After four years of operation a circle has come to an end… The notion of a hybrid society is not as close to my thinking, as it was before…
A new circle begins at Learningecologies.net, builting on the work of hybridsociety.wordpress.com.
![By Fubar Obfusco [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://hybridsociety.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/janus-vatican.jpg "Janus-Vatican")
Janus: the god of the transitions. A head looking back at the past and another one looking at the forthcoming. Placed usually in bridges and doors. By Fubar Obfusco [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
http://ekendraonline.com/edu/library-nu-closure-3293.html
Library.nu, aka ebooksclub.org, aka gigapedia.com finally shut down. I learnt about library.nu about 2 years before and I knew from the first time it would close sooner or later. I was impressed of continuing its service. I heard various explanations like “its server is located at Sweden so it is protected by copyright laws.
I think copyright laws, initially aiming at protecting individuals and their rights, now turned to protect profits of large firms while inhibiting knowledge dissemination. Authors must be paid for their work but some companies are getting enormous profits while other people cannot afford the price. I don’t see any reason for a pdf version of a book to be sold more than 1-2 dollars.
I think library.nu is an innovative idea in books dissemination, both in terms of functioning and user interface. Now a vast number of people around the world know from direct experience how knowledge dissemination should have been and this fact cannot be revoked. I hope our Society to reach a point where such a site will be legal, with book prices of 1 dollar or less. An 1 dollar library… Till then let’s enjoy the obscurantism of the modern era.
http://www.doccop.com/index.html?nc=0.18362667
http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/
http://www.reprintwriters.com/copyright-checker/check.php
http://www.plagium.com/index.cfm?mode=text
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/1-how-to-find-plagiarism/
blogpost:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-online-plagiarism-checkers-protect-your-content/7931/
http://www.whywaldorfworks.org/
![By Drawing: Leyla Dilmen (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Blackboard_04143.jpg/180px-Blackboard_04143.jpg)
Drawing by: Leyla Dilmen (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
WikiDashboard is a graphical tool that allow searching Wikipedia articles showing a graphical distribution of edits and editors preceding each article.. Quite useful because this distribution can help you to decide about the validity of an article..
http://wikidashboard.appspot.com
“Someone with a brain for math, finesse with computers, the eyes of an artist and more. … an intense curiosity to understand what’s behind the data. … to show where patterns emerge. …”
A quite interesting story by Yuki Noguchi at NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/11/30/142893065/the-search-for-analysts-to-make-sense-of-big-data
Inspired by the above article and the quotations listed I wonder: how difficult is to understand the personal story of guy in comparison to the discovery of patterns in big data. May be personal data are big data too. Micro-patterns vs Macro-patterns… Is the same story?
ICT stands for Information and Communication Technologies. Is Wikipedia an ICT? a web 2.0 paradigm? or a promising social media? and “The medium is the message” as McLuhan said. But what is this media? Is it pure technology? And is a pure technology enough to make a change? May be is enough.. or may be is just enough to spark a change.. or may be it depends.. The focus of human attention on technology and media is inevitable, or may be inevitable. The medium is the first thing someone usually observes. It has material or even virtual dimensions, it is there, you can touch it.
What is the medium that Wikipedia visitors see? It is the wiki interface but most of all the articles, there there, they can be touched.. e, sorry I mean they can be read, or printed and then touched. So what is Wikipedia? Simple answer, it is an Encyclopedia, a collection of articles and a supporting technology, wiki software. So simple.
Something missing? hm.. May be Wikiedians? Nonymous editors and admins supporting and defending the project. And anonymous ip contributors contributing small bricks that summed together can build great buildings. And all these contributors, nonymous and anonymous, are human agents, cummunicating with each other.
So, Wikipedia as a technology or something else? Who invent Wikipedia? Jimbo? Cunningham? What is Wikipedia? an Encyclopedia? the medium that changed the world? what? And where human agency is in all this? Or just where is human behavior in all this?
If you do not look at want you want, you never gonna find it. Only by rare chance, you never know.. There is no certainty in anything. –> Destination
When you want something, you won’t find it. Your passion stunts you. You see only what you eager for and you miss the context. — Context
Destination and context. Two concepts bounded together with complexity.
“Always keep Ithaca in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal.. But do not hurry the voyage at all..”. Constantine Cavafy.
What is the relation between Destination and Context? There is the point. The pattern that connects..
Many researchers use surveys for investigating virtual communities, on-line behaviors and digital citizens’ attitudes towards various subjects. Although I found surveys a very useful scientific tool for social inquiries, I wonder whether these surveys are grounded on a strong basement.
I thing a pilot qualitative exploration of the desired domain is an indispensable step to ensure a strong research foundation. Virtual communities and social media are still an unknown and constantly evolving field.
