- Mar 2022
-
ciudadseva.com ciudadseva.com
-
Entre irse y quedarse
The day hesitates between staying and leaving, in love with its transparency.
The circular night is now just a bay: in its quiet cradling the world rocks back and forth.
All is visible and yet elusive, all is close yet unreachable.
Papers, the book, the glass, the pencil rest under the shade of their name.
The beating time repeating at my temple the same stubborn syllable made of blood.
The light makes the wall indifferent, a spectral sparkle theatre.
In the centre of an eye I discover myself, it does not look at me, I see myself in its gaze.
The instant vanishes. Without me moving, I stay and I leave: I am a pause.
-
- Jan 2022
-
www.nonviolent-conflict.org www.nonviolent-conflict.org
-
It would be presumptuous, however, to try to foresee thestructural expressions of this new spirit without that spirit actuallybeing present and without knowing its concrete physiognomy.
respect of emergence from the bottom up and human relating...
-
We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we havecreated inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural af-filiations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of thatword, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes usfrom the experience of Being and casts us into the world of “exis-tences.” This situation has already been described from many dif-ferent angles and many individuals and social groups have sought,often painfully, to find ways out of it (for instance, through orien-tal thought or by forming communes). The only social, or ratherpolitical, at tempt to do something about it that contains the nec-essary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole)is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voiceof the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limitedto a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dic-tatorship of technology.
The dictatorship of technology! He was talking about this years ago. And our inability (or lack of desire to control it...
-
the opposition is every attemptto live within the truth, from the greengrocers refusal to putthe slogan in his window to a freely written poem; in otherwords, everything in which the genuine aims of life go beyondthe limits placed on them by the aims of the system
We can all be part of the opposition seeing as the opposition in parliament is only after getting the power they don't have! Creating a better life will help us create a better system not the other way around.
-
- Dec 2021
-
www.nonviolent-conflict.org www.nonviolent-conflict.org
-
a smallexample of the principle of social auto-totality at work
I think the term social auto-totalitarianism describes this self organising bureaucracy better - the remnants of a once ethical government now existing only in its rules empty of humanity.
-
“posttotalitarian system, I am fully aware that thisis perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think ofa better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix “poso that thesystem is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it istotalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dicta-torships,
Post totalitarian as a descriptor - interesting. Monarchy, democracy with hints of monarchy, and now transformed in a post-democratic dictatorship...auto-totalitarian as the procedures/scaffolding is followed without substance anymore.
-
makesit easier for that structure, as the sole employer, to manipulate theday-to-day existence of all citizens.
using the NHS as the label to buy services from private companies in their network. Closed to the powerless.
-
a superpowerpatriotism which traditionally places the interests of empire higherthan the interests of humanity).
Think about resonance with the days of the 'empire' and the Brexit ideology. Justifies the 'suffering' with it is 'we are in it together for the greater good'...dang.
-
n essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment ofreason and conscience to a higher authority.
Who is the higher authority here? The Science TM - I guess. not just science as a process but The Science that is approved by the dictator. 'centre of power is identical with the centre of truth' and for this it follows that all else is labelled mis-information and censored. And mis-information from the centre of power is the 'only truth'...and they thought they were free...
-
To wandering humankind it offers animmediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and sud-denly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new mean-ing, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneli-ness vanish.
Just blood WOW. Voluntary slavery as per Orwell. Just accept the narrative of the party ignore your senses and life happens smoothly...
-
It of fears a ready answer to anyquestion whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, andaccepting it has profound implications for human life.
it offers -
The political ideology in power now, has been so for over 10 years...not associated with anyone anymore. Just follow the rules...hence it evolved into totalitarianism?
-
dictatorshiphas long since alienated itself completely from the social move-ments that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements(and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements ofthe nineteenth century)
the historicity means there is a coherent infrastructure which is now held up not by a drive to improve our lot but by a caricature of what once was - bare-bone scaffolding held up for it own sake as an end in itself with the house inside having collapsed long ago...
-
a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the super-power center and totally subordinated to its interests.
This is exactly what the new bio-security covid state looks like. I have goose bumps reading this...and they thought they were free...
-
- May 2018
-
theorizingtheweb.org theorizingtheweb.org
-
Redstone
A note to self: add quote by Boyd on #rp18 where she speaks to a future where the 'human' is merely there to absorb liability of the systems when the mess up. We already started doing that 'human error' as a blanket term for 'we do not know why/how the system failed. The human must be at fault.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/lil-miquela-hack-instagram.html
-
just.
And finally, I wish somebody who had read this book had been in the room:
for myself: I am reading 'the highest poverty'
But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.
How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?
May be if we learn to tackle our consumption habits we will stop being seduced by the wall-e future on offer by AI.
-
Kate Crawford
My favourite reflection what the comparison with phrenology - how headlines ( pardon the pun) now replace 'face recognition' as the all knowing way in which we will be able to tell all about a human being's inner r experience 'just by looking at their face gestures...shame on us again.
What will we not do for the sake of convenience?
-
more just.
"panel discussing “oh, it’s not racism—it’s just discrimination on the basis of ‘ethnic affinity’!”
“We can’t use SV’s own ideology of using AI to combat AI problems. We can’t believe that a certain technological progress is inevitable. We must ask ourselves what type of world we want to live in, and see which tools help us fulfill that vision.”
This was explored and tweeted but to me this stops short of saying: No. We are not going to take this anymore. I was reminded of the film Falling Down - the restaurant scene - 'I just want some breakfast'
Some of the examples that were being discussed so calmly - simply outraged me. I just want human beings to do what human beings are good at and machines to support not seek to replace. We have been trying this shit for so long, it sucks. ( I should know, I spent my time building the early AI systems) And the best we can do is, allow the magnitude of the failure to go underground in the service of profit. Shame on us.
-
God View
This was an great example of how to do a final keynote which does not play to the exclusionary dynamics of 'welcoming the hero back from the war' and listening to how they will fix the world...of tech in this case. It highlights for me how important it is to be aware of how power dynamics are played out by how humans set up the physical environment.
This conference keynotes 'panels' create a much better environment for inclusion and dialogue. This one felt like a chat after dinner, exploring the implications of the spread of AI systems to world that have not got a clue how badly they function. Thee systems (as much of tech is) are being bought and sold on the basis of hype they do not deliver, with its makers waiting for human suffering to happen before behaving in a quasi-ethical manner. Enter FB 'acting' on GDPR: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-moves-15bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-european-privacy-law
The panel touched on many example of AI Algorithms 'gone rogue' and even when users use the law to access the code that has ruined their lives...the courts say no. It turns out that systems are assistive and 'only one of the parameters' that play into a decision. These systems are being used in situations where failure means humans suffering.
Where I was disappointed was that whilst the question of 'should we be building them at all?' was touched on, the overall sense was well, yes. With examples being given about how collecting healthcare could help save lives. It could, and we also know for sure that these systems are ruining the lives of people still living.
