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Adam Bohannon

Heidegger 2 Twitter: Technology, Self & Social Networks. - 8 views

blog.semanticfoundry.com/...hts-on-self-interaction-design

heidegger media theory technology design

shared by Adam Bohannon on 06 Dec 09 - Snapshot
  • Both object and subject are converted to a “standing-reserve”, to be disaggregated, redistributed, recontextualized, and reaggregated.
  • And human individuals, who were once reduced to resources (Frederick Taylor, and the authoritarianism of Human Resource departments), or “eyeballs” in the terminology of internet marketing executives; are now the creative engines of growth, innovation, and creativity.
  • This becomes even more interesting when we wonder about the context and meaning of start-ups intentionally exposing their office space’s ductwork - as if the open office with exposed pipes re-instantiates a manifestation of the hearth, or at least ‘un-hides’ the circulatory system of commerce.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality. The limit of postmodern reality is not the total objectification of nature, but the replacement of reality by virtual reality totally under our control.
  • Borgmann’s antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities.
  • It takes commitment on our part to engage in focal activities, but the effort affords us a chance to maintain some sense of self in the technological world.
  • Thus technological rationality can claim that technologies are value neutral, and only uses are good or evil, despite the fact that the uses are shaped by the technologies.
  • And technology leads to new forms of domination. For the critical theorists history has always had domination, but in our time domination has changed from master over slave or lord over serf to the domination of humanity by economics and the market. We are given the illusion of liberty, but that is simply the freedom to choose between brands of mass-produced products.
  • Computer technology further de-contextualizes human experience by emphasizing information over understanding. And computers further domination by providing new means of tracking the productivity of workers to the corporation and depersonalizing supervision; very much a modern panopticon envisioned by Jeremy Bentham.
  • Foucault’s view allows for the possibility that information technology could be used to put people in more direct communication with each other and spread the concentration of power over society.
  • MS Word and freely available blogging software encourages us to constantly revise, so a work becomes a series of drafts, none of which is final (just like this post).
  • Gould’s attitude towards design finds philosophical support in pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that everyone is socially situated. Dewey taught that scientific theories or methods of logic are tools used in a certain social practice. Attention to the practices surrounding an object are important to understanding it. Since he viewed knowledge as participatory he argued that learning must come about by doing.
  • Metaphors provide us a way of understanding the world, by associating one thing with another. Powerful metaphors are like magic, and inform how we think of the objects described, revealing hidden aspects of the thing described. New metaphors for the forces in our lives will suggest new ways of living.
  • Metaphors interact with technology in several ways: technology serves as a source of metaphors, new technologies are understood metaphorically, and our metaphors in life pose problems to be solved technologically
  • By developing new metaphors, interface designers can suggest new ways of working with computers. If these metaphors are carefully chosen then they will provide a natural model which makes operation of the machine easy.
  • Just as metaphors can help us understand computers, computers can provide new metaphors for life. Postmodern theories of psychology suggest that there is no single unified “ego”, but that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of parts, while Minsky discusses the “agencies of mind” in his book “The Society of Mind.” Philip Bromberg claims that a healthy personality is one in which different aspects of the self can come to know one another and reflect upon each other.
  • This fluid multiplicity of personality is what gives us our flexibility and resilience.
  • Social networks allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality, to manufacture and evolve aspects of their personality depending on context and mood.
  • While some observers might see this activity as evidence of Heidegger’s disaggregation of the subject by technology, it can also be seen as a model for Bromberg’s self as being one while being many. This is just one way in which computer technology, the internet, and connected social networks can show us a new way of understanding ourselves.
Mike Wesch

Serious Business (best article on Anonymous to date) - 0 views

www.citypaper.com/...story.asp

anonymous media news scientology theory

shared by Mike Wesch on 16 Feb 09 - Snapshot
  • Anonymous existed before it was called Anonymous.
  • "Oh Fuck, The Internet is here."
  • At the March 15 protest, an anon in his 30s who says he works in homeland security, compares Anonymous to the War on Terror--you can fight terrorists, but you can't fight an idea. Anonymous, he says, is an idea.
Mike Wesch

Tracking the digital traces of social networks | Eureka! Science News - 0 views

esciencenews.com/...digital.traces.social.networks

social networks theory

shared by Mike Wesch on 15 Feb 09 - Snapshot

  • So searching through vast amounts of anonymized data, Contractor and his collaborators found that teens had online friendships that were disproportionately with people in their immediate geographic area -- likely with people they already knew.


    "That finding really went against a lot of the media hype," Contractor said. "People were worried about helpless teenagers talking with strangers, but that is not what we found. This is the first time this has been based on solid evidence."


    Teenagers also tended to be friends with the friends of their friends, not with people who weren't part of their network already, the researchers found.

