社区与圈子 2017-06-21

(增添于2017-08-02)

文章来源:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html

Colleges Celebrate Diversity With Separate Commencements

By Anemona Hartocollis

date: 2017/06/02

Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.

From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.

两天前,第一次在哈佛第一次举行了黑人研究生毕业典礼,演讲者讲述了由于种族原因的种种困惑。

Ms. Delgadillo, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, had lobbied for the event for three years, as a member of a group called the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership.

“The current political climate definitely pushed this initiative to come to fruition,” said Ms. Delgadillo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants living in Los Angeles.

Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.

这类以经历相同遭遇而聚集形成的团体反映了21世纪的学校成为了身份政治的孵育场所。

“It’s not easy being a student, being a student anywhere, but especially at a place like Harvard,” Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former University of California regent who campaigned against racial preference in admissions, said sympathetically.

But events like black commencements, he continued, serve only to “amplify” racial differences. “College is the place where we should be teaching and preaching the view that you’re an individual, and choose your associates to be based on other factors rather than skin color,” he said.

Brandon M. Terry, the faculty speaker, joked that Harvard College’s black graduation had become more mainstream since he graduated in 2005.

“You were teenagers, like Michael Brown when he was subjected to the Sophoclean indignity of being shot dead and left in the blazing sun. Your world was shaped in indelible ways by these deaths and others like them, and many of you courageously took to join one of the largest protest movements in decades to try to wrest some semblance of justice from these tragedies.”

But like all the speakers, he spoke reverently of Harvard as an institution, saying: “The dramatic privileges that you have and will continue to benefit from in virtue of your association with this university are only worth the social cost if they are to benefit people worse off than you.”

类似黑人毕业典礼的活动其实并没有消除种族差异,反而扩大了这种差异。Ward Connerly认为:「学校应该是传达独立这个观点,教育我们成为一个独立的个体,应该基于其他因素而不是肤色去选择我们的伙伴。」

黑人毕业典礼从2005年开始,并逐渐成为主流。由于社会上时常发生由于种族差异引起的悲剧,这些都趋势他们参与运动争取公平对待。

Brandon M. Terry强调:「由于这所大学而获得的名誉和优越感只有用于帮助那些比你弱小的人,你才会继续从中受益并发挥其社会价值。」

Bhekinkosi Sibanda, a first-generation Harvard student from Zimbabwe, said he had been ambivalent at first about participating in the black graduation.

“In an attempt at inclusivity, we don’t want to end up introducing exclusivity,” he said. “You don’t want to end up where this black commencement overshadows the entire commencement of the school. You don’t want to blow away the glory.”

Then Mr. Sibanda remembered how a professor had asked if he wanted to drop a class, when all he wanted was help. “It’s good to be able to take this time for solidarity and identity,” he said, “to celebrate what we’ve achieved.”

Bhekinkosi Sibanda是第一届来自津巴布韦的哈佛毕业生。在他第一次参加这类型的毕业典礼感到矛盾,他认为应该更包容而不应该借此宣传排他性。但是当回忆道教授曾经问他是否想降级,实际他渴望的是帮助这件往事,他认为「我们可以为团结和身份认同感在这样的典礼上好好庆祝一番也是一件好事。」

文章来源:https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634

Building Global Community

by Mark Zuckerberg

date: 2017年2月16日

History is the story of how we've learned to come together in ever greater numbers -- from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn't on our own.

This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: "We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years." We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

建立社区是为了聚集力量以完成个人无法完成之事。「我们总是高估我们可以在两年内可成之事,却低估我们在未来十年里可达成的成就。」我们在Facebook最重要的事是建立基础设施平台以提供人们创建全球社区。

Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one organization or company, but Facebook can help contribute to answering these five important questions:

  • How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional institutions in a world where membership in these institutions is declining?
  • How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can affect us?
  • How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a voice?
  • How do we help people build a civically-engaged community in a world where participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population?
  • How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures, nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?

Facebook可以在回答以下5个方面的问题作出贡献:

  • 支持型社区
  • 安全型社区
  • 信息型社区
  • 公民参与型社区
  • 包容型社区

Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously, and today I want to talk about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.

我们在Facebook的工作是帮助人们作出积极的影响,以减缓技术和社交媒体导致的分裂和隔离。

Supportive Communities

Online communities are a bright spot, and we can strengthen existing physical communities by helping people come together online as well as offline. In the same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships, developing this infrastructure will strengthen these communities, as well as enable completely new ones to form.

We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call "very meaningful" groups. These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure. For example, many new parents tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.

There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives. More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don't seek out groups on their own -- friends send invites or Facebook suggests them. If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.

A healthy society needs these communities to support our personal, emotional and spiritual needs. In a world where this physical social infrastructure has been declining, we have a real opportunity to help strengthen these communities and the social fabric of our society.