They touch on the lack of informed consent, and explore the potential for legislation. I like one suggestion about shifting to 'liability' and away from 'accountability' to force companies to act. If it costs money, they will do something. And, of course, we know that risk assessment these days factors in liability - they know that a car may kill somebody, calculate how much that is going to cost them and rather than fix the problem they incorporate the liability into their numbers...welcome to the pseudo-ethics of corporation. The spectacle of ethics, seeming to act ethically whilst behind the scenes kneeling to the god of profit.
-
- Apr 2018
-
theorizingtheweb.org theorizingtheweb.org
-
Extremely Online Socialism .Moderator Sarah Jaffe .Participants Alexis Goldstein, Shuja Haider, Emma Caterine, Kevin Borden In the wake of several troubling elections, the left has looked to online spaces to play an important role in organizing and publicizing socialist movements.
This is keynote was controversial on Twitter. I found it less focussed on topic than others. Panel members very focussed on their own views and 'selling' their projects more than engaging in dialogue
-
Victoria O’Meara “Weapons of the Chic”: Instagram Influencer Comment Pods as Co-operative Algorithm Hacking
This was really interesting. Victoria is studying Comment Pods on Insta as an example of resistance to the algorithm.
-
Margot Hanley Alexa, Please: Emerging Interaction Rules Between People and Voice-Assistants
Watch later
-
Technology is not merely a conveyance for fully formed ideas. We often think with and through our devices to start to arrive at unanticipated conclusions.
Watch Later
-
Emily Stainkamp Looking back at the selfie: A survey of Western self-portraiture from antiquity to Selfish
To watch later
-
Karen Schrier The Ethics of Co-Created Knowledge
Could not find this on the video. May be speaker did not come?
-
Dave Evans More is Not Less – Self-Denial on the Internet
A historical journey through asceticism with a comparison of how the internet can be used as a tool for self denial
entrepreneurs of the self
Suggestion that vows of poverty in monastics can offer a model to solve internet problems.
Use but not own - similar to federated social media such as Mastodon
Digital ascetic
http://www.evansdave.com/category/research/
Christianity offered a strict set of rules for behaviour and I saw a weird correlation between that and Facebook. So you find very formal systems with rules and people gathering to it to follow its rules
https://philpapers.org/rec/AGATHP
Abstract<br> What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?
-
Ashley D’Arcy Popular mysticism on the internet
synchronistic content and algorithmic content ends up looking the same online LOL
-
Tim Cowlishaw A Digital Dérive: Situationist strategies for reclaiming digital public space.
pseudo public spaces = social media
The spectacle = doing to appearing
The constructed situation to highlight spectacle - performance art type thing -reclaim space for rebellion
equivalent to memes -subversion by being silly
enlarge life rather than show life as it is - to distinguish from dysfunctional use of same techniques.
-
James Hodges Toward a Genealogical Prehistory of Psychological Tracking and Manipulation Online (1965-1986)
Surveillance for self actualisation, religion or Facebook the pattern is the same
-
Jeff Appel What in the World is ‘Originary Technicity’? Exploring an Emerging Philosophical Concept and its Political Consequences for our Shared Digital World
'Originary technicity' Humans a a system that exteriorises thinking into non-human cyphers.
A gift as well as a threat. Farmacon? Plato. Writing may help us remember but also means we do not remember as much.
Memory and tech co-exist and cannot be separated. Co-exist. Thinking and technology cannot be neatly separated
Born into a world that was not created by me. Same is true for all us.
Pharmakon - a cure that is also a poison Stiggler?
'for real legit absence of a world to pass on'
-
Sara Reinis The Aesthetics of Authenticity
What is rendered invisible as well as what is highligted
visual aesthetic excludes technology
We use as self soothing practice #liveauthentic
We are also surrendering, by saying that the only way to be authentic is to go back to this digital free aesthetic
-
- Jul 2017
-
darcynorman.net darcynorman.net
-
How is it possible to argue against any of those rallying cries? It’s not. They’re all admirable goals. But the side effect of using these rallying cries is that it drives and entrenches the narrative that education (that teachers and students) don’t do this already. That nobody has thought to include the voice of the student. That nobody has thought to foster creativity. And that if we value these things, we need to drastically change everything – bonus points for “disrupting” education by bringing in a third party service provider of some type (double-bonus-points if it’s a Silicon Valley startup launched by a Stanford prof who can’t understand why everyone isn’t doing things his way).
The Rallying Cry as a pattern to get work! If not happening in it means there is work for open educators to do! If education is broken then it needs fixing...
-
- Mar 2017
-
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
-
And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it.
Well, that old chestnut! and arrogance says - not me!
-
“Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”
yes, there are many projects that use TW data and tell you 'the kind of person' the stream belongs to.
-
the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.
The fact that what is learnt can be then used at individual level is important to highlight
-
It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.
it becomes a numbers game when you work towards 'large group interventions' and they have the money and the know-how.
-
Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
This is the important point - ignorance...and arrogance! It does not affect me! (it does)
-
With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
key word here potentially. There is a slight exaggeration driven by fear - doing psychology = predictive in terms of what a given test measures. There is a big hairball of questions around this.
-
how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral
this is not certain. I think they say it is not so...
-
Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”
Brexit - Cambridge Analytica worked for free hence technically not empoyed
-
to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.
More than just targeted ads?
-
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money:
Nice strategy to find out about motivation!
-
I click Google’s first suggested link
Great example of substantiating claim online. Re: Mike's work
-
- Apr 2016
-
boundary2.org boundary2.org
-
That failure sealed a process characteristic of the past century: the bungled reception of technology.
it is annoying you have to add text or tag each time you make something public.
-
Viewers need to ask the questions the show does not present: who is behind these technologies? What decisions have led to the societal acceptance of these technologies? Did anybody offer resistance to these new technologies?
Yes, we do.
-
“A happy life in a world of horror is ignominiously refuted by the mere existence of that world. The latter therefore becomes the essence, the former negligible.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 93)
it is annoying you have to add text or tag each time you make something public.
-
the show may function as a sort of precognitive “usage manual,” one that advises “if a day should arrive when you can technologically remember everything…don’t be like the guy in this episode.”
it is annoying you have to add text or tag each time you make something public.
-
Thus, and here is where the problem truly emerges, the episodes can be treated as simple warnings that state “well, don’t be like this person.”
I never felt this on watching any of the episodes. There are no simple warnings, the mixed emotions and the strong pull is precisely because the viewer knows he/she is that person.
-
Indeed, that the program can lead to discussion and introspection is perhaps the highest praise that one can bestow upon a piece of widely disseminated popular culture. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly (depending on your opinion), some of the episodes of Black Mirror rely upon twists and surprises in order to have their full impact upon the viewer
Yes.
-
It may be that what Black Mirror shows is how a dystopia can actually be a private hell instead of a societal one (which would certainly seem true of “White Bear” or “The Complete History of You”), or perhaps what Black Mirror indicates is that a derailed utopia is not automatically a dystopia.
I really like this observation. Dystopia as private hell or an unhinged utopia rather than dystopia at all?
