AMF,
Catherine

Blogging here was a lot of fun! Take good care.

best,
Ann

Over the years, Sivacracy has been literally one of the only blogs that I read every day -- multiple times a day -- and starting my day at Sivacracy brought new insights, new ideas, new analyses, new arguments. It has always been such a pleasure to have a place to read cutting-edge opinion and news on issues that mattered so dearly to me: information policy, feminism, culture, education, science, politics.

And always quirky and humorous, and open. Many blogs have comments enabled, but few blogs are truly open for dialog. Sivacracy was, for me, a model of committed, activist academic blogging.

So I was truly honored when Siva asked me to participate, and although I joined the blog just as my blogging energies were waning, every time I made a post I felt a warm glow. Posting to other Sivacracy readers felt like an "oh by the way" to other people -- not an anonymous blog readership -- but intelligent, questioning, curious folk, who share a lot of peculiar passions, and would be fun to have dinner and a few drinks with.

It's been a pleasure. Let's have that dinner party sometime. A Sivacracy reader/blogger reunion sounds like a blast.

Cheers,

Laura Quilter

It's been a great long while since I've posted, which seemed to be a particularly poor way for me to thank Siva for his kindness and generosity in allowing me to write on Sivacracy. Part of this was simple embarrassment over how my role in the blog hadn't matched up to my initial ambitions. I had hoped to inaugurate a truly revolutionary form of blogging, with prose that would be clean, cold, rational, and nearly dehumanized, aimed at a clinical take on the savagery of international politics and culture. Instead, I soon began simply to praise Kanye West albums and to lament the dominance of the San Antonio Spurs; I had wanted to be Robert Frank but quickly became the guy who takes photographs of kittens and adds slogans like "Hang in there!"

My ineptitude shocked even me. I spiraled into a morass of self-loathing, which only increased every time Ann would post something that would make me laugh, or Laura would post something that would teach me about technology and information control, or Liz would stick it to Joe Lieberman over trying to censor video games (which I play pretty much all the time), or Siva would post something that would make me feel less alone in my rage with one of his pointed jabs about the current American political scene. Why couldn't I do those things? Why were my thoughts (which usually go something like this: "maybe pepperoni I'm glad I'm not a vegetarian anymore because I could also do sausage but I'd better call it in in advance because they get crowded on Friday nights fuck I shouldn't even go on to Burnout Revenge when I haven't completed Grand Theft Auto IV, I forgot to get back to that student's email but why do they need to know the paper topic already, hey, what the fuck I'm out of calming herbal tea, I just bought that canister this morning") so inherently unbloggable, so useless to the larger public debate?

And so I give my farewell with great regret and well-deserved humility, though also with real gratitude to Siva for setting up this wonderful forum and for giving me the great honor of allowing me to take part. Like many other fans, I will miss reading it. And I thank the other writers for their dedication and for sharing their extraordinary insights, and wish them nothing but the best with their other projects.

Sivacracy has long meant something special for me. It was the first blog I read with any regularity, and it was the one that first inspired me to blog over at my own site, Differences & Repetitions. Like BoingBoing and perhaps a few other venues, it seemed like a place where young, hip intellectuals could circulate provocative ideas about and commentary on the world. I appreciated Sivacracy’s spirit and insight as a reader for many years and so was thrilled when Siva asked me late last year to join the Sivacracy team. It’s been a short run—too short, really—but it’s been a blast nonetheless. I say goodbye here without any regrets.

I suppose the mark of any good cultural producer is to know when to say, “enough.” Seinfeld went out on top despite NBC’s having offered Jerry Seinfeld something like $100 million to stick around for one more season. On the flip side, most producers allow their work to hang on well beyond its prime. Take Happy Days, for example, which essentially became a parody of itself in its later years. Desperate to hold on to its waning audience, producer Gary Marshall concocted a sequence in which the Fonz would perform a death-defying leap over a shark tank on water skis. Whenever such gimmickry rears its head in popular culture, people refer to it as “jumping the shark.”

It’s taken me awhile to reconcile myself to Sivacracy’s shutdown, but I realize now it’s probably for the best. I’m tired, and I’ve only been at it here for a scant 10 months. I can only imagine how exhausted those who’ve been with Sivacracy longer than I must feel. Most importantly, I’m pleased that Siva and the whole lot of us have had the good sense not to let Sivacracy jump the shark. Better to let it go than to allow it to become a shadow of what it once was or, worse yet, a sad joke.

So thank you, Siva, for having the integrity not to ask me or anyone else to don our water skis. Thank you Sivacracy team for welcoming me into the fold. And thank you readers for listening and responding to my opinions about the world.

Later, yo.

Millions of blogs end in this way. Tens of millions. One day the author is pointing out the existence of feelings of wonder or overcommitment or angst (often in relationship to the Internet), and the next there is nothing but perpetual silence. The blog continues to exist in suspended animation after the last posting. The thought remains essentially unfinished; the expression is stopped almost mid-sentence. Those who stumble upon such blogs' mysterious contents can only regard them like so so much unclaimed luggage, clues to an absent owner who has long since left the scene.

