Talk:Main Page

First reading notes

0. Re: Deliberation Day - wow. Spinning off one specific tangent here, the "likeminded people become more homogenous" part reminded me a little of some papers I've read on group identity formation (one attached); another example is how people from different states become united as "Americans" when traveling in Germany. Potentially more 'net-relevant: how group and community memberships of discussion participants are formed and displayed (or not) online - roll call lists, sigs, badges, tags. Would it be outside the class scope to discuss group/relationship formation through net-based discussion?

1. Having bibliographies to chase down from the "conference paper" pdf (Macoubrie, I assume - where should I send proofreading suggestions?) would be awesome; is there any way to get these?

2. Re: using the internet as medium for tech policy discussions (Macoubrie): +1 to meta, first of all. I noticed that access to these discourse technologies wasn't really discussed, though;

3. Also re: Macoubrie, where it talks about inclusion of all affected demographics in a discussion: it would be interesting to see whether internet discussions tend to have and/or can support diversity of thought rather than (just) diversity of demographics, and how you'd even begin to be able to answer and measure that question. I've heard that successful members of minority groups are sometimes considered successful because of how well they're able to imitate/conform to the majority's mode of thought/action, meaning that (for instance) a woman on the board may not add that much thought-diversity because she's trained herself to express things in a male-like manner - but in pictures, the board sure looks a lot more diverse. Does this happen on the internet? Are influential participants on the internet already filtered for technologically literate, good English-language writers of short prose?

4. Was reading "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" I hit the part where Feynman describes being on the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster. He tells the process of discourse within the group with pretty decent detail; it might be interesting to compare that (or other pre-internet but still in-fairly-modern-society examples of discourse) with what the same discussion might look like with today's tools.

Mchua 23:00, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

Templates

I took the liberty of template'ing Tools and Topics. If we want the main page to show them, but we also want them to have their own pages, this will keep the two locations in sync. On the other hand, if anyone thinks it will be too complicated for new users, feel free to revert.