The future of the open Internet is decentralized
Joseph Cox, The Daily Dot, May 12, 2014

Many of the recent problems being seen in digital communications - from the cost of acess to the widespread spying to the blocking of services like YouTube and Twitter to the commodification of commercialization of services that used to be free - have resulted from the ongoing re-centralization of the internet, where one or a few services are able to monopolize discourse. This has not resulted (as they say) naturally, but as the result of the deliberate intervention by corporations and governments to make the internet manageable. As a consequence, though, of this clampdown we are seeing the rise of genuinely distributed networks that circumvent attempts at control - things like BitTorrent, Bitcoin, DarkMarket, and now, MaidSafe, which allows users to share bandwidth and processing power to support a distributed and very underground applications network.

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MOOCs’ disruption is only beginning
Clayton M. Christensen, Michelle R. Weise, Boston Globe, May 12, 2014

What characterizes a bubble isn't the chorus of sceptics. It's thee lack of them. So MOOCs - who have certainly attracted the sceptics - are far from the bubble stage of their existence. So say Clayton M. Christensen and Michelle R. Weise in this op-ed. "Undoubtedly pronouncements over MOOCs’ demise are likewise premature. And their potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a long-stagnant industry is only just beginning to be seen."

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Out in the Open: The Tiny Box That Lets You Take Your Data Back From Google
Klint Finley, Wired, May 12, 2014

This article is basically a plug for a kickstarter product (pretty much everything in Wired is native advertising these days) but the concept is sound and a (more affordable) product like this will eventually bei in most homes, "a personal web server preloaded with open source software that lets you run your own web services from your home network–and run them with relative ease."

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“Would you ever say that to me in class?” : Exploring the Implications of Disinhibition for Relationality in Online Teaching and Learning
Ellen Rose, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Networked Learning 2014, May 11, 2014

This paper confirms the impression that discourse online is much less inhibited than discourse in person. "Interviews with 20 instructors and 20 students from a variety of disciplines revealed that their experiences of connection with, or disconnection from, each other were profoundly influenced by the phenomenon of online disinhibition." What is important about this is that it informs our understanding of the nature of education, whether online or offline. "The terminology of “delivery” ... suggests that education is simply a matter of transmitting information effectively; but of course, it is also, importantly, about the formation of relationships between instructors and students."

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Trading routes, bypasses, and risky intersections
Gernot Grabher, University of Bonn, May 11, 2014

I found a lot of good stuff in this paper, which I found while looking for a combination of Harrison White and Actor Network Theory. Part I.1 has a nice summary of the history of the distinction between groups and networks. Part II.1 talks about network governance and II.5 talks about informal networks. Part II.1 takes what I consider to be the key network 'turn', from network content to network structure. "Explanations stem from analyses of patterns of relations." III.3 talks about the autonomy of entities in the network, and III.4 talks about strong and weak ties. III.5 ties this explicitly to the 'small worlds' theory. In section IV we see the "promising turns" and a discussion of rhizomes, ANT and related issues. Finally, in section IV.3 Harrison White is presented as a softer alternative to ANT: "following White’s path allows us to unlock the actors from the rigid grid of homogenous ties and to place them in the fluid context of an entire spectrum of network domains."

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The Basic Framework in the General Sociology of Harrison C. White
Reza Azarian, Stockholm University, May 11, 2014

While writing my posts over the last few days I had occasion, thanks to a tweet, to look up a number of works by and about Harrison White. It's not an understatement to say that a lot of what I say is anticipated years earlier in his work. "Social life is made up of endless chains and multiple overlapping nets, with no clear boundaries. It is long stings .... It is only a messy mesh or, rather, mush. Social reality is a terrain, a typology of networks and chains."

I like what I've seen of White a lot, and it is not surprising to me to read in this interview that he was a friend to Herbert Simon (of Newell and Simon). The major statement of White's thesis can be found in his book Identity and Control. "White replaces person with identity, which, in a distinctively human sense, emerges from frictions and social noise across different levels and disciplines in networks. Likewise he reshapes the notion of goals, maintaining that they merely inhabit sets of stories used to explain agency."

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