http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2392 <pre>Fuchs, Christian. 2012. New Marxian Times! Reflections on the 4th ICTs and Society Conference “Critique, Democracy and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society. Towards Critical Theories of Social Media”. tripleC – Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (1): 114-121. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/411 _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Christian Fuchs 2012-05-06T20:17:20 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2389 <pre>Dear all, Yesterday we concluded the Situated Technologies Series with the symposium “Situated Technologies: Beneath and Beyond Big Data” at Cooper Union. http://urbanomnibus.net/2012/04/april-28-situated-technologies-beneath-and-beyond-big-data/ You can download all nine books below. ~Trebor == The Situated Technologies Series, edited by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/ Urban Computing and its Discontents Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard Fall 2007 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST1-Urban_Computing.pdf Urban Versioning System 1.0 Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque Spring 2008 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/UrbanVersioningSystem.pdf Situated Advocacy Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey Summer 2008 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST3-SituatedAdvocacy.pdf Responsive Architecture / Performing Instruments Philip Beesley and Omar Khan Spring 2009 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST4-ResponsiveArchitecture.pdf A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova Fall 2009 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST5-A_synchronicity.pdf MicroPublicPlaces Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei Spring 2010 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST6-MicroPublicPlaces.pdf From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu Fall 2010 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST7-MobilePlaygrounds_SweatshopCity.pdf The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg Spring 2011 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST8_InternetOfPeople_web.pdf Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects Helen Nissenbaum and Kazys Varnelis Spring 2012 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST9_ModulatedCities_web.pdf </pre> Trebor Scholz 2012-04-29T14:06:33 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2388 <pre>(Hyperlinked version: http://tinyurl.com/dx5dwsb Images discussed: http://tinyurl.com/7g2h77e) New Literacies for a New Aesthetic? by Trebor Scholz As a ten year-old, passing by the Forbidden City of the East German Head of State and his functionaries sparked my imagination. The walled complex, tucked away in a forested area near Berlin, was guarded by an armed division of the Stasi, named after the founder of the Soviet secret service Felix Dzerzhinsky. Back then, you couldn't Google for images of this residential compound; Pinterest, Google Earth, and civilian drones were not around. And even if they were available, there was no grassroots way of mass-reproducing images or texts. After the implosion of the German Socialist Republic in 1989, however, reports about this forest settlement surfaced. My top pick of all stories is that about one apparatchiks’ secret closet filled with Salvador Dali paintings, financed by public funds. Months later, early in 1990, those who celebrated their newly found freedom of movement by grabbing a map of the German-German border region to hike westward found themselves led astray in mysterious ways as the border area was purposefully misrepresented on East German maps to deceive those who wanted to escape. Images invade our consciousness. They can bear witness when words are used up. They can mobilize, gratify and inform. They can be put to work as evidence, argument, accusation, and proof. Images can help us to make sense of our surroundings. We surrender to the onslaught of images; sometimes the anti-punctum: senseless, lackadaisically composed, and extraneous. But images also fail us: the overabundance of visual material desensitizes. In 2006, Ethan Zuckerman investigated a 45 page PDF that circulated among Bahrainis. It uses images from Google Earth to ask uncomfortable questions about land allocation in Bahrain, you know, the small island state east of Saudi Arabia. One image in particular shows the extravagant palaces of the King, built on confiscated public land, next to the packed living quarters of citizens. Protests ensued and the Bahraini government temporarily blocked Google Earth. Over the last five years something has changed when we consider digitally-produced images. Many claims to pictorial novelty have been made. And they concern more than a bunch of cool-looking stuff on Pinterest, an online pinboard. I remember going through shoe boxes of photos in my grandmother's house, noticing that the black and white photos of my grandfather had a tiny cut-out circle on his jacket, dubiously just in the place where he may have worn his party pin. Visuality in the early decades of the 21st century is not merely about image manipulation software though, it is about entirely new attitudes toward visuality. In the early years of the 21st century, the collection of essays Imagery in the 21st Century, edited by Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigl sets out to understand what will constitute an image, and what are novel ways to generate, project, and distribute pictures. Imagery in the 21st Century resulted from a conference that Oliver Grau convened. It traverses the disciplinary divides between art history, anthropology, and cell biology, focusing on: the ecological and ethical dimensions of screen technologies (Sean Cubitt), a course on image practices in the university (James Elkins), machinima aesthetics (Thomas Veigl), medical illustration (Dolores and David Steinman), the obsession with source code (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun), novel cultural interfaces (Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau), the museum as Noah's Arc (Peter Weibel),  and the Warburg Image Atlas for a digital age (Martin Warnke). At first, I asked myself, what holds the twenty chapters in this book together. What do all the puzzle pieces add up to? An analysis of contemporary imagery felt like an uncomfortably all-embracing ambition. John Berger, for example, focused on the way oil paintings primarily reflected on the status of those who commissioned the artwork. What are we talking about when we are thinking about contemporary visuality? The advent of infographics, games, CCTV, animated gifs, art generated by algorithms, histograms, 4D visualizations, or Instagram? Constructively, the authors reflect on imagery not merely through the lens of a specific device, genre, social practice, or social function, and it becomes clear that image literacy can no longer be the exclusive domain of art historians.  But are we really, as the book suggests, amidst an image revolution? "The curse of the ‘perpetually new’ is perpetual," Bruce Sterling writes. What, then, is so subversive or new? A Tumblr  image collection might help to answer. Curated by James Bridle, the tumblr received quite a bit of attention recently with articles in the Atlantic, Wired and a panel at SXSW titled The New Aesthetic. Beyond the claims to newness, it is self-evident that many of the eye-catching images in the collection could not have been created in, say, 1993. In Bridle’s collection, Ian Bogost discovered a screenshot of a “list of tweets announcing the surprising discovery that the Titanic was a real ocean-liner and not just a film.” But there are also maps: Planned Parenthood gave out sixty thousand condoms with QR codes that lead you to a website which asks you to check-in with information about how and where the condom was used. Many of the technologies that generated the images on Bridle’s tumblr are still emergent. Unsurprisingly, they show that digital aesthetic is seeping into architecture and fashion. Over the weekend, my colleague McKenzie Wark fired off a series of tweets about the “new new aesthetic of the tumblresque.” He tweets: The #tumblresque is not John Berger's Ways of Seeing but sprays of seeing. The #tumblresque wants to see you naked. The #tumblresque is a bedroom wall big enough for every teenager on the internet. The #tumblresque is one, two, a thousand Cindy Shermans. Wark shows what is at play in this “#pinteresque” image collection. Thinking about contemporary visuality, there is something lost in comparison to the quirky online aesthetic of the 1990s. With the emergence of centralized platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger, net aesthetics became a big mush of networked sameness, facilitated by template mania. No more experimental, handmade, and surprising websites like AdaWeb that made you chase after javascript-powered buttons to even enter the site. Today, creativity and experimentation on the Internet are not dead  but they have moved onto platforms like 4Chan. Today, visual culture invades societies that are largely unprepared. We surrender. Appropriately, one important axis of discussion in Imagery in the 21st Century concerns the question of much-needed image literacies. The editors aspire to extract a crosscutting literacy that can catch the elusive phenomena of contemporary visuality. Grau calls for an image competency for our culture that is still largely dominated by writing. Do we speak the language of the image? Illiteracy, Grau suitably suggests, has largely been overcome in most countries but the inability to interpret images adequately, has not been sufficiently considered. For me, a cohesive program for image literacy would comprise seven key competencies. It’d entail an understanding of 1) the material foundation of digital images (and its ecological implications), 2) an understanding of the technical processes involved in their making, 3) their historical references, and 4) the fundamental data literacy (the ability to interpret scientific imagery). It’s time to look under the shiny hood of images. And that includes the capability for a political decoding of long tail images, which is my fifth point. Image literacy needs to be more than fuzzy judgment. Can you give nuanced interpretations of QR codes, 3D renderings, complex graphs, visualizations, technical pictures like x-rays, face detection, MRIs, mammograms or mathematical images? With the gaming industry economically outperforming the film sector, it becomes harder to ignore image practices like machinima (i.e., technology to produce films in computer games). Images become findable if properly tagged but which images can we access, copy, or use? Image literacy is also about intellectual property and fair use; that is my 6th bullet point. Images and code, both have a tight grip on us. 7) Image literacy should also be about a basic understanding of the principles of programming. Douglas Rushoff makes an eloquent case for that in Program or be Programmed. “If you don’t understand the software, you are the software,” Rushkoff poses. Students don't have to become industry-strength programmers but they should all be able to converse with programmers. On a foundational level, they should comprehend the workings of information architectures. With the proliferation of digitization, we are inundated with heaps of information. In this Age of Big Data, the ever growing pile of data becomes unknowable as David Weinberger and others have pointed out. There are ever more data but fewer theories to make sense of them. The world has become harder to know. Visualization, aggregation, curation and the filtering of data become core competencies not only for designers but also for journalists, scholars, artists, and scientists. There is no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure, as Clay Shirky declared. This is also true when it comes to “abuses of the visual,” as James Elkins put it referring to compulsively created, senseless images. Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl demand new forms of visualization to face this explosion of knowledge. The artist Robert Smithson in the narration of his series of photographs titled “Hotel Palenque,” most insightfully and poetically demonstrates image literacy, for me. In his quick-witted and perceptive talk to architecture students at the University of Utah's School of Art in 1972, Smithson discusses a peculiar hotel in Palenque, Mexico that decayed on one side while still being renovated on the other. In his talk he put forward the notion of “ruins in reverse.” For me, the visual should not merely connect us to the sciences, as Elkins suggests, but also to the political power of images. Think of the work of the British cultural critic Judith Williamson (e.g., Decoding Advertising), the artworks by Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Trevor Paglen or Alan Sekula. Or, take the recently published book Right To Look, in which Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that "visuality has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony." Such discussion of global image power as political force is indispensable. In his chapter in Imagery in the 21st Century, “Visual Practices the University: A Report,” James Elkins suggests that today, learning mainly happens through images. Already in 1924, the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg used arrangements of images from distant times and places. In his Mnemosyne-Atlas he combines images to create meaning. In fact, Warburg's writing is hard to understand without comprehending his Atlas. James Elkins quotes Henry Hutchens, one of the principal founders of the University of Chicago who in The University of Utopia (1964) argued that nothing should be taught in the university except philosophy. I concur with Elkins here, the study of the visual is erroneously sidelined, shelved in art history departments. 