As Gregory Bateson noted it down”As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.”. New land requires a flexible methodological approach..
I don’t know if I was smarter back then but I sure THOUGHT I was smarter. It made me smile several years later when the department chair showed me his evaluation of a new member of our department which began,“Like most new Ph.D.’s, X thinks he is smarter than God, but we expect he’ll get over it …”I don’t know if I was smarter back then but I sure THOUGHT I was smarter. It made me smile several years later when the department chair showed me his evaluation of a new member of our department which began,“Like most new Ph.D.’s, X thinks he is smarter than God, but we expect he’ll get over it …”
excerpt from:
http://www.thejuliagroup.com/blog/?p=651
Barry wellman argues that “Many analysts view social networks much as aliens might view the earth’s people: hovering above and observing the relationships linking all members of the population”. This is the Copernican view of an entire social system. And Barry Wellman continues “..whole network studies are not always feasible or analytically appropriate. Those who use them must define the boundaries of a population, compile a list of all members of this population , and collect a list of all the relationships (of the sort the analyst is interested in) among the members of the population.” After presenting this argument, Wellman declares his position: “Therefore many community network analysts … have concentrated on studying smaller personal (or ego-centered) networks defined from the stand point of focal persons: a sample of individuals at the centers of their own networks. Rather than showing the universe as it is viewed by an outside observer, personal network studies provide Ptolemaic views of networks as they may be viewed by the individuals at their centers: the world we each see revolving around us.”
Although I understand and acknowledge the importance of a Ptolemaic view on a social network, which is more close to a psychologist, I don’t understand why Wellman, a sociologist, prefer this view over Copernican view, which I think is more “sociological” and as important as the “psychological” view. I think both ways of looking at a social network is very valuable and can answer to different, complementary research questions. I think in his effort to reject the term of community and recognize only social networks, Wellman adopts the Ptolemaic View. Copernican view results to the term of community, not necessarily locally determined, but to a clearly bounded group of people according to “a list of all the relationships (of the sort the analyst is interested in)…”, that is a kind of shared identity or common aim/challenge/interest. Wellman argues that a group is just a densely knit and tightly bounded type of social networks. He prefers to recognize these structures as special sub-clusters in a person’s personal network.
According to Barry Wellman “most studies of social support have looked only at how different types of social relationships provide different kinds of social support… Yet social relationships do not exist in isolation but are embedded in social networks. A network is more than the sum of its ties because the composition and structure of a network can affect the resources to which network members have access and the ways in which social relationships operate.”
Sequential Analysis as a research method is actually a pragmatic (not meaning) analysis of a dialogue, according to an aspect of the dialogue meaning as defined by a defined, mutually exclusive and exhaustive, repertoire of utterances.
“Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow and steady, was never read from the rocks. It presented a common cultural bias, in part a response of nineteenth century liberalism to a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history… The history of life, as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era.” Stephen J. Gould
Far away from equilibrium a system can be driven by a minor factor to the one or the other side of a bifurcation. In the modern informational era we are living our world in a state far from equilibrium, where rapid, unpredictable and sudden changes are happening all the time. This is a macro view. From a micro view changes are affecting the lives of millions people, confronting economic crises, poverty or threat of poverty, losing jobs, unemployment, pollution and deterioration of human life in all aspects. In this state even a minor change, the equivalent of a buterfly movement, can lead the world system to a state of upper orginization or to a total destruction. In either case, times of dramatic, rapid social changes result in human and not human lives paying the price: stress, psychological burden, death, lost dreams and painful adaptation to a world with an unpredictable route. The scream created by Edvard Munch 1893, although successfully representing the agony of the man in the transition to industrial society, today is representing a fragment of the scream the modern man needs to echo in the time of informational society…
We live in the time interval of great rapidity. Until the next stable state we have to pay the price. Well I don’t want to pay this price, me or anyone else. Is that possible?
“For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct producive force, not just a decisive element of the production system.” M.Castells
In pro-informational societies, elites learn by doing, thereby modifying the applications of technology, while most people learn by using, thus remaining within the constraints of the packaging of technology. What is the difference, if any, in modern Informational societies?
“… on-line communities are fast developing not as a virtual world, but as a real virtuality integrated with other forms of interaction in an increasingly hybridized everyday life.
… a new culture is forming, the culture of real virtuality, in which the digitized networks of multimodal communications have become so inclusive of all cultural expressions and personal experiences that they have made virtuality a fundamental dimension of our reality.”
Manuel Castells in The rise of the network society..
Teenagers’ bedrooms have become command centers, with everything just a click away. Mark Bauerlein is a professor at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation.
The story of how a simple home made video with a trivial subject (little David after visiting dentist) became very popular and resulted fame and money to the family. This video reveals the potential dynamics of new social media for individuals.
