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?!
??!