Annotation | Chris Aldrich

👓 Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own | Connected Learning Alliance

Read Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own by

Doug Belshaw (Connected Learning Alliance)

Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. That domain name could be your gamer tag, it could be your real name, it could be a heteronym — it was up to you!

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. ❧

Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it’s because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.

If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire. Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.

With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.

The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg’s.

Twitter and Facebook are publicly-traded companies and beholden to shareholders looking to make a profit. Google, which owns YouTube and processes over 70% of the world’s search traffic, is likewise legally obliged to return a profit. ❧

legally obligated? they’re definitely supposed to try or shareholders may move their money elsewhere, but why can’t they create things for the common good as well?

A world where one’s primary identity is found through the social people-farms of existing social networks is a problematic one. Educators and parents are in the privileged position of being able to help create a better future, but we need to start modeling to future generations what that might look like. ❧

This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to do with my own website. Naturally I use it selfishly for my own purposes, but I’m also using it to model potential behaviours for friends, family and colleagues.

I’m sometimes tempted to change the tagline on my website to “A digital canary in the coalmine”.

📑 Code of Conduct

Annotated Code of Conduct for EDU522 by

J. Gregory McVerry (edu522.networkedlearningcollaborative.com)

Incessentaly correcting graamer ❧

This may be my favorite line of the entire code of conduct! I’m doing my best to resist….

📑 Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — A reply to heatherstains annotation

Replied to an annotation on Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick by

Heather Staines (Hypothesis)

Social media networks provided immediate solutions to a few problems with those early blogging networks: they relieved the moderately heavy lift in getting started and they created the possibility of connections that were immediate, dense, and growing. But as those networks expanded, they both pulled authors away from their own domains — so much quicker to tweet than to blog, and with a much speedier potential response — and they privatized and scattered conversations. ❧
Exactly the use case that annotation is hoping to solve! Enabling the connection between different sites.

While I’m pondering on this, I can’t help but feel like your annotation here is somewhat meant as a reply to Kathleen. I’m left searching to see if you tweeted it with an @mention to notify her. Otherwise, your annotation seems like a cry into the void, which I’ve happened to come across.

I say this because I know that her website now supports sending and receiving Webmentions (she notes as much and references a recent article I wrote on the topic within her text.) If Hypothes.is supported sending Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) for highlights and other annotations on the page they occurred on, then the author of the post would get a notification and could potentially show it on the site (as an inline annotation) or in their comment section, which might also in turn encourage others to open up the annotation layer to do the same. Hypothesis could then not only be an annotation system, but also serve as an ad hoc commenting/conversation tool as well.

You may notice in her comment section that there are 60+ reactions/comments on her site. One or two are done within her native comment interface, and one directly from my website, but the majority are comments, likes, reshares, and mentions which are coming from Twitter by webmention. Imagine if many of them were coming from Hypothesis instead… (try clicking on one of the “@ twitter.com” links following one of the commenter’s avatars and names. What if some of those links looked like:

instead?

👓 Connections | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Replied to Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitz.info)

There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧

...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧

The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.

I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers^1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.

She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.

I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂

If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)

References

Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.

Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.

👓 The last Sears in Chicago is closing | MSN

Read The last Sears in Chicago is closing (MSN)

Sears is closing its final store in Chicago, the city it called home for more than a century.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

The Six Corners store, like more than 100 other Sears locations, is owned by Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate company controlled by Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert. Seritage, which is publicly traded, has a market value nearly 10 times greater than Sears Holdings. ❧

Interesting to see the interaction between Sears Holdings and Seritage. The value is apparently all in the real estate.

👓 The Billionaire’s Typewriter | Butterick’s Practical Typography

Read The billionaire’s typewriter by Matthew Butterick (Butterick’s Practical Typography)

A friend pointed me to a story on Medium called “Death to Typewriters,” by Medium designer Marcin Wichary. The story is about the influence of the typewriter on digital typesetting. It references my “excellent list” of typewriter habits.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth. On the contrary, the minimalist program—as it initially emerged in fine art of the 20th century—has been about diverting the viewer’s attention from overt signs of authorship to the deeper purity of the ingredients. ❧

This also sounds like a great way to cook!

Like all nonsense, it’s intended to be easy to swallow. ❧

You’re giving up far more than design choice. Mr. Williams describes Medium’s key benefit as rescuing writers from the “terrible distraction” of formatting chores. But consider the cost. Though he’s baiting the hook with design, he’s also asking you, the writer, to let him control how you offer your work to readers. Meaning, to get the full benefit of Medium’s design, you have to let your story live on Medium, send all your readers to Medium, have your work permanently entangled with other stories on Medium, and so on—a significant concession. ❧

You’re definitely not owning your own data.

Boiled down, Medium is simply marketing in the service of more marketing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for advertisers. It is, therefore, utterly superfluous. ❧

📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash

Annotated Unfollowing Everybody by Anil Dash (Anil Dash)

To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.

Some good general advice…

👓 On Generosity and Obligation | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read On Generosity and Obligation by

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

I am returning, at last, to the thoughts I was exploring in my recent posts on Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (post 1 | post 2), and I’m starting to wrestle this morning with the big one: obligation. Thinking about community as a strategic rather than an idealized concept, community in its pragmatic coalition-building sense, leads me to consider the work required to create and sustain communities. If the kinds of communities that I am seeking in trying to imagine a more generous relationship not only between the university and the publics that it engages but also, crucially, within the university itself are first and foremost voluntary communities—self-organizing, self-governing collectives based in affiliation and solidarity—what exactly can we be said to owe those communities? Do those communities and our relationships to them impose obligations on us?

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether. ❧

The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they’re paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.

I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.

👓 Strategy and Solidarity | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read Strategy and Solidarity by

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

As I noted in my last post, I recently read Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community as a means of thinking a bit more deeply about the ways that Generous Thinking deploys the notion of community.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Calls to work on behalf of the community or to the community’s values wind up not only, as I noted in my last post, ignoring community’s supplementary role with respect to capital but also essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations. ❧

This reminds me of some studies in psychology about why people vote and for whom they vote. It’s not always who they would vote for individually, but who would a group of people like them vote? This makes the “community” portion far more complex than it would appear.

I should track down the original references, but I think I remember reading about them via either George Lakoff or possibly Malcolm Gladwell.

Under late capital, the non-profit has been asked to take over the space of providing for community needs or supporting community interests that had formerly been occupied by the state as the entity responsible for the public welfare. ❧

I know the book American Amnesia talks about the value built up by a strong government working in conjunction with a capitalist machine over the past century or so. I wonder if the later half of the book gets into how to shift things back in this manner?