Saturday, November 8, 2008

Feeling quite overwhelmed by the amount of information I perceive i'll need to process to present a thorough research paper...Though what I mean by thorough isn't really defined yet...

I'm trying to establish the connection between the language and imagery use to discuss and present prisons and prisoners, how that has affected the way that society views prisoners and how these views have translated into legislation. prisoners. prison reformness, administration

Technological determinism. We use technology to separate our prisoners.

Technological culture has affected the way that we thinking about people and their stories.

A story. Politics. Legislation. Buying things. Shape stories. Narrative vs Database "ontology".
Empathy plays a crucial role in civic engagement.
Empathy is particularly difficult to have for the nation's incarcerated due to a number of reasons. One of them being the misconceptions, misrepresentations,
The implications these distortions and ignorances have on the lives of these men and women show that they are not just perversions of the truth, but impediments to a fair and just society.

However thanks to new media these hurdles towards compassion for the incarcerated fellow are being assuaged.


Of all the avenues for civic engagement, of all the problems in world fighting for our attention, why prisons?

Whorf - the way in which language shapes our view of the world.
Technology and progress and control.
"Infrastructure"
New media is in a sense a continuation of the written word.


What is new media mediating: technology breaching technology

What stands between you who are reading this and a person behind bars.
Stamping a node on your landscape of society, whether you like it or not.
This paper argues that the narrative of technology diverged and is cannibalizing itself.
What is convenience is no longer convenience. What is control is not longer control.




Image construction.
Self construction
The power of an image

Communications
New media in grassroots.
New media for non profits like sentencing project
Blogs - "bringing the individual back in".
prisontalk.com
prison penpals.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Statistical revelation.

As I was taking my statistics quiz today, I had a revelation, the validity of which will now be evaluated as I attempt to remember and articulate it the best I can now.

Statistical significance is an important concept in statistics because if a statistic you derive from a study sample is deemed insignificant, then your results are likely to be the product of chance.

In a sense, humans are all statisticians, whether we know it or not.

I hypothesize that humans are consciously or subconsciously constantly evaluating statistical and practical significance, but irrationally, haphazardly, and not empirically.

The significance of a statistic becomes difficult to gauge because we do not clearly define the population.

Then there is statistical significance and practical significance.

For example, when we see a
In a sense, humans are all statisticians.

When a black

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Firrrstt post....

Week 7 and I'm feeling pretty good about my research so far; I pretty much have an outline!

I found some blogs by an ex-convicts. He actually has several and I dunno which one is his "main" one. But I'm hoping to mine some effects-of-new-media gold from this. http://ihad2haveapieceofu.blogspot.com/
http://frankiecon.blogspot.com/
ttp://blogs.secstate.wa.gov/ils/
http://ccpoa.blogspot.com/

prisontalk.com

Blogposts of the stakeholders.
Bring up the example of propositions. Having access to this points of view makes and articulation of what the proposition entails and the conceptualization of who the proposition affects, much more well-rounded.

empathy in civic engagement

empathy for prisoners


Left to research:
To make good use of the AWESOME blog I found, I'll have to research blogginess. Just what to make of the blogosphere; in terms of interactivity and community and all that jazz. I'm guessing it HAS "democratized" information, for better or for worse, and in the case of