Do images really push themselves in front of words, as  Elkins claims? Have words hopelessly deteriorated? The editors argue along those lines: “It would appear that images have won the contest with words." (p6) Indeed, long-form platforms like WordPress grow slower than short-form writing and image sharing through micro-blogging services. The image sharing board Pinterest grows at an explosive rate. An Instagram photos make sharing even faster than tweets. But thinking of the media representation of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 or the Kosovo War in 1999- images failed to make these atrocities vivid enough; they did not do very much. Susan Sontag concludes that narrative and contextual framing establish more meaning than images. But luckily learning in colleges and universities is still largely based on texts. Part of my responsibility as a professor is to bring students into the intimate, delicious sphere of reading. The visuality of Khan Academy’s hand-written lectures on videos is an interesting hybrid. But still, we largely discover the universe through words. The long sentence is worth defending against the click-click moments of the networked cacophony. There are many accounts that professors assign shorter readings than they used to five years ago. This does not indicate, however, that today's students are simply sub-standard but it does signify that there is more going on in students’ lives. Reading habits change when students have to work longer hours to keep their student loans at bay. Sean Cubitt's in his chapter “Current Screens” instructs us to consider specifically the ethical-ecological layer of discussions about screen technologies.  Her emphasizes that our culture is highly material, especially when you consider the ecological footprint of the raw materials. LCD screens, for example, are poorly biodegradable and potentially significant water contaminants. Sean Cubitt demands that next steps cannot be achieved without respect for the poor and for the ecosphere. Sean Cubitt suggests that in the haste to populate our lives, the screens we have opted for are good enough instead of the best possible. Which trajectories of technological development become abandoned and what kind of social and political capacities and performances would they have suggested? Cubitt's essay also reminded me of the fact that an avatar in the virtual world Second Life consumes as much electricity as a real life person in Brazil. The "immaterial" can't escape the burden, the solace, and social costs of the material world. In this discussion of visual culture, media art has a role to play. How can we rescue digital artworks from oblivion? Oliver Grau's warns of the total loss of our cultural memory of digital art of the past ten years. Most definitely, hardware and operating systems change and without explicit, thoughtful, and well-funded efforts, most works will indeed be lost. There is no one-fits-all preservation solution. Oliver Grau, who is also the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, provides impressive examples of indispensable media artworks like Jeffrey Shaw's T-Visionarium. Already in 1999, questions about preservation of media art were at the center of Jon Ippolito's important exhibition Variable Media at the Guggenheim Museum. 
Peter Weibel, in his chapter, states that a degree of democratization and personalization of technology has helped to empower users. We are all consumers and producers of visual culture. Art, too, is included in this democratization. Painters no longer have a monopoly on creating images ever since photography made it possible for everyone to take pictures. Artists have lost their monopoly on creativity. Museums, Weibel suggests, are floating crates. They are meant to store works in their bellies, just like Noah’s Ark. They are meant to assure that artworks do not perish. If we inquire how many works have been preserved during the last century, the estimates vary between 1% and 7% of the whole production of art. Museums have done a poor job, Weibel states. They have passed judgments with the guillotine of history–separated out the majority of art and rejected it. Today, we have the opposite of Noah's Ark. The Social Web is an endlessly deep archive. The net has become the ark of the creativity of everybody, the support and storage system of the creativity of the masses, Weibel writes. This is an incredible attack on the principle of selection, the Noah's Ark principle. The museum, with the aid of the Social Web, will become a platform where people speak with one another and discuss artworks and topics, he hopes. Today, when I return to the former East Germany, my GPS powered cellphone will not only lead my way, but it will also reveal all that was hidden back when I drove by Erich Honecker Secret City. Smartphones embed geographic location in the photos that I capture. My daily photographic practice allows me to visually cross-question my environment. I take notes and share them. This image practice is a daily solace for me. I surrender to the world of images that surrounds me. While pressing my fingers into the hardcover of  Imagery in the 21st Century, I can’t stop myself from asking why a publication that is so much about the liquidity of the frameless image, the shrinking shelf life of the jpg, a book that so heavily relies on hyperlinked references, is not published online. High quality images, animated gifs and videos could be included this way. Eventually, a PDF of the book will probably surface on aaaaarg.org or scribd.com. An interactive, web-based publication, however, could have better served as an open educational resource, made the content available to far more people, very much supporting the kind of thinking that the publication encourages. This is not a shortcoming of the editors but it behoves all of us to find adequate and creative responses to the old business models of mechanical reproduction. I was thrilled to read Grau’s and Veigl’s Imagery in the 21 Century and I will use it in my teaching. The book can be brought into productive conversation with Nicholas Mirzoeff's Right to See, David Weinberger's Too Big To Know, Cathy Davidson's Now You See It, and also Design Studies: A Reader, edited by my New School colleagues Hazel Clark and David Brody. Imagery in the 21 Century is a fabulous resource for the reflection on contemporary visuality. _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Trebor Scholz 2012-04-29T13:58:20 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2373 <pre>I know that many of you believe that COPPA is intended to curb the practices of companies, but it has serious unintended consequences that affect parenting, education, free speech, and children's rights. For that reason, I want to share a new study that I've been working on has serious policy implications that affect every aspect of internet studies. For those who don't know anything about COPPA, it's the U.S. legislation that prompts most major U.S. companies to make their websites 13+. The regulation is currently being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission (and they're seeking public comments by Nov 28 so if any of you are interested, please let me know!). Anyhow, I'm really excited about this study and I hope you will be too! Title: "Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the 'Children's Online Privacy Protection Act'" Authors: danah boyd (Microsoft Research/NYU), Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern), Jason Schultz (UC-Berkeley), and John Palfrey (Harvard) Full article: http://bit.ly/ParentSurveyCOPPA danah's blog post: http://bit.ly/tgKZrE Huffington Post op-ed: http://huff.to/rVocz5 CNet Coverage: http://cnet.co/tnNPw1 Topline: A major new nationwide study released today shows that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site's restrictions. Parents are often complicit in helping their children join the site. These new data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is currently under review, inadvertently undermines parents' ability to make choices and protect their children's data. This study has significant implications for policy makers, particularly in light of the discussion in Congress and at the Federal Trade Commission about COPPA and other age-based privacy laws. Based on a national sample of 1,007 U.S. parents who have children living with them between the ages of 10-14, this survey conducted July 5-14, 2011 found: • Although Facebook's minimum age is 13, parents of 13- and 14-year-olds report that, on average, their child joined Facebook at age 12. • Half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds report their child has a Facebook account, and most (82%) of these parents knew when their child signed up. Most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account. • A third (36%) of all parents surveyed reported that their child joined Facebook before the age of 13, and two-thirds of them (68%) helped their child create the account. • Half (53%) of parents surveyed think Facebook has a minimum age and a third (35%) of these parents think that this is a recommendation and not a requirement. • Most (78%) parents think it is acceptable for their child to violate minimum age restrictions on online services. The authors argue that these data call into question the efficacy of COPPA. Their findings have important implications for COPPA reform and other age-based legislation, such as the "Do Not Track Kids Act" currently being discussed in Congress: • COPPA is well intended but has major unintended consequences in terms of encouraging general-purpose websites like Facebook, Skype, and Gmail to limit kids under 13 from accessing educational and social opportunities. • Age-based restrictions imposed in response to COPPA undermine parental authority and limit parents' freedoms to make choices about what their children do and what information is collected about them. • As a result of COPPA, lying about one's age has become normal and parents often help children lie. This creates safety and privacy issues. • Online safety and privacy are of great concern to parents, but most parents do not want solutions that result in age-based restrictions for their children. • Parents are open to recommended age ratings and other approaches that offer guidance without limiting their children's access. The implications of this study go beyond issues of governance. The age restrictions engendered by COPPA have serious implications for parenting, education, and issues surrounding children's rights. To learn more, view the complete article at http://bit.ly/ParentSurveyCOPPA ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria </pre> danah boyd 2011-11-01T14:31:39 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2372 <pre>Dear All, I had written earlier around the question of Digital Natives as a preparation to the Mobility Shifts summit earlier this month. It was a pleasure to present at the Summit and present some of the research that we have been doing the last couple of years. Continuing with the argumentation, I am sharing this new blog that I have written for the Digital Media and Learning blog at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives I am replicating the text for people who don't want to click on the link. Given how many people are working around these issues on this list, I hope that this leads to an interesting discussion. I look forward to the conversations. Warmly Nishant * In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives* This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world. In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society &lt;http://www.cis-india.org/&gt; (Bangalore, India) and Hivos &lt;http://www.alliance2015.org/index.php?id=46&gt; (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey &amp; Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies. Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc. Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis. *Other Digital Natives* Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book *Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?&lt;http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook&gt; * available for free download. For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities. *Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young.* Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit. It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of. Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives. *Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital.* It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships. Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions. *Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives.* This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital. But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices. *Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality.* This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native. The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us. I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based. </pre> Nishant Shah 2011-10-28T12:43:08 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2366 <pre>A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software By Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting. The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts of the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM. Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways. Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo, Madrid, Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is proliferating. On October 15 cities across the globe will amass with people protesting against the systemic robbery. Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine? They will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings. They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers, stock owners, traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market. Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer around ‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance capitalism years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious to perform the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the future in the form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. Stop listening to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are just pimps, and politics is dead. What should we do? Living with the Finazist violence, bending to the arrogance of algorithms, accepting growing exploitation and declining salaries? Nope. Let’s fight against Finazism because it is never too late. At the moment Finazism is winning for two reasons. First, because we have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange. The large army of lovers have to wake up. Second, because our intelligence has been submitted to algorithmic power in exchange for a handful of shitty money and a virtual life. For a salary that is miserable when compared to the profits of the corporate bosses, a small army of ‘softwarists’ are accepting the task of destroying human dignity and justice. The small army of software programmers have to wake up. There is only a way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only a way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight. Burning banks is useless, as real power is not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract connection between numbers, algorithms and information. But occupying banks is good as a starting point for the long-lasting process of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving all of us. This is the only politics that counts. Some say that the Occupy Wall Street movement lacks clear demands and an agenda. This remark is ridiculous. As in the case of all social movements the political backgrounds and motives are diverse, even diffuse and quite frequently contradictory. The occupation movement would not be better off with more realistic demands. What is thrilling right now is the multiplicity of new connections and commitment. But what is even more exciting is finding ways that can set in motion the collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony. Let’s not talk about the ‘sustainability’ of the movement. That’s boring. Everything is transient. These fast-burning events do not help us to overcome the daily depression. Occupying the squares and other public spaces is a way to respond to the short duration of the demonstrations and marches. We are here to stay. We are not demanding a reform of the global financial system or the ECB. The return to national currencies of the past, as requested by the rightwing populists, will not make ordinary citizens less vulnerable to currency speculation. A return to state sovereignty is not the solution either, and many people already sense this. The demand for more ‘intervention’, control and oversight of markets is a hopeless gesture. The real issue is that humans are no longer in charge. We need to dismantle the machines themselves. This can be done in a very peaceful manner. Hack into their system, publish their crimes through Wikileaks-type initiatives and then delete their real-time trading killing networks for good. Financial markets are all about the politics of speed and deterritorialization. But we know their architectures and vulnerabilities. The financial world has lost its legitimacy. There is no global consensus anymore that the ‘market’ is always right. And this is our chance to act. The movement has to respond at this level. Decommissioning and re-programming financial software is not the dream of a Luddite sabotaging the machine. ‘Market regulation’ will not do the job, only autonomy and the self-organization of software workers can dismantle the predatory algorithms and create self-empowering software for society. The general intellect and the erotic social body have to meet on the streets and squares, and united they will break the Finazist chains. </pre> Geert Lovink 2011-10-13T07:43:14 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2360 <pre>I am Ramon Sangüesa My background is very technological (PhD In Artificial Intelligence) but I have been motivated since a long time ago by the interaction between technologies of information and opportunities for change in society. I am currently a professor at the Technical University of Catalunya in Barcelona, but I also have been involved am currently involved in initiatives that promote "the digital". And by "the digital" I don't mean just the access to or knowledge of digital technologies but a deep understanding of their (to me) peculiar way in which digital technologie ahve created a culture with their own ways of building knowledge. Also new modes of innovation and organization. Or maybe there was another culture that spawned digital technology processes of innovation and organization? Anyway,there is an fascinanting change going on that revolves around "digital code". I have been working on its influence on citizen participation, learning, and new economic forms. Initially I collaborated with "knowledge transfer" with a twist with the creation of the i2cat Foundation in Spain (on advanced internet possibilities). Then become one of the founders of Citilab (Citizen's Lab) to bring citizens to the front of digital innovation. Now I am collaborating with CoCreating Cultures which focuses on collaborative ways to create together new learning possibilities around science and the arts (and the mix of the two). And from time to time and create and use some digital technology;-) A pleasure to meet you all! Ramon Sangüesa </pre> Ramon Sangüesa 2011-10-11T13:13:36 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2356 <pre>Hello Mobility Shifts and idc-ers, I'm writing on behalf of my Mobility Shifts panel, consisting of David Gagnon, Nathan Graham, Germaine Halegoua and myself, Jessa Lingel. Our panel is on Saturday (at 3pm) and deals with tools and technologies for DIY archives, activism and education. We wanted to extend our shared interest in creating accessible tools for archiving interactions and conversations beyond our panel, so we created a YouTube based game intended to provoke discussion from the conference. Our YouTube video explains the objective here (www.youtube.com/user/localinterventions) but we wanted to share on the idclist as well. Each day of the conference, we will upload a question to our Local Interventions YouTube channel, as well as the Local Interventions website: http://www.digitalborn.org/archives/34. Our first question is drawn from Henry Jenkins' idc post earlier today, which addresses questions of how educators can bring technology into the classroom when burdened by restrictive institutional policies on media, how libraries can offer students digital literacy without adequate staff or funding. In short, our first question is largely a pragmatic one: -What obstacles have you faced in your work as an educator, academic and/or activist in terms of media policies? What has proven successful in overcoming these obstacles? We invite you to treat each question as a challenge to interview other conference attendees (or people who are just interested in the conference topics) about the questions we post, take videos and upload those videos to the channel. Our short term objective is to foster dialogue based on content that emerges from Mobility Shifts, but we also have the long term aim of creating a digital archive of the conversations that take place as a result of meetings, panels, sessions and Q&amp;As. To upload videos, send them to this e-mail (4uhg08wkjvkp&lt; at &gt;m.youtube.com - we know it's not easy to remember, so just type it out once and add it to your smart phone address book.). You can also use the Twitter hashtag: #localinterventions to send in questions and comments. There will be a prize for the user who uploads the most videos, but really the motivation should be to contribute to a lasting digital artifact that documents Mobility Shifts as a site of interaction, discussion and play. Let us know if you have questions, please join us in our online game, and see you at the conference! Jessa Jessa Lingel PhD Candidate School of Communication and Information Rutgers University http://jessalingel.tumblr.com/ -----Original Message----- </pre> Jessica F. Lingel 2011-10-09T21:23:53 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2351 <pre>I teach at Eugene Lang College, in the Literary Studies Department. I have published widely on Caribbean and African literatures, especially poetry, drama and theater, women's writing and literary history. I co-edited the first feminist collection of essays on Caribbean literature (Out of the Kumbla: Women and Caribbean Literature). I have written two books on Jean Rhys for Cambridge University Press, and also a volume of poetry (flame tree time). I am completing a book on elegiac poetry in the shadow of empire, as well as editing the work of two Caribbean writers (Edmund Austin and Bruce St. John) and the MLA teaching Approaches to Kamau Brathwaite. I am very pleased to be part of this innovative conference, and look forward to learning a lot! </pre> Elaine Savory 2011-10-06T01:14:48 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2350 <pre>Greetings I am Lev Manovich and my talk at the forthcoming conference will be called "Data Literacy and Cultural Analytics" Here is what I plan to address: The joint availability of numerous large data sets on the web and free tools for data scraping, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing enable potentially anybody to become a citizen data miner. But how do we enable this in practice? What are the necessary elements of “data literacy”? How do we inspire students in traditionally non-quantiative fields (art history, film and media studies, literary studies, etc.) to start playing with big data? One the limitations of the existing popular data analysis and visualization tools is that they are designed to work with numbers and texts – but not images and video. To close this gap, In 2007 we have established Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) at University of California, San Diego. The lab’s focus in on development of new visualization methods particularly suited for media teaching and research. In my presentation I will show a sample of our projects including visualization of art, film, animation, video games, magazines, comics, manga, and graphic design. Our image sets range from 4535 covers of Time magazine to 320,000 Flickr images from “Art Now” and “Graphic Design” groups, and one million manga pages. In September 2011 we released ImagePlot - free software tool that visualizes collections of images and video of any size. I will discuss how we use ImagePlot in classes with both undergraduate and graduate students to create collaborative projects which reveal unexpected cultural trends and also make us question our existing concepts for understanding visual culture and media. You can download software here: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html best, Lev --------------------- Dr. Lev Manovich Director, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 &lt;softwarestudies.com&gt; Professor, Visual Arts Department, UCSD &lt;visarts.ucsd.edu&gt; email: manovich.lev-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org lab: softwarestudies.com www.manovich.net twitter.com/manovich www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=668367315 youtube.com/user/softwarestudies Mailing address: University of California, San Diego, Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, 9500 Gilman Drive. #0084, La Jolla, CA 92093-0084, U.S.A On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Trebor Scholz &lt;scholzt-rMPiz86vIOZkZI0wD67Jjg&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Lev Manovich 2011-10-02T18:34:23 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2349 <pre>#occupywallst #mobilityshifts Here's a demand: forgive student loan debt As US student loan debt nears $1tn, it's time for the banks that stole these young people's future to do the right thing Robert Applebaum guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 October 2011 18.08 EDT As the Occupy Wall Street protest enters its third straight week in New York and continues spreading all across the country, what is abundantly clear is that "the other 99%" – as opposed to the super-wealthy 1% who've been coddled for decades under the failed economic premise that cutting their taxes and providing them with countless tax shelters, loopholes and other breaks will "trickle down" to the masses – are simply fed up with the status quo. So they are doing the one thing within their power to make their voices heard. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act fell far short of addressing the practices and behavior that lead to the near-collapse of the world economy. Corporations are sitting on record levels of cash, but are refusing to hire. Personal debt, including mortgages, credit cards and especially student loan debt have reached astronomical levels. All this is true, yet Washington, DC and the bankers on Wall Street seem tone deaf to the needs of the people. For two and a half years, I have been advocating for a new way of stimulating economic growth from the bottom-up – a "trickle-up" approach to rebuilding the economy that reflects the realities of the 21st century via the campaign Forgiving Student Loan Debt. The argument is simple: relieving middle-class people of their educational debts would enable them to begin spending money in ailing sectors of the economy, start businesses and families and buy homes – that is, to have the "American Dream" that seems more and more out of reach with each passing day. For the first time in history, total student loan debt recently surpassed total credit card debt in the US: current and former students collectively owe approximately $946bn in student loan debt, with no sign of this accumulation slowing down. In fact, it's projected to exceed $1tn within the year. Student loans have been stripped of nearly all basic consumer protections that every other type of debt enjoys, including bankruptcy protections and statutes of limitations. So, while you can have your business, credit card, mortgage and even your gambling debts discharged or restructured in bankruptcy court, student loan debt is with you for life – and sometimes beyond. By turning education into a commodity where the students must personally bear the full costs of an educational system that, in fact, benefits all of society, not just the students themselves, we've shifted the ever-increasing burden of skyrocketing tuition costs down the socio-economic ladder onto those who can least afford to shoulder them. Couple that with a job market that's been utterly decimated by the irresponsibility and greed of those at the very top, the underlying reasons for the Occupy Wall Street protests start to come into focus. If the Federal Reserve can hand out over $16tn in loans, at little to no interest, to the very institutions that caused the financial collapse in the first place, why must average Americans borrow money at upwards of 8% or more just to obtain an education? How can we expect the housing market ever to improve when those we generally rely upon to purchase homes – college grads and professionals – are buried under tens of thousands of dollars or more in student loan debt, from which there is almost no escape? If education is "the great equaliser" it's always touted to be, then why have over 432,000 people signed a petition in favor of student loan forgiveness as a means of economic stimulus? In the two and a half years that I've been working on this issue, I have yet to come across a single person who doesn't want to pay back what they actually borrowed (as opposed to three, four or five times the sum they borrowed); but they simply don't have the means to d For more than 30 years, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer and the middle class has been nearly squeezed out of existence. Forgiving student loan debt would not only provide for a sustained economic stimulus over the course of the next 20-30 years by allowing educated Americans to use the money productively – rather than have to spend it on repaying several times the amount they borrowed to obtain a degree that no longer has the same value it once did. That would not only grow the economy, but it would also serve as a reaffirmation that an education is actually worth pursuing. The American taxpayers bailed out Wall Street for their recklessness. It's time for Wall Street to do right by the American people who did absolutely nothing wrong, but who feel punished every day. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/03/demand-forgive-student-loan-debt/print _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Trebor Scholz 2011-10-06T09:58:34 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2347 <pre>As we get ready for the Mobility Shifts conference, I have been asked to see if I can provoke a conversation among attendees. Here's what I have on my mind today: For some time, those of us who work closely with educators observe a core paradox. The work of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative have focused attention on games-based, mobile, networked, connected, participatory, affinity space, geeked-out modes of learning (Hope I got all of the buzz words in there) and there's a great deal of research and experimentation exploring the value of these approaches. But the story on the ground looks very different with schools installing networked computers and then, in effect, disabling all of the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms from being deployed by teachers and students. So, federal funding comes attached with restrictions on access to social media and with the requirement of filtering software which makes it hard to use much of the web for instruction. Many teachers are blocked from using YouTube and other video sharing platforms. In Los Angeles, there are work arounds which allow the teacher to punch in a code and authorize the use of YouTube, but it has to be punched in for each clip and has to be done very quickly before the clip is accessed, so you can not even line up all of the clips you need for a particular class period at the start of the period. Teachers are discouraging their students from using Wikipedia, because they have not been trained in how the online project works. And of course, our hopes that librarians might become information coaches for their students have been complicated by the fact that whole school districts have fired all of their librarians or forced them back into being mostly full time classroom teachers. So, we are gaining ground conceptually and losing it on the level of policy. So, what are we, as a community of researchers, theorists, and educators, going to do about this? What are our prospects for a meaningful collective response to what is a set of policy decisions, partially made at a Federal level and tied to funding, partially at very local levels and thus highly fragmented? Talk among yourselves. </pre> Henry Jenkins 2011-10-03T21:47:39 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2341 <pre>Some of you may already have seen these initial thoughts on an earlier iteration of the conference self presentation and program... But if not, it may still be of some interest as I don't think the issues raised have as yet been discussed. http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/louder-voices-and-learning-networks / (Tiny URL http://wp.me/pJQl5-76 ) "...in looking at this array of attractive intellectual baubles I'm left with one nagging concern. Amidst all this media and networking and mobility what exactly will be the content of this "Twenty-first Century University as global learning network"? Where will the content come from, that will constitute the "learning" component of this learning network? How exactly will the promise implicit in this statement-"digital learning is increasingly recognized as an important part of development worldwide" be realized in fact, and by whom, and ultimately in whose interests?" This follows along from an earlier blogpost which may also be of interest in the context of "Mobility Shifts" and elsewhere http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/the-dead-hand-of-western-academe-co mmunity-informatics-in-a-less-developed-country-context/ (Tiny URL http://wp.me/pJQl5-6Z ) "A consistent theme that emerged from my discussions was confusion and frustration that many of these colleagues expressed at trying to fit the dead hand of their received discipline based knowledge and training into the urgent vibrancy of the requirements for their skills and engagement in the world just outside their doors." MG Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Centre for Community Informatics Research, Training and Development Ste. 2101-989 Nelson St. Vancouver BC CANADA v6z 2s1 http://www.communityinformatics.net tel./fax +1-604-602-0624 Blog: http://gurstein.wordpress.com </pre> michael gurstein 2011-09-26T19:03:56 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2332 <pre>Hi all, In relation to the excellent recent discussions, I thought some people might be interested in an article I put together for a zine for today's "Day of Student Action" in New Zealand. It is a fairly straightforward reading of Foucault and Derrida that will be no news to most of you, but I think the pairing does reflect the desire to link the political and the ethical that the discussion has reflected on, and that we've seen in many recent movements. If you want to follow the occupation at University of Auckland right now, twitter hashtag is #occupyUOA. Cheers, Danny Neo-liberal and future universities Danny Butt Written for "We are the University" zine, published to accompany Nationwide Day of Student Action, University of Auckland, 26th September 2011. What is a university for? For the German tradition of research and specialist knowledge that underpins the U.S.