1977 annual meeting in Seattle

You are invited to Seattle for the 1977 Annual Meeting, its theme to be "Change, Comparison, and Controversy." Suggestions are made for activities in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, including the cohost city, Vancouver, British Columbia.     

From public sphere to public screen: democracy,activism, and the "violence" of Seattle

The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen” as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.     

Group Affiliations,Opinion Polarization,and Global Organizations: Views of the World Trade Organization Before and After Seattle

Group affiliation plays a key role in shaping individual opinions on public policy issues. Understanding group-related differences may be important for global organizations that depend on broad public acceptance of their policies. Research indicates that people's opinions become polarized to match perceived opinions of their group and that media reports may signal normative opinions group members should adopt. Surveys administered before and after the World Trade Organization's (WTO) 1999 meeting in Seattle indicated significant differences in opinion by group affiliation. Respondents overall held negative views of the WTO before the meeting, and more negative views after the meeting. Business and civic group members were more positive toward the WTO than were human rights and environmental and union group members, reflecting their self-interests. However, contrary to public opinion theory between-group differences in opinion in many cases became less polarized, whereas attention to media coverage served to further polarize only the opinions of union group members.     

把握方向更新观念服务社会

首先,我代表中国档案报社祝贺<北京档案>杂志出版一百期.下面我主要谈两点意见.     

基于在线服务视角的中美英澳国家档案馆网站比较研究

介绍了档案在线服务涵义及其分类和中美英澳四国的国家级档案馆网站,通过对四个国家档案馆网站在线服务比较,给出了我国档案网站提高在线服务的发展建议.     

Higher Education,the Production Function,and the Library

No abstract available for this article.     

On synthetic technologies: the book,the university,the Internet

This article examines the ‘synthetic’ – i.e. constructed and recombinant – histories of the book, the university and the Internet to argue that the vitality of the institution that links them all, the university press, will depend on yet further syntheses. These will include, in particular, an increasing commitment to the collaborative development of innovative digital technologies.     

Shaw,Caesar, and the critics

This study examined the extent to which the destruction of trust of one group member by another, influenced the quality of communication in a small group discussion. A nonfluency category system was applied to verbal data. Under trust‐destroying conditions, results indicated substantial decreases in verbal fluency of a naive subject, as well as the remaining group members.     

Retrieving the irretrievable; or the editor, the author, and the machine

Present day programs of computerized information retrieval overvalue the importance of retrieving "facts" without either attaching a scale of importance to the material with which they deal or ordering information in any way which corresponds to the order of human thought. The limitations of classification by subject heading become especially apparent when a body of information becomes, through new insight, pertinent to a new area of thought. That body of information thereby acquires new subject headings: thus one sees that the system of retrieval by subject heading can never serve to aid fundamental discovery. The dangers of the present approach lie in their devaluation of traditional methods. Critical reviews are devalued, personal knowledge of the literature is devalued, and a false impression is created that knowledge is the same thing as retrievable information. This diminishes respect for that sort of personal organization of knowledge which alone can serve creative insight.