Tag: Literacy
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Empathy and Technology – Damned Journalists
This is the first in a series of posts about Empathy and Technology. The next installment will be on Surveillance — As you may know, I have been following the Leveson inquiry into media ethics in the UK and it continues to yield amazing entertainment and insights. Among other things it demonstrates how very little…
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Jazz: An Unfinished Conversation (Race and Language in the Digital Age)
Jazz was – among other things – a century-long political conversation between Black Americans and White Americans. It was a musical, intellectual and spiritual conversation within a highly politicized social context whose axes were language, race and power. Jazz was also a conversation about technology, and about techno-cultures. To be specific, in jazz the conflict…
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Phone Hacking and the Future of Privacy
I have been keeping tabs on the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, which continues to deliver the most astonishing insights into contemporary media culture and its effect on the lives of British citizens. Today’s testimony was perhaps the most remarkable yet, although its hard to measure degrees of amazement when almost every witness offers mind-boggling…
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Tunisian Revolutionary Slim Amamou Breaks Down OS3 Culture
This morning I had the great fortune to tune into the latter part of a talk given in Stockholm by Tunisian web activist and revolutionary Slim Amamou, as part of the ambitious Net4Change conference being held there today. The live feed is available here: http://juliagruppen.se/lang/en/nyheter/ Slim Amamou is a programmer who was arrested in 2010…
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My Mobility Shifts Talk
MY MOBILITY SHIFTS TALK You are a tree. You are a bird. You are a fish. You are a flower. You are a cloud. You are a baby. Every atom that comprises you, each of you, all of us, has at one time been a tree, a bird, a fish, a flower, a cloud, a…
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The Foundering Fathers
It fascinates me how often political arguments in the United States revolve around the words of America’s ‘founding fathers’. Of course it is not all their words that matter, just the ones that were written down. And specifically, Americans are obsessed with the words these fathers wrote in the founding documents of American nationhood, namely…
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iDC post #2: DIY: nightmare for humanities, social sciences, media
As previously mentioned, I post regularly to the terrific Institute for Distributed Creativity listserv, and have started cross-posting my contributions there to this blog. Here is yesterday’s post, in response to George Siemen’s post titled: DIY: nightmare for humanities, social sciences, media. The entire thread can be found here: https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-September/thread.html Hi George, well, first of…
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What You Know vs. Who You Know
Last night I was speaking with Moses, a visitor from Kenya, about the difficulty young people have finding jobs in his homeland, even when they have a degree. Because, he said, “It is not what you know that matters but who you know.” Now this is a phrase I have also heard used to describe…
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The Publication Studio – an Interactivist Publisher!
In my last post I talked about the iDC listserv. Today I was contacted by a lurker on that listserv. His name is Matthew Stadler and with his partner Patricia No he runs an extremely interesting organization called The Publication Studio, which describes itself as ‘makers and destroyers of books‘. How cool is that? Better…
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Literate Debt in the Digital Age
Literate culture has mortgaged its future. Who will pay? In OS1 (oral) cultures, debt did not exist. Obligations existed. You can, for example owe someone your gratitude, or your allegiance, or your help or your vengeance in OS1 culture. But obligations in OS1 culture are defined by relationships between people. Whereas in OS2 (literate) cultures,…
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