-descended graduate school, it would be the production of Bildung, "to develop all possible capacities and to represent the universal in each individual" through the integration of research and learning toward a national culture (Ricken 489). For the French-English college model that underpins undergraduate education, the university is the cultivation of the intellect through Cardinal Newman's liberal education, where the development of a life of the mind is "not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense", but in a "true and high sense as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or treasure that will be shared with the world (88)." Both Humboldt and Newman's ideas of the university appear naive and romantic as we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of a third canonical statement on the modern university, University of California president Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University, which defined the contemporary higher educational institution as a "multiversity." Rather than defending a single ideal and seeking social allies for its institutional expression; the multiple-mission multiversity would serve the many needs of techno-capitalist democracy, though they would not be served in the same way. For the historical "idea" of a university, Kerr substituted a "model" that reflected neo-liberal rationality. As Ashby describes it, where once the university was cultivated as a garden flower, of no more significance to the prince or bishop than the court musician; the modern university is expected to be a yield-bearing crop (8). For Readings, this productivity requires that the university no longer conforms to an idea of culture, but to an idea of excellence: "There is no 'common reader' in a regime of excellence, since everyone can be excellent in their own way (104)." The university is "dereferentialised" and contentless-the key principle for Kerr was "internal differentiation" by sector, campus, department, programme, institute, laboratory, "in sum, a bewilderingly complex organization (Rothblatt 184)." Viewed through a political-economic lens, what is striking about the transformations of the last half-century is their conformance with the tenets of neo-liberal economic agendas. Flew notes the unfortunate tendency for neo-liberalism to be used as a catch-all term for capitalism; and most critiques of neo-liberalism concentrate on globalisation, privatisation, trade, and international monetary policy (locally see e.g. Jane Kelsey). However, as important as such issues are in a university system that is increasingly integrated into international trade, Foucault's historical analysis of neo-liberalism is perhaps more useful in analysing the subjective experience of university life on two levels, that McNay summarises as i) "regulatory or massification techniques" to manage populations, and ii) co-constituting "individualising, disciplinary mechanisms" that regulate behaviour (57). Foucault's late 1970s lectures at the Collège de France situate the specific philosophy of the individual in 20th century German and U.S. neo-liberalism in relation to liberal European thought. Classical European liberalism of the 18th century underpinning the development of the modern university conceived freedom as embodied in a civil society which sought to trade outside the control of the state. A Protestant logic of secularisation moves the structure of civic values from the public/religious into the private sphere, reflected in Adam Smith's famous figure of the "invisible hand" of the market. For economic liberalism in Smith's tradition, the idea that the state can or should attempt to achieve particular market outcomes would be as counter-productive as trying to understand God's natural design. Instead, government should maintain a blindness and neutrality to the actual objectives of economic governing, and remove the roadblocks to the market economy that will "inevitably" lead to the most efficient distribution of resources. Ironically, such inevitability must be taken on faith (Foucault 16, 32). However, we see in neo-liberal theory the development of an entirely new rationale for government management of the economy and its goals for the post-1960s university. If the modern "liberal" version of the university brought about the "professional" academic who inhabited the university bureaucracy with expertise; neo-liberal ideology has shifted to what Olssen and Peters call a "consumer-managerial" model of accountability, based on quantifiable output measures for the university's new task of human capital development (328). For the German ordoliberals of the 1930s-50s and the neo-liberal theorists of the United States, liberalism left too much to chance. The experiences of the German state under National Socialism had shown that merely letting capitalism do its work would not necessarily result in an increasingly free market: the market game of exchange could come to wither under state control. Therefore, to these thinkers, the principles of competition underpinning effective markets should be advanced in a "positive" way, markets must be produced through active policy, rather than simply being allowed or facilitated. It would become the responsibility of government to produce the truth of the market, and at the same time the market will constitute "the general index in which one must place the rule for defining all governmental action (Foucault 121)." The formal rigour of competition should be supported by an appropriate regulatory framework: one which does not act on any direct economic facts or toward social outcomes (particularly not "equality"), but instead to support the "environmental factors" that allow competition to flourish. In neo-liberal doctrine, market logic itself must not be directly altered, but must be taken on faith in light of the many documented failings of state intervention (meanwhile, the documented failings of capitalism are merely opportunities for improvement). Most of all, interventions should work to "keep players in the market game," a sentiment vividly reflected in the recent government bailouts of financial enterprises internationally. Neo-liberal interventions no longer see the economic world as a distinct zone of activity separate from social or religious activities: economics comes to be defined in the 1930s as "the science of human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses (Foucault 222)." Foucault notes that economics is no longer the logic of these processes that are taken as given, but analysis of the "strategic programming of individuals' activity" within this world-view. There is an anthropology at work here, an identifiably Christian-heritage individualist view of the human that Foucault sees emerging in the behaviourism of psychologists such as Skinner, and which would be later reflected in the extension of economics by Becker to even non-rational or sub-rational activity. Economics would then become the über-social science; the sole means and measure of humanity. Neo-liberal homo oeconomicus is not a partner in exchange with another individual when visiting a neutral public market. As Foucault notes, "the stake in all [neo]-liberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings (226)." He (and it is a "he" that is theorised) becomes ceaselessly productive, rather than consumptive: in consumption, according to Becker, he simply "produces his own satisfaction (Foucault 226)." It is a lonely life. With Becker comes the extension of market logic to all spheres of human activity: the market becomes a "grid of intelligibility", decomposing the traditional governmental concepts of virtue, ethics, morality, or any kind of public benefit or public domain. Instead, the principle of maximum economy will require the development of human capital (biopower) for the "greater good" (Tribe 694). The enterprising self should "naturally" maximise its own production for its own purposes. But because the self responds to the environment, the participation of populations in the market game can and should be stimulated for maximum output. Yet conforming to this version of individuality will involve "adoption of a 'a lifestyle', a 'way of being', a moral choice, a 'mode of relating to oneself, to time, to one's environment, to the future, the group, the family (Lazzarato 121)." To achieve economies of scale, the market-based individual must be created through what Stiegler calls the synchronisation of modes of life (85), rather than these modes being allowed to develop in their own unproductive individualised difference. As Wendy Brown summarises the neo-liberal paradigm, individual freedom is thus produced as a mechanism of government rather than in resistance to it, and the consequences of this freedom are morally valorised. In the 20th century the rationale for public investment in universities has moved from cultural development; through the redeployment of soldiers and production of an elite managerial class; to enhanced economic production and reduction in youth unemployment (Nybom 75). The social good becomes progressively individualised as access expands - in Perkin's terms leading European countries upped the participation rate of the student age group dramatically from under 10% in 1960 to 50% or more by 2000 -in the UK this went from 9% to 60% over the forty year period (192). In the wake of decreased public funding, massively increased participation, and chronic unemployment and underemployment among graduates, we could now describe the investment agenda of higher education as the profitable production of false hope, a cynical form of "credit baiting without infrastructural involvement (Spivak, Critique 220)." The aim is to produce the indebted student who will be inculcated with fear and inducted into "stress, worry and pressure" as the normative mode of life (Williams 96). As Harris describes the scam, "the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt." It should not come as any surprise that the growth in participation of women, people of colour and the working classes in the student body has occurred at a time when that participation has been turned from a publicly-funded asset to a mechanism of enslavement in debt; nor should it be surprising that the white males overwhelmingly in charge of this transformation siphon substantial salaries from this debt, owing to the qualifications they received on the public purse decades ago. No doubt any collapse in the higher education bubble will see the financialised university bailed out without affecting the kinds of executive compensation we witnessed for the financial services industry, and it goes without saying that bail-outs of student debt are unlikely to follow. The heat of this bubble is why the contemporary university is described as being in crisis. The cynical managerialism of government is matched by a certain deligitimation of the university in the eyes of the public, augmented by the dissipation in the market value of university qualifications. While the useless nature of humanities scholarship has been critiqued for as long as the university has existed, the last two decades have seen substantial and widespread revolt against both the value of university teaching (Arum and Roksa being merely the latest in a long line) but also scientific knowledge, perhaps most remarkably on the issue of climate change. The specialist expertise of the scientist is no longer seen as the authoritative source of the inexorable advancement of knowledge; or perhaps it might be more truthful to say that once scientific enquiry no longer functioned with the rhetorical promise of limitless economic and technological advancement, many no longer sought its authority. Of course, there are many for whom it was never a convincing saviour in the first place. The circulation of information in the postcolonial era makes visible cracks in the inevitable telos of Western university knowledge's superiority over "less advanced" others; and where such neocolonial dynamics are still in play they appear to be secured less by discursive moral force generated by experimental resolution of the secrets of the universe; rather, they are secured through the brute force of financialisation and capital accumulation, backed up with military and ideological support where necessary. While the European model of the university continues to spread, few new institutions outside Europe would give the ideals of a Cardinal Newman or Kant or Humboldt precedence over the development of human capital and intellectual property promised by neo-liberal technoscience. However, Mary Poovey points out that this entire logic can be subverted, and this logic appears to be the target of many global occupations of the university: The means/ends logic of the market is tautological because, by measuring means solely by their ability to achieve the end the market defines in advance, it undermines the credibility of any alternative definition of value. The only argument that is theoretically robust enough to counter the self-confirming logic of this tautology is an argument that is also tautological. Instead of accepting the idea that the market defines value, we have to suspend the market model entirely in favor of an alternative system that defines value differently.