and groups within countries will gain more than others. Technology-haves gain rapidly while technology have-nots will be left behind. This reinforces, if not increases, the divides. This is the problem of the “digital divide”.
The digital divide operates unchecked in a world without intervention. Fortunately, our world is not one such. National governments, development agencies, inter- and non-governmental organisations, citizens groups and even individuals can take, and have taken, steps to positively influence the technology infrastructure and information environment.
Contemporary efforts aim to:
· make access easier and wider,
· make content more useful and relevant,
· promote entrepreneurial efforts, and
· change laws and policies so as to foster information creation and knowledge sharing
Such efforts improve the readiness of a political economy to gain from the benefits that information, and information and communication technologies have to offer and to share the benefits more widely and equitably.
What are the contours of the efforts we have mentioned above? What is their interplay? How do we choose, if we need to, between the appropriateness of various initiatives? What are the various hurdles that people seeking to change the status quo are faced with in the field and in officialdom? How do we design a plan of action sensitive to the needs and circumstances of a particular region or group? How do we determine what problems are worth dealing with using technology, and in what priority? These are some of the difficult questions that we will ask. We hope you will participate by sharing your experiences, opinions and thoughts.
I'm really glad to see all of this being discussed at Harvard. I want to go back and review some of the resources from the PBS series on The Digital Divide. There was a book by that name thatI have looked at during a few of my Borders/BarnesAndNoble coffee stops.
9:06:52 PM 
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Dave Winer's weblogHost for Bloggers at Harvard.edu (hosted by the the Berkmann Center for Internet and Society at Harvard (Law Blogs) (complete with pics of Starbucks in Cambridge)
9:04:15 PM
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I was just noticing how much stuff there is here lately that have to do with David Weinberger. I started thinking, I wonder if he noticed this, if it would give him the creeps or something? Like , "Blog-stalking" or something. Rest assured, it's just good ol' Google type stuff, and a lot of stuff I've been looking for today, around topics such as Blogging Events, bring up David's JOHO blog since he's blogged a couple of Big "Blogger-topic heavy" conventions recently (ETech and BlogTalk). (and an interview by Weblogsky I found when looking for more Blogging Events stuff., and I knew Jon had gone to that conference)
I also blogged a bit about re-reading Small Pieces, since I heard him and AKMA at Vanderbilt about 3 weeks ago. I blogged the latest "takes" on Small Pieces with some Amazon affiliate linkages so I might increase my "lottery-winner-level" chances of actually getting an affiliate sale. The money thing is getting quite the worry, and I SOOOO wish I could do something worthwhile that would also be profitable for me in that department.
2:27:38 PM
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On the theme of Blogging Events, we have:
Weinberger with several articles (starting here and working their way forward in time, or to the link to the right of "Back to Blog" on the JOHO blog) that are Blogs straight from the Emerging Technologies conference hosted by O'reilly. There were several bloggers blogging the conference, many of the conferences covering various aspects of blogging, so one could say that there were many instances of Bloggers blogging the ETech coverage of Blogging..
2:17:43 PM
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I got a chuckle when I read Jon Lebowky's opening question in an interview here linked to from Jon's site:
You offer Small Pieces Loosely Joined as a way of thinking about the web. I hate to ask you to summarize a concept that filled a whole book, but could you give us an abstract of your thinking? Why are they small, and why are they loose? Read on.....
some highlights:
The pieces are us and what of ourselves we have put on the Net. The pieces are small because they're generally fragments of a life, not carefully researched "products" produced by megacorps. The pieces are loosely joined because the structure of the Web is determined by the hyperlinks we've put in, each one of us, representing our own shifting and amorphous interests.
1:56:13 PM
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A WIRED article that looks like a promising place to start and collect things that couod help me to "pitch" the idea of Web Services as a tool for Church Communication agencies and aspiring ecumenical or denominational news agaencies as a way to allow some of their information and applications to get used and exposed as "syndicated" application.
1:43:27 PM
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Scott emailed me about my earlier post on Blogging Events.
Just a quick blog : I went and looked at his site briefly, and noticed that I want to go back and explore a bit, when I 'm done working on my tasks for today . I noticed how he mentioned "The Barnes and Noble Public Library" (seems like my kind of guy -- som uch of the stuff I'm interested in is not on actaul Library shelves yet, and there's no coffee to drink either -- at least in my library). He also was looking at a Stewart Brand book. Hmmm....Church blogs, Stewart Brand, Barnes and Noble......lots of common interests there.
1:35:36 PM
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I've just been lookingat links to Blogs of Events and presentations. It has its own lingo , ie.
"I'm going to Blog the Conference"
I was just wondering: Is it an "inapropriate" idea to "blog a Church service"; maybe so (tapping on keys would tend to be distracting), but what about "non-worship" events? The Methodist yearly conferences are going on next month (June) , and the Big One is in 2004, the General Conference, in Pittsburgh. It seems that these kinds of events would be a good "test site" to illustrate/exemplify the uses of "blogging" events. It could also serve as a precursor to instigating "Smart Church Mobs", as it would inevitable lead to experiments of all kinds with things of the WiFi -world.
