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Donna Haraway: the cyborg is our ontology

“The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” – Donna Haraway, from ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150.
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via IFTTT

Including this as a reminder to myself to read A Cyborg Manifesto pronto… but also to consider cyborg ontology in relationship to gender, feminist thought, materiality, political action, and the historical and cultural situation of Haraway at time of writing.

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Blade Runner 2049

“Replicants are like any other machine. They’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.”

A benefit or a hazard, says Deckard. One or the other. Not both, not neither. The binary nature of this didn’t hit me as fully at the beginning of the course, but now I see it – now I’m onto you, Blade Runner 2049. But it’s here, and it’s unmistakeable, the perfect microcosmic example of why the critical ideas surrounding digital cultures are so necessary… over-simplistic sci-fi and bad action films may never been the same again.

 

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Four initial thoughts about lifestreaming

Wall-E
On a mission

(i) It is really hard (for me at least) to make the ‘lifestream’ parts of the blog (i.e. what is pulled in from IFTTT) look nice. I’ve experimented with a few different applications and judged them practically exclusively on their aesthetics. Tumblr looks nice when you have images with a bit of text. Evernote works well for text. So does Scannable when you’re using photos of things you’ve taken yourself. I wish I could find a Twitter recipe for auto-embedding tweets in WordPress, it’d look so much better.

(ii) I find myself needing to aggregate lots of different formats. Random things I find on the internet and want to store for later. Things that fly into and out of my head faster than I can find a pen that works, and which I sometimes manage to scribble down on whatever I can find: notebooks, post-its, the backs of envelopes. Useful videos I come across (normally accidentally) while watching interviews with the cast of the new Ghostbusters on YouTube. Lists of things I’ve read, want to read, intend to read but never will. Things other people send me, or share, and that I want to collect. It’s been fun to work out how best to aggregate all of these things.

(iii) There are a couple of things I use (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) which I want to keep strictly ‘personal’. It feels like I’m approaching this from an incoherent direction: I don’t want to have strict boundaries on the things I use ‘professionally’, but more that I don’t want academic, sensible things seeping into the streams of cat pictures on Instagram.

(iv) Automating things and thinking about workflow shows me how central Zotero is to everything that I do. I love Zotero; it is my favourite thing. But it’s been a nightmare to automate it – exporting the raw data is easy enough, but exporting it in a useful format hasn’t been straightforward at all.

Gears and cogs
Automate all the things!
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What I’m reading

To read:

Bayne, S. (2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education, 8(1), 5–13. http://ift.tt/2jia4pV

Ross, J. (2012). The spectacle and the placeholder: Digital futures for reflective practices in higher education. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Networked Learning (pp. 227–244). Retrieved from http://ift.tt/2jIwoFO

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January 14, 2017 at 12:08PM
Open in Evernote

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What I’m reading

Pre-semester reading

Knox, J. (2015). Critical Education and Digital Cultures. In M. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (pp. 1–6). Springer Singapore. Retrieved from http://ift.tt/2jHCGtp

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January 13, 2017 at 08:43AM
Open in Evernote

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The power of three

Three boats

I’ve just finished the pre-semester reading (Critical Education and Digital Cultures, by Jeremy Knox, in Springer’s 2015 Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory).  It’s a short piece introducing the main themes of a ‘digital cultures’ approach. Knox proposes that these approaches provide a critical lens by which to view – I barely know how to describe it – the history of the Internet and Internet usage. So in this three-stage history, ‘cybercultures’ refer to the early days, when the Internet was other and radical; ‘community cultures’ concerns the social bit, communications and participation, and what back in the day we used to call Web 2.0; and ‘algorithmic cultures’ is where we are now, with powerful non-human algorithms influencing our behaviour and decisions and causing all kinds of ethical dilemmas.

My thoughts are jumbled, but I’m struck by several things. I’m wondering what digital cultures’ approaches think will happen next; I’m assuming (possibly wrongly) that it isn’t just a means of thinking critically about what happened in the past, or where we are now. How can digital cultures’ approaches drive our thinking forward? What can these approaches tell us about what might replace algorithmic cultures? Where will the ‘fourth stage’ stand between determinism and instrumentalism? I’m looking forward to finding out.

In addition, I’m excited about thinking critically about the digital cultures’ approaches themselves. The short encyclopaedia entry, understandably, doesn’t seem to get stuck into the nitty-gritty of it. At first glance, it struck me as a Western, privileged account of Internet adoption and usage, and even maybe a little nostalgic. And I was concerned by its problematic exclusion of those in our society (even in the West) without access and the benefits and challenges it affords. An old quote, but a goodie from Manuel Castells (2001, p. 247):

[t]he centrality of the Internet in many areas of social, economic and political activity is tantamount to marginality for those without, or with only limited, access to the Internet, as well as for those unable to use it properly

So, anyway, more questions than answers right now, but I’m really looking forward to this…

References

Castells, Manuel (2001), The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on Internet, Business and Society (Oxford: OUP)

Knox, Jeremy (2015), ‘Critical Education and Digital Cultures’, in Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Singapore: Springer)

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