Category: participatory media

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A political economy of Twitter data – revised and published on LSE Impact blog

Last year I wrote a blog post for the Contagion project website, building from the experience of attempting to do research with Twitter data as relative novices. Putting the pragmatic techniques of doing such to one side, it became striking that doing this kind of research with Twitter’s apparatus is neither easy, nor, when one delves a bit deeper, is it ‘free’.

The post was been picked up by the LSE Impact blog, who asked to re-blog it, which was very nice of them. So, you can find a slightly updated (numbers, sources and bit more nuance in the argument) version of the blog post there.

The question I end up posing is: “Should researchers be using data sources (however potentially interesting/valuable) that restrict the capability of reproducing our research results?” This is not easily answered, not least when so many ‘non-academic’ researchers are merrily plugging away producing social scientific research, increasingly consumed by the general public, which is gaining influence, and which, perhaps, could benefit from some critical engagement…

Please do read the post and get in touch if you’d like to discuss this, and any of our research, further.

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Your email address is worth 100 tea lights…

Ikea Family mailshot: 100 tea lights for your email address

How much is personal data worth? How might that be calculated? These are hard questions. Nevertheless, personal data does attract particular kinds of value, often determined by those harvesting and selling it on, such as Facebook, Google and so on.

These are rarely visible calculations, probably necessarily so – data is sometimes only worth something when it is part of a larger set. We are both an individual and part of one or more populations (which can be variously defined and derived in data). When you make up a ‘segment’ of a given population, your data, and what can thereby be inferred, has a particular value.

For example, the email marketing company Topspin apparently calculate the pecuniary value of a person’s email address to a band harvesting it based upon the amount of money that person (fan) will, on average, go on to spend on their music.

In a recent piece for the New York Times website, Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group, offers an example:

“Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. You can slice and dice markets, like women 25 to 35 who live in the Southeast and are fans of ‘Breaking Bad,’ … The new Atlas platform, she said, “can track people across devices, weave together online and offline.”

The data collected by various market research companies carries a notional value that is sometimes rendered visible in stark ways. Another example illustrates this: In a 2011 article for Huffington Post the price list for marketing data company Rapleaf shows for how much particular pieces of data were sold.  Age and gender are given away free, whereas ‘Likely smart phone user’ is $0.03.

We are thus worth something insofar as we are represented (accurately or otherwise) as a collection of data in one or more databases. We individually value our own data variously, depending on its use, context and so on. An email address, then, may be valuable if it is private, or not valuable if it is used for any old competition entry – this is often contextual and that can, of course, be missed by the marketing data companies (perhaps this is a good thing).

Nevertheless, we, or, more accurately, the data that are used to variously represent us, are commodified – our data-selves are products. Any sense of a unified ‘self’ is possibly too neat, our physically bodied selves rendered endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations, what Deleuze referred to as ‘dividuals’ in his excellent ‘Postscript on Societies of Control‘. There is a real sense in which, thought in this way, we are variously rendered separate from and without control of our representations in data.

The Ikea flyer, pictured above, soliciting an email address for a notional inducement of 100 tea lights made me think through the above and back to the excellent Paying Attention conference of 2010, concerning the idea of attention economies. At the conference, and in other contexts, the redoubtable Tim Kindberg formulated his ‘Facebook data provocations‘ – encouraging others to speculate about what would happen if we (the users) charged Facebook for our data. Thinking back over the academic moment of worry over privacy it seems necessary to continue to think about these things. While the horse has bolted and the stable door has long since been the portal to an upmarket barn conversion, I argue that these  questions remain pertinent.

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Tweets about Ernesto Laclau

[Amended: 15/04/2014 22:24 to reflect better stats on the links being shared]

As a number of other bloggers have highlighted, and as I noted on Twitter, the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau sadly passed away on the 13th of April. There is an excellent obituary on the publisher Verso’s blog, which is worth reading.

Like, I think, a lot of others I discovered this news on Twitter and, as is the modus operandi of the tweeter, I re-tweeted the tweets through which I discovered the news. I certainly do not intend to trivialise this news, but what is quite interesting about the spread of this sad news is that while the English spread of the news on twitter was largely driven by retweets, a lot of which linked to a story in the English language Buenos Aires Herald, the Spanish spike in tweets was not wholly driven by retweets.

