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Charles van der Haegen

New Media Literacies: Greening a Digital Media Class - 0 views

newmedialiteracies.org/...ning-a-digital-media-cours.php

media litteracy education do-it-yourself ethnocentrism planet disadvantaged multi-cultural cultural assumptions citizenship

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11
     
    Blogpost by Antonio Lopez, co-learner at MindAmp I've been a media literacy educator for a dozen years, although as a consequence of participating in the punk movement during the early '80s, I've been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I've worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time with disadvantaged groups. Working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted. At one point when I was working on the rez, a Native American elder opined on the information highway by remarking, "any road can get you somewhere." Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the "somewhere" we are moving towards. It was during this period that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and also understood the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of "progress." More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work as an educator. As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American University in Rome, I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of m
Charles van der Haegen

‪The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See‬‏ - YouTube - 3 views

www.youtube.com/view_play_list

8 oarts of this lecture about arithmetic growth

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11
     
    "2 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Prof. Albert Bartlett) has to say. When I saw this lecture at a conference in 1995, I came out blasted, thinking "This needs to be required listening for every person on the planet. Nothing else will matter if we don't understand this." The presenter is Albert Bartlett, a retired Physics prof. at U of Colorado-Boulder. The presentation is titled "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," and I introduce it to my students as "The most boring video you'll ever see, and the most important." But then again, after viewing it most said that if you followed along with what Bartlett is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because the content is so damn compelling. If you forward this to everyone you know, we might actually stand a chance in staving off disaster in the global finance system, peak oil, climate change, and every other resource issue you can think of. Without a widespread understanding of what Bartlett's talking about, I think we won't be able to dodge ANY of those issues. BE ABSOLUTELY SURE you catch the parts about "the bacteria in the bottle" (in Part 3) and the list comparing things that add to the problem and things that address the problem. If we don't choose from that right-hand column, nature will choose for us. I for one, would rather we be the ones making the choice."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 09 Aug 11
     
    I suppose many of you have seen this video, at least the first one... The question is: will growth save humanity? Than answer is.... : Wrong question! Maybe it should be: What kind of growth should save humanity? Will pondering on this question bring us further? Einstein said once: The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. Albert Einstein, (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate How do we formulate Humanities Problem?
Charles van der Haegen

Bruce Cahan Helping Consumers Buy Products that Reflect their Values; How Google's Mobi... - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Bruce Cahan internet searching consumer decisions advertising

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 19 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 19 Sep 11
     
    "ABSTRACT Internet searching and advertising increasingly plays a role in consumer decisions and purchases, yet pertinent information for making value-judgments is currently awkward to ferret out and certainly not universally accessible or useful. There is rarely a feedback loop aligning vendor or manufacturer's environmental, social or governance policies with a shopper's values, so shoppers, over time, rarely cause industries to change their behavior. There needs to be a way for shoppers to aim their purchasing power at achieving social values of highest regional priority. There needs to be a way to accumulate and redeem "social values rewards". What's missing is timely and impactful analysis of a candidate purchases' impact on the Shopper's family, region and planet (expressed according to their values), so that the purchaser can more easily make informed purchasing decisions. With some modifications to Google ads and Google product search, Google could solidify the feedback loop and help consumers, by their actions, build a greener and better world. Speaker: Bruce Cahan Bruce B. Cahan, President Urban Logic, Inc. (a nonprofit organization) Email: bcahan@urbanlogic.org Bruce Cahan is an Ashoka Fellow, a social entrepreneur, a non-residential fellow of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, a lawyer, and a banker."
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Sep 11
     
