Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Electronic Mediations) Review

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Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Electronic Mediations) ReviewFor those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares `...nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog...' (p.155).Interrogating the myth of online disembodiment, and the concomitant deceit of neoliberal colour-blindness is what essentially coheres this book. Contrary to the utopian readings of techno-culture, analyzing Internet space as a site of racial re-embodiment is at the heart of Nakamura's project. ...
[...]Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Electronic Mediations) OverviewIn the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet's rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today's online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people's racial, ethnic, and gender identity.

Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.

Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.


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Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Review

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Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives ReviewI loved this book. Sensitive, aware people perceive on a daily basis that actions, behaviors and emotions impact the lives of those around us, but the science that proves conclusively that your behaviors are impacting mine, my spouse's and friend's in Idaho offers such hope for improvement in the cosmic social network of which we all have our "connectedness". I loved the anecdotal stories - Nicholas and Erika meeting, the Starbucks employee, crazy unstoppable laughter - to which each reader will add additional network stories. We are connected, like it or not, so perhaps we can all start behaving in ways that benefit the entire network. Everyone who reads this will think twice about the impact of cutting someone off in traffic. Dr Christakis and Dr. Fowler have written for the scientific world, NY Times and lay reader - all who are part of the network.Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Overview

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Being Virtual: Who You Really Are Online (Science Museum TechKnow Series) Review

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Being Virtual: Who You Really Are Online (Science Museum TechKnow Series) ReviewDavey Winder's book manages to do something that most books on the same subject as his do not: He's very personal. Even confessional. The title of Chapter One -- Identity Crisis - sums up not just the theme of the book, but what seems to have been a driving theme in the life of Winder. Having gone from a killer career Sports manager, to a home-bound, wheelchair bound web junkie, Winder's makes the strongest case for the credibility of a digital selfhood. The best part is that he introduces the disabilities factor, which is usually only allowed a footnote in most digital reporting. In fact, I would strongly recommend this book to any organization that works with the disabilities community that has a lending library program. Aside from Winder's own accounts, there are other anecdotal stories in here of disabled persons reinventing themselves or simply recreating themselves, as is -- wheelchair and all -- in the virtual landscape. The back-story of each anecdote is poignant and well told. All of them extremely personal.
Not all of the stories of are from persons with disabilities. The others are from self-seeking souls looking for the right vehicle for self expression, which they find online.
The personal touch of the book is well balanced with an informing narrative that qualifies the book as a primer for Second Life and other Virtual World platforms. The cover of the book speaks to this element and, unfortunately, only this element. If I were to judge the book by the cover, which I initially did, the autobiographical element was not something I expected to encounter within these pages. They appeared almost as easter-eggs that wanted to be found. In that sense, the book cover is the only liability.
I'm not sure what the mood is these days on Second Life. But Winder's presents the best argument so far that this is more than just mere novelty.
[...]Being Virtual: Who You Really Are Online (Science Museum TechKnow Series) OverviewThanks to the Internet, it has never been so easy to become the person of your wildest dreams. Immersive 3D worlds such as Second Life and THERE.com provide an escape route from the ordinary, into a virtual world where you have the power to mould your life in any way you please. Forget about walking, wheelchair users can fly. Pensioners wipe away the pains of age, discovering youthful exuberance and making young friends once more. No wonder it has become harder than ever to honestly answer the question: who am I?
In Being Virtual, Davey Winder looks at how an increasing number of us are living part-real, part-virtual lives, and how it affects who we are. He looks at the opportunities and dangers that a virtual identity offers us, how we juggle our real and online lives, and what happens when one spills over into the other… He uses his own personal experiences to bring the issues to life, and backs them up with the real-life stories of others and testimony from the experts. Along the way, he looks at some fascinating questions such as:
Are you a virtual liar?

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The Unofficial Guide to Building Your Business in the Second Life Virtual World: Marketing and Selling Your Product, Services, and Brand In-World Review

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The Unofficial Guide to Building Your Business in the Second Life Virtual World: Marketing and Selling Your Product, Services, and Brand In-World ReviewYou should visit even if you don't plan to establish a business presence. I bought the book because I was featured in it. It's an excellent book about the opportunities available to the people willing to take the time to build a business. I know several people who have built SL businesses since the book was written and despite the generally bad economic times we're in currently. If you're a creative person and have a feel for Second Life, get this book to spur you forward.The Unofficial Guide to Building Your Business in the Second Life Virtual World: Marketing and Selling Your Product, Services, and Brand In-World OverviewWhy market and sell to people only in the "real world.,." when there's a "Second Life" filled with unlimited possibility for profit? A comprehensive, in-depth guide to the opportunities in this new marketplace, "The Second Life Business Builder" gives readers practical tips and strategies for creating an income stream, and marketing or extending a brand on the site. This is the one book that reveals the best ways to make money using the hottest thing online.

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Twisted Network Programming Essentials Review

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Twisted Network Programming Essentials ReviewCheck out the table of contents: The chapters are Getting Started, Building Simple Clients and Servers, Web Clients, Web Servers, Web Services and RPC, Authentication, Mail Clients, Mail Servers, NNTP Clients and Servers, SSH, and finally Services, Processes, and Logging.
That's a lot of distinct subjects in a two-hundred page book. The result is a good demonstration of how broad Twisted's domain is, but the chapters, for the most part, do not build on one another. While that allows you to skip the chapter on news servers and read the SSH chapter without much difficulty, it also means you're getting lots of separate chunks of knowledge that don't add up to anything greater than the sum of their parts.
I was hoping to see more material on general topics that apply to all Twisted programs. Interfaces are one example. Interfaces, as used in Twisted, are not a part of the Python standard library and I would not assume a reader to be familiar with them. But while Interfaces do come up in a number of the examples, nowhere does the author take the time to explain why you're importing from zope.interface or how and where Twisted uses them. Yes, there are examples, but nothing to help you understand the theory for when you have to write your own code.
Nowhere do we learn how to write tests for asynchronous functions. While the last chapter touches on the organization of services in a Twisted application, it fails to note basics like what method you'd want to implement to run tasks during a graceful shutdown. In all the attention to different network protocols, the framework aspect of Twisted seems to have been neglected.
So overall, if you want to embed an email server in your application, this book will give you a place to start. If you want a hard copy text to demonstrate the range of applications Twisted can reach, this book will do that. But if your main concern is that Twisted makes your head hurt and you want someone to make it seem less alien, I'm not sure this is the book you've been waiting for.Twisted Network Programming Essentials Overview
Twisted Network Programming Essentials from O'Reilly is a task-oriented look at this new open source, Python-based technology. The book begins with recommendations for various plug-ins and add-ons to enhance the basic package as installed.It then details Twisted's collection simple network protocols, and helper utilities.The book also includes projects that let you try out the Twisted framework for yourself. For example, you'll find examples of using Twisted to build web services applications using the REST architecture, using XML-RPC, and using SOAP.

Written for developers who want to start building applications using Twisted, this comprehensive guide presents examples of the most common tasks you'll face when building network applications.It also helps you understand the key concepts and design patterns used in Twisted applications.Here are just some of the topics discussed in Twisted Network Programming Essentials:

Installing Twisted
How to make TCP connections
How to use Twisted to work with the Web
Twisted's authentication framework
Usenet and SSH clients and servers

Along the way, each lesson is supported by thorough notes and explanations to make absolutely certain you're up to speed with this leading-edge Python technology.


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