-
The stories that are told in Black Mirror, as was mentioned earlier, focus largely on the tales of individuals – “Be Right Back” is primarily about one person’s grief – and though this is a powerful story-telling device (and lest there be any confusion – many of these are very powerfully told stories) one of the questions that lingers unanswered in the background of many of these episodes is: who is behind these technologies?
This is the most powerful question and section in this critique. It is something the show does not address and it is a key question to explore if we want to redirect the 'bungled reception of technology' referred to later in the article.
-
This is the danger of Black Mirror that it may accustom and inure its viewers to the ugly present it displays while preparing them to fall prey to the “bungled reception” of tomorrow – it inculcates the ethos of “one’s own defeat.”
Yes, I see this danger. Getting accustomed to the ugly? Are we not already doing that daily? Is the bungled reception of technology what we [in the open education movement] struggle daily to make visible?
-
he commodities we continue to produce are those that elevate the “bungled reception of technology” to the level of a widely watched and critically lauded television serial.
To me this commodity shows me that as David Whiteland says: ‘You should never underestimate the power of comfort. To our everlasting discredit, we owe our utter dependency on technology to our inability to resist it.’
-
if you hate “spoilers” you should consider yourself warned.
Spoilers here. Not really!
-
“One cannot but marvel at an organization which provides the antidote as it distills the poison.” (Ellul, 378)
This is a killer quote!
-
That, however, may be the point.
I really think it was the whole point of the series - provide the antidote using the same medium it is critiquing. Arguably, to preach to others than those already converted?
-
- Mar 2016
-
www.katecrawford.net www.katecrawford.net
-
Such social media platforms are among the manyforms of networked space that are already offering us a glimpse of how the boundaries ofhuman attention and subjectivity are being reconstituted.
Are we reconstituting of simply creating the possibility of attending to an amount of data humans cannot attend to without 'delegating listening'? I am unsure about the implication that somehow social media listening is creating new human abilities....the human attention span is reducing significantly and it was never great in the first place. So, what is it that this background listening is meant to give us that 'adds' to relationship? Hmmm....
-
We are still discovering what the thresholds of human listening might be,quantitatively and qualitatively. The study of the listening subject is just beginning: aswork on the practices of surveillance and the disciplinary gaze produced an understandingof the observed and observing subject, so we need a better understanding of the listenedto and listening subject.
I think we know already that to the extent that breadth increases depth decreases and that we adapt to this surface knowing or 'meta knowing' unconsciously and begin to label it 'knowing'. The embodied nature of depth of listening and being forgotten.
-
As Don Ihde writes, ‘Ifthere is an ethics of listening, then respect for silence must play a part in that ethics’(1976, 180). But equally, there will be advancing demands for increased and multi-channelled attention, and the ability to listen – even if only in the background – to achorus of voices
Ethics of listening entails respect for silence
-
Imperatives of attentiveness impinge on all areas of life, but there is alsoa force of resistance, a point at which individuals can no longer sustain expectations
Force of resistance
-
Jonathan Crary has arguedthat it is possible to think of modernity as ‘an ongoing crisis of attentiveness’:...in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention anddistraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources ofstimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing andregulating perception...But at the same time...the articulation of a subject in terms ofattentive capacities simultaneously disclosed a subject incapable of conforming to suchdisciplinary imperatives. (1999, 13 – 14)
a crisis of attention equals modernity
-
The invention of radio ‘created the possibility of abandonment of choice – you couldjust let it play on and hear whatever came along’ (Goodman 2009, 17). People could cleanthe house, work, or socialize while the radio played continuously in the background,audible but not focused on. This kind of listening generated considerable concern. In the1930s, distracted listening was seen as a risky practice, as listening to the radio in anindiscriminate, ongoing way could make people into easy prey for propaganda (31)
And today we feel the same about background listening ( and hence assumption of not attending or absorbing) content deeply -
-
Like radio, they can circulate in thebackground: a part of the texture of the everyday. Twitter is itself a word that implies thesonic in both its derivations: either as the calling of birds, or the ‘idle’ chatter of humans.
:)
-
decentres the current overemphasis on posting, commenting and‘speaking up’ as the only significant forms of participation.
About time we did this - but we won't do it. Too many vested interests in 'being heard' and 'counting followers'.
-
It reflectsthe fact that everyone moves between the states of listening and disclosing online; both arenecessary and both are forms of participation.
Yes.
-
If we reconceptualize lurking as listening, itreframes a set of behaviours once seen as vacant and empty into receptive and reciprocalpractices.
Key to article
-
‘peripheral participants’ (Zhang and Storck 2001) and ‘non-public participants’(Nonnecke and Preece 2003). While these terms attempt to remove the stigma fromlurking, they continue to define this majority group by what they are not: not public, not atthe centre. As terms, they fail to offer a sense of what is being done, and why it is importantto online participation.
need a term that describes not implicitly devalues.
-
They directly contribute to the community byacting as a gathered audience: neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but listening (even ifdistractedly).
A gathered audience
-
they contribute a mode of receptiveness thatencourages others to make public contributions.
bla
-
This group has been described as more like readers thanwriters (Sharf 1999), as more akin to passive TV viewers (Morris and Ogan 1996), and asfreeloaders who leech the energy of online communities without offering anything inreturn (Kollock and Smith 1996).
Definitions of lurkers through the years
-
‘they want information technologies to be used to create a new“Jeffersonian democracy” where all individuals will be able to express themselves freelywithin cyberspace’
We privilege 'voice' above all else.
-
Disparities emerge between what users are technically able to do, and thelimits of their schedules, desires and bodies
Sometimes we need to ask beyond 'can we' and wonder 'should we'.
-
I will consider three modes here: reciprocal listening, background listening, anddelegated listening, when the act of online listening is outsourced altogether.
:)
-
This kind of ongoing yetdiffuse engagement is increasingly common,
surface engagement but continuos... we know about stuff but do we 'know' stuff?
-
Nick Couldry argues that aural terms are more able ‘to registermedia’s social presence’ as they have distinct ‘advantages as a source of metaphors forthinking about the social world’ (2006, 6). He writes of the ‘reciprocal, embodied nature oflistening; its embeddedness always in an intersubjective space of perception’ (6). Thisintersubjectivity is important to the functioning of many online spaces. It is my hope thatthe concept of listening will allow us to analyse the various affordances of online attention,and to assess the ways in which we listen also shape us as late modern subjects.
Interesting notion that as 'modern subjects' we need to explore how we now listen.
-
Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Craryreminds us that ‘the ways in which we intently listen to, look at, or concentrate on anythinghave a deeply historical character’ (1999, 1)
Find.
-
Pejorative terms such as ‘lurking’ have failed to capture much detail about theexperience of presence online. Instead, much online media research has focused on‘having a voice’, be it in blogs, wikis, social media, or discussion lists.
heyhypothesis Why oh why? Can I not have the same default for highlights and notes - ironic the paper is about listening online. It is really annoying!
-
This paper develops the concept of listening as a metaphor for paying attentiononline.
