Share your thoughts on the Digital Nation Roundtable a place to discuss, even debate, many of the issues raised by the film. The platform will be tackling one subject a month, with some of the most interesting and knowledgeable people in that area.

Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained?

Read here more of the synopsis

Chapter 1: Distracted by everything. M.I.T. students are among the world’s smartest and most wired. They constantly multitask with their tech tools.
Chapter 2: What’s it doing to their brains. Tests given Stanford’s multitaskers yield troubling discoveries. Other research into Net use and the brain raises more questions.
Chapter 3: South Korea’s gaming craze. Some cautionary lessons from a country where Internet addiction has become a health crisis.
Chapter 4: Teaching with technology. Teachers are embracing digital media–’it keeps students engaged; new skills are needed for a new age.’ But is there a catch?
Chapter 5: The dumbest generation? The debate has just begun on wether we are losing as much as we’re gaining in 24/7 wired world.Chapter
Chapter 6: Relationships. Millions of people are inhabitating the Net as it were a real place, satisfying the urge to connect to others in online games, virtual worlds.
Chapter 7: Virtual worlds. Second life offers a totally new reality for humans, says it’s creator–and IBM has begun shifting it’s meetings into this virtual space.
Chapter 8: Can virtual experience change us? The U.S. military is using virtual spaces for PTSD therapy and for flying drones in Iraq while based in a room in Nevada.
Chapter 9: Where are we headed? A school is organized around learning through video games–may be it’s students are getting something we are’nt yet able to measure or recognize.

Alfie commented on Twitter: “The piece on internet addiction in South Korea is at once funny and profound”

Hundreds of people turn up for a massive snowball fight in DuPont Circle in Washington after an intense snowfall blanketed the nation’s capital and much of the Mid Atlantic region, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010. The snowball fight was promoted on Facebook and other social-networking sites.

Twitter access in Mexico may soon be restricted if plans by the Mexican Revolutionary Democratic Party become law. The plan, drafted by republican and PDR member Nazario Norberto hopes to restrict Twitter usage in an attempt to cut down on crime.

The bill is still in draft stage, with no word on a date for submission.

Tags: Cartels, Drugs, Free Speech, Mexico, News, twitter

The key is the mainstream publishers’ worry that e-books will cannibalize the sales of physical books. Mainstream book publishers, along with mainstream music publishers and the legacy media newspapers, are actually primarily manufacturers. The costs of the content, in royalties to the authors, are only about 10 percent of the cover price of the book, and less than that for the record. It’s the costs of setting type or mastering, printing the books or pressing the disks, shipping, cataloging, and selling them that dominates the costs of publishing.

Now, along come e-books and readers, like the Kindle and the iPad. Suddenly the whole business of publishing has changed. You can sell a physical book or an e-book — but each copy of the e-book costs literally one one-millionth as much to produce.

“I’d like to believe that pastors/layleaders have the shared spiritual and technical understanding to use this tech - but history present and past dictates that not being the case”

“Those are who enabled in the Body to teach spiritual truths need to come up beside those who are technically able to use the tools of this age and together build on our faith. Sorry, we can’t wait for a generation of pastors to come forth who have this shared knowledge - it will be too late”

Good

“Sometimes the citizen journalists can get out there faster — and give better reports — than the professional ones” “Take, for example, the recent 7.0 earthquake in Haiti”

“Not only can the blogosphere be the first to report on breaking news, but it can even help make the news a bit more personal to media consumers than simply watching two anchors sitting behind a desk”

Bad

1. Blogs are opinion; Journalism is fact. Most people can’t tell the difference between the two, therefore the entire field of journalism will be soiled by slanted reporting.

2. Bloggers are going to put all journalists out on the street. Why pay someone to report the news when millions are doing it for free?
“If someone doesn’t even have the brains to run spell-check, they might not have the brains to be analyzing economic trends or providing political commentary, either”

To sum it up: “Bloggers are beginning to prove why journalists still have jobs.”

Nitika Tolani-Brown, Meredith McCormac, Roy Zimmermann published the research paper in the Journal of Education for International Development 4:2, December 2009 titled ‘An Analysis of the Research and Impact of ICT in Education in Developing Country Contexts’. (pdf)

Reported are the demonstrated and measurable impacts of ICT on students. The research paper generates an innovative and rigorous research agenda addressing salient issues such as impact and effectiveness, return on investment, and total cost of ownership.

More IFAP Information Society programmes “building an information society for all” ensuring that all people have access to information they can use to enhance their lives.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, has twice quoted Will McCants and Jarret Brachman’s Stealing al-Qaida’s Playbook report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, once in a video and once in his book, The Exoneration. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi too has cited material from the CTC, comparing it favorably to that of his challengers within the jihadist environment:

The understanding of our enemies and their readings of my publications, have yielded results that differ completely from the calls of those inexperienced people and their understanding. For example, the theorists of the Combating Terrorism Center in the US Military, in the 6th issue of their magazine, studied the possibility of exploiting Al-Maqdisi to strike at jihad and the mujahidin (as they have exploited the leaderships of the Egyptian Islamic Group). The conclusion was that such an attempt will lead to failure because of [Maqdisi’s] steadfastness and the firmness of his positions. This is what the enemies said about me and distributed on the Internet.

