pbstv:

Celebrate Earth Day this Weekend With Some PBS Films!

Over on PBS.org, we’ve curated our best videos on the environment.

We’ve got the most recent and compelling green documentaries, photos, and articles on our Earth Day collection page.

Today’s video: Nature’s new film, “River of No Return.”

Have a green weekend, everybody!

The digital powers that be over at Being should restore the like (heart), follow (plus), and reblog icons to the individual blog posts at Being Blog. Tumblr is just as valid a way of interacting with the content as Facebook and Twitter. If people can only “Like,” “Tweet,” and “Link to” the content, then this media does not depart much from the traditional model of broadcasting in which knowledge flows from a particular font.

One of the things that social media allows is the “mashup,” really just a new name for the folk process. As long as we’re sourcing things appropriately in the reblog—and Tumblr is building in attribution with its reblog routines—then content providers, connected to traditional broadcast or not, should provide this feature. Similarly, the Being Blog should also allow people to comment on posts with their Tumblr handles, and not just DISCUSS. If content providers truly want people to interact with information on their own terms, they have to give them some latitude for mashup. For after all, we are not talking about who “owns” information, but what is our global cultural legacy.

beingblog:

Reflections on a Radio and Digital Adventure

by Krista Tippett, host

“Volar” (photo: Kaytee Riek/Flickr via Creative Commons)

It’s been a complex year in my life. I boarded a plane for nearly two weeks away — a restful vacation, this time, to make up for the exciting but exhausting schedule of events and travel of this past spring and fall. I keep thinking about Esther Sternberg’s analogy about the effects of stress on our bodies: that, just as we need to reboot our computers, sometimes we also need to reboot ourselves. Shut down, and then restart. To be more personal about this, I’m feeling my limits — physical and mental — and though that is hard, it is also good and necessary.

It has also been a momentous year on the program, of course — a year of change and the excitement and vulnerability that come with that. There are things I would change about the process of introducing the new name, if I could. This too is the nature of life. I wish, for example, that we had made the process more transparent to our listeners. Practical exigencies made that impossible.

Yet, as I experience it now, the name change remains a work in progress that we and you, long-time and new listeners, now live into together. In the beginning, we used the formal name of Krista Tippett on Being as a bridge between the old and the new, understanding that it would quickly be shortened in casual usage. We’re experiencing that the short form nearly everyone prefers is On Being, not the word Being on its own. I like that.

And while even I work at times to get used to this new identity, I’m grateful for this vast yet elemental framing word we chose. I just turned 50. I’ve been creating this radio program and podcast, if you include the piloting that led to its launch, for a decade. My craving to draw out the big questions and big ideas of life is unabated. At the same time, more than ever before, I am utterly impatient when these questions and ideas remain abstractions. I need to see them lived and embodied and therein tested and stretched. We need more than a self-contained concept in our world called “faith.”

We need virtues — the practical expressions of faith, spiritual life, and ethical imagination — at play at the center of life. We need questions so vigorous, existential, and sacred that they change us, become part of our very being and our action in the world. That spirit gave rise, after all, to all of our great traditions, and it will reinvigorate them for the exacting century to come.

And I have continued to hear fresh wisdom and hope coming from unexpected places as we’ve produced our shows and events of this past fall and winter. I will never forget the young founder and chairman of Twitter leaning forward in his seat at the Clinton Global Initiative, telling me that social networking technologies should reinforce the value of human relationship — ultimately driving us towards new ways of connecting physically as well as digitally. My sense is that while his passion lies close to his surface, he is rarely invited to give voice to it. It is counterintuitive to many casual analyses of social networking’s dangers.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter, answers my question at a plenary session on technology at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative. In the foreground, Ory Okolloh, founder and executive director of Ushahidi, laughs along with and John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco.

More recently, I moderated a discussion, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Nour Foundation, on emerging understandings of the nature of human consciousness. This was a conversation at the intersection of science and philosophy — an intersection, interestingly, that the discoveries of cutting-edge science are making necessary again. There were a range of views on that panel about how intrinsically “real” the human self may be, how dependent on or potentially transcendent of mere biology. A German philosopher on the panel represented the extreme view that our experience of our selves is, in the end, a biologically generated illusion that dies with us. Yet even he acknowledged that the effects of our consciousness don’t remain isolated — our “selves” imprint other realities, other conscious and unconscious beings, in manifold, uncontainable ways. We change the world as we move through it. I’m recalled to those intriguing insights of Paul Davies, in my interview with him about Einstein:

“Einstein was the person to establish this notion of what is sometimes called block time — that the past, present, and future are just personal decompositions of time, and that the universe of past, present, and future in some sense has an eternal existence. And so even though individuals may come and go, their lives, which are in the past for their descendants, nevertheless still have some existence within this block time. Nothing takes that away. You may have your threescore years and ten measured by a date after your death. You are no more. And yet within this grander sweep of the timescape, nothing is changed. Your life is still there in its entirety.”

I was surprised at first when members of our team suggested that we reprise, and to some degree, recraft the show we created in September to introduce our name change to listeners. But I’ve come to see it as fitting for the turn of a year, and the end of the momentous decade in which this program has grown up. It is a kind of snapshot of the timescape, up to now, of this radio and digital adventure. We do not lose any of this. We build on it as we move forward. And we continue to build it with you, our listeners and readers.

Please know that while every email you write to us is not answered, every email and Facebook posting and tweet is read and pondered and becomes part of the identity of this project too. I wish you all a blessed season and new year, and am grateful to you beyond measure for helping to keep this improbable media space alive and growing.

Belarus? Storify? This is what I like about blogging as a means of discovery. I’ve found out two things. First, there is post-election violence in Belarus, and second, that there is a new social media platform, Storify. This may have very practical implications for my teaching. First, I may use the case of Belarus as a warmup in my Sociology of War and Peace class next semester. Given what is known about the aftermath of Orange and Rose Revolutions, there are likely to be geopolitical implications here. I’m sure that we and Russia will be on opposite sides of what is occurring in Russia’s backyard, and that energy is likely to be involved. Second, Storify may be a useful tool for the explorations of the media-saturated generation from which most of my students are drawn. Like okay, people, the fact that you can retrieve information that much more quickly and in greater volume implies for me a greater responsibility to curate it into knowledge.

npr:

Trying this as an experiment - embedding a storify about Belarus post-election violence into a Tumblr post. My apologies if it blows up your Tumblr stream.