theatlantic:

Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality

If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.

Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which the above graphics were drawn. The book’s authors, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation and the Institute’s Mark Graham and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, reluctantly conclude that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”

“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” they write. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.” 

We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The researchers also sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.

The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal. 

Read more. [Image: Oxford Internet Institute]

(via bookworm-chic)

Source: The Atlantic

pantheonbooks: Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus explores the making of his seminal graphic novel, Maus, and features drafts like this one, showing early iterations of scenes from the Pulitzer-winning work. I posted about this book left and right on my second tumblr, I still haven’t looked over the DVD yet, but I did love the interview and seeing his sketches for the pages. Even though he was displeased with the glue he used for coloring as the pages aged, it’s kind of a weird nice aesthetic to the pages, it exemplifies the impermanence of art and the growth of knowledge from when he started making comics to when MetaMaus came out. His ball point sketches were interesting and seeing some of his litho prints and things excised from the book.  If you like background information and enjoyed Maus pick this book up. The sketches and the process of creating this book are informative. 
View Separately

pantheonbooks:

Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus explores the making of his seminal graphic novel, Maus, and features drafts like this one, showing early iterations of scenes from the Pulitzer-winning work.

I posted about this book left and right on my second tumblr, I still haven’t looked over the DVD yet, but I did love the interview and seeing his sketches for the pages. Even though he was displeased with the glue he used for coloring as the pages aged, it’s kind of a weird nice aesthetic to the pages, it exemplifies the impermanence of art and the growth of knowledge from when he started making comics to when MetaMaus came out. His ball point sketches were interesting and seeing some of his litho prints and things excised from the book. 

If you like background information and enjoyed Maus pick this book up. The sketches and the process of creating this book are informative. 

fishingboatproceeds: This is an interrobang. It should have become a punctuation mark, but it never really caught on. Maybe it will in the future, but probably not. The keyboard is pretty well standardized by this point, and people seem happy enough to say, “He hooked up with Sheila?!?!??!” I think about the interrobang a lot when I am thinking about the habit we have, as a species, of assuming that the world in which we live was entirely inevitable—that we as contemporary humans are just along for the ride. But the truth is we all make up the world together as we go. We choose ?! over the interrobang. I know it feels like someone else has made this decision for us. But the truth is that together, we are making the decision right now. Remember my love of the interrobang? I do.
View Separately

fishingboatproceeds:

This is an interrobang. It should have become a punctuation mark, but it never really caught on. Maybe it will in the future, but probably not. The keyboard is pretty well standardized by this point, and people seem happy enough to say, “He hooked up with Sheila?!?!??!”

I think about the interrobang a lot when I am thinking about the habit we have, as a species, of assuming that the world in which we live was entirely inevitable—that we as contemporary humans are just along for the ride. But the truth is we all make up the world together as we go. We choose ?! over the interrobang. I know it feels like someone else has made this decision for us. But the truth is that together, we are making the decision right now.

Remember my love of the interrobang? I do.