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This book explores community dynamics within social media. Using
Wikipedia as an example, the volume explores communities that rely
upon commons-based peer production. Fundamental theoretical
principles spanning such domains as organizational configurations,
leadership roles, and social evolutionary theory are developed. In
the context of Wikipedia, these theories explain how a functional
elite of highly productive editors has emerged and why they are
responsible for a majority of the content. It explains how the
elite shapes the project and how this group tends to become stable
and increasingly influential over time. Wikipedia has developed a
new and resilient social hierarchy, an adhocracy, which combines
features of traditional and new, online, social organizations. The
book presents a set of practical approaches for using these
theories in real-world practice. This work fundamentally changes
the way we think about social media leadership and evolution,
emphasizing the crucial contributions of leadership, of elite
social roles, and of group global structure to the overall success
and stability of large social media projects. Written in an
accessible and direct style, the book will be of interest to
academics as well as professionals with an interest in social media
and commons-based peer production processes.
This book shows how institutional religion and the religiosity of
political and cultural life provide a necessary dimension to Walter
Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. Lived
religion surrounded Benjamin, whose upper-middle-class Jewish
family celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah in Berlin as the turmoil
of war, collapsing empires, and modern urban life gave rise to the
Nazi regime that would destroy most of Europe’s Jews, including
Benjamin himself. Documenting the vitality and diversity of
religious life that surrounded Benjamin in Germany, France, and
beyond, Brian Britt shows the extent to which religious communities
and traditions, especially those of Christians, influenced his
work. Britt surveys and analyzes the intellectual, cultural, and
social contexts of religion in Benjamin’s world and broadens the
religious frame around discussions of his work to include lived
religion—the daily practices of ordinary people. Seeing religion
around Benjamin requires looking at forms of life and institutions
that he rarely discussed. As Britt shows, dramatic changes in
religious practices, particularly in Berlin, reflected broader
political and cultural currents that would soon transform the lives
of all Europeans. An original perspective on the religious context
of a thinker who habitually raised questions about the survival of
religion in modernity, Religion Around Walter Benjamin contributes
to wider discussions of religious tradition and secular modernity
in religious and cultural studies. It provides a foundational
overview and introduction to the context of Benjamin’s writing
that will be appreciated by scholars and students alike.
This book shows how institutional religion and the religiosity of
political and cultural life provide a necessary dimension to Walter
Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers. Lived
religion surrounded Benjamin, whose upper-middle-class Jewish
family celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah in Berlin as the turmoil
of war, collapsing empires, and modern urban life gave rise to the
Nazi regime that would destroy most of Europe's Jews, including
Benjamin himself. Documenting the vitality and diversity of
religious life that surrounded Benjamin in Germany, France, and
beyond, Brian Britt shows the extent to which religious communities
and traditions, especially those of Christians, influenced his
work. Britt surveys and analyzes the intellectual, cultural, and
social contexts of religion in Benjamin's world and broadens the
religious frame around discussions of his work to include lived
religion-the daily practices of ordinary people. Seeing religion
around Benjamin requires looking at forms of life and institutions
that he rarely discussed. As Britt shows, dramatic changes in
religious practices, particularly in Berlin, reflected broader
political and cultural currents that would soon transform the lives
of all Europeans. An original perspective on the religious context
of a thinker who habitually raised questions about the survival of
religion in modernity, Religion Around Walter Benjamin contributes
to wider discussions of religious tradition and secular modernity
in religious and cultural studies. It provides a foundational
overview and introduction to the context of Benjamin's writing that
will be appreciated by scholars and students alike.
To what degree can the human exchanges we observe online be called
"sociability"? In other words, do these exchanges amount to any
meaningful type of social organization? Are they more than the mere
froth of collective emotion discharging its energy with a lot of
noise but little consequence against the wave breakers of social
media? Do the social interactions that take place in virtual
space-all those kind or not-so-kind words sent back and
forth-suggest the same level of commitment, dedication, morality,
passion, or even depravity that we see in everyday life? Or, more
succinctly, is sociability online less "social," less "real" than
what we see in everyday life? The present collection of papers
reflects some of the most insightful contributions to the Purdue
Online Interaction Seminar. Representing a variety of interpretive
frameworks, the conversation is circumscribed by a number of
themes, of which two are most important. The first one is the
nature of online sociability. Are or could online groups be
"community-like," bound by ties as strong as those of kith and kin?
Should they be qualified as a type of contractual, rational,
self-interested "society"? Or should we propose a new interpretive
framework? Should online communities be seen as a type of
"communitas," which is a form of social aggregation that appears
during certain initiation rituals? If this is so, are
communitas-like virtual spaces characterized by the same transient,
liminal state that mixes a variety of contradictory characteristics
(temporary and permanent, close and distant, essential and
fleeting) that we observe in other types of "communitas"? Can
virtual communitas lead to social and personal transformation, just
like its traditional counterpart? Table of Contents Sorin Adam
Matei Introduction 1 The book is dead Long live the ubibook 9 User
Guide 16 Susan Huelsing Sarapin Front Porches and Public Spaces:
Planned Communities Online 20 Pamela Morris Glimpses of Community
on the Web 45 Brenda Berkelaar Van Pelt Peering Behind the Curtain:
The Virtual Wizard Offers No Guarantees 59 Brian C. Britt The
Invisible Man: Speaking into the Online Void 84 Robert N. Yale
Welcome to I-berspace: Media Gratifications in Successful Virtual
Communities 101 Christina Kalinowski Individualism Online:
Virtually Escaping the 'Massness' or Vanishing into the
'Electrovoid'? 119 W. Scott Sanders SIDE Theory, Small World
Networks, and Smart Mob Formation: A Beginner's Guide 136 Online
Interaction Seminar: Selected Readings and Discussion Topics 153
Author Biographies 162
In Biblical Curses and the Displacement of Tradition Brian Britt
offers an intriguing perspective on curses as the focus of debates
over the power, pleasure, and danger of words. Biblical authors
transformed ancient Near Eastern curses against rival ethnic
groups, disobedient ancestors, and the day of one's own birth with
great variety and ingenuity. Transformations of biblical curses
proliferated in post-biblical history, even during periods of
'secularization'. This study argues that biblical, early modern,
and contemporary transformations of curses constitute displacements
rather than replacements of earlier traditions. The crucial notion
of displacement draws from Freud's psychoanalytic theory,
Nietzsche's critical philosophy, and Benjamin's engagement with
textual tradition; it highlights not only manifest shifts but also
many hidden continuities between cursing in biblical texts and
cursing in such 'secular' domains as literature, law, politics, and
philosophy. The tradition of biblical cursing-neither purely
'religious' nor purely 'secular'-travels through these texts and
contexts as it redefines verbal, human, and supernatural power.
Exalted for centuries as a hero and author of the Bible, Moses is
inseparable from biblical tradition itself. Moses is also an
inherently ambiguous figure and a perennial focus of controversy,
from ancient disputes of priestly rivalry to modern issues of
class, gender and race. In Rewriting Moses, Brian Britt analyses
elements of polemic and ideology in the Moses of the Bible, of
film, novel, visual art and scholarship. He argues that the
biblical Moses lives within writing, while the post-biblical Moses
lives more often in biography. Yet later rewritings of Moses
refract biblical traditions of writing in surprising ways.
Rewriting Moses provides an original account of the Freudian
insight that traditions preserve what they repress. This is volume
14 in the Gender, Cutlure, Theory series and is volume 402 in the
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements series.
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