In this video Howard Rheingold among others talk about literacies in social media. Participation is an important literacy in digital era. According to Rheingold “expressing yourself and connecting with your peers is something you want to do especially the youth”. That’s why young people connect to the Internet and participate in social media and virtual communities. Not because their teachers or parents told them to do so.
It is a human need to connect with peers and express ideas. And this need is present in the whole
history of man as a social animal. However the ways to satisfy this human need are different in the era of participatory media. Today we confront the challenge of taking advantage of social media in formal education system. Participation and collaboration can form Personal Learning Networks for education modern young persons. To do this modern educators need to participate and use social media and also need to know how to make a platform for their students to participate and form a virtual learning community.
In social internet age, literacies are as important, or even more, as technologies. And peers are better than classmates. Personal Learning Networks are a form of social capital.
Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group…
New social media literacies is best to be considered as social skills rather than autonomous user technical knowledge about how to use modern web 2.0 tools. However it is still midnight at Palermo… Schools in Greece are still trying to educate students in modern ICT technology, ignoring that the essential point is cultivating social skills to navigate in the virtual sphere. So school’s lessons are becoming more and more irrelevant to the modern reality and consequently more and more boring. Education always failed to educate the inquiring mind while succeeding to educate mathematicias, engineers, linguistics. Today the question is whether school will manage to educate the collective, social and inquiring inteligence. Should we be optimistic?
I consider myself as not techno-phobic and open to new ideas and 
evolutions in our social interactions. However, from time to time I hear concerns about human rights in facebook social network. So I looked at the terms of use of facebook. This is something I should have done before joining this social network, but I remember I press the button “I agree with terms of use” mechanically, anyway I was eagerly wanting to learn about this new social media and in any case I could leave later If I wouldn’t like it (so naive to think so!). So now I read the terms of use (last revised on February 4, 2009) and I feel very angry. Although I have no law expertise I think there is no respect to human and individual’s rights. Below are the sections that drive me mad (from February 4th, 2009 revision).
“We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these Terms at any time without further notice. Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.” What this means? Do I have to check the terms of use everyday to see if there is a revision? Is this possible? Why guys you impose such a term? Wouldn’t have been more fair to send a notification mail when there is a revision? Why facebook wants to be able to change terms without noticing users? This term makes me suspicious, at least.
“If you are between the ages of 13 and 17, we strongly suggest that you seek parental consent to use the Facebook Service.” This is a term to laugh with. I thin it is not applicable. There is no teenager who is going to ask for parental consent. I think facebook wants to show that is responsible but I think this term is a pure hypocrisy. The ages between 13 and 17 are were the future and best clients are recruited and of course facebook doesn’t want to miss them. But what a hypocrisy!
“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you … (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising …” Again I want to state that I am not a lawyer but I think this is very bad and dangerous. No respect to my personality. Why not to have a social media service that respects my rights and treats me like a human being? I want to own the intellectual rights of my personal photos, of my own thoughts and of my own artifacts.
Of course in terms of use it is clear stated that use of the service is at my own risk. And I could have chosen not to join. I voluntarily joined this social network and agreed with terms of use. To some extent this is right. But users join facebook or continue to flock to facebook, because it’s there where their friends are. So everybody can deny facebook but there is a social pressure. Remember the term about ages 13 to 17. These are the ages where people are more vulnerable to social pressure. Teens are doing what their classmates are doing. They are imitating and try to appear cool and renowned. May be there is a choice for me not to join facebook. But for a teenager there is not such a choice. That’s why it is a great hypocrisy.
Another concern I have is the possibility of leaving facebook. Well actually you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave… Users of facebook are unable to completely their profiles, even after “deactivating” their accounts. The users’ personal information (including photos) remains on facebook’s servers even after a user deactivates his/her account, though no longer “accessible”. However, the account can be activated again at any time. Users who wish to completely remove their private information must log in and delete manually all profile’s content, then deactivate the empty account. However, email information persists. May be in no other social network is so difficult to delete your account. Steven Mansour provides further info of how to get rid of facebook in his “2504 steps to closing your facebook account” (www.stevenmansour.com).
I don’t like the idea of letting a private cooperation (even a public orginization) owns my private data and handle it in a malicious way. And I don’t like facebook to disrespect my human rights. And I don’t like a company to capitalize and utilize my human need for social networking in the information society. I want a hybrid society human-centric not company-centric. New social media does not necessarily means less human rights and knowledge is power. We have to demand our rights granted or move to other social networks.
Modern blogs and web 2.0 sites are media that offer us the opportunity to distribute our 
thoughts, suggestions, opinions, novels, poems and artifacts to a potential global audience. A blog post can easily be read (or actually accessed and seen) by many many guys.
