LINK OF THE WEEK
ARCHIVE
This archive
preserves past links and my notes and comments on
them. I abandoned the originally ambitious goal
of posting a new link each week. "Week"
has become a manner of speaking about a varying
length of time. Someone might look for a thematic
thread running through this selection of
resources on the World Wide Web. In truth, it
simply reflects my shifting interests over the
past several years of surfing.
Old Link Fifteen: NATIONAL
REVIEW ONLINE
Some
articles from Bill Buckley's venerable rag
now come in free cyberspace form. NRO is a
good place to get a straight shot from the
right. If you tend not to lean by nature
toward the right, NRO will make you stop and
think about your biases. It will give you a
glimpse, usually in civil terms, at the
mindset of the people who think the nation
now is in just the right political hands.
That, at the very least, will awaken you to
the need to think about events in a different
light, even though you end believing what you
believed in the first place.
An
article in NRO provoked my reaction in a working opinion. [Link of the Week from 1 October 2003
to 8 August 2004]
Old Link Fourteen: ISLAM
ONLINE.NET This
site appears to be a reasonable window into Islam
for Americans trying to learn more about a
religion and a culture that since 9-11 insist on
our attention. The site aims to become a
reference serving non-Muslims as well as Muslims.
It claims to give "a sharp and balanced
vision of humanity and current events." It
says it supports "the principles of freedom,
justice, democracy, and human rights" and
lifts up "the tolerance and the
humanity" of the laws of Islam. Links on the
homepage go to the basics of Islam, including the
Quran; a "Fatwa Corner"; counseling
service; news, views, and analyses; health and
science; entertainment. I have found that
browsing in this site helps me to season the
standard American media fare on our current
global engagement with Islam. It appears to me to
be unabashedly Islamic without being aligned with
extremist political Islamism--a distinction worth
cultivating as Americans try to imagine the
longer term future of relations between Islam and
the West. [Link of the Week from 28
November 2002 to 1 October 2003]
Old Link Thirteen: POETRY
DAILY tries
to pluck poetry out of the clouds and bring it
down to earth, where on any given day it can
offer someone a good experience. The site opens
with a reference to the Introduction to
Poetry by Billy Collins, our current Poet
Laureate: "The urge to 'tie the
poem to a chair with a rope and torture a
confession out of it' lessens when poetry arises
freshly each day." On the day I created this
link, the poem of the day was by Jon Loomis,
"On the First Tee with Charles Wright,"
from The Pleasure Principle, published
by Oberlin College Press. Poems from the past
year were archived. The site has links to
sponsors such as The Poetry Center of Chicago. [Link
of the Week from 13 July 2002 to 28 November
2002]
Old Link Twelve: Hobbes'
Internet Timeline,
by Robert H. Zakon, "Internet
Evangelist." Copyright (c) 1993-2002 by
Robert H. Zakon. This link takes you to "an
Internet timeline highlighting some of the key
events and technologies which helped shape the
Internet as we know it today." Zakon keeps
the timeline current with new information from
time to time. This historical reference helps me
put into perspective the arrival of the World
Wide Web. I
reviewed the account of the 1991 birth of the WWW
by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. It
still amazes me how recent the WWW is. When I
began dabbling online in 1995, the WWW was just
maturing into a widely accessible technology,
thanks to dial-up systems like Compuserve and to
the spread of the Netscape browser. It's fun to
think about being a user virtually at the
beginning. On the other hand, as this timeline
shows, the online cyberworld has been in the
making longer than many realize. Like so much
else, its roots lie in the Cold War. One of the
US responses to the Soviet space shot Sputnik in
1957 was the creation of the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA). The ARPANet developed
during the 1960s. It was the start of what would
become the Internet we know. The copyrighted
Hobbes' Internet Timeline links to rpr/WORKS
website with the permission of Robert H. Zakon .
Zakon signs himself "Robert H'obbes'
Zakon"--hence the name of the timeline. [Link
of the Week from 21 January 2002 to 13 July 2002]
Old Link Eleven: DIGITAL FORDISM is part of an experimental
electronic book project-in-the-making. The
project--From Analogue to Digital Fordism--will
be published in final form online at the Center for Digital Discourse
and Culture (CDDC) of Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University in the College of
Arts and Sciences. With Ford Motor Company as an
example, the text analyzes the transition from
vertically integrated corporate structure and
strategy to horizontally distributed and
technologically mediated organization. The
project gives a window onto the new
organizational universe by using the very
hypertextual medium that makes such a revolution
possible. In doing so, it offers an insight into
the postmodern economic order in a globalized
setting.
I became aware of
the project when Professor Timothy W. Luke,
University Distinguished Professor of Political
Science, and graduate student James David Bowen
at VPI emailed me. They sought (and obtained) an
okay to download my notes and comment on David
Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity.
They wanted
to add my piece on Harvey to a large hypertextual
archive of material related to Fordism,
Post-Fordism, and Modern Industrial Organization.
