Downloading culture: community building in a decentralized file-sharing collective

File-sharing collectives have significantly disrupted models of digital media distribution since their emergence and widespread popularization in the late 1990s. This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct their communities of practice. Conducting a case study of a private torrenting community, data were gathered via participant observation, interviews, and online postings (i.e., blogs and forums). Findings challenged dominant notions of opportunism, selfishness and task-oriented individualism advanced by Human–Computer Interaction scholars. Three key constructs were identified in private torrent community building: boundary construction, membership maintenance, and a sense of belonging and solidarity. Findings illustrate how a file-sharing community cultivates the formation of prosocial digital peers, fosters an affective approach to peer-to-peer collectives, and ultimately forges a downloading virtuoso community. This sisyphean, goal-oriented community seeks to create a comprehensive archive of media artifacts independent of and in opposition to dominant corporate platforms. The community demonstrates a downloading culture inspired by technological design, yet driven by trust and solidarity.     

Urbanization in China and the Coordinated Development Model—The case of Chengdu

China's urbanization faces two greatest difficulties of creating non-farm jobs to “landless farmers” and providing required amenities and social services to urbanites-to-be. In the earlier phase of development, TVE employment had provided important relief to the job pressure. Later, the “Small-city Strategy” that emphasized forming towns and small cities around where rural population resided successfully deterred rural population's entry into large cities. Today, China is implementing a Coordinated Development between the urban and rural sectors, aiming to reach a balanced development between the two sectors by making not only large cities more welcoming to rural migrants but also the small cities, towns, and areas where rural population now reside harder to leave. At the core of the coordination are three concentrations of rural residents, farmland, and firms, intended to help rural residents to settle in large cities, small cities and towns, as well as new residential areas in the countryside, to de-segment land to realize economies of scale, and to gather firms of a same industry in organized industrial areas to gain agglomeration economies and create non-farm jobs. This article examines the trajectory of China's urbanization, analyzes the working mechanism of the Coordinated Development model, and investigates Chengdu's practice of the Coordinated Development, which will help to provide insights into the new developments in China's urbanization.     

Failing better: The stochastic art of evaluating community-led environmental action programs

This article provides insights into the evaluation of a government-funded action for climate change program. The UK-based program aimed to reduce CO2 emissions and encourage behavioral change through community-led environmental projects. It, thus, employed six community development facilitators, with expertise in environmental issues. These facilitators supported and learnt from 18 community groups over an 18-month period. The paper explores the narratives of the six professional facilitators. These facilitators discuss their experiences of supporting community groups. They also explain their contribution to the wider evaluation of the community-led projects. This paper reflects on the facilitator experience of the program’s outcome-led evaluation process. In turn, it also explores how the groups they supported experienced the process. The facilitator’s narratives reveal that often community-group objectives did not align with predefined outcomes established through theory of change or logic model methodologies, which had been devised in attempt to align to program funder aims. Assisting community action emerges in this inquiry as a stochastic art that requires funder and facilitator willingness to experiment and openness to the possibilities of learning from failure. Drawing on in-depth accounts, the article illustrates that a reflexive, interpretive evaluation approach can enhance learning opportunities and provides funders with more trustworthy representations of community-led initiatives. Yet, it also addresses why such an approach remains marginal within policy circles.     

Current Challenges of North/South Relations in Gay-Lesbian and Queer Studies

ABSTRACT

The article assesses and analyzes different dimensions of the current configuration of North/South dialogues within gay-lesbian and queer studies, with particular attention to the interrelations between the United States and South America. It looks into how gay-lesbian and queer studies relate to the global division and hierarchy of intellectual labor traditionally embedded in academic practices, and it asks whether the scope of its radical program includes a revision of unequal academic dynamics. Its concerns are both ethical and epistemological, as they speak not only to the moral and political dimensions of academic practice, but also to how these modes affect the knowledge produced in the United States and in South America today. By offering a view from the South conversant with South American as well as Northern production, we hope to contribute to both local and international debates regarding the present and future of the field.     

Analyzing event stream dynamics in two-mode networks: An exploratory analysis of private communication in a question and answer community

Information about social networks can often be collected as event stream data. However, most methods in social network analysis are defined for static network snapshots or for panel data. We propose an actor oriented Markov process framework to analyze the structural dynamics in event streams. Estimated parameters are similar to what is known from exponential random graph models or stochastic actor oriented models as implemented in SIENA. We apply the methodology on a question and answer web community and show how the relevance of different kinds of one- and two-mode network structures can be tested using a new software.     

Identifying Higher‐Order Rationality

Strategic choice data from a carefully chosen set of ring‐network games are used to obtain individual‐level estimates of higher‐order rationality. The experimental design exploits a natural exclusion restriction that is considerably weaker than the assumptions underlying alternative designs in the literature. In our data set, 93 percent of subjects are rational, 71 percent are rational and believe others are rational, 44 percent are rational and hold second‐order beliefs that others are rational, and 22 percent are rational and hold at least third‐order beliefs that others are rational.     

反驳克里普克的语义论证

克里普克的语义论证被简要重构为,大前提:如果关于名称的描述论是正确的,则名称的意义必须是确定其所指的充分必要条件;小前提:事实上,名称的意义不是确定其所指的充分必要条件;结论:关于名称的描述论是错误的。本文作者只接受此论证的小前提,但不接受大前提,故不接受其结论,本文揭示了在语义论证中两个很成问题的隐含假设:假设1,"名称或摹状词如何指称对象"这一问题仅仅是名称或摹状词与对象、语言、世界之间的一种客观关系,与使用名称或摹状词以及整个语言的"我们"(语言共同体)无关;假设2,如果名称有意义并且其意义由相应的摹状词给出的话,这些摹状词应该是确定名称所指的充分必要条件;并且,我们有可能找到这样的充分必要条件。通过强调语言及其意义的社会性、约定性和历史性,本文批驳了假设1和假设2,由此得出结论:克里普克的语义论证不成立。     

长城不是闭关自守的符号

如何评价长城的价值和作用,是一个值得继续探讨的重大课题。最近,有人把明朝缺少和田玉归咎于大修长城,闭关自守,把清朝拥有许多和田玉归功于不修长城,实行开放。长城俨然成为闭关自守的符号,成为一切罪过的祸根。有人还把修长城称为＂大愚蠢＂,彻底否定其价值和作用。其实,长城并不是闭关自守的符号。明清两朝是否得到和田玉,与是否修长城根本无关;修长城的王朝未必闭关自守,不修长城的王朝也未必实行开放;长城的价值和作用,应予历史的肯定。     

"刽子手悖论"之消解

消解强化的与再强化的“刽子手悖论”之要点为:1.法官之判决涉及对囚徒认知状况之预言,故囚徒就判决所作之论证应作为判断判决能否被执行之依据;2.囚徒之论证不可靠;3.该论证依赖于一个错误的认知原则;4.该认知原则之错误根源在于,误以为推得一命题必然意味着知道该命题。