Why a metaphor?
-
- Oct 2015
-
www.lse.ac.uk www.lse.ac.uk
-
In Amartya Sen’s recent reworking of the theory of justice, communication is the site where the lifeworld comparisons that ground claims for injustice get made. As Sen puts it at the end of The Idea of Justice, ‘it is bad enough that the world in which we live has so much deprivation of one kind or another . . . it would be even more terrible if we were not able to communicate, respond, and altercate’ (2009: 415). And yet through the myth of Big Data we are starting to give credence to a working model of social knowledge that operates as if the explanation of human action, and the processes of meaning-making on which such explanation has relied, don’t matter any more.
Well and truly depressed, I do to look for this book too. In a world where we no longer can ( or know how to) communicate skilfully we cannot even 'talk' about injustice?
I also wonder here if dismissal of psychology and searching for evidence that x cannot explain or predict where x is psychology or sociology based has as subtext 'who knows why humans do what they do and who cares when we can measure that they do and monetise it without explanation or meaning...techno-behaviourism!
-
a polity based on an impoverished model of the human subject cannot expect much loyalty from, or legitimacy with, those it governs. The warning holds, whether it is governments or dense networks of corporations that are promoting the ‘construct of the intellect’ in question. The right response is not, of course, to walk away from the challenges and opportunities to which today’s new forms of social interconnection and information generation give rise, but instead to make sure that, in facing those challenges and thinking creatively about those opportunities, we take care to hold on to our richer accounts of human agency and knowledge, and to the sense of possible democratic agency and possible justice whose basic components they supply.
don't walk away but hold on to the richer accounts of human agency and knowledge...even if nobody is listening...
-
the alienation of the interpreter from the interpreted’ (2004 [1975]: 312)
could we say that digital mediation is the instrument to alienate the interpreter from the interpreted? all 'us' the interpreted in the hand of 'them' the interpreters...
-
here a vast power asymmetry is emerging that would not, I suspect, betolerated if it were exclusively state power that was benefiting
Interesting. He is saying we tolerate it because the power is in the hands of 'people like us'?
-
As US legal scholar Julie Cohen notes, we all increasingly operate in our daily lives in ‘networked space’ but ‘the configuration of networked space is . . . increasingly opaque to its users’ (2012: 202). Indeed, she argues, today’s web of protocols and passwords, data requirements and data monitoring, has created ‘a system of governance that is authoritarian’, in the sense that there seems little alternative but to comply with it.
Yeap.
-
All the myths I have discussed tonight rationalize massive concentrations of symbolic resource; all therefore involve injustice of a sort. Such injustices are difficult to name, precisely because they involve concentrations of power over the resources for naming.
Power over the resources for naming...again a description of what is see - not an injustice if I redefine justice....
-
I call this research ‘social analytics’: that is, the study of how social actors are themselves using analytics - data measures of all kinds, including those they have developed or customised – to meet their own ends, for example, by interpreting the world and their actions in new ways
Find out more about this?
-
First, agency, by which I mean not brute acts (of clicking on this button, pressing ‘like’ to this post) but (following Weber) the longer processes of action based on reflection, giving an account of what one has done, even more basically, making sense of the world so as to act within it.
Nice example of the two types of discourse he has been discussing. Brute acts vs Making sense of the world so as to act in it.
-
As my colleague Robin Mansell argues in her book Imagining the Internet, we cannot move beyond such misalignments, unless we build new imaginaries - or at least, renew our hold on old ones. Challenging the myth of big data – a myth in which mass media and social media, the focus of my first two myths, are increasingly implicated and in which states and corporations are investing on a massive scale
Must read.
-
Such analysis, by abandoning any language for interpreting what human subjects mean by their action, condemns us, like sleepwalkers, to submit to such changes.
if the critique take the shape of the critiqued it is just part of the same phenomenon?
-
when a vast attempt is under way to build a different account of how and why people matter, it is not enough just to say that people matter. We need an alternative account of why knowledge about people matters for understanding the social, and indeed why ‘the social’ matters, if understood as more than just a probability set for predicting repeat action.
and the alternative account is?
-
we have become accustomed to giving accounts of ourselves in such data-saturated ways on social networking sites and elsewhere; as such habits become established, we may lose the sense that our collective life could lie anywhere else than in such ‘datafied’ forms
life becomes Facebook life, like Facebook is the Internet....
-
We risk building a social landscape peopled by what the 19th century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol called ‘dead souls’: human entities that have financial value (in his novel, if you remember, as mortgageable assets; in our new world, as unwitting data producers), but that are not alive, not at least in the sense we know human beings to be alive.
Need to read this. A dead soul is a virtual self? If you remove the tangible, the physical then all that is left is the digital counterpart and it can keep making money for dear Mark into eternity...
-
Its new form of ‘social knowledge’ splits up discourse populations: the groups that could once be talked about aspopulations for various purposes. It fractures the space of discourse, depicting its data subjects in ways that don’t connect any more with the space of action and thought in which actual individuals think they live; and it stretches the time of discourse, aggregating action-fragments from any moment in the stream of a person’s recorded acts into patterns that bear little relationship to how those people themselves understand the sequence and meaning of their actions.
Okay, shoot me now. I am disenchanted. But what do I do? What do I do beyond the obvious?
-
But if the big data model works by equatingouronly forms of social knowledgewith such probabilities, then we have already started organising things so that the single story – your story, my story - really doesn’t matter.
I see this so clearly in my online interactions. It leads to some resisting the possibility of the existence of any knowledge that holds over time, and that itself helps build the myth it is trying to destroy... <I need="" to="" reflect="" on="" this="" a="" lot="">
-
Judith Butler provides a clue to this when in her book Precarious Life, discussing how a media of excessive spectacle (too much showing) narrows our grasp of the human, she writes that ‘there is less a dehumanizing discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse’ (2004: 36). It is the gaps and breaks in our languages of social interpretation, authorised by the myth of big data, on which we must focus.
And in a sentence, he also dispatches my illusion that making a commitment to re-learning true dialogue might be part of a new way...
-
we too are involved in its reproduction, supplying information (to government and countless other collectors, including social media platforms) about what we do, as we do it, allowing that information to supplant other possible types of information about ourselves, what we say, and how we reflect on our situation.
Is the only way out to commit digital harakiri? I am already a Facebook Suicide, do I now need to consider killing other virtual selves?
-
predictive strings that tell those who care what, say a man in his 50s with a certain educational background will do on a Thursday evening in November
and the individual man will start to do just that thing on a thursday just because it is easier than making a different choice...
-
of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology’. Why? Because the proxies that big data generate are good enough; or as Google’s research director put it, ‘you can succeed without them’. But success for who? For what purpose? In the service of whose or what notion of knowledge?
Wired magazine 2007 - end of theory article stated that 'big data meant out with every theory of...' ( again glitch- cannot select 1 sentence across 2 pages)
You can succeed without them indeed...and each time I log into Google mail I support this version of reality. I despair and cannot see a way out...