Megan Harlow

Walter Benjamin - 0 views

www.marxists.org/...benjamin.htm

benjamin theory media technology philosophy aesthetics

shared by Megan Harlow on 02 Feb 09 - Snapshot
  • The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance.
  • or the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century.
  • The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.
  • Evidently a different
    nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because
    an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously
    explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one
    knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride.
    The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly
    know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this
    fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its
    lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and
    accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to
    unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious
    impulses
  • Megan Harlow
    Megan Harlow on 02 Feb 09
     
    Interesting analysis of the evolution of art from cave to the film screen - as techniques of art changes so does the way we view art - What counts as art - which also shapes our notion of self, authenticity, society etc.
Mike Wesch

Gives Life Meaning: Homeless Mind - Modernity's Discontents - 2 - 0 views

taylorandmore.blogspot.com/...-modernitys-discontents-2.html

berger theory anonymity bureaucracy modernity discontents religion theodicy

shared by Mike Wesch on 05 Jan 09 - Snapshot
  • The discontents derived from the bureaucratization of major institutions are very similar to the ones just mentioned. However, they are even broader in scope for the simple reason that bureaucratization has affected nearly every sector of social life.
  • A congregation of Tibetan Buddhist monks, let us say, transplanted to the United States, can start using electric razors without thereby altering the character of their social relations. If, however, this monastic community started to bureaucratize its procedures, the very fabric of its social life would change almost immediately.
  • Because of the religious crisis in modern society, social "homelessness" has become metaphysical--that is, it has become "homelessness" in the cosmos.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In the private sphere, "repressed" irrational impulses are allowed to come to the fore. A specific private identity provides shelter from the threats of anonymity. The transparency of the private world makes the opacity of the public one tolerable.
  • A limited number of highly significant relationships, most of them chosen voluntarily by the individual, provide the emotional resources for coping with the multi-relational reality "outside."
  • The individual is "surrounded" by bureaucracy far more effectively than he is by the technologized economy,
  • Political life has become anonymous, incomprehensible and anomic to broad strata of the population
  • Modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear. This has produced an anguish all its own, and one that we are inclined to think adds additional urgency and weight to the other discontents we have mentioned.
  • All the major public institutions of modern society have become "abstract."
  • The most fundamental function of institutions is probably to protect the individual from having to make too many choices.
  • Human beings are not capable of tolerating the continuous uncertainty (or, if you will, freedom) of existing without institutional supports.
  • In their private lives individuals keep on constructing and reconstructing refuges that they experience as "home." But, over and over again, the cold winds of "homelessness" threaten these fragile constructions. It would be an overstatement to say that the "solution" of the private sphere is a failure; there are too many individual successes. But it is always very precarious.
Mike Wesch

Gives Life Meaning: Homeless Mind - Modernity's Discontents - 1 - 0 views

taylorandmore.blogspot.com/...nd-modernitys-discontents.html

anonymity modernity discontents berger identity self theory

shared by Mike Wesch on 05 Jan 09 - Snapshot
  • As we have seen, modern technological production brings about an anonymity in the area of social relations. What we have called componentiality, which is intrinsically related to the manner in which modern technology deals with material objects, is transferred to individual relations with others, and ultimately with the self. This anonymity carries with it a constant threat of anomie. The individual is threatened not only by meaninglessness in the world of his work, but also by the loss of meaning in wide sectors of his relations with other people.
  • Furthermore, he is constantly in the situation of having too many balls in the air simultaneously. In the words of the classical American joke: He has "too many choices" all the time. The complexity of the multi-relational modern world puts a strain on all standard operating procedures, not only in the individual's activity but in this consciousness as well.
  • Once more the result is tension, frustration and, in the extreme case, a feeling of being alienated from others.
  • Mike Wesch
    Mike Wesch on 05 Jan 09
     
    As we have seen, modern technological production brings about an anonymity in the area of social relations. What we have called componentiality, which is intrinsically related to the manner in which modern technology deals with material objects, is transferred to individual relations with others, and ultimately with the self. This anonymity carries with it a constant threat of anomie. The individual is threatened not only by meaninglessness in the world of his work, but also by the loss of meaning in wide sectors of his relations with other people.
Adam Bohannon

Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communications & Monopolies of Power - 0 views

www.media-studies.ca/...innis.htm

anthropology communication innis media theory wec2008 wecfuture

shared by Adam Bohannon on 08 Aug 08 - Snapshot
  • The Bias of Communication
  • he relative stability of cultures depends on the balance
    and proportion of their media.
  • a key to social change is found in the development of communication
    media.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • each medium embodies a bias in terms of the
    organization and control of information.
  • Time-biased media, such as stone and clay, are durable and
    heavy. Since they are difficult to move, they do not encourage territorial
    expansion; however, since they have a long life, they do encourage the
    extension of empire over time.
  • Space-biased media are light and portable; they can be transported
    over large distances. They are associated with secular and territorial
    societies; they facilitate the expansion of empire over space. Paper
    is such a medium; it is readily transported, but has a relatively short
    lifespan.
  • It was Innis’ conviction that stable societies were able to achieve a
    balance between time- and space-biased communications media.
  • He also believed
    that change came from the margins of society, since people on the margins
    invariably developed their own media. The new media allow those on the
    periphery to develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to challenge
    the authority of the centre.
  • Oral communication, speech, was considered by Innis to be time-biased
    because it requires the relative stability of community for face-to-face
    contact. Knowledge passed down orally depends on a lineage of transmission,
    often associated with ancestors, and ratified by human contact. In his
    writings, Innis is forthright in his own bias that the oral tradition
    is inherently more flexible and humanistic than the written tradition,
    which he found rigid and impersonal in contrast.
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