Safe Community

Today's threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not. Problems like terrorism, natural disasters, disease, refugee crises, and climate change need coordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point. No nation can solve them alone. A virus in one nation can quickly spread to others. A conflict in one country can create a refugee crisis across continents. Pollution in one place can affect the environment around the world. Humanity's current systems are insufficient to address these issues.

To help during a crisis, we've built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we're safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster. Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in two years and has already notified people that their families and friends are safe more than a billion times. When there is a disaster, governments often call us to make sure Safety Check has been activated in their countries. But there is more to build. We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources during emergencies. Over time, our community should be able to help during wars and ongoing issues that are not limited to a single event.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community.

Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community.

As we discuss keeping our community safe, it is important to emphasize that part of keeping people safe is protecting individual security and liberty. We are strong advocates of encryption and have built it into the largest messaging platforms in the world -- WhatsApp and Messenger. Keeping our community safe does not require compromising privacy. Since building end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp, we have reduced spam and malicious content by more than 75%.

Informed Community

Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared. But the past year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality. It is our responsibility to amplify the good effects and mitigate the bad -- to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world.

The two most discussed concerns this past year were about diversity of viewpoints we see (filter bubbles) and accuracy of information (fake news). I worry about these and we have studied them extensively, but I also worry there are even more powerful effects we must mitigate around sensationalism and polarization leading to a loss of common understanding.

But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives. We must be careful how we do this. Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.

Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously. We've made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong. Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy.

Fortunately, there are clear steps we can take to correct these effects. For example, we noticed some people share stories based on sensational headlines without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that's a good sign the headline was sensational. If you're more likely to share a story after reading it, that's often a sign of good in-depth content. We recently started reducing sensationalism in News Feed by taking this into account for pieces of content, and going forward signals like this will identify sensational publishers as well. There are many steps like this we have taken and will keep taking to reduce sensationalism and help build a more informed community.

Connecting everyone to the internet is also necessary for building an informed community. For the majority of people around the world, the debate is not about the quality of public discourse but whether they have access to basic information they need at all, often related to health, education and jobs.

Civically-Engaged Community

Our society will reflect our collective values only if we engage in the civic process and participate in self-governance. There are two distinct types of social infrastructure that must be built:

The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging with issues and representatives, speaking out, and sometimes organizing. Only through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes reflect our values.

The second is establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in collective decision-making. Our world is more connected than ever, and we face global problems that span national boundaries. As the largest global community, Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.

Inclusive Community

Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people. That means we need Community Standards that reflect our collective values for what should and should not be allowed.

In the last year, the complexity of the issues we've seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community. We saw this in errors taking down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in removing the historical Terror of War photo from Vietnam. We've seen this in misclassifying hate speech in political debates in both directions -- taking down accounts and content that should be left up and leaving up content that was hateful and should be taken down. Both the number of issues and their cultural importance has increased recently.

I've spent a lot of time over the past year reflecting on how we can improve our community governance. Sitting here in California, we're not best positioned to identify the cultural norms around the world. Instead, we need a system where we can all contribute to setting the standards. Although this system is not fully developed, I want to share an idea of how this might work.

The guiding principles are that the Community Standards should reflect the cultural norms of our community, that each person should see as little objectionable content as possible, and each person should be able to share what they want while being told they cannot share something as little as possible. The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.

The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings. We will periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and so you don't need to dig around to find them. For those who don't make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.

With a broader range of controls, content will only be taken down if it is more objectionable than the most permissive options allow. Within that range, content should simply not be shown to anyone whose personal controls suggest they would not want to see it, or at least they should see a warning first. Although we will still block content based on standards and local laws, our hope is that this system of personal controls and democratic referenda should minimize restrictions on what we can share.

(社区与圈子的建立真的有必要性吗?两篇文章都提到一点,个体的无力感需要社区来弥补。但是社区是否也会加深个体的无力感,甚至通过加入社区来支持你原来所反感的事呢?想到贝托尔德·布莱希特在《伽利略传》写的一段对话:

安德雷亚:他顶住了。这就是说:愚蠢被战胜了!这就是说:人不怕死!
费德尔佐尼:知识的时代现在真正来到了。
安德雷亚:只因一个人挺身而出说「不」,就赢得这么多的胜利!(安德雷亚刚说完此话,圣·马库斯教堂的大钟便轰然鸣响,众人瞠目结舌,呆若木鸡)
安德雷亚:(大声地)没有英雄的国家真不幸!(冲着走来的伽利略怒呵)酒囊饭袋!保住一条狗命了吧?
伽利略:不。需要英雄的国家真不幸。

其实也可以说一个人需要将希望与安全感寄托于社区那么这样的社会也是不幸的。)

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