Sharing a thought, a poem or anything personal in a closed circle of friends or acquaintances is a quite different process leading to a totally different lived experience. Even publishing in a local community through a local paper magazine is quite different to internet blogging.
Modern cyber culture offers new ways of expression which are not mutual exclusive with the traditional ones. However human time is limited so blogging actually results to the reduction of other ways of communication, such as local publishing or live face to face sharing. This is bad or good?
The available media to express our thoughts are determined by the specific cultural-historical context and cannot easily be compared. Sometimes we have to go with the flow, otherwise we gonna be swept off. We are determined by the flow and we co-determine the flow, but we cannot ignore it.
Once upon a time, in 80’s, I was going to my neighborhood’s shop to buy a magazine and get the information I was looking for. I still enjoy reading a magazine or a book when I have time (rarely unfortunately). But I cannot ignore internet resources, blogs and sites, where I get up to date knowledge, hear different individual’s opinions and have access to collaborative work.
I feel nice when I read a beuatiful poem in a blog’s post. But I don’t feel unique, although sometimes I wanted. Nevertheless, I feel happy being able to share my thoughts in this blog and have the opportunity to listen to different points of you. It is something controversial…
GGG stands for Giant Global Graph. It is a term first used by Tim Berners-Lee the guy who is considered as inventor of WWW. The word Graph may be is more suitable to describe the multimodal connections between persons in online social networks like myspace and facebook, instead of the term Web. But this is a matter of convention. The term Web is, nevertheless, used metaphorically to express the amazing amount of connections between documents and objects, representing, nowadays, persons, feelings and ideas in a semantic web.
According to many guys, Internet and the resulting web is the most succesful artifact ever created… Artifacts are central points in our lives because their ways of mediating the outside world and the internal psychological processes, according to Vygotsky. So Internet is altering us and we are forming Internet in a perpetual circle of mutual determination. What we can observe and research on today is just an instant of this mutual negotiation.
However, despite the changes in our psychological processes, in our cognitive development and in our body, due to sitting all day in front of a computer screen, the feelings, the sense of happiness or misery, are sensed by our very corporal body, the body of the pre-historical, verbal inhabitant of this planet, the body of the industrial worker, the body innocent victims of today war crimes, the body of the digital-born teenager in the virtual community of facebook.
I feel the need to understand humans’ feeling and pain and I am looking for a better place to live, with dignity and respect to human feelings and lives, a place hybrid or not, does not matter, just a human society…
Maybe there are virtual worlds but the pain is always real and shocking. I am wishing health, love and prosperity for all people!
Syntagma square is the most central place in Athens, just in front of the Greek parliament. 
Actually syntagma in Greek language means constitution, the very book of democratic principles that form our republic. Today I was impressed by a facebook event called “Erasmus Freeze in Syntagma”. It is about an open invitation to freeze, stop moving and doing anything, at syntagma square on a given time, initiated by a group of Erasmus students at Athens.
The facebook event and the corresponding public invitation to participate is accompanied by a web link to youtube showing a similar event held at New York (http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo&feature=related). It was very funny and simultaneously persuading to participate. In addition to this, on the specific event’s page there is a passage explaining the rationale of the movement and prompting to join as a reaction to the constantly increasing running in our modern lives. The fact is that in contemporary enormously sized cities we are all running all the time even if there in nothing to catch, with no specific logical reason.
This constant running is a source of anxiety feeding a vicious circle and leading to a substantial deterioration of living quality. However, what is really impressive is that the new technology mediated virtual social environment constructed at cyberspace offers great opportunities for active civilian participation and citizen initiated movements. Social internet and web 2.0 technologies are facilitating the initiation of such movements by providing the suitable interface, the forum to communicate and organize successful social movements.
Ancient Greece was the first place where democracy emerged in cities-states like Athens in the pure form of direct democracy. All the citizens were voting and participating in taking decisions. Direct democracy, a democracy without representatives, maybe is returning back to its birthplace through European students and citizens at Erasmus Freeze event at Syntagma square. Join the freeze:
Before the era of Information Society children were learning through direct apprenticeship and through
direct social interactions in the context of the family, the village or the adjacent city. Information society led to the formation of a global village without clear defined boundaries to hinder the information interchange between the global citizens. In modern society implicit learning takes place due to the norms imposed by mass media. Television and cinema are central actors in today’s learning processes. Family, school and local community remain important learning contexts but mass media play a paramount role by defining what is social accepted as “cool”, trendy and modern which is very important for children and teens as well as for the rest of us.
Mass media and the resulted global village are the “trademarks” of information society. Today however, Internet technologies and the resulted virtual communities constitute a discrete stage in information society because they result to totally computer-mediated social interactions. The salient characteristic of interactivity was missing in traditional mass media like television. Computer-mediated social interactions lead to the formation of virtual social relations or, to be more accurate, to the formation of real social relations based on a virtual space. People entering virtual communities like facebook, myspace, youtube or flickr they feel like joining a real-world localized community, a place full of emotions and lived social experiences with other virtual-mates.
