Category: America
John Young wrote to the nettime-l list in response to a version of the previous post that I sent there. Here is my reply: John wrote: “A commendably hopeful essay. So far the Egyptian initiative has lofted a Mubarak stooge in his place and the elevated overt military control. These are not hopeful yet, and […]
Saul Wainwright commented on the previous post in this series, CLR James and the idea of an African revolution: “I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. […]
My talk makes a number of points that can only be sketched briefly in twenty minutes. 1. Humanity is caught between national and world society. This is both dangerous and an opportunity for us. Yet much of what has been presented here has assumed that we can safely talk about the United States in isolation […]
Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award. I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s […]
A lecture at the Library of Congress on 23rd June 2008 by Mike Wesch. See also: The information revolution The machine is us/ing us A vision of students today Introducing our YouTube ethnography project Interview: how we learn
The period since 1945 saw a revolution in world society which, by the 1990s, had turned into widespread popular emancipation from the repressive state controls installed during the Cold War. The world was becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time, but people in general enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Since the […]
C.L.R. James is one among many writers who came from Europe to America and subsequently published their commentaries on the society they found there. In American Civilization, he explicitly linked his work to a tradition established by two predecessors—the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous study, Democracy in America, resulted from his travels there […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
