Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Breaks Records, Makes $400 Million in One Day (video game)
Real PR (public reality): Harsh Realities in “Call of Duty”
Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Military, TechnologiesVideos on Election Fraud/Theft
Corporations, Corruption, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies, Videos/Movies/Documentaries
+ Stealing America: Vote by Vote
+ American Blackout: documentary of Greg Palast's investigation into voter fraud
+ UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections
+ Hacking Democracy: The HBO Special
+ Election theft video archive from Votescam.org
Note: Diebold – “Diebold Election Systems” acquired by “Premiere Election Solutions” then acquired by “ES&S” which was acquired by “Dominion” in 2010 (wikipedia).
Also see:
+ BlackBoxVoting.org
+ Votersunite.org
+ VerifiedVoting.org
+ Election Defense Alliance
+ Citizens for Legitimate Gov
Event: Oct 15-Jan 9, UN, Design with the Other 90% Cities
01 Poverty, Technologies
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES features sixty projects, proposals, and solutions that address the complex issues arising from the unprecedented rise of informal settlements in emerging and developing economies. Divided into six themes—Exchange, Reveal, Adapt, Include, Prosper and Access—to help orient the visitor, the exhibition shines the spotlight on communities, designers, architects, and private, civic, and public organizations that are working together to formulate innovative approaches to urban planning, affordable housing, entrepreneurship, nonformal education, public health, and more.
Comment: Design for the other 90% is a great ‘movement' but the sponsorship of this event (Citi & Rockefeller Foundation) + UN makes for an unsettling partnership when considering the divide between “the 1%” & “the 99%” and the questions behind the intentions of having their names affiliated with “helping the poor.” I would hope that those within those organizations who can genuinely make a difference are not trumped by those looking to exploit those in poverty.
Worth a Look: Between the Bars: Human stories from prison
Academia, Civil Society, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Technologies
Between the Bars is a weblog platform for prisoners, through which the 1% of Americans who are in prison can tell their stories. Leave a comment – we'll pass it on.
In part with the help of MIT Civic Media.
IBM: proceed with caution (WWII to the present)
Corporations, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Technologies, Uncategorized
3 examples:
IBM is working with DARPA
IBM Testing Biometric Technology for Retail Advertising
How IBM Tech Helped Jump Start the Holocaust
Comment: I would be cautious+keen of the “smart planet” vision of those running IBM, they have made the brand popular for spreading to all cities. Keep an eye on them (biometric pun, sorry) and be friendly.
Patrick Meier: Ushahidi Emergent as Democracy in Being
Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Reform, Serious Games, Technologies, Threats, Tools
Theorizing Ushahidi: An Academic Treatise
Posted on October 2, 2011 by Patrick Meier
[This is an excerpt taken from Chapter 1 of my dissertation]
Activists are not only turning to social media to document unfolding events, they are increasingly mapping these events for the world to bear witness. We’ve seen this happen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond. My colleague Alexey Sidorenko describes this new phenomenon as a “mapping reflex.” When student activists from Khartoum got in touch earlier this year, they specifically asked for a map, one that would display their pro-democracy protests and the government crackdown. Why? They wanted the world to see that the Arab Spring extended to the Sudan.
The Ushahidi platform is increasingly used to map information generated by crowds in near-real time like the picture depicted above. Why is this important? Because live public maps can help synchronize shared awareness, an important catalyzing factor of social movements, according to Jürgen Habermas. Recall Habermas’s treaties that “those who take on the tools of open expression become a public, and the presence of a synchronized public increasingly constrains un-democratic rulers while expanding the right of that public.”
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Ushahidi Emergent as Democracy in Being”
Event: NYC Oct 10-16, MobilityShifts – An International Future of Learning Summit
04 Education, Technologies
Digital Fluencies for a Mobile World
What are new pedagogic approaches for learning with mobile platforms? What are the limitations of the “digital literacies” paradigm and its first world/third world assumptions?
How do we promulgate digital fluency as an understanding of the particular features of global information flows in which data, attention, capital, and reputation might move both to and from individual actors and communities?
How can mobile media platforms be used for more than the one-way delivery of content? What are new pedagogical approaches for real-time mobile learning that make full use of the potential of mobile phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, smart phones, Tablet PCs, and netbooks in formal and informal contexts? How can global participants use mobile media to create rich social contexts around important learning tasks? How can such platforms be leveraged to teach digital rights and the value of collaboration across cultures?
How can we dispel the myth of the digital native?
How can mobile networks reshape our experiences of space and place through interactive architecture, locative art, geo-caching games, and real-time object recognition? What opportunities for networked teaching and learning might we find in such media-rich, responsive environments?
