In the past week, friends have had intertwining conversations that I want to try weave together here. The overarching theme is the power of information to make care, visible. To make the connections and relationships between everything visible. If this in turn has the power to change anything, well, that is another thing and where the post unravels towards the end.
Continue reading “Care-giving, care-taking, and the feminist metaverse”What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite
The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.
I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.
Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
Continue reading “What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite”
Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture
I started reading Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) up to where the free sample ends, around page 78. Right before I chose to buy the ebook, I found a more recent book, Participatory Culture: Interviews (2019) as well as his blog, https://henryjenkins.org/. Ooh, and then also the book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (2020). So, distracted. But great notes here and the thoughts they triggered.
Continue reading “Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture”Chantal Mouffe and my game
Someone suggested my thoughts align with Chantal Mouffe and so I went down a rabbithole. Part of that, and critical thinking, is also seeing what critique exists and this quickly developed into a quagmire of who exactly has the right ideas. So I’m being a bit fast and loose here, and using the general ideas as a description of what the game is hoping to help with.
Continue reading “Chantal Mouffe and my game”Connected data, connected people
In my previous post about the end of expertise, I made the point that the root concerns of conspiracy theorists are valid. The suspicion and mistrust of powerful players are valid. That, if governments and corporations are not going to make the actual shift then we need to make that shift. Everyday people must make that shift.
Here I want to add some comments about the role of structured data in making it easier to access relevant evidence, or supporting insights, and hence, maintaining accountability.
Continue reading “Connected data, connected people”Thinking about public spheres
I am interested in how the digital world, that can dissolve geographical boundaries, can help us keep governments around the world accountable, from the bottom up.
This led me to think about what democracy actually is.
Democracy is meaningful participation
Continue reading “Thinking about public spheres”World-building the real world part 2b: The … other … why: Changing the default civilisation.
I am so tired of being powerless. Of having my agency crumpled up and thrown back in my face. Of having this futile fight against badly run countries and corporates.
I feel that the whole notion of “a country” with physical borders is outdated. Why get screwed over just because of where or what colour you were born? We have the internet. Surely we can do better. So if we don’t need countries, and we don’t want corporates, what other sort of grouping would work? Can we go live in the metaverse?
Continue reading “World-building the real world part 2b: The … other … why: Changing the default civilisation.”