According to the situative approach, learning is a socio-cultural process directly related with living in a society and interacting with other persons. Learning is a social process, so social relations even if mediated by computers and internet lead to learning. Today, children and adolescents use internet social tools, like chat or social networking sites (SNS) more and more in an increasing rate.
There are some attempts to utilize specialized social networking sites to facilitate learning at a class level. These experiments are very important, not because of the very fact that maybe we can use social networking sites to improve learning by “recruiting” a new teaching tool, but mainly because through such experiments we can understand what is changing in the way people are learning. The shift from oral tribes to literate ones changed the very core of human mental and cognitive processes. The increased mediation of human sociality by computer machines maybe causes analogous alterations in our own psychological functions. How learning and cognitive processes are affected by living in a hybrid society? That is the question…
Two days before I was really shocked by a group invitation on facebook named: “Memory of 3yr old
Jamie Bulger PLEASE READ!”. It was shocking to me remembering this disgusting murder. Little Jamie Bulger was only 3 years old when kidnapped by two 10 years old boys. According to this facebook group: “They took Jamie on a walk for over 2 and a half miles, along the way stopping every now and again to torture the poor little boy who was crying constantly for his mummy. Finally they stopped at a railway track where they brutally kicked him, threw stones at him, rubbed paint in his eyes, pushed batteries up his anus and cut his fingers off with scissors. Other mutilations were inflicted but not reported in the press.“. This facebook group is a call to protest against the fact that “This week Lady Justice Butler-Sloss has awarded the two boys (now men), anonymity for the rest of their lives when they leave custody with new identities.” (as reported in this facebook group.
After reading the above I felt angry and craving to join the group. I were remembering the incident from the news, but I wasn’t remembering these brutal details. However, suspicious as usual by what I see on Internet I decided to check the facts twice from other sources. At wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger among others I found that: “They then placed batteries in his mouth . False reports claiming the batteries were pushed up his anus were spread by a chain letter. The letter also claimed that Bulger’s fingers were cut off using scissors; this is also untrue. James suffered skull fractures as a result of the iron bar being struck around his head; this wound is believed to have caused his death.” Jamie Bulger case deserve great attention as it is. There is no need for extra false details. And the worst is that may be the the creator of this facebook group doesn’t know that his/her story is partially true and participates in the propagation of this false (half true) information.
I think wikipedia cannot be fully trusted (as everything!) and I have to triple check. However I like to state here that on internet very often we read partially true information. And although with normal lies is relatively easy to recognize them, this is not the case when we confront half truth. With half truth, or partially truth, the true part of the information invokes part of our previous experiences, knowledge or rationality. A major problem in society is to distinguish between lies and truths, to check the validity of digital information sources. In Hybrid Society and in virtual settlements this problem is even more hard to cope with. And I think modern adolescents, true digital natives, are really exposed to information traps like the described above, unless they receive proper education and instruction to handle the today’s “information mess”. Are the educational systems ready to handle digital challenges?
At this point an ancient Greek philosopher advises us: Ώσπερ γαρ την μέλιτταν ορώμεν εφ’ άπαντα μεν τα βλαστήματα καθιζάνουσαν, αφ’ εκάστου δε τα βέλτιστα λαμβάνουσαν, ούτω δει και τους παιδείας ορεγομένους μηδενός μεν απείρως έχειν, πανταχόθεν δε τα χρήσιμα συλλέγειν.
Today more and more persons are choosing to communicate via social networking sites. In digital
spaces like facebook you have the sense you have all your friends together in a cyber-neighborhood. One consequence of this is that someone feels no need to call his/her friends and meet them for a drink or dinner, to see each other and discuss in a time-spatial proximity. If I feel I see my friends on facebook, then there is no need to meet them. I have already learned their news in “minifeed”. I read the wall posts. I know they are good and healthy, so there is no need for more intimate contact. So virtual intimacy is growing by reducing direct contact.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that we are facing a totally different quality of communication and sociality. There is a lack of direct body contact which is replaced by virtual contact, characterized by different qualities. This has significant results in the area of individual’s psychology and in the ways of social interaction and communication. The hybrid new environment combines virtual and direct social contact. Due to this there is a transformation of psychological functions in the area of conception, imagination, memory, emotions, cognitive procedures and mental functions, as well as learning processes. This transformation of psychological mechanisms can be compared to the transformation due to the transition from oral to literate societies.