There was, therefore, a muted version of a @BBCBreaking sort of effect in English tweets, in the way that there was for example with the news about the death of Peaches Geldof (again, I’m not seeking to trivialise that news or intervene in the discussions about whether or not there was genuine grief being expressed). So, for a ‘concerned public’ (in this case those who are at least partly familiar with Laclau, his work and the topics it addresses) social media became a conduit and key actor in the movement of the information in different ways.

I ran a quick search on ScraperWiki, from yesterday, that encompasses the relevant dates and used some of the tools we have been developing for the Contagion project to look at the time series of tweets and in particular the movement of the news between Spanish and English. We can see how the initial spike of tweets in Spanish leads the spike in English by approximately an hour (please bare in mind that the Spanish tweets are more numerous by an approximate multiple of ten).

Now, the spike in tweets in English can be mostly, but not quite wholly, attributed to retweets of the link to an English language article posted on the Buenos Aires Herald. Yet, there remains a majority of the tweets in the Spanish spike that are a case of other forms of ‘passing it on‘. Tweets featuring a direct link (some as shortened URLs) to the Buenos Aires Herald article account for over a half (at various moments in the spike) of all English tweets between 8pm and midnight on 13th April, and a few more of these tweets link to Stuart Elden’s blog post that links on to the Buenos Aires Herald.

So, its interesting to see how the combination of an emergent ‘public’ convened around that news and the somewhat phatic interaction of re-tweeting once the movement of easily shared links begins (this is related to what Martin Thayne discussed in a paper about Facebook in the issue of Culture Machine I co-edited with Patrick Crogan). This speaks to what Steve Hinchliffe and I have been trying to get at with the definition of ‘contagion’, inspired by Tony Sampson’s Thrift-ian reading of Tarde, as the ‘movement of movement’ – the sense in which the various intersecting constituents of a public / a network, propagate and in some senses ‘accelerate’ the iteration and mutation, hence difference, in repetition.

Obviously, there’s more to what we do, and, indeed, more to do, in this kind of critical theory-inflected analysis of virality in social media and that’s what I’m busy working out with both Steve and our diligent research fellow Rebecca Sandover, who has recently presented some initial ideas from the project at the AAG (the abstract linked here isn’t quite what was presented but it gives you a flavour!).

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Fred Turner talks about his “Democratic Surround”

Fred Turner (STS Assoc. Prof. at Stanford), author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has written another book examining the development of theories of what Turner calls ‘the democratic personality’ by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others into an alternative form of propaganda to encourage opposition to fascism, described as the Democractic Surround, which serves as the title of the book. Turner describes some of the important themes of the book in conversation with Howard Rheingold (who is, incidentally, one of the people that appears in From Counterculture to Cyberculture). Charting movements between American anthropology (through Mead et al.), European avant grade arts (the Bauhaus refugees) and their subsequent absorption into the American cultural milieu in the form of the Black Mountain College (and so John Cage), Turner skilfully weaves an interesting narrative.

For those interested, there is a review essay by Fred Turner of Peter Mandler’s Return From the Natives, on Public Books, which examines the influence of Boas’ ‘school’ of anthropology on war-time (WWII) propaganda.

You can also see Stanford’s form of ‘propaganda’ in the shape of the promotional video they created for Turner’s book…

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Stiegler – We are coming to the end of the Fordist model, we must move to a mode of contribution

In January (2014), a website concerned with proposing and advancing novel and alternative businesses and economic models called Without Model published an interview with Bernard Stiegler concerning his conceptualisation of the economy of contribution. Without Model describes itself as a community of ‘forwarders’, a kind of community of Tardean imitative amplifiers – which is interesting…

In the interview Stiegler reiterates some aspects of his argument for an economy of contribution made elsewhere but also reaffirms the links with an understanding of a libidinal economy. He also,  fairly explicitly highlights the constitution of an economy of contribution is no easy task – it requires some fairly hefty (macro-economic) structural challenges. In other words, Stiegler is not simply outlining an alternative business model for trendy ‘right-on’ companies or co-ops but arguing for something like a structural change to the economy, built from the ground-up. Elsewhere he has argued that this requires a rethinking of education, is contingent upon particular modes of infrastructure such as open data and requires a more holistic understanding of value. Quite an ambition then – but, as outlined in his Disbelief and Discredit series of books, Stiegler sees an immediate and urgent impetus to incite such change.

