I attended a Digital Cultures seminar, The People’s Memes: Populist Politics in a Digital Society held at King’s College London. There were interesting comments about how political movements developed out of what were the inequalities and disenfranchisement felt by those outside of the political elite. Digital communities like the Indignados who were the birthplace of Podemos, a Spanish party to form a more accessible alternative. What I found particularly interesting about the research being done in this field, is that much of the hierarchical systems that these new movements were responding to with regards to inequalities and inaccessibility, is now being replicated online. I thought this example linked well to the Knox (2015) paper and how technology is seen to become ‘anti-institutional and emancipatory’ but in fact just continues to replicate what is already present in society.
After receiving feedback, I commented on other participants’ blogs, trying to get inspiration so I could link more feeds with IFTTT to my lifestream.
On Wednesday, a few of the participants had a Skype chat to share what feedback they had received about their lifestream. It was here, talking to others, that I realised that a narrative for my lifestream synthesis was more about what I had posted and less about what I was thinking.
This interaction with my peers and my dabbling within my MOOCs lead me to question how communities are built? Which is why I bookmarked the Abbott (1995) paper Community participation and its relationship to community development on Diigo.
Most experiences of MOOCs seemed to be negative which lead me to question if they are sustainable.
Finally, I browsed the ethnography posts within MSCEDC so get inspiration for exhibiting my own.
References
Abbott, J (1995). Community participation and its relationship to community development. Community Development Journal 30(2): pp158-168.
Knox, J. (2015). Community Cultures. Excerpt from Critical Education and Digital Cultures. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. M. A. Peters (ed.). DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_124-1
I can see that you’ve had another really active week Chenée, and I hope you feel like you’ve rounded off the community cultures block well – great to se you continuing to commenting on other blogs so usefully.
Manuel Castells’ book Networks of Outrage and Hope might be of interest (http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745695760.html) – he discussed the Indignados, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, amongst others, and focuses specifically on how they are directly related to social media. It’s great to highlight the critical points here though – the web seems to be more and more hierarchical and centralised. Perhaps there is a relation to the ‘x-‘ and ‘c-‘ MOOC varieties there?