Nowadays being wired in the social networking’s cyberspace means to be physical separated by the means of direct contact. Cyber wired but physical disconnected resulting in a different quality of intimacy. Body contact, smell and feromones were always a significant way of moving from individuality to humanity, from individual to person. For thousands of years human psychological mechanisms were developed without literacy and virtuality. The last few thousand years literacy dramatically changed our mental horizons. Virtuality in the last few years may be is changing our route in a way that will be understood in the future by the next fully digital generation.
This is not science but I beleive time and spatial closeness is the key to strong, intimate and health providing personal relations. Be wired results to be physical disconnected, results to be not touched, literally and metaphorically.
I think today in Greece the winning team is Digital Immigrants. But this is a
game we know we gonna lose. Sooner or later, Digital Natives, will conquer the world. Digital Natives are the people born in the era of Hybrid Society and in the context of computer mediated communication and information super highways. For digital natives virtual social interactions are taken for granted and computer’s mediation is inevitable.
I have to confess that I used a personal PC for the first time in my life at the age of 18. My whole school years were pure with no computers and cell phones. I first met the guy named Internet at the age of 21 but at that time I couldn’t even imagine its evolution and its multiplexion with our lives. I consider myself as immigrand in the cyberspace. And I wander what are the differences between my generation and digital natives generation. What are the differences in the learning processes, in the formation of cognitive procedures, in cognitive development, in socialization, in mental health? And at the end what is the overall impact on quality of life and on human spirit? to cyber or not to cyber… That is the question…
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is a wonderful book. Full of emotions advanced ideas and valuable
simplicity. This book cannot easily be categorized. Is not a simple novel, is not a scientific book. Actually it is letter, full of valuable and emotional material, to his children. The book was issued in April 2008 just three months before his death. Randy Pausch passed away in July 25th, 2008 due to pancreatic cancer.
In his book Randy Pausch is writing about fulfilling dreams, his own dreams and others’ dreams. But this is just a “head-fake”. Actually is a letter to his children about what he wanted to tell them but they were to young to understand. However this emotional father’s letter to his children is valuable for every children and every adult. It is a passage full of simple and useful advises for everybody’s life. But surely his children will read it in very special way.
The Last Lecture was very helpful to me and make me think about matters of existence, life value, dignity, compassion, humility, intelligence and time management. As a computer scientist I also enjoyed the section about Alice project (www.alice.org) which I think is an important educational environment for teaching programming. It is more suitable for modern students in comparison with Logo language. It is object-oriented and 3-d environment. Very creative software.
I feel grateful to Randy Pausch for his contribution to our life and I am sure his three children and wife will adore him also through the memories and guides he left behind for them.
Randy Pausch was offering a course named “Building virtual worlds” at Carnegie Mellon University and was a head member of ETC (Entertainment Technology Park) at the same university.
Communications Technology always changes the available for 
communication ways. Literacy, for example, made possible to pass people thoughts and ideas through different generations and human communities without the need for oral communication and with a great level of accuracy (with respect to the fact that orality is a completely different way of thinking and communicating in comparison with literacy). Electronic media, wired and wireless communications changed the available communication pathways and caused what Gergen calls the absent presence.
Online social networking (OSN) is a new communication technology. It is not new regarding the technological infrastructure and communicating tools. Internet and computer networks are available since 1970’s. However Online social networking is new a technology because incoroperate ideas and methods of social interaction never used before in human history. Such a new idea is the infinite interconnection with others through common friends. The other idea is the social construction of identity in social networking virtual environments. In these fully technology mediated environments we are known by the company we carry. However is not difficult to construct a strong social identity becouse relations in environments like facebook are rather superficial in comparison to face-to-face relations. Welcome Homo Hybridious!
McLuhan divides history in 4 discrete seasons: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, Gutenberg galaxy and electronic era. Every stage is distinguished by a new invention with enormous social impact: literacy, typography and information society. Online social networking is a technology (in a wider consideration) that may be leads to the next stage, to hybrid society era. I think hybrid society is a distinct era because social relations change dramatically by the addition of a virtual part, a virtual lived experience that is complementary and multiplexed with normal lived experience.
People today interact socially in a natural world and the same time interact socially in a computer mediated world, in the world of online social networking. Both social interactions are lived by the very same corporal human body. So they are not distinct experiences but they rather consist a unique hybrid social lived experience.
I think Hybrid Social era as a distinct nest stage of information society because of two major reasons.
Hybrid social networking experience is completely new social experience with the theoritical possibility to be connected with all the world population through the friends-of-friends capability, never known before. Second by the characteristic of the powerful social construction of identity. In facebook we are known by our friends and what they say about us.
