Book Reveiw # 3 - Cyber Worship in Multifaith Perspectives

This is most recent review. Previous reviews [published in Sept 2006, Scarecrow Press]

"An information specialist at the Ontario Multifaith Council on Spiritual and Religious Care, Taher explores religious worship on the Internet, in which people engage in prayer, praise, sacrament, confession, Eucharist, pilgrimage, contemplation, and other practices online. He offers a systematic though not comprehensive catalog of services, products, processes, approaches, applications, and functions that encompass mainstream and alternative traditions of belief and practice."— November 2006, REFERENCE & RESEARCH BOOK NEWS

100 best books of 2006 - Publishers Weekly

Thank you Seth for this info. And, there is no accounting for citing the cited source.

Publishers Weekly has recently published its list of the 100 best books of 2006. They only picked one book that might be considered a 'business' book. I'm sort of thrilled by this.

Thanks, guys. I guess there's no accounting for taste. Posted by Seth Godin

Are we using the Web for sustainable and balanced development?

No. is answer from the Global village.

Make bandwidth available to all: Kalam
NEW DELHI: In the small but packed hall of a New Delhi hotel that hosted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Infosys's Narayana Murthy and others, president Dr A P J Abdul Kalam gave the event’s opening keynote address on “Bridging the two Indias.”

Kalam said it was critical to make bandwidth available for inclusion, because “the less educated you are, the more bandwidth you need to communicate! The most educated can manage with asynchronous means like email…the less educated need voice--or video.”

NDTV’s Prannoy Roy moderated a discussion in which Ballmer, N R Narayana Murthy, Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Manvinder Singh of Ranbaxy participated.

Ravi Venkatesan kicked off the event, speaking of the contrasts in India: the millionaires and the malnourished children; the successful e-gov projects and the “graveyard of pilot projects.” Read the full news story

I thank Gail for identifying a new book:

Overselling the Web?: Development and the Internet, by Charles Kenny, Lynne Rienner Publishers 2006 [ Library of Congress catalog ]

"An important cautionary tale.... Kenny demonstrates that the irrational exuberance directed toward the internet as a tool for international development needs serious tempering."—Michael Best, Georgia Institute of Technology

I found some thing interesting and in the same direction (as above), to bring a balance in our thinking, in the following article:

A Critical Perspective on Access, Content and the Digital Divide
By: Oliver Moran | January 18, 2005
The current sense of urgency to adapt ICT in the social sphere, as opposed to the economic sphere where it is already prevalent and well integrated, is derived from the discourse of economic globalisation rather from a more practical desire to utilise the technology in socially-derived ways – building from the top down rather than from the ground up. This is not to discount the potential of the technology but to explain that, just as with the dot-com phenomenon, the technology on its own and certainly as it is presently provided is not good enough. It needs to be redesigned and fitted to benefit social practices and settings rather than be machines for business drafted-in for home or community use.

The above article illustrates the common ground, common concern to look the other way also--not just one way all the time everytime!!!!

I think both these sources talk almost same langugage---i.e., we must always have checks and balances in our developmental perspectives.

Technocrati Tags:
sustainable-development
unsustainable
digital-divide

The book that never grew up

PS. This is not from my desktop


The book that never grew up National Post, Paul Gessell, CanWest News Service, Monday, October 30,
The official sequel to Peter Pan rights some wrongs, the author tells Paul Gessell.

Peter Pan has undergone a transformation in the past century.

The original story, penned as a play in 1904 by oddball Scottish writer James Barrie, depicted Peter Pan as a sometimes endearing, sometimes murderous boy living forever as a child in Neverland.

Now we have the newly published, officially approved sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet, by celebrated British children's writer Geraldine McCaughrean. Peter is still a mischievous, self-centred brat in the sequel but, as the author says, he's not quite so "vicious." Additionally, McCaughrean takes exception to the anti-mother and anti-adult sentiments expressed so forcefully in the original. Full story

Previous posts:

Book in Embryonic Stage - But Ready for Delivery