-
he moral consequences of acting on the basis of ‘big data’ arises - for example, arresting people for offences they are predicted to commit but haven’t yet - they back off and say that big data only provide probabilities, not actualities, and worry about ‘fetishizing the output of our [data] analysis’ (151).
...the fetishizing that the book itself is helping create. 'This will change the world' 'but what about x consequence' 'well it might not change the world at all, stop worrying.' And after that, when the unintended is here: We never meant for that to happen.... replace 'big data' with 'open education' and bingo...
-
Myth works, as I’ve often argued following Maurice Bloch and Roland Barthes, through ambiguity: through sometimes claiming to offer ‘truth’ and at other times to be merely playful, providing what, in the George W. Bush era, was called ‘plausible deniability’, but here at the level of claims aboutknowledge claims!
Ha. Finally somebody who is able to describe what I see at play daily on social media - myth creation live! ;)
-
his lack of sense doesn’t matter, they argue, because a really good proxy, once discovered, will help us see regularity across vast numbers of variables that would otherwise be invisible. The result is to undercut the rationale of not just qualitative methods of analysis, but also of the interpretative models – the hermeneutics, if you like - that for decades have driven large-scale survey research. And, if we reject the very possibility of such a hermeneutic, then we appear to disarm hermeneutic critique also, making the myth of Big Data armour-plated against criticism
What can I add? Just keep reading this paragraph daily for 10 days at least...not that it will stop us from falling for the illusion of explanation it entails...Big data as an accepted and untestable 'explanation' of our humanness...is this a world we want to inhabit? We are too lazy to stop the few making it happen for profit.
‘You should never underestimate the power of comfort. To our everlasting discredit, we owe our utter dependency on technology to our inability to resist it.' The Book of Pages.
-
as in the controversial case where US retailer Target started communicating with a young woman on the basis she was pregnant, just because she had started buying a basket of consumer products that their predictive model associated with women who would shortly start buying pregnancy products.
so many examples like this....
-
analysts are giving up on specific hypotheses and instead focussing on generating, through countless parallel calculations, ‘a really good proxy’
for whatever is associated with a phenomenon and the relying on that as the predictor. (Had to finish sentence here are H would not allow me to select 1 sentence across pages)
-
Big data’s new ‘politics of measurement’ (in anthropologist James Scott’s phrase: 1998: 29) is changing the terrain on which all large institutions (including governments) can claim to tell us the way things are.
If they can claim a 'pattern' from 'big data' then they can claim truth?
-
the claims now being made about what big data can achieve for understanding our world.
This is key.
-
The ‘social’ at which media processes are targeted is being reconstructed all around us.
again the equivalence of 'social' with 'Facebook'.
-
We all know that the tracking of our activity on social media sites is the basis of the value Facebook sells to advertisers and, indirectly, to the new data-mining industry that has emerged to create additional value out of that data.
Do we? If we do we bury our heads...
-
he myth of ‘us’, like all myth, disguises the other knowledges it helps us lose along the way. So we need to dis-enchant such rhetorical claims about the new social world that platform-based networks make possible.
Look at where the limits are and not allow ourselves to uncritically accept new meaning that ave at its root the pursuit of short term individual fortunes.
-
rhetoric about the social does the work of analysis: what do these writers mean by ‘social’? does it relate to what we have meant by that word in the past?
Ha. I see. he suggests we have come to do a Humpty Dumpty on 'social' and have it mean 'networking on social media' with those who do not being 'antisocial'.
-
tracking us as we perform the act of ‘being us’, on platforms that propose we do just tha
performing the act of being us - seems to imply he believes in digital dualism. A public performance, its content determined by what will sell most advertising...sad sad sad.
-
Remember there is no collectivity, no ‘us’, of the sort we have come to talk about around social media, until those platforms attract ‘us’ (whoever we are) to use them, and link to them.
and that is the issue - one 'us' is formed it is self reinforcing and unquestioning, what will humans not do to be included in some kind of 'us'?
-
why talk of ‘myth’, why disenchant what so often is good fun? Because we must be wary when our most important moments of ‘coming together’ seem to be captured in what people happen to do on platforms whose economic value is based on generating just such an idea of natural collectivity. It would not be enough for Facebook, for example, to say that lots of small groups, unknown to each other, do roughly similar things behind virtual closed doors. It is vital to the value claims on which Facebook depends for it to open as many of those interconnecting doors as possible and claim that Facebook is what ‘we’ are now doing together. ‘We’, the collectivity of everyday people, everywhere. Vague as it is, this claim grounds any number of specific rhetorics and judgements about what’s happening, what’s trending, and so (by a self-accumulating logic) what matters: for government, society, business, and for us.
Read that over and over and then read it again! It is such a slippery thing...and yet so fundamental that see past the rhetoric. By this logic what matters to 'us' (humanity) is LOL cats and accumulating strangers's name in a list to define self worth.
-
We see the myth’s effects in accounts of political protests across the world in the past 3 years as Twitter or Facebook revolutions, orin the Guardian’s recent listing of ‘us’ as media personality of 2013.
And Jisc's 50 most influential too? 'US' in social media and if you are not on it, you are 'unmutual'.
-
when Facebook offers to ‘tell the story of our lives’, we have: ‘us now’. Of course, this myth is not yet fully established: if the myth of the mediated centre took decades to become so, the myth of ‘us’ too will only fully stabilise over time.
and to the extent 'we' argue against digital dualism and for openness and connection 'we' are doing Facebook's work for them. Helping establish the 'myth of us' so that a privileged minority can benefit. Interestingly, this is what seems to have happened with the original idea of a connectivist MOOC - the myth of us is established by a few idealists and it is then redefined by a few large corporations. 'We' in the open education collectivity continue to do prop up the Courseras of this world - by refusing to engage with the shadow of openness and connection. What might it mean to become disenchanted to see and still part of the collectivity?
-
A new myth about the collectivities we form when we use platforms such as Facebook. An emerging myth of natural collectivity that is particularly seductive, because here traditional media institutions seem to drop out altogether from the picture: the story is focussed entirely on what ‘we’ do naturally, when we have the chance to keep in touch with each other, as of course we want to do.
I like the use of collectivity - I will take that on board much less loaded with ideology than community. 'seem' to drop out but are now pulling the strings from backstage. 'We' are just keeping in touch and 'we' want to keep in touch. In turn this implies that if we do not want to 'connect' we are dysfunctional and if we choose not to participate 'closed minded'. I see this all around me in the 'we' that is the open education collectivity.
-
Indeed, social media platforms, far from being an authentic social response to large media, represent an entirely new business model for media and communications infrastructures. And, as this new way of organizing business and our lives around digital platforms becomes normalized, a new myth is emerging to make sense of this.
the new normal is to 'be' on Facebook and Tweet and this creates 'the myth of us' in turn propping up the businesses that benefit from this new normal...hmmm...and still un-inquiring minds do not want to hear that 'free is a lie' and give up privacy for a cookie
-
Social media are of fundamental importance to the myth of the mediated centre, because they offer a new form of centrality, a new social ‘liveness’, mediated apparently by us rather than by content-producing media institutions.
