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.
Career Choice Inclination of the College Graduates——under the Analytic Framework on the Basis of LMS Theory
Employment difficulty of college graduates has become a social problem in China today.The research group has found that college graduates have a strong inclination in career choice considering units and regions.In terms of China's manpower market and the segmented labor market theory,it is found that their inclination is caused by the great income gap of different regions,the high cost of job transfer,and the sharp differences in social welfare.It is thus obvious that solution to the problem lies with the gradual breakdown of the institutional segment of labor market.