Quotes

Quoted content
Quoted The Californian Ideology by Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron (Mute)
We need to debate what kind of hypermedia suit our vision of society - how we create the interactive products and on-line services we want to use, the kind of computers we like and the software we find most useful. We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop. While learning from the can-do attitude of the Californian individualists, we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces. We need an economy which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the Promethean opportunities of hypermedia as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity. ❧
As true today as it was 25 years ago.
Quoted from Lecture 2 of The City of God (Books that Matter) by Charles Mathewes (The Great Courses)
Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.
Quoted You need your own spot! by Leo LaporteLeo Laporte (This Week in Google | TWiT.tv)

Everybody, every company, ought to have a website: a place they can call their own, a place where your best stuff lives, a place where, when people Google you, they find your site.

I tell every teenager: [...] create a website, get your domain name—preferably your own name—put stuff up there so when people search for you they find your best stuff. It's so important.

And if you're a business it goes double. A business that's not online practically doesn't exist.

Now you may say, "well i have a Facebook page, I have a Twitter account." You need your own spot! Sure you can have your Facebook page and Twitter feed and all that stuff, and it should link to your website, but you gotta have the website.

—Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy on the Premiere radio network, broadcaster, podcaster, tech pundit. Founder, TWiT Netcast Network. ❧

Quoted from email about "Policy change in regards to Social Media use for social learning from Centre for Innovation, Leiden University" by Tanja de Bie, Community Manager (Centre for Innovation, Leiden University via Coursera)

The Centre for Innovation of Leiden University has always strongly supported social or collaborative learning in online learning:  the interaction between learners facilitating learners, whether that is in discussion forums, peer review assignments or in our Facebook groups, contributes to a deeper understanding of subjects, and prepares learners to apply their knowledge.

However, the Centre for Innovation has a responsibility to our teachers, learners and volunteers, under GDPR and our own Privacy Policy. Based on this we conducted a review of different platforms that we made use of for collaborative, social learning and have decided to move away from those that do not allow us to meet our obligations and promises to those in our care.

Therefore we have decided to close all Facebook groups, Whatsapp groups and Instagram accounts currently under control of the Centre for Innovation, per the 29th of March 2019, and have adjusted our courses accordingly.

You can direct any questions or remarks in regards to this policy to MOOC@sea.leidenuniv.nl.

Kind Regards,

On behalf of Centre for Innovation, Leiden University,

Tanja de Bie, Community Manager

At least part of Leiden University is apparently making the moral and ethical call to close all their Facebook related properties. Kudos! They’ve already got a great website, perhaps they’ll move a bit more toward the IndieWeb?
Quoted Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959 by Martin Luther King, Jr. (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project (okra.stanford.edu) )
Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood.  ❧
I read this quote on Nov 29, 2018 12:04pm through @dswanson's post and it has stuck with me. I thought I’d dig up some additional detail on it. It turns out Swanson’s version was a slight misquote/variation and even at that MLK may have been modifying a quote from somewhere else.

King may have adopted this passage from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Hope of the World [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933], p. 25:

“Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them . . . that kind of church, I think, would hear again the Master’s withering words: ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”’

—annotation in The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project (okra.stanford.edu) “Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959” on page 200

Quoted a tweet by Meg on TwitterMeg on Twitter (Twitter)
Seems like every time I turn around more and more people are going back to old school methods.
#IndieWeb #netpositiveblog Happy #newwwyear

History cannot tell us the origin of wheat

Quoted Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by Jean-Henri FabreJean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
An aphorism which should be more broadly known, particularly as fearmongers begin to attack the public going into election cycles. I thought I’d make an ironic motivational poster out of it.

Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas’s excellent Eat This Podcast

Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

📑 Our Cultural Commonwealth

Quoted Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences [.pdf] by Marlo Welshons (ed.) (acls.org)
...cyberinfrastructure is something more specific thanthe network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular proj-ect, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.  ❧
Quote highlighted in the video from module 1 of EDU522

Looks like an interesting report. I’ll note that Jeremy Dean has annotated a bit of the report in the past, so it may be useful to circle back around and read the entire thing.

Quoted Slack chat by Chris BeckstromChris Beckstrom (chat.indieweb.org)
...holy crap this stuff [IndieWeb] is great. When I started getting webmentions from social media using Bridgy I flipped. It's like we're in the future!!!
I remember the early days of Twitter when people were excited about what it was and what it could do. Even then I don’t think people were as excited as Chris Beckstrom was when he made what is certainly the IndieWeb quote of the week this morning.

Going IndieWeb for Lent?

Quoted Bryan Ruby on Twitter (Twitter)
Although I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore, old habits are hard to die. I plan to reduce my time on social media this Lenten season. Less time here and more on my blogs: Personal Blog: http://bryanruby.com/ Fifty-Two Posts a Year: http://fiftytwoposts.com
I like the concept of this. Lent done #IndieWeb style.

Quote from Mastodon, Twitter and publics 2017-04-24

Quoted Mastodon, Twitter and publics 2017-04-24 by Kevin Marks (kevinmarks.com)
The furore over Fake News is really about the seizures caused by overactivity in these synapses - confabulation and hallucination in the global brain of mutual media. With popularity always following a power law, runaway memetic outbreaks can become endemic, especially when the platform is doing what it can to accelerate them without any sense of their context or meaning.
One might think that Facebook (and others) could easily analyze the things within their network that are getting above average reach and filter out or tamp down the network effects of the most damaging things which in the long run I suspect are going to damage their network overall.

Our synapses have the ability to minimize feedback loops and incoming signals which have deleterious effects–certainly our social networks could (and should) have these features as well.

Quote from The Master Switch by Tim Wu: History shows a typical progression

Quoted The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire by Tim Wu (Vintage)
History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel--from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century's transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television, or film. History also shows that whatever has been closed for too long is ripe for ingenuity's assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again.