They did not say when the project would be
completed. [Link of the Week from 30
September 2001 to 21 January 2002]
Old Link Ten: Chinese
Holocaust Memorial
("We will never
forget you") is a research project
by Chinese scholar Youquin Wang, now in America.
It documents student attacks encouraged by Mao
Zedong against teachers in 1966 and 1968. Wang
provides a chronology of events surrounding the
Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to
1977. Until reading this, I had only a limited
appreciation of the magnitude of the mayhem in
Chinese life created by Mao. Wang's impassioned
research grew out of her realization of the vast
gap between the murderous events of the time and
the sparse documentation of them. She
memorializes names and circumstances of the
murders and suicides of professional educators
hounded down by Mao's "Red Guard." I
hit on this site while looking for background on
Gao Xingjian's book, Soul
Mountain.
Mao's party
is still in power. Granted, the party repudiated
the Cultural Revolution, after a fashion, when
Mao died. And Jiang Zemin has welcomed
capitalists into its fold. But Wang's research
sobers the mind anyway. China by her account has
yet to acknowledge the full reality of the deaths
that amount to a holocaust by her definition. She
forces you to wonder how that scar on its face
will look as China rises to its global role.
[Link of the Week from 28
August 2001 to 30 September 2001]
Old Link Nine: The Electronic
Literature Directory provides extensive listings
of electronic works, their authors, and their
publishers--poetry, fiction, drama, and
nonfiction. Among the new forms of writing
represented are hypertexts and other interactive
pieces, kinetic or animated poems, multimedia
works, generated texts, and works that allow
reader collaboration.
Many visual
pyrotechnics by imaginative online writers
abound. I liked the audio done by Mark Doty of
his poem that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in
1995, A Display of Mackerel (accessed
under short poems). One could spend hours
searching here to see what cyberspace holds of
the Muse. A cursory look tells me that there is
much not worth searching for and some rewarding
stuff.
Since the Directory
is an ongoing project, those interested in
creative expression online will want to check it
for new work from time to time. [Link
of the Week from 3 February 2001 to 28 August
2001]
Old Link Eight: CRITICAL
APPROACHES TO CULTURE, COMMUNICATIONS, +
HYPERMEDIA, Dr. Ron Burnett,
President, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. I first found Burnett on the
Internet in 1995, when his course on postmodern
media and culture at McGill University could be
visited online. It became a hot link in my
Postmodern Programme. He moved on to the Emily Carr
Institute of Art + Design and took his
transdisciplinary view of culture and media with
him. That left me with a cold link to McGill.
Happily, Burnett recently got in touch by email
and I now have a hot link to his lively work
again. Burnett has fresh things to say about the
digitization of culture (title of his new course
at Emily Carr). He has been involved in the use
of information technologies to construct open
learning communities for lifelong learning
worldwide. This for me provides a different
window on the topic of "globalization."
He has an especially important essay on "Technology,
Information, and Learning." It penetrates the original
thinking of McLuhan and suggests that the famous
phrase, "the medium is the message,"
needs to be re-formulated to say, "the
medium is the subject." By shifting focus
from message to subject (person), he raises
interesting new questions about the effect of
information technologies on the way we think and
behave. On top of such creative thought, Burnett
apparently administrates a vibrant school of art
and design on the beautiful western extremity of
the North American continent, which you can visit
through the site of the Emily Carr
Institute of Art + Design. Burnett strikes me as the
kind of person who is swimming inquisitively and
creatively in the cultural sea of
postmodernity--a stimulating person to encounter
in cyberspace. [Link of the
Week from 14 October 2000 to 3 February 2001]
Old Link Seven: THE
NATION Our
nation's venerable leftist magazine began as the
Civil War ended. From its start and through its
history, it has been consistently a critic of
corporate practice and the powers in our society
that undermine democracy and individual freedom.
My study of postmodernism has led me to wonder
where the thought will come from to energize an
opposition to the all-encompassing culture of
late capitalism, as defined by Fredric Jameson.
When I recently visited THE NATION's website, I
thought I saw renewed life in the old horse. In a
moment when Ralph Nader is running for president,
corporate behemoths are reeling from public
criticism of product quality (Ford and
Firestone), and anti-globalizing protesters are
in the streets where conventions and presidential
debates are being held, THE NATION's editorial
coverage suggests the scope and direction of
alternative thought and action. It may give us a
hint of the deeper currents of cultural and
political theory that eventually may modify the
course of corporate global hegemony, now merrily
going its own way. I speculate on this issue in
an essay, Believe
& Resist...But Still Theorize. [Link
of the Week from 3 September 2000 to 14 October
2000]
Old Link Six: POSTSTRUCTURALISM,
BY ROGER JONES
This account of poststructuralism and
postmodernism appears in a course on philosophy
since the Enlightenment for adult students at the
Working Men's College, Camden, London, England.
