Suchergebnisse

It is often taken for granted that personal computers today are designed to hide technical information in order to make software seem easier. While "transparency of interaction" has influenced popular understandings of computer systems, it also shapes our engagement with software as critics. This essay examines the origins of transparent design in different models of usability proposed by IBM and Apple in response to popular concerns over the inaccessibility of personal computers in the early 1980s. By tracing how and why transparency emerged from this period of crisis, we can better interrogate its justifications and imagine alternative relationships to computing.

Among the many slogans and descriptive terms concerning educated youth, "youth without regrets" occupies a special place. On the one hand, it is one of the earliest and best-known slogans about educated youth, and even became a cultural symbol of China in the 1990s. On the other hand, its initial association with educated youth and popularity actually reflect not so much a coincidence as a complicity between the popular and state narratives. This article thus analyses in depth the whole range of issues related to the slogan "youth without regrets": the social context and political reasons for its emergence, the process that led to its popularity, its real meaning, and the common misunderstandings surrounding it, as well as the social, cultural, and political functions hidden behind its popularity. (China Perspect/GIGA)

An examination of sport, national identity, & gender performance focuses on women's soccer in the US & draws on 1992-1996 data from a larger study of the Poseurs, a San Francisco Bay Area (CA) women's soccer team comprising mostly Irish immigrants. The connection between Irish nationalism & Gaelic football is discussed, along with the ancillary role played by women, the Gaelic Athletic Assoc's antipathy to soccer, & the 1987 formation of the first female soccer team of immigrants from Ireland. The social & symbolic functions of team membership are discussed, along with practical advantages, eg, access to a job-finding network. It is suggested that the violation of traditional gender roles manifested through the soccer team serves to reinforce detachment from Irish paternalist & parochial norms. Distinctions are made between coping strategies devised by male football players & female soccer players, noting both exhibited considerable ambivalence toward their cultural inheritance while expressing a strong attachment to Ireland. J. Lindroth

This article is a contribution to theoretical reflection on the notion of generation applied to the study of youth in Taiwan. Starting from the polysemy of this concept, which has remained problematic for the social sciences since the nineteenth century, it shows that beyond the simple demographic cohort, the young people born in the 1980s and 1990s form a new "actual" generation, in the sense of Mannheim, i.e. characterised by objectively distinctive traits and a generational consciousness that contrasts with their elders. It also seeks to explain the process of formation of this generational consciousness and its implications for political mobilisation. (China Perspect/GIGA)