Paying attention: when a FOSS advocate meets sociologists

[ Thanks to M. Fioretti for this link. ]

"Attention is precious and scarce like gold in this age of continuous interruptions, tweets limited to 140 characters and people for which something simply doesn't exist if it doesn't pop out in the first page of Google Search results. In september 2010 I have participated to a conference devoted to this theme, that is Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational Responsibility. It has been an interesting experience and one that has confirmed to me, as I'll explain in a moment, the need for "hackers" and all the other people, including (especially?) people in academia, to pay as soon as possible much more attention to each other.

" I am not a real software hacker (a term whose real meaning is not "computer criminal", thank you very much!). Sure, I only use Free Software like Gnu/Linux or OpenOffice, I write and teach as much as I can about it and I can proudly apply patches to source code and compile it all by myself if I really have to. However, almost always I stop at that much simpler, wonderful way to automate computer usage called scripting. Still, I was probably one of the closest things to a real hacker you could have found in that particular conference."

Complete Story

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