Academic blogs are a notable exception. Perhaps it is because the professorial personality likes finality and wants to have a few pithy words at graduation. Michael Bérubé knew to say goodbye properly, first with a long posting and then with a YouTube video of orchestral nuclear annihilation. (The ending of that blog remains a source of personal unhappiness for me, by the way, since I still amaze people by correctly predicting the winner of the Super Bowl each year.) Rationales are provided even for a pseudonymous blog. Even Dr. Crazy had to explain her departure. In true didn't-you-get-the-memo fashion Peter Krapp signed off with a top ten list. (Some of the video of Krapp's very definitive farewell is here.)

And yet, how much do these final rationalizations really tell the reader about the reasons for ending a blog. Does the suicide note really explain the suicide? Does the Dear John letter really explain the ending of the relationship?

Siva has given a number of excellent reasons for why this blog will be ending. The most important reason has to do with a fundamentally new attitude about publication in the age of social media. Many academic blogs, such as The Googlization of Everything, have become testing grounds for books, and places like the Institute for the Future of the Book understand and support this. My own blog for my own personal hobbyhorses about government institutions as media-makers, Virtualpolitik, has functioned in this way, and now that the book will actually be coming out in print, I have to figure out my blog's function as I begin to work on a second book about very different material.

Of course, I envy blogs like Ann's Feminist Law Professors, because it has a very clearly defined audience and a clearly defined voice. I don't see FLP writing its final blog postings any time soon.

I will certainly miss the comradery here, especially since -- thanks to my subscription to Sabres.com -- I am frequently reminded of the fact that I entered a collaborative writing community of digital rights activists who were fans of sport teams other than the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, since I can't end with Stanley Kubrick-style armageddon, I would just say "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

ChronicleReview.com:

YOUTH & TECHNOLOGY
Generational Myth

Not all young people are tech-savvy

By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you talking about? There is no such thing as a "digital generation."

In the introduction to his book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (Macmillan) last year, Jeff Gomez posits that young Americans constitute a distinct generation that shares a sensibility: resistance to the charms of printed and bound books. Gomez, who has been a sales-and-marketing director for a number of global publishers, has written a trade book whose title and thesis demands that we ignore it. Alas, I could not.

"The needs of an entire generation of 'Digital Natives' — kids who have grown up with the Internet, and are accustomed to the entire world being only a mouse click away — are going unanswered by traditional print media like books, magazines, and newspapers," Gomez writes. "For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time."

When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes. And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the "kids today" or "this generation believes" argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.

Of course they use Google, but not very well — just like my 75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours, just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers. (According to the American Library Association, visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004).

What do we miss when we pay attention only to the perceived digital prejudices of American college students? Most high-school graduates in the United States do not end up graduating from four-year universities with bachelor's degrees. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2007 only some 28 percent of adults 25 and older had completed bachelor's degrees or higher. Is it just college-educated Americans who are eligible for generational status?

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital" willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged. It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time, knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender, and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions about digital media. ...

You may have noticed that we have not posted here for about a month. That's because we learned in August that the servers at NYU had been taken over by some evil porn bots. By the time NYU got around to telling us that everything was cool, we were busy with a thousand other projects.

But now, we are back to say farewell.

All week I will invite the various Sivacracy contributors to post their own alohas here. And I will cap it all off with a long, sappy farewell message on Friday. But meanwhile, here is what I have been up to.

Over on the blog section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein and I are going to do a series of conversational posts about the essays that we wrote in this week's Chronicle Review. Mine is called "Generational Myth: Digital Youth are a False Demographic Category."

In the essay, I make two arguments that should be familiar to Sivacracy readers.

1) What we call "the digital generation" is not universally or uniformly digital.

2) There is no such thing as a "generation" anyway.

Please check out our essays and the forum discussion that Mark has graciously offered to host. I will post the URLs when the Chronicle posts the pieces.

I have been busy writing The Googlization of Everything and getting back into the teaching mode. I am teaching a great course on "Privacy and Surveillance" this semester. I am not allowed to tell you any more about it.

Oh, and there is much more. All good. I will let the rest of the crew say goodbye in their own ways and tell you what they are up to as well.

So why am I suspending this blog? Mainly, it's a distraction from my day jobs. I have a massive and painful book deadline coming up. If I continued to blog daily about the election and the state of the world and everything else I would drive myself and everyone around me crazy.

Plus, this is less fun than it used to be. Back in 2004 it seemed fun. Blogs were the bomb. Now, I think my blogging voice is hoarse. And I am tired.

There is more. I will reflect on it all in my farewell post on Friday.

Until then, Aloha.

Trojans have priority of use for 'SC' logo, says the administrative tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

No word on whether the Bowl Championship Series computers could change the result.

The USPTO's page on the dispute, with links to the relevant documents, is here.

Sometimes I realize this as soon as I’ve come up with it: “Oh, I can’t use that great chorus I just wrote, I guess it’s the same melody as that Gnarls Barkley song.” Sometimes I don’t realize until years later where the ingredients of a song came from. Discussing this with a few friends of mine, we decided to make “unveiling” mix tapes for each other — tapes that would reveal the original songs we had, knowingly or unknowingly at the time, been “inspired by.” (”Inspired by” is sometimes known as “illegal infringement of copyright,” depending whether or not you’re in a court of law!) I already knew some of the songs I would have to put on my own “unveiling” tape; I was well aware that certain songs I’d written had been “inspired by” (since I’m not in court) bits of other people’s songs.

Cartoon by Steve Greenberg.