Author: Walter

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Scope

Religious Encounters in Digital Networks

Conference on Religion and
Computer-Mediated Communication

“Background
The emergence of the Internet has provided a new context for interaction between religious groupings and individuals in modern society. Religious encounters can now take place in digital settings that apparently transcend a number of conventional boundaries such as organisational structures, time zones, geographic borders, religious traditions, cultural divisions, and ethnical identities.”

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thelordismyshepherd.com: Seeking God in Cyberspace (Home)

“thelordismyshepherd.com opens a new and necessary dialogue on the soul of cyberspace. It will change the way people think about their computers, about God, about the future and about the interconnected destiny of humanity in this ever-shrinking world.

“The author, a noted rabbi and journalist, alternates between analytic and experiential approaches to the subject, escorting the reader on a multi-dimensional quest for spiritual and intellectual growth — a “virtual pilgrimage” if you will. A pilgrimage that travels tens of thousands of miles in a matter of instants, from Jerusalem to Mecca, to Chartres, even to Kosovo, and provides a new means of utilizing the vast power of technology to connect us to God and to transcend the artificial boundaries that separate us.”

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Mark Stefik, The Internet Edge: Social, Legal, and Technological Challenges for a Networked World.

stefik

Mark Stefik, The Internet Edge: Social, Legal, and Technological Challenges for a Networked World. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1999.

Reviewed by Arthur L. Morin [1]

“Mark Stefik works at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a “technologist” who creates “new kinds of things” (xvii). He recognizes that “[c]reative times brings many changes” (p. xi). He also recognizes that change in what he calls “Internet time” (ibid.) occurs more rapidly than during earlier times of change. His book, The Internet Edge: Social, Legal, and Technological Challenges for a Networked World, is “about some of the changes taking place in Internet time” (ibid.).”

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Pareto principle

The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa
J.M. Juran

“The “Pareto principle” has by this time become deeply rooted in our industrial literature. It is a shorthand name for the phenomenon that in any population which contributes to a common effect, a relative few of the contributors account for the bulk of the effect.

“Years ago I gave the name “Pareto” to this principle of the “vital few and trivial many.” On subsequent challenge, I was forced to confess that I had mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle.1 This confession changed nothing – the name “Pareto principle” has continued in force, and seems destined to become a permanent label for the phenomenon.”

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Into the Mystic : Science News Online, Feb. 17, 2001
Scientists confront the hazy realm of spiritual enlightenment
By Bruce Bower

“After spending 8 years training in the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism, neurologist James H. Austin spent a sabbatical year from 1981 to 1982 at the London Zen Center. On a pleasant March morning, while waiting for a subway train on a surface platform and idly glancing down the tracks toward the Thames River, Austin got his first taste of spiritual enlightenment.”

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Book Reviews

“One of the most rich subfields of cyberculture studies is, for lack of a better term, cyberfeminism, the study of gender and the Internet in general and the study of feminism and the Net in particular.”

” Recent and relatively recent contributions to this field include Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise’s Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, and Sadie Plant’s Zeros Ones: Digital Women the New Technoculture.

“A new and important contribution is women@internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace, edited by Wendy Harcourt. Our coverage of this book is unique. First, we begin with a review from Kalí Tal, a Professor of Humanities at Arizona International College of The University of Arizona. Next, we feature a lengthy and engaging rejoinder from the book’s editor, Wendy Harcourt. Finally (for the moment at least!), Kalí Tal replies to Harcourt’s rejoinder.

This is interesting stuff. The site is great, it has a walth of reviews and rejoinders and so on. Navigate it by hacking the URL!!!

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Stanislaw Lem

Scriptorium – Stanislaw Lem By Nathan M. Powers

"If [Stanislaw Lem] isn't considered for a Nobel Prize by the end of the century, it will be because someone told the judges that he writes science fiction," predicted a Philadelphia Inquirer critic in 1983. Lem is arguably the greatest living science fiction writer, and even one of the most important European authors of his generation; yet he commands little critical attention, and has failed to reach discerning American science fiction readers who ought, one would think, to be most interested in him. The reasons for this may be sought, paradoxically, in the high demands he makes of his own work: Lem is a true original, but at the price of being marginal."

I want to read this man's books.

amazon

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Content is not King

Content is Not King

" What the argument that content is not king does say is that people are willing to pay far more for point-to-point communication than for the famed content. That is likely to be reflected in what kinds of networks are built, and which companies succeed. It inverts the usual ordering of priorities, making point-to-point communication central, and content secondary."

Thanks Christine for the link – a basic and lovely idea – one way we put this notion in a cult I belong to is that "conserved culture" is not as important as "spontaneity".

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