Tensegrities

On the plane back from Brazil I read an extremely disturbing account of a man who died while in the custody of ICE (immigration and customs enforcement). And now today, I came across this piece up at DailyKos. All of us across the US need to sit up and wake up and listen to what’s happening in these cases. This is shameful, and ought not to be taking place! You can check here for action alerts, and ways to get involved.

Here’s an interesting reflection from a social scientist on the nature of evangelicals in Venezuela.

Here’s a compelling ad in the campaign to support marriage in CA. (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

I think this is a brilliant satire — with Stephen Colbert interviewing Jane Mayer on her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror turned into a War on American Ideals.

BetweentheAlreadyandNotYet is a thoughtful blog by a new pastor navigating the rapids of her first pastorate. I hope she can continue to find God’s grace so strongly present — and be so articulate about helping us to see that!

danah boyd has an excellent piece up comparing and contrasting Wikipedia with Google’s Knol. Among other reflections:

What makes me most annoyed about Knol though is that it feels a bit icky. Wikipedia is a non-profit focused on creating a public good. Google is a for-profit entity with a lot of power in controlling where on the web people go. Knol content is produced by volunteers who contribute content for free so that Google can make money directly from ads and indirectly from search traffic. In return for ?

When are we going to learn that the Internet is really good at collective action? When are we going to learn that getting people to develop and maintain bodies of knowledge on the Internet is an art? When the incentives are all wrong (e.g., Yahoo! Answers), the result is pure crap. When are we going to learn that experts alone never produce the best content? Hell, even a high school kid can improve most articles with some simple editing.

Juan Cole points to a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Seems like we ought to at least listen to what our senior military scholars are noting, right?

Also, a quick note about the Association of Internet Researchers conference this coming October in Denmark. I wish I could go, but I won’t be able to. Check out their list of presentations and abstracts, just to get a small sense of what people are thinking about in this field.

Thanks to Paul Walker for this link to a slideshare of a presentation by Simone Heidbrink on social media and Christian practice. I think I find much to agree with in the presentation, although her earliest slides about substituting “social media” for “Web 2.0″, although probably accurate, are an issue more for scholars than anyone else I think. Still, I’d like to find a way to be in conversation with the author, particularly given my own presentation planned for later this week (sorry for the long download time, I need to figure out how to put this Keynote presentation up at Slideshare).

I’m at the Media, Religion and Culture conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and just got done watching a really compelling video of some ethnographic work that Patricia Bustamente is doing with the Nasa people of Colombia. So it is interesting to come back to my room to rest a bit (which meant I opened up my RSS reader for the first time in days) and find that the first piece I opened up had a link to this post about the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

The day was actually yesterday, August 9th, but I figure there’s something mystical reminding me of it today — and in any case, we ought to be aware of these issues more than one day a year anyway.

I’ll try to blog more about the conference, but during it I’m so caught up with the discussions that I haven’t found myself blogging. You can read Lynn’s posts, however, and as I find more people blogging the conference, which I’m sure will be out there, I’ll update the list here.