(11) The opening of this alternative value system may ironically be found in the heart of the university itself. -*- The university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, not even the traditional idea of critique, meaning theoretical critique, and not even the authority of the "question" form, of thinking as "questioning." That is why I spoke without delay and without disguise of deconstruction. - Jacques Derrida, "The University without Condition" Discussing Marx's concept of crisis, Hay notes that "[C]risis is derived from the Greek, Kri no, Kri sis (to decide) and refers to a moment of decisive intervention, a moment of transformation, a moment of rupture, [... of] objective contradiction yet subjective intervention (Spivak, Critique 323)." In light of the itinerary traced above it is no surprise that one of the most historically informed recent accounts of "the idea of the university" is also the most utopian. In 1998 Derrida delivered a lecture at Stanford eventually published as The University Without Condition, an essay which reflects on what the University should be, and also makes suggestive asides on the role the visual arts may take. Derrida's characteristic approach is to head straight to the central defining concepts of the university: the university as the space of universal freedom; the professor; the function of academic work and academic works. Under critical pressure, these central concepts prove themselves to provide openings to a future: rather than seeking adaptation to the various challenges to the university from without, Derrida seeks the future within, in a kind of "intellectual occupation." He notes that if the university is to have a role in the questions of human truth, it must firstly be through "unconditional discussion", in a space where research and re-elaboration can take place "without presupposition." This is not in order for such discussion to "enclose itself" there, but "on the contrary, so as to find the best access to a new public space transformed by new techniques of communication, information, archivization, and knowledge production (Derrida "The University without Condition", hereafter UC, 203)." This thorough yet provisional embrace of utopia perhaps is perhaps reminiscent of Spivak's well-known use of the term "strategic essentialism." Derrida is not nostalgic for any actual university past, noting that "this unconditionality... the invincible force of the university… has never been in effect (206)." In another talk, Mochlos, Derrida establishes Kant as an architect of this space of freedom in the modern university, but notes that Kant's price is high-Kant achieves the space of freedom intellectually by removing the university from the corrupting public domain of the political. Such a non-politicised "public" space of "immunity" inside the university, Derrida is quick to note, has never existed or been tenable "in fact or by law (UC 219)." And in the transformation and permeation of institutional and disciplinary boundaries being brought about in a globalising academic economy, such a space seems "more archaic and imaginary than ever", while also seeming to fail to engage the political as we might hope. "Hence the necessity to rethink the concepts of the possible and the impossible (210)." Nevertheless, Derrida claims that "the idea of this space of the academic type has to be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if its interior were inviolable [...] even if and especially if it must not prevent us from addressing ourselves to the university's out side without any utopic neutrality (219)." Derrida, the philosopher whose convoluted style is routinely mocked by Anglo-Saxon critics, becomes disarmingly direct and clear here, as he often does when discussing institutional imperatives: "This freedom or immunity of the university and par excellence of its Humanities is something to which we must lay claim, while committing ourselves to it with all our might. Not only in a verbal and declarative fashion, but in work, in act, and in what we make happen with events (219)." For Derrida, this freedom is not dispensed by a benevolent state bureaucracy as Humboldt sought in the nineteenth century, but is instead claimed through acts that are and should be the hallmark of the professor. Derrida notes that the word "professor", of Latin origin, had only a religious sense in English before the establishment of the university in the 13th and 14th centuries. [He also notes that the word "fable" also comes from this root, thus fiction is tied to the term]. To "profess" was to take public vows of a religious order. Derrida turns to Austin's distinction between constative ("saying what is") and performative ("making things happen") speech acts, noting that to profess is not simply to commit to the craft of holding constative scientific-technical knowledge; but prior to taking up this craft to make a pledge, to commit one's responsibility, even to fight for something in the future. "What matters here is this promise, this pledge of responsibility, which is reducible to neither theory nor practice (214)." If the professor has power in a world of generalised archivisation techniques and knowledge circulation, it is in this commitment: "Beyond and in addition to knowledge, know-how, and competence, a testimonial commitment, a freedom, a responsibility under oath, a sworn faith obligates [the professor] to render accounts to some tribunal yet to be defined (222)." One must work for the university not in response to the contingencies of practical management, but in light of the judgement of those to come in the future. Derrida then moves on to the question of the kind of work that is implied in this commitment. It is not simply work as labour, for "we know better than ever today that a gain in production can correspond to a diminishing of work (221)." Instead the professor must engage in the production of works (oeuvres) that carry this signature mark of responsibility in their profession, and which "remain after and beyond the time of the operation (216)." If such a work is to be critical in the performative sense, rather than merely talking about the critical, it cannot remain bound by traditional genres of critique, but must take up an "unconditional right to ask critical questions not only about the history of the concept of man, but about the history even of the notion of critique, about the form and the authority of the question, about the interrogative form of thought (204)." In short, in order for the professoriat to fully carry out their responsibility to the future of the profession, they must create works that allow new modes of thinking in that profession to become possible, just as innovative works of the past have allowed us to think today. Needless to say, in humanities disciplines where the student is initiated into the academy on arrival, this "professing" role is also available for the student, in the mode of humanities learning that Spivak calls the "uncoercive rearrangement of desire ("Ethics" 615)." In this sense Derrida introduces the modality of the "as if" in fiction, in fabulation, that is appropriate to all oeuvres, not only singularly oeuvres d'art, the fine arts (painting, sculpture, cinema, music, poetry, literature, and so forth), but also... all the dis cursive idealities, all the symbolic or cultural productions that define, in the general field of the university, the disciplines said to be in the Humanities-and even the juridical disciplines and the production of laws, and even a certain structure of scientific objects in general (212). Speaking of academic outputs, he claims that he will "not hasten for the moment to reduce these "objects" (of professorial activity) to fictions, simulacra, or works of art, while acting as if we already had at our disposal reliable concepts of fiction, of art, or of the work (212)." Even without such definitions, for Derrida the work of the professor ultimately cannot be simply the "competent exercise of some knowledge" in a constative or techno-scientific sense, but must be an imaginative exploration of the limits of the very field in a way which cannot be undertaken with pre-existing conditions. Derrida's account of the unconditional university speaks directly to the goals of many student-led occupations of universities in recent times. It addresses the autonomous and unlimited demands which have and should be made of the university, as the university can only be truly "universal" if it is a space without limit. From this perspective, the neo-liberal quantification of university inputs and outputs, indexed to credit hours, rankings, productivity, and-most of all-debt, becomes a regime that aims to bond students' personal aspirations and growth to the demands of the market. But other types of value are possible, and they will not be available at some distant point of freedom granted to those with an excellent GPA or ranking in a research assessment exercise. They must instead be enacted immediately, in our relations with each other, so that new forms of collective value can be discovered outside the coercive principles of competition and productivity. As Judith Butler explains, the autonomy we seek as individuals can only be found together: In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy [...] If the social world… must change in order for autonomy to become possible, then individual choice will prove to be dependent from the start on conditions that none of us author at will, and no individual will be able to choose outside the context of a radically altered social world. That alteration comes from an increment of acts, collective and diffuse, belonging to no single subject, and yet one effect of these alterations is to make acting like a subject possible(100). Danny Butt &lt;www.dannybutt.net&gt; teaches in the Critical Studies programme at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. He is completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne on the development of the art school within the research university. Works Cited Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift : Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ashby, Eric. "The Future of the Nineteenth Century Idea of a University." Minerva 6.1 (1967): 3-17. Brown, Wendy. "Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy." Theory &amp; Event 7.1 (2003). Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. "Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties." Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Ed. Rand, Richard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. 1-34. ---. "The University without Condition." Trans. Kamuf, Peggy. Without Alibi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 202-37. Flew, Terry. "Letting Go of Neo-Liberalism (with some help from Michel Foucault)." : Queensland University of Technology. July 29, 2011 &lt;http:&gt;&lt;/http:&gt; Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978-79. Ed. Senellart, Michel. trans. Burchell, Graham. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Harris, Malcolm. "Bad Education." n+1 (2011). 2 September 2011 &lt;http:&gt;.&lt;/http:&gt; Kelsey, Jane. "The Denationalization of Money: Embedded Neo-Liberalism and the Risks of Implosion." Social &amp; Legal Studies 12.2 (2003): 155-76. Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Lazzarato, M. "Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social." Theory, Culture &amp; Society 26.6 (2009): 109-33. McNay, Lois. "Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics." Theory, Culture &amp; Society 26.6 (2009): 55-77. Nybom, Thorsten. "A Rule-Governed Community of Scholars: The Humboldt Vision in the History of the European University." University Dynamics and European Integration. Eds. Maassen, Peter and Johan P. Olsen. Vol. 19. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2007. 55-80. Olssen, Mark, and Michael A. Peters. "Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism." Journal of Education Policy 20.3 (2005): 313-45. Perkin, Harold. "History of Universities." International Handbook of Higher Education. Eds. Forest, James J. F. and Philip G. Altbach. Vol. 18. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006. 159-205. Poovey, Mary. "The Twenty-First-Century University and the Market: What Price Economic Viability?" Differences 12.1 (2001): 1-16. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Ricken, Norbert. "The Deliberate University: Remarks on the 'Idea of the University' from a Perspective of Knowledge." Studies in Philosophy and Education 26 (2007): 481-98. Rothblatt, Sheldon. "A Tale of Two Berkeleys." Minerva 42 2 (2004): 173-89. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching." Diacritics 32.3 (2002): 17-31. Stiegler, Bernard. Acting Out. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tribe, Keith. "The Political Economy of Modernity: Foucault's Collège de France Lectures of 1978 and 1979." Economy and Society 38.4 (2009): 679-98. Williams, Jeffrey. "The Pedagogy of Debt." Toward a Global Autonomous University. Ed. The Edu-factory Collective. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2009. 89-96.