Although oversimplified, it is a useful overview
of what I studied in the Postmodern Programme
at Sixth Avenue. Jones's site has
similar accounts of the major philosophical
movements in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. He is a versatile
fellow who not only teaches philosophy but also,
according to his
homepage, consults on information
technology. [Link of the Week from 7
May 2000 to 3 September 2000]
Old Link Five: CHARLES
J. STIVALE - DELEUZE & GUATTARI WEB SOURCES Charles Stivale is Chair of
Romance Languages & Literatures at Wayne
State University. He maintains this page of web
sources on the late French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze and his late collaborator, psychoanalyst
Felix Guattari. (He also is the key voice on the
unmoderated discussion list, deleuze-guattari, to
which I subscribe.) The page provides links to
translations and articles on D&G. It also
links to Stivale's homepage at Wayne State. My
reading of D&G is ongoing and rather
undigested; but their work, I think, illuminates
much about the way the world appears to the
postmodern mind. Stivale, I find, is a
well-informed and friendly host at the D&G
feast of ideas. I made some notes on their book, A Thousand Plateaus. Stivale's page
links to a review that he wrote of the same book;
it gives a better-informed view of the book than
my notes. [Link of the Week from 24
February 2000 to 7 May 2000]
Old Link Four: THE
TECHNOLOGY SOURCE
This on-line magazine began in 1997. It is edited
by James L. Morrison, Professor of Education at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Morrison's courses deal with research, planning,
management, and using technology in educational
organizations. The magazine's purpose "is
to provide thoughtful, illuminating articles that
will assist educators as they face the challenge
of integrating information technology tools into
teaching and into managing educational
organizations." The editorial fare
leans toward the hands-on; the conceptual
foundations of the information revolution,
however, are visible. This academic publication
has corporate sponsors--SCT, Microsoft, Compaq,
SmartForce. In the current (November/December
1999) issue, the lead article is an interview of
the president of SCT Education Solutions. Caveat
lector, I suppose. Still, I find the articles
readable and relevant to my consulting activity
with A
Community of Agile Partners in Education (CAPE). [Link
of the Week from 21 December 1999 to 24 February
2000]
maturana
Old Link
Three The
Contributions of Humberto Umberto Maturana to the
Sciences of Complexity and Psychology, Alfredo B.
Ruiz, Instituto Terapia Cognitiva. Santiago,
Chile. Ruiz
gives us a lucid summary (in English) of the main
concepts of Maturana. He explains Maturana's
concept of "autopoiesis" and his idea
of the "self" as a product of
"constitutive ontologies." Maturana is
important to me because he sheds light on the way
the old liberal humanist idea of "self"
has changed in contemporary thinking. The self
constructs itself in the process of sustaining
itself, and is never isolated from the other who
observes it in action. Also,
"autopoiesis" has been influencing some
who are rethinking the way to lead organizations
in the post-industrial environment. (For
instance, see Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership
and the New Science: Learning about Organization
from an Orderly Universe [Berrett-Koehler,
1992].) Ruiz's readable text ends with a
brief summation of Maturana's main ideas. In it
he captures much of what has changed in
contemporary assumptions about the way we define
ourselves in a living environment. We know the
world we have lost; Maturana, through Ruiz, tells
us something about the world that is taking its
place. [Link of the Week from 6
October 1999 to 21 December 1999]
Old Link
Two On-Line
Bibliography--Philosophy of Personal Identity:
Historical Studies This link takes you
to a bibliography of classic and contemporary
references dealing with the notion of personal
identity. What is the "subject" or
"the self"? That question pervades
current philosophical thinking not because it is
new but because it is so persistent in the
history of philosophy. This very useful
compendium of sources takes you back to Plato and
brings you forward to references written within
the past year. It also gives you links to other
related sites, such as philosophy of
mind, embodiment, self, & personal
identity,feminist theories of personal identity.
The maker of this bibliography, Shaun Gallagher
of Canisius College, appears in the bibliography
with an article interestingly titled, "The
Theater of Personal Identity: From Hume to
Derrida" (The Personalist Forum 8, 1992,
21-30). [Link of the
Week from 13 August 1999 to 6 October 1999]
Old Link
One The
WWW Virtual Library: Philosophy This link takes you to the Philosophy
page of "The WWW Virtual
Library" at the University of
Bristol, United Kingdom. The library is jointly
hosted by the University's Philosophy Department
and the Institute for Learning and Research
Technology. It appears in collaboration with
SOSIG, the Social Science Information
Gateway. The website is a nest of
information about academic philosophy in the UK,
Europe, and the world. Of particular interest is
a link to Philosophy on the Internet (a SOSIG
subject guide), maintained by Martin Poulter
of the University of Bristol's Philosophy
Department. Poulter's page "aims to
introduce some of the ways in which philosophers
can use the Internet to support their work."
[Link of the Week to 13
August 1999]
31 March 1999; last
modified 8 August 2004 Richard P. Richter
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