    Interesting-looking talk, but long. Is there a text version?
Antonio Lopez

Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a 'Rights of the Internet' declaration - Opinion - Al J... - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201228715322807.html

internet cultural citizenship proflopez digital media decolonize media decolonize the media

shared by Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • bitroots politics
  • For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be
  • A perfect storm of counterintuitive grey ethical areas, the internet is metal, code and flesh looking for harmony. This harmony will only come as the full potential of the assemblage is realised, as (and if) it overcomes the enclosures that contain it: capitalist mandates of profit and accumulation, modern human fear and pettiness, and the artificial territorial boundaries imposed by the concept of the Westphalian nation-state.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The corporate legislation project to gradually asphyxiate life in the web follows a twofold strategy: first, to gain terrain inch by inch by crafting ridiculously crippling legislation only to "tone it down" - making legislators look cooperative and magnanimous - while still advancing petty agendas
  • As Shirky notes, what is constantly in play is always how deep the "next turn of the screw" will go.
  • Code and hardware change us as much as we change them. Because we can’t uninvent the internet, we need to make sure it is the healthiest possible web.
  • Healthier code and healthier computers are critical for a society shaped by code and computers. As the recently deceased German philosopher Friedrich Kittler put it: "Codes - by name and by matter - are what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid disappearing under them completely."
  • Codes now reside in brains and bodies as much as in processors and hard drives. These particular individuals are there in representation of those who could not attend, but also in representation of the thick wilderness of codes and machines that bind them together.
  • an assemblage
  • Humans, encompassing their biological selves and their cultures and institutions. Hardware, including computers, mobile devices, mass storage facilities, transmission equipment, transoceanic cables, and so on. Code, including a vast wilderness of ever evolving protocols and software.
  • The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming
  • that life itself is, in ultimate analysis, a series of information streams that bind diverse entities through feedback: "Any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information."
  • The ultimate political challenge that defenders of the internet must face today is to secure lasting health for this hybrid life-form made of metal, code and flesh.
  • It is still relatively uncontroversial to attack a network protocol because everything about it seems morally trivial: Isn't it all artificial in the end? Seen as just a result of human cultural, economic and political forces, machinic life seems enslavable.
  • Ethics in this realm, it must be stressed, are not about what good the machine can do for us, and not even about how we can use the machine to do good - for we are in fact part of the machine, part of the life-form. It means making the whole assemblage healthier for all its parts by fostering "the means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information", within and among its three actors.
  • For example, by noting that the list of corporations co-writing and lobbying SOPA, PIPA and ACTA include not only entertainment but also pharmaceutical corporations, it is evident how human health is tied to the network's health in very real ways.
  • "the internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer
  • With the decline of state colonialism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.
  • The internet is not territory to be conquered, but life to be preserved and allowed to evolve freely.
  • Thinking of the web in terms of machinic life is important in practice for three powerful reasons: First, it guides us through the building of political models that encompass the human and the non-human, a politics for radical yet peaceful diversity needed now more than ever. Second, it unveils the ethical dimensions beneath seemingly neutral issues, allowing stronger defence for issues such as sharing and peer-to-peer practices that depend on healthy protocols and healthy hardware. Third, it is an approach that operates at any scale, allowing us to have nuanced and yet consistent positions regardless of whether we are debating the microscopic labyrinths of a computer chip (metal), the intangible nature of the BitTorrent or Bitcoin protocols (code), or the global impact of WikiLeaks (flesh).
  • Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12
     
    This is a very provocative essay, worth lots of discussion.
David McGavock

The Myth Of AI | Edge.org - 1 views

edge.org/...the-myth-of-ai

augmentation neuroscience myth Jaron Lanier

shared by David McGavock on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • what I'm proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing.
  • it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field.
  • we can talk about pattern classification.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous
  • I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.
  • this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.
  • If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.
  • our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on
  • people often accept that
  • all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.
  • other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.
  • there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.
  • if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.
  • it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened
  • What's not clear is where the boundary is.
  • If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.
  • we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.
  • If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore
  • not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.
  • because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.
  • Cortana or a Siri
  • This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Key relationship between automation of tasks, downsides, and expectation for AI
  • If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.
  • It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
  • I'm going to give you two scenarios.
  • let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
  • Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.
  • some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly
  • This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Another key - focus on the actuator, not the agent that exploits it.
  • the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality
  • not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI
  • The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.
  • What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.
  • another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.
  • There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,
  • You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.
  • To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.
  • The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.
  • In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
       
      Technical priesthood.
  • If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.
  • A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.
  • David McGavock on 17 Nov 14
     
    "The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture-that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world-that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us."
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