Modern society is hybrid consisted of a virtual and a real world part. What about learning. According to 
Vygotsky and other thinkers, learning is a social process. We learn when we interact with others. Children are learning in families, local societies, tv and media, Internet and virtual communities. What is left for school? Well school is also a place of social interactions and learning. An important issue is the combination of social interactions and learning procedure. This is done be Virtual Learning environments like Moodle. However these environments are course-centric, so social interactions within are kept to a minimum level. Maximizing social interactions can be done with the use of educational social networking technologies. That is a student-centric and not lesson-centric educational platform. May be a kind of social-extended and user centered Moodle platform. So every student can have a central user profile and approaches educational material and educational social activities.
I am not sure whether the above idea is functional or not. Finally may be we have to keep some things traditional. Technology cannot be the drug to treat every disease. But we have to check it. The fact is that modern students are definitely using social networking for their needs.
Even if social networking is proven to worth use it in a class, introducing the procedure into school practice is a very hard task. A great effort is required to educate teachers and pay the cost and nobody intends to do so. What I see in my country is always formal training programs for teachers that are implemented during teachers free time, without paying them. And always the content of the programs are at least nothing worthies the time to attend. I cannot understand why someone who want to train teachers to a modern approach, uses traditional approach in his/her very teaching! I assume he/shedoes not know what is supposed to teach.
Great Expectations…
virtual reality worlds bring a totally new social environment for mankind. Human psychological characteristics developed through many years of evolution in a natural environment with no virtual stimulus. Modern hybrid society imposes new ways of social interactions. We have the body of a primitive hunter in a technology mediated social environment. In any new context some men are better adapted and some others no. Natural selection is expanded to include technological adaptation.
Virtual experience is altering human psychology in many ways. New acquaintances in facebook are reinforced by social contacts, guaranteeing the individual’s integrity. Social networking users are social defined beings. In facebook we are known by the company we carry with us. Virtual experience is affecting real world processes and vice verse. Human cognitive functions are context sensitive. New technology mediated social environment is expected to change human thinking.
Learning was always a social process and a fumdamental mean for human development. Today learning is also a social networking process. Hybrid society lead to hybrid experience and hybrid social learning.
This is a phrase from Randy Pausch’s famous book “the Last lecture”: when we are connected to others, we become better people. The fact is that man is a social animal. We want to be with others, we want to engage with others, we want to communicate and interact with others. The rules of social engagement and the allowed and offered ways for people interaction are impos
ed by the given cultural-historical context.
People are determined by the surrounding society and also determine and change society in a mutual way. Place and history and current events co-construct the human fate. Human actions are causing changes in the already modulated historical-cultural social capital to be delivered as a social context for the subsequent generation.
According to this historical-cultural approach, online social networking (facebook etc.) is the result of the appearance of some concurrent factors. Information Society, modern communication technology and infrastructure, social parameters of living in modern crowded big-cities are some of these factors. Modern citizens and adolescents are modulated by social networking and simultaneously are define the dimensions of social internet.
We are humans and we need to be connected to be humans. But what is the role and the place of social networking connectivity in relation with the traditional ways of social interactions that includes human touch? Is virtual experience similar to lived-real world experience? Is it superior? Is it inferior? Is it complementary?
We live our lives in present time. Our life today is hybrid with a virtual and a real-world part. And we don’t know, we cannot now how our life would have been without internet and modern communications technology. So we can’t make comparisons and decide what is best. We have to live in the specific historical-cultural snapshot and cannot do otherwise. May be that’s why we have to understand what is going on, how computer and internet mediation is affecting personal and social psychological processes. How our social mind is changing in the social media era, what are the possibilities, the new horizons and the pitfalls.
In any case biological and cultural development do not occur in isolation. Social interaction and social learning actually lead to cognitive development. May be the same is happening with social networking learning…
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) or Learning Management Systems (LMS) are widely used internationally at least for the 10 past years. In Greece, Universities are using VLEs the last few years. However in secondary education Moodle platform came as an innovation in official school net (www.sch.gr) only the previous year and in a limited framework.
VLEs are course-centric. So in a moodle installation the central unit is the course. Social networking is person-centric. So in facebook the central unit are the individual’s profile. Youtube is object-centric, so the central unit is the media. What about a combination of moodle and facebook? What about a person-centric VLE? Is it going to be a new learning experience or a distracting one? And how can be integrated with collaborative activities in order to create zones of proximate development?
The fact is that Greek adolescents are definitely using online social networking in a very sensitive period of their life. Very often students are surfing in social networking sites during lesson time. We have to
study the phenomenon and not to close our eyes.What are the social implications of this behavior? Is it possible to use specific social networking utilities for educational purposes?
I think a good educational paradigm will be the parallel use of a traditional VLE (moodle) with Person-centric, institution-specific VLE (elgg). And I support the use of Alice software for creating collaborative and constructivist learning activities.