'apparently' by us ;) yet not so!
-
Media have evolved elaborate categories of thought to express the myth of their centrality: for example, the language of ‘liveness’ and celebrity, the greater value given to what’s “in” the media over what isn’t. But, as I have argued for a decade or so, we need to disenchant that language, not because it is necessarily bad for us, but in order to grasp all the work done that keeps it in place, and sustains the particular perspective onsocialknowledge that it involves.
disenchantment needed in order to be able to 'see' what the narrative hides and for whose benefit. It does not 'just happen' but much money is spent in making it 'real'.
-
This myth is what we might call a ‘reserve rationalization’ that makes sense of our organizing our lives around the content flows of media organizations; it tells us that society has a ‘centre’ of value, knowledge and meaning, and that particular institutions, those we call ‘media’, have a privileged role in giving us access to that supposed ‘centre’.
I wonder if the compulsion to be in the middle of social networks, with centrality ratings for example, is an example of this reserve rationalisation he speaks about?
-
the exchanges of signs that enable acts of communications to make sense, to accumulate over time as meaning, as knowledge.
Communication is the exchange of sense making signs which accumulate over time as 'meaning' and 'knowledge'. Wondering about connection with arborescent/rhizomatic nature of knowledge. This seems to imply as D&G did there is a cyclical nature to rhizome and tree - as things accumulate over time they 'have' a meaning and those meaning are challenged at certain points in history and redefined?
-
we run’, he said, ‘the risk that the whole humanities enterprise of trying to understand ourselves is coming to seem peculiar’.
Make me think about the big to do on the non-replicability of psychological studies. The subtext was not that 'understanding ourselves' is hard but that the field was useless.
-
the myth of Big Data emerges, because it challenges the very idea that the social is something we can interpret at all
I see this in the context of our obsession with network diagrams as 'showing' the truth of interaction. Yet all we see is procedural (number of nodes, bidirectional links, total number of tweets) meaning making is irrelevant or not explored.
Wonderful example from a colleague: student pauses on video used to determine 'difficulty' of teaching material. Student could be pausing to go to the bathroom but if many pause in the same place - we can generalise something from that but not necessarily 'difficulty'. Without the qualitative sense making element that is.
-
rationalizing a certain perspective on how we come to know the social, obscures our possibilities for imagining, describing and enacting the social otherwise.
Act like a metaphor to highlight one aspect of reality and background others driven (in this case) by naked commercial interest and not long term well being of people.
-
rethinking government as a version of total data access
Damn observant. I so need to read this kind of thing more. Psychology is embedded in sociology and politics - we ignore this all too often. We as in my field of psychology.
-
The ‘myth of us’ has, as its domain, our activities of social interaction as registered by social media platforms; its effect is to underwrite the belief on which those platforms rely that this is where we now come together: the ‘us’ here is not necessarily national, it is just as easily transnational. This myth’s immediate beneficiaries are the platform owners, while the ultimate benefit passes to the institutions from government to marketers that want to remain in touch with us this way.
This is stark and frightening and actively propped up be people and institutions with a great deal of money.
-
collectivities:
is a collectivity just a non-purposeful gathering of people and resources under a label?
-
Calling these different processes ‘myths’ enables us to see an underlying pattern in how, as societies, we make sense of organizing things around assumptions that certain types of information, expertise and knowledge are more valuable than others, and offer us a privileged view on the reality of social life. I say ‘we’ because these myths are not merely an elite production: we are all, potentially, involved in producing these myths through our everyday actions (making ‘myth’ a more useful term, incidentally, than ‘ideology’). Each myth I have mentioned has a distinctive domain, a distinctive effect and a distinctive set of beneficiaries.
Myth = Process societal sense making through simplification. individual action has potential to contribute to process. Myth related to ideology Myth = domain + effect + beneficiaries.
-
entangled with the building and sustaining of platforms for social interaction (such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo) and with the continuous gathering of data about us whose value fuels those platforms and increasingly the whole of the media and cultural industries.
I like the word entangled. I often think about that when Twitter of Facebook 'are' the news. TV/radio/papers also dependent on the 'we' created by the digital mob.
-
three ‘myths’ by which the relations between media and social knowledge have been framed and disguised.
how we frame the relationship between media and knowledge - the myths.
-
1 A NECESSARY DISENCHANTMENT:
This has been ringing in my mind for days! May be it is a wholesome stage to go through, stopping the heroic narrative that the internet will give us world peace ;)
-
I am interested in how certain institutions with concentrated power over the production and circulation of symbols (we’ve usually called them ‘media’) have for at least two centuries been bound up with our possibilities of knowing the social.
Still needing to say something meaningless to get a highlight as part of my notes..
-
representing shared reality, reality that becomes recognised as ‘ours’, in part, through what media do
How 'we' becomes 'we' - not just by undiscerning tele-tubby love but by what the media chooses to highlight.
-
-
blog.ulisesmejias.com blog.ulisesmejias.com
-
“moving things rapidly may increase a general state of inertia; fixing things in place before alternatives have the chance of developing.”
-
- Sep 2015
-
mcmorgan.org mcmorgan.org
-
Chorus stems from chora, and chora [khôra] is a potent term in my field of rhetoric, meaning, variously, the discovery of ideas, the space outside the walls of the city where ideas are born, or as a place of “emerging possibility”.
'Khora' another new word - one that @googleguacamole would like ;)
-
with three or four or howevermany versions of a document.
Okay. Here I can only work with one version of the document. A difference from FW
-
“only one valid set of relationships, inscribed by the author.”
-
keeping links within the document but letting every person have as many copies of that document as they like, with whatever links they want on each.
So like I do here in hypothesis? I have a copy of the page and can add opposing views, cat pics or whatever...why use fedwiki specifically though?
-
send Carr into even more neuro-cognitive apoplexy
Funny!
-
[L]inks as imagined by the heirs of Bush — Engelbart, Nelson, Van Dam — formed a layer of annotation on documents that were by and large a separate entity.
-
But it does place links on an independent layer
-
Paratexts.
-
For all the breadth the web and hypertext promises, it is still limited by single authors getting their stuff out there as their single perspective
because as the author I chose what/where to embed? I had not thought about the idea of finding links the 'author may not want you to find'. This would be possible if independent layer - ha, neat.
-
Technically, the link is a deixis. It points to something not present that is necessary to complete the meaning or to extend the meaning. In this case, it points to something I don’t own.
I like this word! everything in life is a deixis not just links if we stop to reflect!
-
- Jun 2015
-
www.helinurmi.fi www.helinurmi.fi
-
I am missing basic exploratory orientation, thinking, assessing, evaluation, critics and I see mostly preaching. I am sad and worried, that’s why I wrote this post.
I am adding this again it seems to have got deleted first time. I said that I too feel this in relation to many interactions online. I despair hearing
in far too many spaces online.
-
I think that the model pattern of phenomenon describes well the rhizo-like courses without content, where community is the curriculum.
