How behavior and institutions are affected by social relations is one of the classic questions of social theory. This paper concerns the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society. Although the usual neoclasical accounts provide an "undersocialized" or atomized-actor explanation of such action, reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong. Under-and oversocialized accounts are paradoxically similar in their neglect of ongoing structures of social relations, and a sophisticated account of economic action must consider its embeddedness in such structures. The argument in illustrated by a critique of Oliver Williamson's "markets and hierarchies" research program.
Category: Bookmark
🔖 Science and Complexity by Warren Weaver
🔖 Want to read Son of Interflux by Gordon Korman
Simon's father is the head of Interflux, the world's largest manufacturer of useless things. When Interflux decides to build a factory on the grounds of Simon's high school, Simon "reinvests" the Student Council's funds and decides to fight for his school.
🔖 OpenStax
Access our free college textbooks and low-cost learning materials.
👓 Can We Ever Reset the Field? | Smokey Ardisson
The rise of the massive corporate-run social networks—silos, where everything was stored inside and nothing left—changed distributed online social relationships. The silos replaced distributed with centralized; all of your social connections were now in one place, making it faster and “easier” to keep up with everyone. Easier in some ways, yes, but now everyone could see every aspect of you, even if you didn’t want them to. Worse, your constant software talk annoyed your bowling-league friends, and your one uncle could not stand the fact you supported the Democratic Party. All of that didn’t happen at once; it took time for these corporate social networks to consume all of your communities, to seize ownership of all of your connections and relationships, transforming something very human into mere pieces of computer data, eventually hollowing out your communities and your humanness in the process. But once it had happened, and once you realized those downsides (and others, such as abuse, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda), how could you escape? Was there even anywhere to escape to?
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:19PM
our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:21PM
You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:23PM
web we lost ❧
https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
August 21, 2018 at 01:24PM
we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:25PM
👓 A quick introduction to Blogmesh | Blogmesh
Blogmesh aims to make blogging more social, and in doing so create an alternative for existing social networks. The main idea is to connect existing blogs in a way that resembles other social networks, like Twitter. Simply follow your friends and see a timeline of their updates.
Because blogs are usually self-hosted, this means Blogmesh has the potential to become a decentralized network that belongs to its users, and where every user owns their own content.
Blogmesh uses existing, well-established standards like RSS. This means that many existing sites are already Blogmesh-ready.
Hi @simonw remember blogmesh? my friend @roytanck behind blogmesh made this https://t.co/wMPe5tQpVC to show how to re-blog. This proof-of-concept uses WordPress. It’s super easy to re-create the social aspects of walled garden social media with RSS & #WordPress #Openweb #indieweb
— Bjorn W (@Bjorn_W) August 21, 2018
Blogmesh looks like an intriguing concept, and on its face it sounds like it’s in a tangential space to Alex Kirk‘s Friends plugin, which allows private connections to friends via WordPress, or even to PressForward, which is a very full featured RSS plugin for WordPress. It almost sounds like a version of Jack Jamieson‘s original Yarns reader which integrates a feed reader with micropub capabilities into one’s WordPress site, but perhaps may not be as powerful as Jamieson’s pending rewrite of Yarns as a Microsub server.
Clicking a post from a friend will take you to their blog, where you can read the full post and leave comments.
While this may be an interesting concept, it isn’t adding much to the broader IndieWeb stack of technologies which are already in place for WordPress. I don’t imagine greater power with this compared to the Micropub spec which might allow me to write a reply within the reader portion of the plugin, publish it to my website and then send a Webmention to the other site the way the coming wave of Microsub servers and reader interfaces will allow. 1
While Blogmesh seems like a relatively solid solution and may fix a few UI issues for some, it doesn’t seem like as robust or decentralized a solution as Microsub, which I think has more promise and which almost any website (WordPress or otherwise) could support. This being said, I also suspect that Roy likely has a much broader vision for the plugin’s functionality that hasn’t yet been stated. It always impresses me the ingenuity and work that people are putting in to fix the problems that exist with current social media and this case is certainly squarely in that category.
