Culture, changes and the limitless boundary

First week of the course is almost over so it's important we tackle the assignment in hand:

Ask yourself: what echoes or suggestions of current educational debates can you see and hear in these resources? What has changed? 

To address this question I want to point to one of my highlights from the essay

E-topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel On the Democratizing and De-democratizing Logics of the Internet, or, Toward a Critique of the New Technological Fetishism

Technology as rhetoric and social text: approaching technologies as one
instance of the ‘machinery’ of sense-making practices; emphasizing the
interplay between dominant social rhetorics and the function of tech-
nologies as powerful cultural metaphors across other domains of social
action. The task here is not merely to see technology ‘in’ culture, but to
view technology as culture, investigating the reconfiguration ‘work’ of
different types of agents and users, the role of digital metaphors in
different cultural spheres, and the role of science and technology as social
metaphors which redefine received ideas of self, body and society
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995; Ihde, 1979; 1990; Jones, 1997; Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980; Masten et al., 1997).

To me is vital to explore the roles of digital metaphors beyond devices and both in/within culture and as a culture. The importance of the user goes beyond the intended consequences of the hardware he possesses or can get; is there to be stretched and challenged. This parallel avenue exists as the surplus technology creates by its mere existence and by going as fast as it does, it creates more and more possibility that might not seem obvious right away (like, why do we need an 128G Ipad?). I'm interested on those phenomena because we are living amongst those culturally programmed with this scheme of problem solving/edge exploring bug If you might call it that: Millenials. Yes, I study millenials and that's why this blog exists in the first place.

Back to topic.

There's a charming and also relevant story about this in a recent A List Apart article that I would love to hotlink exactly but can't. Go read it, it's pretty interesting.

The part I want to cite is:

Reseting device expectations
One of the main things I’ve come away from 2012 with is the understanding that people don’t use devices the way we expect them to.
In 2011 I met Ludwick Marishane, a 20-year-old student from South Africa. He’d invented a gel called DryBath that works without water. Because he didn’t have a computer, he typed his entire 8,000-word business plan on his Nokia 6234 cell phone.
People use whatever devices they have access to. Ofcom found that 20 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds visit websites on a game console. It seems like a lot. But it’s easy to forget that for some, a game console may be the only device they have access to that has a browser.
The console browsing experience improved considerably over 2012, which should lead to more people browsing on TVs—so the living room environment is a context we need to be thinking about a lot more in 2013.
—Anna Debenham, freelance front-end developer

So, what have changed? Everything has. Everything IS.

Simply put, there's no obvious limitation anymore for anyone that really wishes to DO (in a per formative sense of the word) with the tools available. This lack of boundaries might be the most revolutionary aspect of the debate of the digital culture in classrooms and general education.

The issue sounds something like this:

If there's no limit (awesome!), how are we going to make sure this status quo continues to be democratic, safe, productive, useful and creatively explored? (scary!)

I have no idea but I'm not urgently concerned right now. Some teenager is hacking a Raspberry Pi to turn off his alarm clock or to find a new way to explore the sky, our bodies, the sea.... or blowing stuff up and watching porn.

And it's ok, really, it's gonna be ok.

New media and me

Im returning to the blog taking space from my regular schedule (of no schedule at all) to take notes about my first MOOC at Coursera.
Stay with me, I promise to make this interesting.


Today I organized my own video screening with the materials from the class (#edcmooc) and had a long chat with a fellow course member. I also read two very interesting essays:

• Chandler, D. (2002). Technological determinism. Web essay, Media and Communications Studies, University of Aberystwyth
• Hand, M. and B. Sandywell. 2002. E-topia as cosmopolis or citadel: On the democratizing and de-democratizing logics of the internet, or, toward a critique of the new technological fetishism. Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 1-2: 197-225. (p.205-6) 

The second one focuses on definitions, limitations and introduces very strong propositions about how to handle our technological fetishism. The first one ends with this phrase:

things are what we make with words.

Words. Like. These.

We love to think about powerful mass media, intrusive technology (dystopian ideas included), means and ways of repetition and education and seem to forget that everything would be completely useless without the power of words molded as ideas, in bits, or even color-coded. 

I'm certain none of this simplifications function as frontiers for the concepts we try to delimiter on 2013:

Utopian claims	Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on electronic computation possessintrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).	Information technologies possessintrinsically de-democratizingproperties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves todemocratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.	Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.	Cyber-politics is essentially one ofresisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

The videos required for this week focus on the relationship machine-human as medium-message and aspiration-reality, need-want.

I can honestly say that they were very on point picking on the concepts of utopia-dystopia UNTIL... I got very sad because I felt a connection where I wasn't supposed to. 

The description of the clip is "A very short, very grim representation of the effects of technology on humanity". Sad part is that I really really would love to be permanently connected to "the feed" (one, many, every one) and I would be happy about that. I would totally volunteer for a beta of the project.

Nothing more to say.

I mean, who wouldn't?!
Hello?!
??!