Contingency and the 'Networked Information Economy': A Critique of 'The Wealth of Networks'
Yochai Benkler is right when he argues, most recently in "The Wealth of Networks", that the "networked public sphere" affords a looser, more democratic "platform" for innovation and deliberation than the "one-way, hub-and-spoke structure" of the "mass-media model." His suggestion, however, that the techniques of meaning production in the emergent technologies themselves vindicate the liberal theory of deliberative democracy is unconvincing to the extent they, in Benkler's rendering, remain unavailable or unintelligible to whole swaths of the citizenry. By overstating the accessibility of the new technologies, he obfuscates the extant political economy of cultural production. It may now be truer than ever that the decentralized and transparent characteristics of the new platforms allow ideas and information to flow more efficiently and democratically to more people than under the "mass-media model." It also affords more people the opportunity to create and participate in a range of "nonmarket" deliberative processes in public and in private. But these facts do not mean that we are all smarter, or freer, or (with apologies to Adam Smith) better off. The "networked public sphere" is hardly analogous to the lived public sphere in which the putative free flow of ideas itself has a "nonmarket" logic that is contingent on a variety of entrenched economic, social, and cultural arrangements. Until policy leaders develop strategies for expanding the availability or improving the accessibility of the new technologies, the affordances of the "networked public sphere" will accrue only to its wired participants.
A new deal for Blacks : the emergence of civil rights as a national issue
In Search of Democracy : The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (1920-1977) The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (1920-1977), Sondra Kathryn Wilson Associate of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Harvard University, Jul 9, 1999, Social Science, 544 pages. This collection of writings offers a glimpse into the minds of three N.A.A.C.P. leaders who occupied the center of black thought and action during some of the most troublesome.
Language Socialisation and Language Shift in the 1b Generation: A Study of Moroccan Adolescents in Italy
Abstract This paper reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the language socialisation of a group of Moroccan adolescents who migrated to Italy in the late 1990s. The approach is based on the notion of language socialisation, which sees the process of acquiring a language as linked to that of becoming a member of a culture. The participants live in small towns in a semi-rural area in Northern Italy and were closely observed during their initial contact with Italian Ethnographic observations continued in the following years, and were conducted both in the homes and in school programmes. Five years later, in-depth interviews were carried out on a range of issues dealing with ethnolinguistic identity, and language knowledge and use in a variety of domains and intercultural relationships. Written materials were also collected on personal experiences and attitudes towards Italy and Morocco. These data, taken together, show how socialisation into the new culture is producing a very rapid shift in language use and associated attitudes towards the different languages in the repertoire, i.e. Italian, Moroccan and Standard Arabic, and other European languages. Patterns of language use, linguistic ideologies and ethnolinguistic identity of this multilingual community are discussed in relation to educational policies.