:) I made that link earlier on. Something becomes a phenomenon not based on painstaking research over time but on something else entirely - human need for belonging and validation. Is this what the book is saying?
-
We could explore a mooc as a social cultural phenomenon.
If we use the frame of a cultural phenomenon then what the book Heli is summarising says applies to moocs. I most certainly see the connections you are making here.
-
please come here everyone this is awesome)
the need to 'sell' the phenomenon kills it. As those selling the idea refuse to acknowledge the limitations of universals ( everyone, all the time, never) as it apply to their own narrative?
-
What are the common mistakes? One of the blunders is to fall in love with one idea and forget other people’s needs
If somebody is so attached to a given way to see the world (be it a rhizome or a tree) they will only want to convince you of the truth of view and never ask how does it look from where you are standing?
-
The basic need is to be charmed by something with other people and take part in something jointly, yet feeling like an independent individual. Research is not the right way to do
The basic human need of belonging appears to be met without commitment? Reminds me of Sherri Turkle:
We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.
If this is the intent of coming together online then research and theory has little place in such frames of reference. What matters is that the group validates me and tells me I belong to something special and durable?
-
New tribes celebrate around their totem poles and the irrational elements are connecting people, not only rational actions and discussions.
Newly created tribes come together via emotion as well as rational action and discussion? I am reminded also that when 'the community is the curriculum then there may be more emotion and less rational action and discussion?
-
rhizo14 FB group refused to accept some negative results
I guess negative here means mis-aligned with current awesome story the group is telling?
-
I have not read it yet, but I think there may be resonances between the checklist for a successful event in Heli's book and Armellini and Steffani?
-
What is needed for an successful phenomenon (event, case) to occur?
- Shared interests
- act jointly yet choose own way
- commitment to an ideology
- commitment to a cause
- individual must believe s/he is freely choosing
- individual identity is mirrored by the crowd not<br> enforced by the crowd
- event can be designed or unintentional
- innovators followed by strengtheners are needed
- Strengtheners may be individuals or things the crowd will appreciate and hence accept
- innovators need sensitivity to needs of potential crowd - belong to what, be against what
- A frame that combines new and old for sense making
- Fans have a place
- memorabilia helps
- negative events can support cohesion
- An attitude to reject the rejectors or critics: How dare you resist this lovely event?
- common enemies bring cohesion
-
Light satisfaction is the glue of a crowd for enjoying
This could be a catch phrase for much online interaction - does learning happen here? Are we just seeking to have our human need for inclusion met?
-
want to share things. That is why we need phenomena to connect us with certain people.
We want to share and need phenomena to connect. This reminds me of Jim Groom's concept of a pedagogy of triggering events. He believes these special events promote online presence when teaching online.
-
The pattern of these phenomena is the book’s theme. The book is very practical and its intention is far from mine, it helps to sell something to anyone, it gives lists to check if you have tried properly
The book: Effectiveness checklists that you can follow in a selling activity. How to do it properly.
Your aim: Understand authentic events online
-
- May 2015
-
www.jceps.com www.jceps.com
-
"We do this as educators who are seeking to ‘occupy’ spaces of higher education inside and outside of the institutions in which we work."
I have been interested in Occupy for a while. What an interesting use of an explicit metaphorical mapping. Occupy as a non-physical activity
-
'deviant or diverted spaces, though initially subordinate, show distinct evidence of a true productive capacity' (2008: 383), and in doing so reveal the breaking points of everyday life.
Connections to third space and heteropias?
-
"a critique of the politics of space and time into the institutions and idea of education itself."
What does this mean?
-
"Critical practical reflexivity adheres to our space-time formulation in that theory and practice are considered as immanent to each other"
How is this different from praxis?
-
'education’ cannot be separated from ‘life’ in institutions, and that thinking about education cannot be separated from the spaces and times in which we produce knowledge – which, in this formulation, are potentially everywhere and always'
Embodied cognition?
-
"critical practical reflexivity is more than simply intellectual or theoretical knowledge production; that it is embodied, affective, intersubjective and collective"
Critical Practical Reflexivity has a certain ring to it
-
"the Occupy movement is explicitly pedagogical."
I never thought about this before. The very existence of something in space and time can be pedagogical? They know they will not succeed but they will teach?
-
"Do the core principles and diverse practices of Occupy, as well as its weaknesses and contradictions, suggest a new ‘pedagogy of space and time’ (Lefebvre 2008: 354) that can inform the increasing struggles against all forms of dehumanisation in contemporary society, including, but not solely, those which have their origins in the violence of capitalist abstraction?"
Okay 'the violence of capitalist abstraction' somebody give me something beyond surface meaning?
-
does Occupy open new possibilities for reclaiming higher education from capitalist logics; for creating new forms of teaching, learning and critical inquiry that enable the production of autonomous subjectivities and liberating relationships within, but more importantly beyond, formally ‘occupied’ territories and environments?
How can we enable the production of autonomous subjectivities and liberating relationships within and beyond formally ‘occupied’ territories and environments? Is this not what the open education movement is trying to do?
-
Can 'the very act of refusing domination and acting autonomously have a politically transformative power? How is this exemplified in open education?
-
"primary function of both formal and informal education is to produce docile neoliberal consumer-citizen subjects"
I am having difficulty with the overly generalised propaganda. This depersonalised the activity of education. Some educators might produce such beings but not all?
-
"The logics and languages of Occupy resonate with these projects, being experimental, emergent, focused on journeys rather than destinations, valorising the critical attitude, positioned outside of hegemonic discourses and practices, and radically hopeful (Cote et al. 2007: 14)" Sounds familiar?
-
"Is the Occupy ‘event’, as some prefer to call it, a ‘school’? If so, what type of ‘school’?"
-
"They also asserted that because it was primarily an idea or collectivised sense of agency, it could never be ‘evicted’ from social relations."
I love the idea that you cannot evict an idea :)
-
Are we also trying to ‘reconfigure the common experience of the sensible’ and ‘create a new landscape of the visible, sayable and doable’?
And does this landscape now include the virtual? How?
-
"will remain a permanent crisis unless it is understood in a more holistic materialist way"
This seems to imply an asserted need for embodied ( I prefer it to materialist) understanding?
-
"It may be said of a natural space modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group that it has been appropriated by that group. Property in the sense of possession is at best a necessary precondition, and most often merely an epiphenomenon, of “appropriative” activity, the highest expression of which is the work of art’ (Lefebvre 2008: 165)."
Discuss please? Their lips move but I cannot hear what they are saying
-
"a confirmation of the undefined and indefinable multiplicity of things, and gets lost in classifications, descriptions, and segmentations’, curricula may be regarded as violent abstractions in their own right"
I love the evocative words...and I do not really understand them... is it as simple as a curriculum can be a violent abstraction if it is fixed and 'unoccupied'?
-
"It can only exist when enacted within particular social relations and material environments, spaces and times."
This reminds my of Jim Groom's idea of content being the residue of relationships that exist in space time...
The Really Open University love that!
