Mike Gurstein wrote:
> http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/immiserating-the-poor-we-have-an-app-for-that-social-media-vs-the-iphone-in-egypt-and-a-kenyan-slum/
I was about to reply and slag you, Mike, for touting this as an
example of "wondrous" community IT, as it appears to me that what the
project is doing is just removing "friction" from a privatized market
in a necessity of life.
So I was happy to read further and find:
The fundamental problem with all of this comes in the failure to
distinguish between the residents of Kibera as consumers using their
cell phones and this "shiny app" to pursue their individual consumer
dreams, and the residents of Kibera as citizens who could and should
be insisting on the availability of water as a right of residence or
alternatively developing some community based collaborative approach
to responding to the water crisis.
Right.
The situation reminds me of the Onion piece on private action against
the inbound earth-shattering asteroid.
On an only tangentially related note, I mentioned that I had looked
(briefly) at Facebook and found that there were already multiple
groups targeting corporate personhood. I occurs to me that contrary
to the optimism of (the most simplistic version of) Metcalf's law, too
many connections lead to one of several strategies to cope. One of
those is balkanization -- math guys would call it partitioning -- such
that possible connections are rejected, existing one deleted and new
ones accepted on increasingly trivial criteria or increasingly
automated rules. With the potential for a million (or even a couple
of thousand) putative "friends" on a "social medium", there's no way
to evaluate them substantively or reflectively. So people who might
be unified in their support of (say) single-payer medicine are
partitioned into those who like Metallica, those who smoke pot,
vegetarians, those who use good grammar, those who don't, pre-, mid-
and post-trib Christians, atheists etc. etc. (Okay, dumb example, but
you get the idea...)
This turns my thoughts back to the review of Lakoff's book that I
posted a while back. If the objectives of serious, reality-based,
empathetic thought can be realized only by capturing the minds of a
large fraction of a population -- of the electorate; of people under
30; of retired progressives; of Republicans who lack health insurance
-- then what are our possible strategies? Are we limited to methods
the use of which violates the integrity we claim to evince and
represent?
What are the chances for introjecting a meme into a "social media"
environment that will become viral if dozens of major corporations
drown it out with heavily subsidized, carefully calculated "social media
strategy"?
- Mike
PS: It's 20F tonight but the tomato plants in my micro-greenhouse have
blossoms. And 50 snow buntings have been hanging out in our back
yard.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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