Social Bargains: Ubiquitous!

The closing section to the final chapter in Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is a perfect summation to both his book and this course.  In All Groups Have Social Dilemma, Shirky looks at many of the social internet trends and case studies he mentioned throughout his book (and many others mentioned previously in prior blog posts and class readings).  Some examples of successful social platforms on the Internet worth noting and summarizing:

Meta-textual Ergodica

Quite possibly the quickest and easiest way to understand Aarseth’s ergodic literature genre is to quite simply look at the document itself.  If you decided to do the readings this week, you went online, checked the syllabus, clicked the link, and were brought to a website: Sample Chapter from: Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Given the nature of the medium, you then were given two choices: print out the reading as a hard copy on paper, or simply read it off the computer screen.  A simple choice usually dictated by personal preference (or sometimes even the economy of time) has the ability to change this reading from ergodic to unergodic literature.

Food for thought…

The De Landa reading this week reminded me of this.

I think that comparing new media technologies to technologies of nuclear warfare is pretty legitimate.  In the above, it is mentioned that it is feasible to protect our country with a barrier that will prevent nuclear weapons from hitting us.  However, the consequence of creating such technology would also yield technology able to create nuclear weapons more powerful than we could possibly imagine.  When, for the sake of mankind, do we need to stop technological advances… and is it too late to do such?