I don’t want to be technophobic. I just remember some years before the first appearance of Speech recognition software. At that time there was a great expectation about the end of computer keyboards and keyboard writing. Typewriting wouldn’t be necessary any more. Today is clear to me that keyboards will not be replaced. What we are thinking at a given time is not always clear to us. We need time to think and to reshuffle our thoughts. This is the very point where typewriting is essential. We need to add words or change the order of the sentences. Hand-writing or keyboard-writing is a way of thinking and managing our ideas, is not a way of expressing an already clarified passage inside our brain.
The fact is that with any kind of innovation cannot be sure or make accurate estimations about public acceptance and success. We have to try and check after. The truth is out there…
Online social networking is a new social communication technology. A new computer mediated environment, fascilitating social interactions (or inhibiting essential human contact according to others). Most people believe that virtual (or better mixed) social interactions is the enevitable human future or even the today reality. But I think we have to wait and see. May be the result will be saturation and going back or adopting something new. Unfortunately future is unknown. This is the human curse or may be the magic of life. Let Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos do their job.
time and space… time and virtual space… lived experience and virtual experience…
Traditional time metering is defined by natural and social phenomena. A 24 hours day is defined by the alternation of light and darkness (natural phenomenon), a year by the alternation of seasons (natural phenomenon). A modern 7 days week is defined by the sequence of 5 or 6 working days and a free (or wished so!) weekend (social phenomenon). People suffering from work burn out they see friday as heaven and monday as hell…
I wonder whether days, weeks and months are suitable measuring units for time in virtual environments like facebook. In virtual dimension there is no sun light and moonlight (sometimes this is the case in modern cities!), no working days and holidays no season changes. Actually a facebook user can have a sense of the season from the photos uploaded and this is because of a connection to real dimension. But there is no clear correspondence between time in face-to-face environments and virtual environments. In virtual communities we have session varying from a short facebook account check to a pathological long net gaming period.
How we measure virtual time and how this measurement is connected with off-line experienced time?
At the end time is the only good we cannot save and store…
… but my week has 7 days …
You are the … facebook queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
Facebook queen, feel the beat from the newsfeed
You can chat, you can jive, having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that cam, dig in the facebooking queen
Yes!!! you can have everyone you wish!
In facebook the potential to meet more and more possible mates has converted singles to consumers comparing “products” and looking for “opportunities”. I think it is the result of the modern society in general to oversupply potential chances. However the “opportunities” are only potential, usually virtual and very rarely accomplished.
Modern capitalistic societies are based in the illusion that you can be reach and happy. And indeed you have the potential. But this is an illusion because in reality only very very few men will fulfill their dream. In online social networking and dating we have an analogous situation. Individuals see a lot of stuff, compare the “products” and make choices that seldom comes to a result. Of course an individual who is lonely and isolated in traditional face-to-face environments maybe will have better chances with online social networking.But I think the oversupply of potential opportunities is enough to destroy one’s personal life and over estimate his/her abilities.The image of a couple sharing the dream of unified life is replaced by the agony of personal and professional evolution.
… unless you have set it up yourself!!!
Today research methodology is too mechanical. A typical research paper consists of: a general background research in a way that serve the authors, setting the research questions according to this theoretical background (actually to the this specific view of the background) and the results we are expecting with great statistical accuracy but based in wrong theoretical foundation. Isn’t this approach too mechanical, to formulated, to limited to result real knowledge?
I just saw some brutal uncensored photos from the real war between Georgia and Russia. Real world means real pain, real death. I was shocked.
First the shock and then the anger because human life and value is considered expendable by the world governors.
I hope in virtual environments to have only “virtual” pain, but I doubt.
A friend of me commented when he saw a facebook list for first time: all these girls are looking so beuatifull! I think users, especially female, make great efford to choose their best photos. And this is quite normal and expected I think.I also noticed that users usually prefer to appear with other in their profile photos. I looks like telling the others: look I am not alone, I am social successful!In localized face to face relations we appear attractive to new persons by explicit presenting our personality, we don’t carry our friends with us in a bundle. In facebook we try to appear attractive to new possible friends by presenting our established social network, our existing friends. In theory I think this is a good way to make the others trust us. But I wonder what will be the consequences of this new way of approach in our face to face, traditional making of new relations. May be will be less capable of gaining the others with our personality.
I think modern society is hybrid. Modern society is both off-line and on-line, virtual and real. I can see only one society continuum. At one edge there is the absolutely natural expression of the society, making love, hugs, human contact. At the other edge is the virtual edge, absolutely technology mediated. How technology mediation alter our social interactions in meta-modern hybrid society, in comparison with older traditional societies? That is the question! How we can find the answer? Is it a biological – behavioral question or a philosophical one?
Alexis
Complexity Digest | Alex on Missing library.nu: obscuranti… |
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 | Randall Arnold on Wired & disconnected! |
| alex on How children learn in a Hybrid… |
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