</pre> Danny Butt 2011-09-26T07:14:57 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2330 <pre>Hi Brian, Of course, Henry Jenkins and I will be talking about the tensions between participatory culture and public education in our conversation at Mobility Shifts, but I don't think it is quite fair to characterize the whole UC system as "corrupt." I run the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College in UC San Diego and also supervise our upper-division experiential learning courses with our Practicum Director, so I suppose I am one of those frequently demonized UC "administrators." Because I have an interdisciplinary faculty appointment, I am also able to teach courses in three departments (Communication, Literature, and Visual Arts). In Sixth college we have a lot of first-generation college students and a lot of students who come in as transfer students from the community college system, so I am on the front lines of where tuition hikes and service cutbacks fall. This poses a lot of challenges, because we also have a very ambitious curriculum devoted to what we call "utopian pedagogy" that covers everything from art-making to social action to computer programming. You can look at the Sixth College Academic Plan for more information. I have to say that one of the advantages of this particular large public institution is its relative transparency. Certainly it is not perfect. But we are public servants, and if you want to know how much I earn or how much any members of my team earn, you can look it up online. That's not true of a lot of other educational institutions or philanthropic organizations or learning groups. We take accountability very seriously, and we share information about spending very openly with the public, because we need their help. I know that isn't always apparent when listening to UC President Mark Yudof speak (or mispeak), but it isn't fair to paint such a large and diverse population of educators devoted to complex collaborators with a lot of stakeholders with such a broad brush. What about Sixth College faculty members creating courses with our community partners so students can think about urban communities as sites of knowledge making? We don't have budget to pay them to do this with course releases, but they do it anyway. Are they corrupt? You cite Bob Samuels as a good source of information about the UC system, and I have to disagree. I've known Bob for over a decade, and I think he's a Class A hypocrite when it comes to the question of remaking the university. For example, he was a very vocal opponent of a project that we launched when I was back at UC Irvine that was designed to encourage more online collaboration and pedagogical sharing among people teaching gen ed courses. He actually defended individual ownership of "intellectual property" at those meetings. I work for the public and have absolutely no feeling of proprietary interest in further monetizing my own pedagogical work, and I put everything that I can online in the spirit of sharing. If someone wants to take my slides and podcasts, which are all online, and copy my entire freshman core course on Media Seductions at http://losh.ucsd.edu/courses/CAT1.html, I would take it as the highest form of flattery. There are a lot of other UC faculty, particularly those in Sixth College, who feel the same way. Liz Elizabeth Losh Director of Academic Programs, Sixth College Culture, Art, and Technology Program 249 Pepper Canyon Hall University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0054 (858) 822-1666 lizlosh-XkckGZ689+c&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org http://losh.ucsd.edu ________________________________________ From: idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org [idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org] on behalf of Brian Holmes [bhcontinentaldrift-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org] Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 6:40 AM To: idc-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org Subject: Re: [iDC] DIY: nightmare for humanities, social sciences, media Hello Blake, hello Janet, nice to hear from you - Yes, I have seen the TED talk on algorithms, and it's worth watching. It shows how the demands of high-speed trading - in milliseconds - reshape the very landscape, the "ground beneath our feet" as I've often said. For the past fifteen years I've been studying the social consequences of finance capitalism, and I've come to the conclusion that it has really been the driving and shaping force of the whole informational era, along with the hi-tech military of course. The reason for considering that the universities are almost as corrupt as Wall Street is a trip I made to the UC system around March 4 of last year: a little stroll down memory lane, since I'm a California native and grad of UCB. As Blake surely knows, the UC strikes produced a tremendous amount of information about how that formerly public university is actually run, all the way from "Regents" like the billionaire real-estate and construction mogul Richard Blum (conveniently married to long-term CA senator Dianne Feinstein) down to weapons labs at places like UCSB or UCSD, which cream off vastly disproportionate shares of state and federal grant money and turn it into the robotic solidiers that the US craves for its oil wars. Although the occupations of late 2009 were tremendously effective in raising consciousness, the walkout of March 4 which I went to encourage and support was in fact very disappointing. Notably because of how few professors - in southern California at least - came out in active support of this adjunct-driven movement. (Though a few months earlier it was interesting to see videos of one of my old French dept. profs, Ann Smock, out protesting the attempts to more or less erase the foreign language departments.) Blake, I assume you were at UC Davis at the time and your read may be different. I came back from California with two words in my head, which had not been there when I left. The words: total corruption. My claim is that most of US universities have become systemically corrupt --that is, captured by interest groups - in the course of the neoliberal period, essentially since the passage of the Bayh-Dohl act in 1980 which reengineered the conditions under which knowledge is patented and sold by the intellectual property departments. Three key books on the systemic corruption of the universities are: The University in Ruins, by Bill Reading; How the University Works, by Marc Bosquet; and Unmaking the Public University, by Christopher Newfield. But there are many others, check out the work and blog of Bob Samuels which is spot on. It's also well worth reading Charles Schwartz's questions about the "public" nature of education where undergraduate tuition pays for the administrative execs, real-estate deals, six-figure professors and corporate labs: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/who_pays_the_hidden_cost_of_un.html Now, indeed, I fully agree with Blake that in an era where the critique of public institutions is carried on by the corporate class, the point is not to destroy those institutions - and that is exactly what I've been arguing here in various posts. However, what has actually happened in the UC system and in many other cases (as I infer on the basis of less detailed study) is not so much the destruction as the appropriation and remodeling of those formerly public institutions. The ground has already changed beneath our feet. So to worry about whether we are losing the Enlightenment, at this point when the universities massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology, is, I am afraid, to be exactly the kind of humanist that the Frankfurt School thinkers would have excoriated for being unable to see that - how did Adorno put it? - "the whole is the untrue." What would be needed, but what we don't have, is someone like Marcuse who would incite both students and professors to revolt on the basis of deep, searching and totally uncompromising work that engages its author body and soul. Instead of doing that in a way that would match the demands of the times, professors go on producing peer-reviewed articles on tiny details, jetting around to fancy conferences, building their pet gallery, media lab or whatever, and climbing the career ladder. They are an interest group. Many people who think this way just want to burn the places down, they are active readers of The Coming Insurrection. Not me. I think it's necessary to create autonomous sites of egalitarian-ecological critique which can encourage the desires of students to ruse up against a corrupt system, and also challenge professors to do the same, which does not mean just having nice thoughts about possible arcadias. Since the Second World War, with just a short pause in the 60s-70s, the American middle class - what you might call the organic intellectuals of global capital - have been enriching themselves while our country despoils the planet. Now the wonderful neoliberal governmentality, described so well by Foucault in his book on The Birth of Biopower, is destroying the American middle class the way it destroyed the Latin American middle classes decades before. Intellectuals need to take risks in the name of equality. Unless, of course, they are just parasites... The words are strong. But the situation is too. The whole issue of the middle classes, of a place situation between the dominators and the dominated, is which side do you take in a structurally compromised position? I'd say the difference between left-liberal critique and the corporate variety is that the latter is transformative, it has appropriated and remade the institutions, while ours has largely been just commentary, a bunch of moot points for which you get a minor prize. To defend the university as it is, means defending a highly advanced state of corruption. After all that has happened in the last decade, and in the face of a total makeover of society under the guise of the response to a crisis created by finance itself, I just don't see any excuse for remaining naive. Shouldn't we try to stop business as usual? And start something else? best, BH _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref </pre> Losh, Elizabeth 2011-09-23T17:51:46 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2325 <pre>Hi, I'm new to this list and have just started following the discussions around the online world and the future of the university. If you're UK based or nearby you might want to come along to The University Project's: Past and Future event over the 14-16 October in London. (More information below). Best, Pippa Buchanan http://univproject.pbworks.com/ *Universities: Past &amp; Future 14-16 October, Hub Westminster, London Please join us for a weekend of conversations &amp; encounters, exploring the past and the future of the university. This is a free event. The idea is to bring together people involved in all kinds of projects and experiments in creating new pockets and pathways for the cultivation of knowledge, within or outside of existing institutions. Let's share our stories and experiences, find places where we can collaborate or support each other, and remember the long history of the invention and reinvention of the spaces in which we learn. The weekend will run from 7pm on Friday to 4.30pm on Sunday and you're welcome to join us for all or part of it. We'll use an informal unconference structure, so the schedule will take shape over the weekend itself. * * * *To register your attendance please fill add yourself to this wiki: http://univproject.pbworks.com/* </pre> Pippa Buchanan 2011-09-21T13:53:14 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2320 <pre>from: FATE in Review, Foundations in Art: Theory and Education 2006-2007, Volume 28 http://foundations-art.org/documents/FATE_Vol28-final.pdf Topics: "Escaping the Confines of Museums, Collapsing Boundaries Between “High” and “Low”, Rejecting Originality, Jouissance, Working Collaboratively, Appropriating, Simulating, Hybridizing, Mixing Media, Layering, Mixing Codes, Recontextualizing, Confronting the Gaze, Facing the Abject, Constructing Identities, Using Narratives, Creating Metaphors, Irony, Parody, and Dissonance" Discussion: Terry Barrett's article serves as a "cheat sheet" for introducing first year students to contemporary art theory and practice. "This article is a straightforward and accessible introduction to major ideas, attitudes, and approaches influencing postmodernist artmaking.The article introduces theory through art examples that can be found in a library and on the Internet. What follows can be used to motivate art-making and for analyzing recent art." It is a well-considered summary of several challenging and exciting ideas. But can short descriptions sum up decades of art and theory? Can they motivate people to seek out more work and source texts? Related: Art 21 (http://www.pbs.org/art21/) Wikipedia as initial research "Introducing" graphic guides (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Nietzsche-Graphic-Laurence-Gane/dp/1848310099) Best, Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Westbrook -- Jessica Westbrook Assistant Professor, Director of Technology Initiatives The Department of Contemporary Practices The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 37 S Wabash Avenue, Room 316 Chicago, IL 60603 -- Adam Trowbridge, Adjunct Associate Professor Department of Contemporary Practices School of the Art Institute of Chicago 37 S. Wabash, Chicago, IL 60603 atrowbridge&lt; at &gt;saic.edu 312.945.8769 Office _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Adam D Trowbridge 2011-09-21T01:05:21 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2318 <pre>Hi, I've been reflecting on this DIY discussion and questions about how it relates to formal learning and such. At this point, I cannot imagine a scenario or situation that will be more damaging to humanities, social sciences, and, to a lessor degree, media scholars, than the large scale breakdown of traditional universities. What system (certainly not patronage) has given philosophers and scholars better