whatknows's blog

We are in that part of the semester where we could use some levity. The past week has been hard for many of us, but rather than get stressed out, I thought I would share some of my favorite creative blogs that never fail to make me think and smile. Consider this my list of "Blogs to Survive By." (And by all means, add your own!)

Garfield minus Garfield

This blog is genius. By carefully cropping Garfield out of each of Jim Davis' comic strips, we are left with "the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

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This week's blog heroes, consider virtual worlds

• Morgan Ames, over at Accretions, shares her recent experience at Burning Man and considers the similarities to Second Life: 

  "I was thinking about the interviews I did last spring on Second Life and on my research interests in the role of fantasy worlds in our lives more generally.

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Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).

These two numbers popped out of my readings this week for my Science and Technology Studies course taught by Dr. Ribes. This semester we have already produced a variety of answers to the question I posed several weeks ago: "How does one produce truth?" The production of knowledge deserves lifetimes of attention, for sure, but today I am perplexed with a different question: What if we've got it all wrong? Or more importantly, how would we even know?

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Telenovelas, first dates, and fertile ground -- everyone has their own relationship with this defined, yet far from settled, medium. Justin Hall, often considered the first blogger, probably had no clue what he was on to when he first started coding his diary into HTML. The personal journal remains one of the most popular forms of individual blogging, but political, technical, l and news aggregate blogs have entirely reshaped the boundaries and potentials of self-publishing.

So what then is an academic blog? And what does it mean to be an "academic blogger"? Definitions are problematic. When I look through my blog subscriptions in Google Reader for some model to follow, the topics and purposes are as divergent as the titles.  Read More »

How does one produce truth? This summer I have put the finishing touches on a chapter about anonymity, identity and craigslist Missed Connections. I have now spent about a year studying how people use and abuse this potentially unintended social space (you can see the beginning of this journey here on gnovis), and (if I do say so myself) have some good ideas. In just a matter of days I will have completed my grand theory. But it's just a theory, and according to Chris Anderson's recent Wired article, despite my supporting data, it's just as passe.  Read More »