“We could continue to flock to Twitter and Facebook — we could keep paying those who have and will rip off democracy for a stock price — or we could turn our backs and help the open web instead.”
Privatization gets to the heart of the theft of ’empowerment’ from the left. Alongside the purely economic sense of privatization, there’s a sociopolitical sense of privatization that encourages individuals to focus on their privatized troubles, rather than on public issues, which as Dag Leonardsen explains, “transcend the local environment of the individual and concern the broader society and its structure.” If people experiencing poverty are expected to purchase their own ‘low-cost’ housing, it then becomes a private and individual responsibility on their part, rather than a public obligation. In the examples of empowerment I cited from Microsoft and Pearson, their tools are marketed along the same individualistic lines, and systemic problems are transformed into personal problems of motivation and individual style. Empowerment sounds “activist and conservative at once”.
“Every time we make the argument that audience matters, we forget that reflection matters more. Our goal shouldn’t be to #becomepopular. It should be to #becomebetter. Blogging and sharing in social spaces can help us to do that whether anyone is listening or not.”
“It’s almost as if my teachers set me up to fail and take pleasure in that failure.” These quotes from first-semester college writers demonstrate how the “red pen of death” shapes the student experience of an academic culture of humiliation.
We noticed three dominant motifs emerge, in which mocking and shaming work together to undergird a capitalistic hierarchy that dehumanizes and commodifies students.
Source: Student Shaming and the Need for Academic Empathy – Hybrid Pedagogy
As the Boomers age, grandparents and grandchildren will vie for scarce funds.
If the underlying problem behind all these issues is competition for funding, couldn’t we also say that the underlying issue is the lack of funding?
Could we not say that the underlying problem is that too few people are collecting too much of the wealth generated by the economy and paying too little tax on it?
doesn’t the fact that some states have to choose between being sensible and being civilized– isn’t that a sign that we may have veered a bit too far in the direction of using government primarily to service the desires corporations and the rich folks who run them? Because I don’t think there’s anything sensible or civilized about a country that makes Grampaw and Junior fight over table scraps while the rich are grabbing more food than they know what to do with.
Source: CURMUDGUCATION: Fight for Scraps (The Real Causes of the Strikes)
“Flawed men artists and their crumbling art remind us that we have excused and still do excuse men (often mediocre) almost anything while simultaneously discounting women and people of color for any transgression.”
Maybe there is an unintended lesson to these flawed men and their flawed works that can lead us to a better way that allows them some limited space as we make room for those too long ignored and even silenced.
Source: Flawed Men Artists and Their Crumbling Art | radical eyes for equity
“Men gain credibility for bearing their flaws. Often, their flaws become the very source of their authority.
It turns out sad women don’t get to be asshole geniuses.
Source: Women Don’t Get to Be Asshole Geniuses – Electric Literature
“So Lisa, the show’s unshakable crusader for justice, including in matters of popular culture, has been reduced to a mouthpiece for the lazy idea that asking for better representation is an unfair burden on creators.”
Source: ‘The Simpsons’ To ‘The Problem With Apu’: Drop Dead : Monkey See : NPR
@wordpressdotcom, how about some love for microbloggers? This is frustrating and unusable, especially given that after peeking at the post and closing the editor the list loses vscroll. I’m trying to have an indieweb moment here. 🙂
I updated “Compassion is not coddling. Design for real life.” with a selection from “Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk”.
“Edge case” is, to be frank, a phrase that should be banned from all developer conversations (and then tattooed onto the forehead of anyone who continues to use it).
When we say “Edge Case” we mean “Stress Case”. In their book, Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher point out that what we glibly call an “edge case” is normally an enormously stressful event for a user.
It often accompanies high emotions, stress, physical problems, financial problems, etc. When we discount and dismiss the “edge case”, we’re actually saying “I don’t care about that particular user’s stressful situation”.
Source: Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk
I also dropped in these lines.
Without the social model and intersectionality, we’re just bikeshedding injustice. There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.”
I’ll further explore the common ground between the social model, intersectionality, and design for real life in a later update, or perhaps a new post.
rnbn 