So al-Maqdisi is writing jihadist materials (”my publications”), western analysts such as Joas Wagemakers are then publishing “their readings of my publications” in the CTC’s magazine, al-Maqdisi is commenting on this on his own website, whereupon Thomas Hegghammer at the Jihadica blog translates al-Maqdisi’s comment, and posts it at Jihadica with commentary of his own.

Each side is basically addressing its own people here, and the other side is eavesdropping — and yet as I said above, a sort of conversation emerges. When you read someone, and quote them, and they read your work and see themselves quoted, you and they may be bitter adversaries — but you are bound to feel some degree of personal connection, perhaps even satisfaction. Indeed, Hegghammer admits “I would be lying if I said I am not envious of their being cited by jihadi legends” — to some extent mirroring the delight al-Maqdisi takes in being assessed as “steadfast” and “firm” by the folks at CTC.

*

In the case of Abu Walid al-Masri and Leah Farrall, the conversation has been taken a whole lot farther.

Leah Farrall was until recently the “al Qaeda subject matter expert” for the Australian Federal Police, and investigated the 2005 Bali bombings on their behalf. She is presently completing her doctoral dissertation on “Al Qaeda and militant salafist jihad”.

Some months back, Leah “rather cheekily requested a dialogue with a prominent Islamic militant,” Abu Walid al-Masri, whom she describes as “a legendary figure in mujaheddin circles … known during the Soviet-Afghan war for his prowess as a military strategist” and “the first foreigner to swear allegiance to Taliban leader Mullah Omar.” Abu Walid has written, “I cannot deny that it amazed me personally. I did not think in my mind that this would happen one day” — but he accepted Leah’s suggestion, and they have now exchanged a considerable number of posts, each posing questions to the other.

Abu Walid’s posts in response to Leah’s questions are up on Leah’s website in Arabic — Leah has already translated some of them into English, the rest will follow — and very recently, Leah posted her own, extensive responses to Abu Walid’s questions. I’d already written up the correspondence between the two of them on this blog and on Zenpundit some time back, shortly after it began, and Leah has graciously invited me to post my own responses to this most recent exchange, which I will again do in two parts, here and on Zenpundit.

*

Here, I want to address the issue of online communications between people of opposing views. These can often be contentious in the extreme, as anyone who reads the comments appended to online press reports of anything from politics to soccer games can quickly tell.

Leah and Abu Walid are not, on the face of it, “on the same team”: Abu Walid describes them as “the (terrorist) and (counter-terrorist)” — and yet their tone throughout is cordial. Thus Abu Walid writes:

I hope that our dialogue will be a step towards a common understanding and human relations between the natural and fair people. That is a goal worth working for and sacrificing for. It also illustrates the importance of the brave step you have taken to open the door to such a dialogue and continuation of it.

and Leah responds:

Like you, I think our dialogue is important. We may not agree, but hopefully we can keep talking and come to a greater level of understanding. As you say, it is a small step, but it is an important one, and any step towards greater understanding is a step away from conflict, which we all want to end. At the end of the day we are all humans. We all have families. We all want to live in peace and freedom and support our families to the best of our ability. I hope that these universal traits eventually lead us down the road to peace instead of conflict.

My own response (soon, on Zenpundit) to the substance of their discussion will begin from that point.

*

My purpose here is to draw attention to the possibility this dialogue exemplifies, that of having a probing yet civil dialogue between people with passionately held opposing points of view.

To my way of thinking, Leah and Abu Walid manage this by speaking plainly, by sharing a common interest in learning more about each other’s views, by allowing each other the understanding that there may be some things each of them would prefer not to discuss, and — I believe, very significantly — by couching their dialogue in the form of questions.

These questions may contain assumptions, in some cases, with which the respondents disagree — but because the format is question- rather than statement-based, the respondents can then dispute the assumptions while proposing their own views. The question and question format — because this is not an interview, in which one person questions and the other responds, but a mutual questioning — in my view facilitates listening, facilitates the hearing of the other’s position.

*

In her article about this dialogue for The Australian, Leah comments:

In the war on terror it has become commonplace to dehumanise our adversaries and disregard their grievances. A fear of moral contagion means talking to militants legitimises their cause. Understanding what drives them has taken second place to eradicating them, even in the academic world.

The US Secretary of Defense said recently that he recognizes the Taliban to be “part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point”, and that “Political reconciliation ultimately has to be a part of settling the conflict”.

The dialog between Leah and Abu Walid lays some groundwork for that process, in a manner unthinkable before the advent of the internet.

Howard Zinn was a historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright, best known as author of the bestseller A People’s History of the United States. Zinn has been active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States. The author of some 20 books, Zinn was Professor Emeritus in the Politica Science Department at Boston University. He lived until his death in Massachusetts with his wife, the artist Roslyn Zinn.

A People’s History Of The United States of Howard Zinn presented by History Is A Weapon

A review of tributes, audio, video and press obituaries at http://www.howardzinn.org/