Johnella E. Butler: What Is an American?

Butler, Johnnella E. “Reflections on Borderlands and the Color Line.” Power, Race, and Gender in Academe. eds. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Maria Herrera-Sobek. NY: The MLA, 2000: 8-31.

What is an American? What are new frameworks for community identity? How can the larger narrative for an inclusive civic culture and democracy be forged? . . . How do we encourage an American consciousness encompassing a cooperative, relational pluralism that connects, matrixlike, these merged entities with a mestiza consciousness to result in the American, the United States citizen, the America that Tocqueville projected, without the “tyranny of the majority” and binary individualism at the expense of community? … [How do we develop] ways of perceiving the relationships between and among people, our pasts, our pasts’ legacies, our present lives and struggles, our environments, disciplines, and texts. … How do we shape policies to encourage the best in human beings? How do we utilize scientific discovery and progress and technological advancement to the benefit of all human beings and our environment? How do we use our positions [of power] … to help the greatest number of [persons] become human beings who care about one another and their environment? How can we reveal the unity in diversity, the sameness in difference, and how can we engage long-term intractable differences and conflicts in ways productive to humans and not necessarily with the goal of winning and defeating? How can we live together with different moral positions without hatred, violence, or imposition and without permissiveness and amorality? How can we begin to understand that my freedom ends where your denial of freedom begins? Can we reconcile individualism with community and individual needs and desires with community needs and desires? (23-24)

Peter Ludlow: Watching the Watchers -- Power and Politics in Second Life; Henry Jenkins: Choose Your Fictions Well

There comes a point where you have to recognize that technology has passed you by... and we wonder why it is so difficult to get people to pay attention to injustices in RL. These reports are like a massive pile up on the freeway and I cannot look away

Peter Ludlow: "Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part One)"

Peter Ludlow: "Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part Two)"

Henry Jenkins: "Choose Your Fictions Well."

William Fisher: US Government Sued Over Cell Phone Tracking

Gov't Sued Over Cell Phone Tracking
by William Fisher
Common Dreams

If you are a U.S. resident who owns a cell phone, you should care about the outcome of a court case that "could well decide whether the government can use your cell phone to track you - even if it hasn't shown probable cause to believe it will turn up evidence of a crime."

That was the warning issued to the public by several major civil liberties organizations as they appeared in federal court in Philadelphia to argue for more privacy protections in the use of cell phones as tracking devices by law enforcement agents.

The case is at the heart of the constitutional crisis now being played out in the U.S. federal court. Civil liberties groups are asking the court to require that the government show probable cause before it can track your whereabouts.

The groups are the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

Back in 2007, the U.S. government applied for court permission to obtain information about the location of an individual's cell phone, without showing probable cause that tracking the individual would turn up evidence of a crime.

A magistrate judge denied the government's request and a district court upheld that decision in September 2008. The government is appealing the ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

A number of civil liberties groups, on behalf of plaintiffs in the case, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the district court decision, arguing that district courts must require the government to show probable cause before permitting the government to obtain information about the location of a cell phone.

To Read the Rest of the Report