Notices by Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social), page 2

At the height of Hollywood's hegemony, only countries with substantive public funding for local media production, protectionist cultural policies, or some combination thereof managed to buck the trend. Erik Barnouw's "The Image Empire" gives a good account. 🧵 3/12

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-image-empire-9780195012590?q=the%20image%20empire%20barnouw&lang=en&cc=us

Today, Meta engages in a similar game, plowing profits initially made off its large U.S. user base into Free Basics, providing free access to Facebook to people in impoverished nations who could not otherwise afford internet access at all. For those consumers, Facebook can effectively become synonymous with the internet. 🧵 4/12

Revisiting this piece by Olivia Solon on Facebook's Free Basics program and thinking about where this playbook begins. When it comes to media, it seems to me you can trace it back at least as far as Hollywood. 🧵 1/12

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets

Thanks to a first-mover advantage and the enormous size of the U.S. audience, American TV networks and Hollywood studios were able to recoup the investment they laid out for film and TV programs domestically, meaning that any money they made in international markets was pure profit. This allowed them to engage in predatory pricing, rolling out programming in foreign markets at cut rates that kneecapped other countries' domestic film and television industries. 🧵 2/12

That means, of course, that we need to make college more accessible — free, even — so that anyone who _wants_ a degree can get one, and do so without constantly thinking in terms of return-on-investment. And it means thinking about the societal value of higher ed more expansively than how it affects GDP. 🧵 8/9

'"In one case," McKeen continued, "the danger is seen, and an alarm is instantly given to all to be on their guard; in the other it is concealed, and the destroyer is embraced and cherished by those who are soon to be his victims." 🧵 6/9

https://www.bowdoin.edu/mckeen-center/about/1802-inaugural-address.html

[Edit: Added link to source.]

I might never put it so dramatically (though I very much enjoy that McKeen did so), but I think the underlying point that higher education should be treated as something that's ultimately for the benefit of the public as much or more than the individual is worth internalizing — and extending beyond McKeen's era of the affluent white male scholar. 🧵 7/9

Look, the price of tuition today is a crushing burden that shocks the conscience. Amid this backdrop, there's no way for families *not* to look at college — or choice of degree — in terms of return on investment. 🧵 1/9

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/podcasts/the-daily/is-college-worth-it.html

At the same time, societally speaking, emphasizing the value of higher education in narrowly economic terms is a huge trap. The value of a liberal arts education, specifically, is about ensuring that we have an educated citizenry with enough exposure to different viewpoints and systems of inquiry to cultivate empathy and solve thorny problems for the common good. To have a working democracy, in other words. 🧵 2/9

It's about expanding the moral horizons of the people we imbue with technical knowledge, so that the doctors, lawyers, and engineers we elevate aren't lacking in moral imagination. 🧵 3/9

Joseph McKeen, Bowdoin College's first president, gave my favorite formulation of the liberal arts ideal: 🧵 4/9

https://www.bowdoin.edu/about/common-good/index.html

He believed that it was outright dangerous to confer degrees upon people on the basis of technical skill alone, without educating the whole person. The highly skilled, but morally uneducated graduate, he said, is "more dangerous than a madman, armed with instruments of death, and let loose among the defenceless inhabitants of a village." 🧵 5/9

Yay! Zettlr 3.0 (@zettlr) is finally out after an immense amount of work by developer @hendrikerz. It’s got some great new features — with more on the way — and has been an amazing tool with which to think, write, and take notes.

https://zettlr.com/

@academicchatter #academicChatter #foss

The Hint.FM Wind Map is something else right now. http://hint.fm/wind/ #Weather #DataViz

Matthew Hindman, in his book "The Internet Trap" <http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s13236.pdf>, notes that most research on the internet has focused on its supposedly decentralized nature, leaving us with little language to really grapple with the concentrated, oligopolistic state of today's online economy, where the vast majority of attention and revenue accrue to a tiny number of companies. 1/

The Mastodon network doesn't rely on laying cable (that's someone else's scaling-infrastructure problem), but all the point-to-point connections between users in the network do create analogous scaling issues in terms of data storage, which piles up as those links are established—each connection a conduit for a bunch of new posts that have to be stored somewhere. 7/

This is a really nice observation. While it's true that the research on concentration in new media is laggy, I'd suggest it's useful here to look to the political economy and material realities of previous communication systems. In particular, there are a number of important dynamics that have historically tended to shape the organization of telecommunication networks that have interesting implications for Mastodon. 2/

You see this every time a novice admin posts with exclamation points about how quickly their new instance's hard drive is filling. And they're providing the service for free, so they're not recouping *any* costs apart from possible crowdfunding donations. 8/

Another issue has to do with rights of way. In the physical world, the government is the one with the power to allow you to trench up streets for your cabling or use a particular radio frequency, so they have lots of leverage over you. You can't move your Chicago telephone exchange to Philly, either, so historically governments driven hard bargains (not these days for reasons I'll touch on). Unsurprisingly, then, graft and logrolling have long been rampant in the telecom business. 9/

To start with, consider the physical infrastructure of older point-to-point communication networks like the telegraph and telephone. Economies of scale for these networks work in an entirely different fashion than in industries, like retail or manufacturing, that come most readily to mind when considering how markets work. 3/