Internet: Knowledge and Community

From Internet: Knowledge and Community

Contents 1 About 2 Introduction 3 Authors 4 Hot Topics 5 Definitions, Terminology, and Relevant Material 5.1 The Internet as a Resource for Communities 5.2 Technology, Social Justice, and Social Change 5.3 Wired vs. Non-Wired Communities 5.4 Technology's Impact on Communities 5.5 Philosophical Questions 5.6 Shaping the Internet 5.7 Protecting your computer: Internet Technology 6 Appendices 7 Conclusions 8 Bibliography 9 Further Reading

About

In this section you will find some of the initial ideas, goals and tasks that were presented at the beginning of this project.

Introduction

Internet: Knowledge & Community

A Community Inquiry

For the 2010/2011 academic year at The Evergreen State College, professors Doug Schuler and Stephen Beck team taught a program that addressed the impact of the Internet on the development and spread of Knowledge and how it affects different aspects of Community. This wiki was a Winter quarter class project, and an experiment to see how a community of classmates could use the current technology to conduct a Community Inquiry into the program topics.

At the beginning of winter quarter each student posted a question to the wiki of an area of interest within the course topics. Several of these questions have developed into lengthy discussions between students and some questions have developed into more traditional wikipedia-style article pages covering whole topics such as: anonymity and the internet, and the use and implementation of realtime user data.

Authors

If you are visiting for the first time, please click the Authors link above and get to know the students and faculty that contributed to this wiki project. If you're in a hurry, at least check out these highlighted profiles to get a sense of the diversity of viewpoints, interests, and types of contributions to this site that went into what you see before you:

~Author page awards will be presented on Wednesday, the last day of class. 
Edits should be done by Monday at midnight. 
Pages will be judged by content, creativity. 
We will also take into consideration the guidelines posted on the authors page. 
Thanks for your participation.

Hot Topics

Current news relevant to the internet, communities, and the distribution of information.

Each article follows a specific format. A short presentation on the material of the article or topic, with a link to the source and full article. Following each presentation is an area for discussion and debate.

• A People's History of the Internet : 1969-2009 A series celebrating 40 years of The Internet, by The Guardian newspaper.

• Declaration of the Seminar on the Right to Communication (the Right to Inform & to be Informed)

• Anti-budget cut activists An article of how protesters of budget cuts use social networks to coordinate internationally.

• Anonymous hacks Westboro Baptist Church during talk show

• Internet 'kill-switch' prohibited and The need for a constitutional amendment for Internet Freedom

• Facebook and social media in Egypt's uprising The effects of Facebook and other social media in Egypt's uprising.

• How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price. Aaron Barr vs Anonymous

• Minecraft documentary - An Indie Game's Impact The impact of an extremely successful independently developed computer game.

• Libertarian debates regulation and government with newscaster Setan Motley, Libertarian, discusses flaws with having the government do anything.

• BREAKING NEWS Hacker group vows 'cyberwar' on US government, business Actions to retaliate for treatment of WikiLeaks, Manning, spokesman for Anonymous says.

Definitions, Terminology, and Relevant Material

Before the wiki project began, Doug and Stephen led Fall Quarter's Internet: Knowledge and Community class in the exploration of what constitutes knowledge and how it is developed (or something like that). Here is some of their work: Papers From Last Quarter

Definitions can be viewed by Authors from the course reading or as an alphabetical list of all terms.

Part of the course material included three guest lectures on topics related to the program.

Plato Lecture Series Recordings:
*Ann Bishop - Jane Addams and Neighborliness
*Langdon Winner - Hacktivism in Spain
*Fiorella de Cindio - The Internet as a Platform for Political Engagement

The Internet as a Resource for Communities

The internet functions as a tool and resource that can be utilized to develop communities. User generated content can be an integral part of this process as long as access to the technology and ease of implementation are sufficiently high.

Technology, Social Justice, and Social Change

Recent political trends (Egypt) are showing the power of the internet to mobilize people around issues. As technology becomes more and more widely accessible will it further the cause of traditional social justice issues, or will it create a whole host of new and equally challenging dilemmas?

Wired vs. Non-Wired Communities

Howard Rheingold is credited for the first exploration of "virtual communities" in which members of the new community species communicate with each other exclusively or primarily through the use of online services. Since not all community groups will not adopt the emerging technologies equally, what sorts of things will become dividing lines between wired and non-wired social networks?

Technology's Impact on Communities

Explores the relationships between people, communities and the technology that connects them.

Philosophical Questions

The age of reason saw the rise of science and the spread of its reach into every corner of human exploration. For a short time the chaos of the unknown was conquered and "civilized" society arose out of the wretched state of nature. With the rise of the internet and the drastic changes in how information is distributed and how knowledge is gained and shared, humanity is shifting away from these old mechanistic views of the world and leading to many new emerging philosophical questions about the nature of our relationships to each other and to the government that claims the right to decide our future.

Shaping the Internet

The Internet has gone through several iterations. The dot-com boom and subsequent bust. In the short number of years since it has been available to the public, it has experienced enormous growth and the rise and fall of various applications, fortunes, and paradigms. Coupled with a unprecedented growth in mobile (and "smart") telephone use around the world, a new global communications infrastructure is being developed that is ubiquitous, programmable, multiway, multimodal, and fast.

Questions are likely to center around policy, applications, resources that are made available, projects that people start on the Internet, relationships that are created or sustained via the internet and what people do (and think about what they do) on the internet.

Protecting your computer: Internet Technology

Free antivirus protection continues to dominate the paid versions - which is safer? There is much of a debate. This topic explains how and why you should protect your computer.

Appendices

Conclusions

Bibliography

Further Reading