Produce, publish, and promote: Tell your story

Atavist facilitates the process from beginning to end, in any digital format:

Likened to Etsy by the NY Times, Atavist is a platform for media craftsmen. It’s a platform that integrates all media formats and adapts to emerging devices, and not just for “serious” writers, this app may very well do for writing what the printing press did for reading and the Internet did for knowing.

I can here the click-click-clicking of your thoughts already!

Check out four other “revolutionary apps for digital storytellers” vetted by the Tyee.

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Live within limits without limiting life

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Neutral technology is exactly the problem

This is dedicated to my former students. In case I didn’t quite make clear my message about technology being good, bad, or neutral, let me sum up…

Philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and even some savvy technologists (engineers included), have long debated the neutrality of technology: Is it inherently good or is it inherently evil?  Even as I am writing this, an article just appeared in my inbox asking “Is The Digital World Hurting Us Or Making Things Easier?”

Why does everyone who comes to visit us have to leave?

Tears this morning. She awoke remembering her grandparents would be gone, stumbled up the stairs and delivered this little chestnut: “Why does everyone who comes to visit us have to leave?”

In Good Faith

I just can’t let go of the idealism that journalists and politicians truly desire to make the world a better place. At some time, each of them must have sat in a college class, hardly able to sit still through lectures on social injustices, and decided to do something about them.

It seems to me that political imperatives arise out of the mechanics of working within “the system,” and rising above that system is a challenge most of us do not take on. We have all seen the news about the toddler who was run over in China, and no one came to her aide. I have not been able to bring myself to watch the video, but there have been a flurry of theories rationalizing the behaviour, which points to our capacity to excuse and rationalize our actions, regardless of how gruesome. Judging the would-be samaritans in China, is similar to judging journalists and politicians. We take on “holier-than-thou” assumptions that we would behave better, yet there is resounding evidence that we wouldn’t.

Gendering

So here’s the thing, sometimes girls just want to do girlie things, as some studies on newborn monkeys are starting to illustrate. I was a child of the 70s, and went to elementary school in 80s, when feminism transitioned from theory to practice.

Feminism at that time focussed on opening opportunity for women. “Anything boys can do, girls can do better!” was the triumphant call to all little girls. The fervor of the campaign was fierce. So fierce, that they not only forgot about choice and equality, but they railroaded them.

Is the ideal public sphere fantasy…

… or art?

Yesterday I was put to the task of identifying a public sphere without constraints befitting the criteria:

1. open dialogue actively takes place
2. free from corporate market imperatives
3. free of hierarchical institution(s)
4. demographically, spatially, and temporally accessible

My initial questions are:

I suffer an overdeveloped sense of ‘me’… but I try not to ‘should’ myself

George Herbert Mead argued that individuals play multiple roles in society; anticipating the reactions of others through our own perceptions of how others perceive us.  ‘Me’ is how a person thinks others see him or her.

The importance of ‘me’ is something parents actively institute in their children.  If I was caught somewhat unkempt, my mother would demand I “try to look as though someone loves you!”  In the early years, peer pressure is a new parent’s closest ally: “The other kids are sitting nicely at the table, so should you!”  Later on, children learn “If Grandma hears that language, she’ll turn you over her knee!”