Education and Digital Cultures
How do we create institutional cultures where the digital isn’t amplifying that approach but is instead a place suffused with the messiness, vulnerability and humanity inherent in meaningful learning?
Donna is one of my very favourite people, and I’m sure Dave is excellent too. This lecture/presentation is worth watching. Twice.
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Also, while we’re on podcasts, this one is also brilliant. The episode ‘The Rainbows of Inevitability’ is about propaganda, big data and targeted advertising, and has some interesting things to say about how self-perception can be changed through targeted ads based on browsing habits.
Some quotes:
“it’s become more about the collecting of data and for an advertiser buying placements based on that data than it’s been about marketing”
“that’s what really leads to this change in self-perception, that’s what is resulting in behavioural change beyond just being interested in an ad, but it’s really changing how you see yourself”
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Brilliant episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Criminal. It’s all about how difficult it is to fake your own death, and there’s a fascinating section on how big data (though it isn’t named as such) can inhibit this. It’s not just a matter of sorting out the legal or practical side of things, but data collected on your hobbies, your patterns of behaviour, etc. can all be used to track you down.
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“Sharing” economies
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I found this article while looking for something else entirely, and it helped to clarify a few thoughts I’ve been having about identity and prejudice and how online communities can both mitigate and catalyse, often at the same time, our personal biases.
“As the reach of digital devices extends further and deeper into our daily existence, one can only foresee a further and deeper takeover of mental life – at least among human beings – by what I loosely call binary thinking, and the corresponding spread as a form of mental constraint that conceives of itself quite innocently as freedom.”
– J. M. Coetzee, round table on ‘The Future of Literary Thinking’, Textual Practice, 30.7, August 2016, p. 1152
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I read this quotation on a lecture handout one of our academics had sent me to put onto our VLE. I thought it encapsulated a lot of the presumptions we might make about our use of technology for communication, as well as being a link to the themes of the cybercultures block.
Is technology smart enough to fix the fake news frenzy? | John Naughton:
An excellent, timely, thought-provoking article. Good conceptualisation of the complex assemblages in which technology is implicated, and the political, economic and social ramifications of it. Interesting, too, to consider how assessments of technology being able to ‘make up’ for human failure or inadequacy can shift depending on our appraisal of those failures and inadequacies.
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I listened to this on the way to work yesterday, and Wayne McGregor – an award-winning choreographer, responsible for the Royal Ballet, had some fascinating things to say about technology and it’s relationship to the body. It’s definitely worth a listen (like all episodes of DID), but I transcribe below what I thought was particularly relevant:
“I’m fascinated by the technology of the body, I mean, if you think about the body as the most technologically literate thing that we have, in a world where technology is developing at a rate where we can experience our lives in really challenging and interesting ways. It just feels to me that the body is central to all those conversations”.
How is the body technologically literate? And is there a way of conceiving of this without being strictly anthropocentric?
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“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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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.