-
"We can escape a notion but not the social relations that create knowledge. These only exist in space"
-
So what might it mean to ‘occupy’ a curriculum?
Well, people what might it mean?
-
"We are always in occupation."
We understand what is occupying a space and then adapt what is there for alternative purposes. It is how knowledge grows.
-
“occupy” our classrooms, “occupy” the curriculum, and then collect stories about what we have done (Bigelow 2011).
It’s your classroom; occupy it with some important and creative lessons! Amen to that! and yet becoming harder to do with LMS requirements
but authors suggest caution:
"As Judith Butler advised, while acting out can give a buzz of empowerment, ‘it’s really important to be able to situate one’s rage and destitution in the context of a social movement’ (Bella 2011)"
I am not sure I have ever situated my rage in the context of a social movement. Should I? Why?
-
less metaphorically
"the alienation and exhaustion that come from the intensification, exploitation and abstraction of academic labour"
Is this part of the 'why' rage should be situated?
In the UK we have: "We have rather lost control over the form, structure and function of academic knowledge; the determination of the times and spaces in which we teach and learn; the relationships between educational philosophies and the material environments of teaching; and relationships between students and teachers."
If this is so in this sweeping kind of way, then may be I need to become more of an activist...
-
a moral code: ‘social ethics’ rather than ‘business ethics’ (161), grounded in what Merrifield describes as the Other of abstract labour, ‘the nature and capacities of concrete people’ (21)
I like this but do not really understand it.
-
"It is therefore likely that any really promising occupation of the curriculum, which appropriated it to communalise, defetishise and decommodify education, would constitute a direct threat to the logics of capital and give rise to political struggle"
"is central to the global project of transforming educational institutions into business machines"
"the disciplining of knowledge through its channelling into abstract and quantifiable forms"
I have difficulty with this type of language.
-
Appropriation is not simply an act of taking space, but is more fundamentally the other of dominated space in practice: a ‘natural space modified to serve the needs and the purposes of a group’
This resonated with heteropias?
-
This paper is not about online spaces, but resonates strongly with connected learning spaces?
"groups take up residence in spaces whose pre- existing form, having been designed for some other purpose, is inappropriate to the needs of their would-be communal life" and reshape it?
-
'The supreme good is time-space: this is what ensures the survival of being, the energy that being contains and has at its disposal’
Discuss?
-
"use value is converted into exchange value in a process dominated by both the violence of abstraction and resistance to abstraction"
two sides of a coin that create the problem? In trying to solve it, perpetuates it? I have no idea what this means...yet seems important to understand it
-
"the time they take to connect humanly, to feel the groove of insurrection resonances around the world and around them’ (Merrifield 2011: 76)"
-
"time is no longer simply a measure of work, but a rhythm which corresponds to the ‘beat or pulse of human life’ (Neary and Rikowski 2000). Living labour."
-
"Our next step is to have ‘good conversations’ (Gunn 1989) with those living the life of Occupy in its various articulations, and with ourselves."
And this is non-trivial. Having just spend a semester teaching mindful online communication, I can vouch for that :)
And the authors here are not factoring in text mediated conversation which adds richness to the conversations...
I searched for Gunn and found him I can find no reference to 'having good conversations' but then it is a crappy pdf I found.
-
"Occupying the curriculum thus demands that we become open to diverting and reappropriating our selves. Occupy illustrates the kinds of collective, creative struggle that such critical-practical self-reflexivity demands, and challenges those nurturing the spirit of Occupy within higher education to dare harder in appropriating the spaces, times and relations of critical knowledge production in everyday life."
It always goes back to looking in the mirror
-
"It is not possible to be merely in, or against, or beyond the existing conditions of social life – as Lefebvre points out, ‘no space ever vanishes utterly’."
Note to self read Lefebvre.
No space vanishes utterly? is it just a case of what is foregrounded backgrounded for our human purposes?
-
"the production of such spaces – and times, and relationships, and ways of knowing – is ultimately a political project."
Darn, will I end up a politician in my old age? Am I already an reluctant activist? :)
-
Desires to reinvent the contemporary university for human purposes ‘mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space’
Discuss. Can the space be virtual? They seem to emphasise the need for physical space too. I note that MOOCs that have worked for me have both.
-
Abstract/concrete labour - unclear to me. Living Labour implies lived experience.
Knowledge produced and captured as abstract labour - explain?
Is this about the need to situate learning and teaching? Physical only? Physical and virtual? Only virtual?
-
SaP and SSC are, in one sense, each attempts to occupy the curriculum.
What are our attempts to occupy in open education?
-
"This ‘crisis of the University’ is described by Andy Merrifield in his writing on Henri Lefebvre: ‘Abstract space started to paper over the whole world, turning scholars and intellectuals into abstract labour and turning university work into another abstract space. Suddenly free expression and concrete mental labour – the creation and dissemination of critical ideas – increasingly came under the assault from the same commodification Lefebvre was trying to demystify. Suddenly and somehow, intellectual space – academic and ideational space in universities and on the page – had become another neocolony of capitalism, and scholars at once the perpetrators and victims, colonizers and colonized, warders and inmates’ "
I need to read and learn about this.
-
"students as scholars become revolutionary social beings within open, socially-driven spaces, rather than becoming institutionalised agents’
Are we doing the same thing in Open Ed?
not yet an experiment in ‘dissolving higher education into a form of mass intellectuality’ throughout society (Hall 2011) Richard Hall (2011) calls it an act of ‘pedagogic resistance’. ‘academic values, including critical thinking, experimentation, sharing, peer review, co-operation, collaboration, openness, debate and constructive disagreement’
They are not going to win any blog of the year award. they need help!
An emerging educational cooperative that aspires to create opportunities for advanced study and research in the social sciences which are both free of charge, and intellectually and politically democratic. Social Science Centre
-
I love the way they embody polarities. within/aganst dissolve/reconstitute
"Student as Producer is set firmly ‘within and against’ the idea of the university as a neoliberal institution, but within that context the student remains, resolutely, ‘the student’ (Neary and Hagyard 2011). The limit of Student as Producer is that the student does not exceed its own institutional and idealised form: ‘the idea of the student’ (Neary 2010). In order for the student to become more than themselves, the neoliberal university must be dissolved, and reconstituted as another form of ‘social knowing’ (Neary 2011)."
-
"the central issue of ‘the idea of the university’, the meaning and purpose of higher education, is reinvented at the level of curriculum development as a democratic, horizontal pedagogical process"
Is this different from self-directed learning?
-
don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory”
-
"giving them the sense that they are part of creating that future – as subjects/makers rather than objects/victims of history."
Awww... optimism and self direction in education. I'll have some of that.
"In what ways does the curriculum point towards the future?"
Well not when students are blogging in the LMS damn it!
-
what are the spatial learning landscapes within which teaching is set? geography - classroom, campus, beyond. In an environment 'saturated with digitalised educational technologies' are students made aware of the politics of 'machinic production'"
hmm....saturated? Is the LMS a teaching landscape? Is the open web another?
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