support? Sure, artists will produce art even if they are not eating. And have throughout history. However, artists, thinkers, philosophers - people who shape our view of ourselves and enable us to shape our future - are pushed to the margins of influence if they are not connected to a system that amplifies their influence and preserves their freedom to work. Question: How do those of you who are calling for large scale educational reform (I'm one, btw), but don't earn your living in the "practical sciences" like engineering, math, etc., envision the future of your discipline if the traditional system implodes? Who will pay the people whose research and ideas influence decades in the future, rather than in the next quarterly corporate report? For example, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, and I are currently running an open course on Change (http://change.mooc.ca/ - free to join if you're interested). It's global - about 1700 involved, many from emerging economies. All of us are doing this under the cover of a university or research centre. I don't speak for either of them, in fact, I'm confident they both disagree with me, but I need the system of the university to play at the edges of learning and knowledge creation. Without that "protection" I would be worrying about doing "practical" things that generate economic value today. While the economics of reform are never very attractive (we get passionate about ideas, principles, hope, not about balancing our personal budgets), they need to be considered. I don't hear the economic dimension of reform in most calls for change. Or, if I do hear it, it's on par with the UK higher education system imploding as public funds are removed and BPP-type organizations flood the system. George </pre> George Siemens 2011-09-20T14:05:29 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2316 <pre>Hi everyone, Caroline Buck asked us to lead a discussion related to our upcoming presentation at Mobility Shifts, as part of Tiffany Holmes’s "Free iPads!?: Scalable Digital Pedagogies for Undergraduate Education" panel (Fri, Oct 14 http://mobilityshifts.org/conference/program/program-friday-october-14-2011/ ) Currently we are working towards a meaningful integration of new media, and design within the first year experience in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We are engaged in the development of "foundation" level research and studio course materials and are considering the critical theory and cultural circumstances informing our thinking. Before we discuss a contemporary curriculum for art and design in the first year of college, traditionally and now perhaps questionably called “foundations,” we should plan for the day when our curriculum becomes less relevant. In designing the Vorkurs, the Bauhaus preliminary course introduced in 1919, Johannes Itten could not have imagined that he was designing a curriculum for 2011, and yet much of foundations art and design education is still based on his approach (or more dated approaches). He had already been pushed out of the Bauhaus by the time Gropius made clear that the school was concerned about the “dominant spirit of our epoch”.1 Itten’s writing makes clear that his teaching was radical and responded to the contemporary art and design worlds, in which he participated.2 Foundations programs have adopted, rather randomly, Bauhaus curriculum components since the end of the Berlin Bauhaus in 1933 while seemingly ignoring that the conditions that lead to their development had shifted, and continue to change, radically. We propose abandoning the results of Itten’s process and instead considering the process itself. He was responding to the events of the First World War and the resulting “scientific-technical” civilization.3 In contrast to his resulting pedagogical approach, we can no longer responsibly imagine an art and design approach that is ordered, singular or universal. We instead begin by constructing limited, contemporary scenarios. We are only jumping ahead twenty-four years after the Bauhaus, to the Situationist International’s “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation”. Yet we are light years closer to our contemporary issue of creating an open system of examples rather than principles and laws: “That's why the Situationists don't confront the world with: ‘Here's your ideal organization, on your knees!’ They simply show by fighting for themselves and with the clearest awareness of this fight, why people really fight each other and why they must acquire an awareness of the battle.”4 Which battles can we prepare students for? Which situations can we construct within the structure of a formal institution? How can we better refrain from indoctrinating students into our own art and design worlds and instead support them in formation of their own? 1. The use of simulation and scenario Our projects are often based on assuming a background the student does not have and inviting them to enter into an experiment seemingly already in progress. Rather than reducing students to a blank slate or helping them find some imagined, internal core, we invite them to engage with materials and concepts without preconceived outcomes. We encourage collaboration, solidarity and alliances as approaches to working outside a singular practice. We encounter students’ aesthetic senses as events already occurring. We cannot hope to counter eighteen years of commercial media. Instead we focus on media literacy and helping them to develop an ability to selectively engage and process media. Our scenarios are interlinked. Each result moves into the next project. There is no final product but there is always an invitation to practice, to take risks and fail. 2. Coming to terms with perpetually shifting “foundations” and teaching a contemporary approach to learning We cannot presume that any specific skills are a foundation for inventing art and design, much less the traditional studio skills related to painting, sculpture and life drawing. In the last few decades, art has refocused on daily life yet also expanded further into science and technology. In the collapse of civilization, space has become available for broad experimentation, but the situation is unstable. Art, design and community were intertwined before art was cut out and placed in a white cube. The return of art to social life and food, but as a “practice,” is a symptom of how far into the collapse we are. At the same time, design, art and technology intersections have moved far beyond the pairing of artists and engineers in "9 Evening: Theatre &amp; Engineering" (despite its recent resurrection as AOL’s “Seven on Seven”). Art and design students must make sense of materials, substances, systems, knowledge, process, generation, and simulation. Code is art practice is design is research is community. The unstable present must be addressed but we question whether “change” should be so readily embraced. Deleuze noted that in our contemporary societies of control “perpetual training” would tend to replace formal education.5 While this has been discussed on this list, in the form of DIY approaches, we note that approaching constantly changing contemporary art and design worlds should not lead to constant mobilization, as described by The Invisible Committee: “Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory poles of work: here we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation is exploited. Ideally, you are yourself a little business, your own boss, your own product. Whether one is working or not, it’s a question of generating contacts, abilities, networking, in short: ‘human capital.’ The planetary injunction to mobilize at the slightest pretext – cancer, ‘terrorism,’ an earthquake, the homeless – sums up the reigning powers’ determination to maintain the reign of work beyond its physical disappearance.”6 In this contemporary space of art and design, we focus on teaching students to research critically, to live critically, to notice things and to immerse themselves in heterogeneous scenarios discussed above. In our eleven years (combined) teaching, we have not yet reused the same material from a previous year. It is no longer possible to occasionally update curricula, things must be continually and radically changed. This reflects our own approach to design and art in a similar way that the Bauhaus instructors’ focus on architecture, order and spiritual exploration was reflected in the Vorkurs. We presume that our approach will also change and that it will someday become less relevant. Until then, though, we remain committed to providing students with a transient set of scenarios encouraging them to invent the future and construct their own, shared worlds. It is the most up-to-date approach to art and design we can imagine. Discussion: While we are open to discussing anything related to this post, we are specifically interested in situations and skills that you think are relevant, and perhaps unique, to 21st century art, design, new media and social engagement. We also have a longstanding interest in the place of critique in the art and design (and any other) curriculum. Finally, we are interested in discussing parallel and alternative approaches, including how existing institutions can build bridges (or dig tunnels) to organizations like The Public School. Best, Adam+Jessica Footnotes: Subject: Our use of "a transient curriculum" as the title came after we rejected multiple versions and was not inspired by Roy Ascott's essay from 1994, found in Telematic Embrace (p 317) —at least not consciously. However, we take having stumbled upon the same phrase as Ascott as a good omen. Ascott ends the chapter "We cannot turn (yet again!) to the industrialized materiality of the Bauhaus. Klee, Schlemmer, and Gropius, for all their ingenuity and charm, cannot sustain us any more. The twentieth century is passing. New practices are forming, new values have to be forged." 1. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in th e First Machine Age, pp 278 - 9 Available: http://books.google.com/books?id=ewPCi4SZC6cC&amp;dq 2. “In 1915-16 I worked on pictorial compositions of geometric abstract forms and mounted natural materials. Hölzel sent me my first students to enable me to make a living. At first, my own work was strongly reflected in my teaching, but through the students’ many questions, problems of art education came into focus for me...We worked on geometric and rhythmic forms, problems of proportion and expressive pictorial composition. Assignments with textures and subjective forms were something new. Besides the study of polar contrasts, exercises for the relaxation and concentration of the students brought amazing successes. I recognized creative automatism as one of the most important factors in art. I myself worked on geometric-abstract pictures which were based on careful pictorial constructions” Itten, Johannes. Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus. Trans. John Maass. p 8 3. Ibid, p. 11 4. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Chapter 24. Available: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/216 5. Deleuze, Gilles "Postscript on the Societies of Control". October 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3-7. Available: http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm 6. The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee Available: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/ </pre> Adam D Trowbridge 2011-09-19T17:28:38 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2308 <pre>Hi all, I'd be interested to hear comments from list members on where we find the value point for education today...i.e. why go to university instead of a diy approach? My thoughts are here: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/09/15/duplication-theory-of-educational-value/ George </pre> George Siemens 2011-09-15T17:25:47 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2307 <pre>Dear All, I have been posting intermittently over the last couple of weeks, about the research we have been doing, looking at youth-technology-change questions in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. The knowledge from the research inquiry is consolidated in a 4 volume collective titled "Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?" now available for a free download from http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook I am sure this will be of interest to many on the group. Do feel free to spread the word and share the book and links with others who you think might be interested in it. As usual, I look forward to comments, questions, suggestions and conversations that these books hope to open up. I shall bring a few copies of the book with me to the Mobility Shifts summit, and if you want a copy, do write to me off-list and I will try and carry it with me. Warmly Nishant </pre> Nishant Shah 2011-09-15T16:22:59 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.culture.media.idc