I will say that it appears that Roy’s user interface is very solid–I wish there were more WordPress IndieWeb contributors with these kinds of design chops.
The repost functionality which Bjorn W highlights is very cool looking and quite intuitive. It has a simple, but intuitive user interface. However, it isn’t very different from David Shanske‘s solution for reposting content to one’s website using the Post Kinds Plugin. In this case, Post Kinds is even more powerful because it also includes a lot more social post types and can also be easily dovetailed with Webmention and Micropub for broader decentralized social interaction.
I’ve bookmarked the Github repository for Blogmesh and look forward to seeing what develops. I’ve also helped to stub some of Blogmesh on the IndieWeb wiki. I’d love to hear what others think of it if they try it out. I’m blocking some time for the weekend to add it to a WordPress instance I’ve already spun up to test it out.
References
👓 Hypothes.is Collector | John Stewart
In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms. It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user.
🔖 Write, Right? Write! – TRU Writer
Welcome to a new experiment in simple but elegant web publishing. This site let’s you quickly publish full formatted and media rich articles, essays, papers — without requiring any logins or tracking of personal information. Don’t take our word for it, explore one piece published here, chosen at random.
A published work includes a header image which you can upload to the TRU Writer. Choose how you wish to credit yourself as an author, or choose to by anonymous.
You should be able to copy the contents of anything you have written in a Word Processor, or already published on a web page, paste it into the TRU Writer editor. Most standard formatting (headers, bold, italic, underline, lists, blockquotes, hypertext links) will be preserved.
You can then edit/augment your work using a rich text editor, including embedding content from social media sites, and you can upload new images to be included within the text of your writing.
So find an essay or article and see what you can do with it by publishing online with the TRU Writer.
This is implemented as a WordPress theme, so it can be created for many different sites. Learn more about TRU Writer and where to find the theme.
🔖 mcnees tweet about LaTeX graph paper
If you (like me) use a lot of graph paper, here is some LaTeX code with lots of different styles that you can customize. Fee free to fork and make improvements!https://t.co/SHyJZY5OmF (And send me pics of your best graphs, plots, dungeons, wilderness maps, etc.) pic.twitter.com/nPijUpv6em
— Robert McNees (@mcnees) August 19, 2018
👓 Put your multiple personalities in Firefox Multi-Account Containers | The Firefox Frontier
Our new Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox means you can finally wrangle multiple email/social accounts. Maybe you’ve got two Gmail or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook a...
🔖 Feed43 : Convert web pages into professionally looking RSS feeds
Offer your customers a convenient way to follow your news. Use Feed43 as a powerful information aggregation platform for your business. Or use Feed43 to streamline the way you read the news from websites you care about.
🔖 April Open Perspective: What is Open Pedagogy? | Year of Open
A variety of educators answer the question: "What is open pedagogy?"
❤️ Protohedgehog tweet
Questions we need to articulate better answers to:
— Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) August 13, 2018
1. What is open science fighting against?
2. Who is open science for?
3. What is the ultimate vision for an 'open science ecosystem'.
If we can't answer these for ourselves, don't expect the message to be heard by others.
🔖 ❤️ vilhalmer tweet
You can get an IndieWeb user's avatar in one line of python:
— vil (@vilhalmer) August 10, 2018
site = 'https://t.co/5tn70Ey5Kj'; import bs4, requests, urllib.parse; urllib.parse.urljoin(site, bs4.BeautifulSoup(requests.get(site).content, 'html.parser').select('.h-card .u-photo')[0].attrs['src'])
It’s a Hacks/Hackers project.
Some of the details might be useful for digital pedagogy settings as well. May make an interesting project for those in EDU522 especially if you’re considering the hoax website assignment?