Please leave comments with links to any good sources/examples of Blogging Events (not neccessarily or likely relgious in nature, since there probably aren't any, but good examples, like David Weinberger in Vienna (this link is to one of his posts from Vienna linking to other people who are there, also "Blogging the Event" at Blogtalk. I wonder if David will see the "Trackback" while he's there? -- probably so, since he's using Movable Type which is server based, and he can certainly logon while there. So, if so David, and you have time, Trackback to here too, just to illustrate (once I mirror this post in Radio over to Movable Type).
In the meantime, go to David's list and read the posts before and after that "Listing of other Blogtalk Bloggers" and get a feel for how to Blog an Event.
11:40:56 AM
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It seems there should be a role for me somewhere, with some Denomination or religious/ecumencial agency, to be a combination Web developer/Webmaster, Database developer, and Online Researcher of Communication and Online Theology. That's a mouthful (and a screenful). But the idea is that I have long experience (in Internet Years), as a Developer and Maintainence person, and as a writer/theologian/Internet-junkie, and that these ingredients provide two useful things, either of which should be econmically justifiable to have on staff.
One is the day-to-day tasks needed to keep Websites running, troubleshoot errors, and keep content rotating in and out, and seek out what new thing needs to be constructed. The other is the much needed studies of human behavior, psychological and sociological impact, and "God forbid", the "Spiritual issues". I say "God forbid" becasue so many people dismiss the topic of Online Spirituality as if it was a false issue; or no issue. That these people seeking "spirtuality" online are some form of 21st century mutant, and that they simply need to get their butts off the computer chair and into a Church (as if that was any more of an automatic panacea than they accuse the Internet "utopians" or hypsters of fostering).
8:32:09 AM
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In Give Me That Online Religion, Brenda Brasher says :
In Cyberspace, pastors and priests, rabbis and imams diligently strive to translate or interpret the historic messages of their tradition into virtual geography and digital sacred time.
The problem , I see, is coming up with a Web hermeneutic. In other words, a style of interpretation that befits the onlinen communication paradigm(s); I offer the option of the plural because it's veru much an exploration of many options to see what "works for us".
For me, it's not a call to a mad online rush to "protect" the sacred "dogmas" from the anarchy of the "authority-free" Internet "hacker-ethic" inspired revolutionaries, but to seek to be a fellow sojourner in that world. To be "in the world, but not of it" may get even trickier in theonline sense than the traditional concerns that lie behind those words. There is a sense in which to be "IN the [online] world" requires some expertise in navigation. That we "know the language" , yes, but also that we be able to walk among the veteran and comfortable online personas as peers and as communicators, always willing to "open up the doors" to our own "constructed places".
To be "NOT OF it" is not to be a statement of moral superiority, where we stand as "protectors of the faith" aginast the aforementioned "hordes" of personas who have no absolutes and for whom anything goes (because this is just as bad a case of straw-man, stereotyped, pigeonholed imaginary "struggle" as the fundamentalists fight against the evil conspiracies they rail against). To be "NOT OF IT" is to be an alternative; to be an "oasis" of care and of sensitivity in a context where most Web sites are all "gaga" about "eyeballs" rather than hearts; where the ruling motivation is to "get clicks" on that "BUY NOW" button, or "Clickthroughs" on those links and Banners off on other sites.
8:16:34 AM
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I'm so angry these past few days. I can't escape from the sense of utter waste that my having no job represents for the Church. There is such a dire need for scoping out the territory of the online landscape; to seek out the conversations by persons seeking meaning and causes to believe in, and affirm that the Church is there and is listening and has people who share their passions. But in order to do this, a valiant effort has to be underway. I think of people who have launched and remained in lifetime studies of sociological, psychological, and spirtual impacts of the online relationship and online self and "Wired" society (or , increasingly, "WireLESS" society). People like Howard Rheingold in his watershed The Virtual Community (now in a second edition), or Sherry Turkle and Life on the Screen.
At the very least, I can do ASP and a lot of diverse Web tasks! I've been a professional Webmaster for 5 and a half years, and a pro-bono Webmaster since 1993. I was even a webmaster before I knew HTML and had before I surfed the Web for the first time, because before the Web hit the scene (or at least, MY scene), I was thinking about such things as "A Compuserve for the Church", where I discussed with ecunet folks how the Church needs to be about constructing online "villages" or "worlds" , perhaps along the idea of a Virtual City consisting of Schools, Libraries, Coffeeshops, Churches, and Town Squares (and even Marketplaces). Now, with the online population exploding, and people becoming "untethered" from the wired-operated Internet and finding ways and places to connect in many locales (via WiFi), the urgency for the Church to have some prescence and ability to converse intelligently is growing to epic proportions.
7:56:04 AM
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