Sherlock Nero and Us

Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld

Some people have a drink when they get home from work—a martini, a beer. Maybe two or three. Life is especially stressful in the twenty-first century. The same indecent forces that are destroying nature are disrupting our working lives as well. Who will own the company tomorrow? Will there be a “reduction in force” or some other euphemism for the ax? When is the next reorganization coming? Is my ten or twenty years of faithful service an asset or, more likely, a sign of obsolescence and suspicious loyalty to bosses and co-workers now out of favor or working for other companies? How am I to answer the fax that arrived at 4:00 p.m., the one that seemed to contradict the fax that arrived at 11:00? When will I find time to fill out the questionnaire from the Resource Management Office, and does it take precedence over the Goals Enhancement Strategy questionnaire that came from the Administrative Services Division? Are my computer files compatible with the new software system, and, if so, why did the box on the screen say, “This paragraph is un-readable. Do you wish to substitute a standard paragraph?” Just what is our real work, anyway? Alcohol can take the edge off stress, but it is not everyone’s consolation. Some choose television or the Internet; mine is to pick up one of the scores of detective novels that I keep close to hand and plunge in. Then I can forget for a little while the vice presidents, deans, and other academic, corporate-style bosses who do their best to make life in the modern university an unproductive misery. In this way I can put out of mind, temporarily, the pleas of students who don’t understand why there are no courses to take and the ravings of colleagues who can’t figure out how to cope with the contradictory, impossible demands placed on them. Why should detective stories be, for so many, such a good and entertaining way of escaping from reality? That they are is clear; billions of copies have been sold.

First Monday ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Cerratto-Pargman ◽  
Daniel Pargman ◽  
Bonnie Nardi

Is the digital infrastructure and its footprint an ideological blind spot for recently emerging ecological communities, including eco-villages? This paper examines how a group of people who are concerned with environmental issues such as peak oil and climate change are orchestrating a transition toward a more sustainable and resilient way of living. We studied a Swedish eco-village, considering how computing in this community contributes to defining what alternative ways of living might look like in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a social-ecological perspective, the analysis illustrates, on the one hand, that the Internet, along with the digital devices we use to access it, capitalizes and mobilizes values, knowledge and social relationships that in turn enhance resilience in the eco-village. On the other hand, the analysis shows that an explicit focus on ecological values is not sufficient for a community of individuals to significantly transform Internet use to conform to ecological ideals. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the imbrication of social technologies with practices that are oriented to perform sustainable and resilient ways of living.


SEEU Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Viona Rashica

Abstract As a product of globalization and as a fruit of new public diplomacy, digital diplomacy is considered one of the major trends of the twenty-first century in diplomatic communication. Being under the influence of the extraordinary advances in ICT, the internet and social media, the way of realization and presentation of diplomacy has been radically changed and is increasingly removed from the traditional diplomatic elements. The importance of digital diplomacy is based on the usage of ICT, the internet and social media, which at the same time represent its base, for the strengthening of the diplomatic relations. Therefore, knowledge about the role and importance of digital diplomacy is indispensable. This paper will offer information on the definition, goals, evolution and effectiveness of the digital diplomacy. Meanwhile, the main focus of the research lies in the classification of its benefits and risks. For international actors is more than clear how useful is exploitation of digital diplomacy benefits for achieving their goals in the international arena. However, the process of digitization is unseparated from cyber risks, as well as the freedom of the internet and social media is abused for various purposes that state and non-state actors may have. Although coupled with benefits on the one hand and risks on the other hand, the risks of digital diplomacy are still covered by benefits, making digital diplomacy a key element for the realization of diplomatic activities. Based on all the information over the features of the topic, the primary goal of the paper is to provide sufficient arguments for verifying the abovementioned hypothesis, which is also the general hypothesis of the paper.


Author(s):  
Veronica Sheen

The nature of work is undergoing fundamental transformation in the twenty-first century with drivers including digitalization, automation, and new forms of work organization. This chapter explores how the concept of retirement itself is increasingly redundant in relation to the new world of work. Of course, working lives inevitably do come to an end, but for whom, and at what point, and under what personal and social financial conditions, is this end point? Many people will want, and be required by public policy, to continue their working lives well into later life. In addition, the new dynamics of work and employment unfolding may enable this later life engagement. But in the “post-work” world predicted by many scholars, will later life employment be a possibility for them, and even for many people in their middle and younger years? This chapter explores the implications of the future of work for how traditional models of working lives and retirement need to be restructured and examines the one vital reform to ensure everyone can sustain a decent life in the new highly volatile world of work.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dijana Kovacevic ◽  
Ljiljana Kascelan

<p> </p> <p>the present study deals with a more detailed, and updated, modified model that allows for the identification of internet usage patterns by gender. The model was modified due to the development of the internet and new access models, on the one hand, and to the fact that previous studies mainly focuses on various individual (non-interactive) influences of certain factors, on the other.</p> <i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup> <p>The Decision Tree (DT) method, which is used in our study, does not require a pre-defined underlying relationship. In addition, the method allows a great many explanatory variables to be processed and the most important variables are easy to identify. </p><p>Obtained results can serve as to web developers and designers, since by indicating the differences between male and female internet users in terms of their behaviour on the internet it can help in deciding when, where and how to address and appeal to which section of the user base. It is especially important to know their online preferences in order to enable the adequate and targeted placement of information, actions or products and services for the intended target groups.</p><p> <b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><br></p>


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.


Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


Target ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Iribarren

This article explores translational literary Web 2.0 practices and user-generated cultural creations on the Internet, focusing on video poetry that re-creates canonical poets’ bodies of work. It will be argued that the use of for-profit platforms like YouTube and Vimeo by indie creators and translators of video poetry favours the emergence of new translational attitudes, practices and objects that have positive but also contentious effects. One the one hand, these online mediators explore new poetic expressions and tend to make the most of the potential for dissemination of poetic heritage, providing visibility to non-hegemonic literatures. On the other hand, however, these translational digitally-born practices and creations by voluntary and subaltern mediators might reinforce the hegemonic position of large American Internet corporations at the risk of commodifying cultural capital, consolidating English as a lingua franca and perhaps, in the long run, even fostering a potentially monocultural and internationally homogeneous aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Robert B. Perks

For decades, oral historians and their tape recorders have been inseparable, but it has also been an uneasy marriage of convenience. The recorder is both our “tool of trade” and also that part of the interview with which historians are least comfortable. Oral historians' relationship with archivists has been an uneasy one. From the very beginnings of the modern oral history movement in the 1940s, archivists have played an important role. The arrival of “artifact-free” digital audio recorders and mass access via the Internet has transformed the relationship between the historian and the source. Accomplished twenty-first-century oral history practitioners are now expected to acquire advanced technological skills to capture, preserve, analyze, edit, and present their data to ever larger audiences. The development of oral history in many parts of the world was influenced by the involvement of sound archivists and librarians. Digital revolution in the present century continues to influence oral history.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document