This is, of course, not without risk – in Stiegler’s terms these new capacities for becoming (or in his terminology – transindividuation) are pharmacological, the particular ways in which they play out in the world can be both a ‘poison’ and a ‘cure’ (following Plato’s argument that writing is a pharmakon). Elsewhere, Stiegler argues that such an economy of ‘pharmaka’ is a therapeutic – it is possible to resolve the poison/cure relation either way – that is not dialectical (i.e. an opposition) but rather a composition of tendencies that emerge in the relations of a milieu.

I suppose the one criticism that might be immediately levelled at this version of Stiegler’s argument is that it sort of implicitly assumes that we must create alternative institutions to invoke such change, which of course needs to be ordered and civil, and so the very basis of change is potentially compromised by the inherent contradiction of needing to create another bureaucracy to get rid of the current, corrupt one.

As usual, I have added queries, clarifications etc. in square brackets and with a couple of footnotes. Also, all of the links within the text have been added by be for clarification of particular terms or concepts. I welcome comments and suggestions.

We are at the end of the Fordist model, we must move to mode of contribution

Bernard Stiegler is a philosopher and theoritician of the evolution of technical systems. He discovered free/open [source] models almost by accident while serving as the Director of the INA.

As the founder and president for the philosophical organisation Ars Industrialis, created in 2005, since April 2006 he has also directed the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou centre.

[interview begins]

Q. Open, contributory and collaborative models are becoming more numerous and these forms of contribution extend into new territories – how do you interpret this evolution?

B.S. Before responding, it is a necessary precondition [of this conversation] to recognise that all of these models are not equivalent. Facebook is contributory, but in certain ways, it is a worse model [of operation] than its not contributory equivalents, I almost prefer the model of TF1. These mechanisms of the capture and distortion of data lead to a strong depersonalisation, a phenomenon that is exacerbated by ‘big data’. This is both exciting, because the data open up new possibilities, and dangerous.

It is for this reason that I discuss the pharmakon. In all technologies or systems, there are two simultaneous and opposing tendencies – one is good, positive and emancipatory, and the other is negative and predatory. We need to analyse the toxicity of these phenomena, for as they become better they also become more toxic. A pharmakon today necessitates a therapeutic: It must be a an organ of care [organe de soin 1] which like any medicine, if it fails, can kill the patient. It is thus necessary to conduct these analyses honestly and sincerely, in the same ways an accountant does with company accounts. The problem is that we do not have the perspective of hindsight, the training or the capacities [savoir-faire] for doing so calmly with contributory models.

Today, we need a typology of contributory models.

I work a lot with communities of hackers: until the ‘Snowdon crisis’ they did not see the pharmacological character of the net. In the last year things have changed, there is a kind of ‘net blues‘.

Q. How can one define the economy of contribution, for example how can one differentiate the market?

B.S. The economy of contribution is based on a re-capacitation: it augments the capacities of people more than it diminishes them. The term ‘recapacitation’ draws on Amartya Sen’s understanding of capabilities – a capability is a form of knowledge, life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire] or formal knowledge [savoir formel] – shared with other and which constitutes a knowledge community. Sen has shown that consumerism diminishes capabilities.

An economy of contribution is based in the development of the knowledge of individuals, and the sharing of these knowledges is facilitated by a shared ownership which does not prevent its circulation.

I am not against the notion of ownership [propriété], but it does not have to be proprietorial, at the expense of the collective value of knowledge. Rather than capacitation, the consumerist society is based on proletarianisation, even design is proletarianised.

The economy of contribution is an economy based on parity [parité] – peer-to-peer. In this economy, we often speak of emergent initiatives or the bottom-up, but the bottom-up does not exist alone, there is always an aspect of the top-down – which is to say that there is always an organisation that unites and valorises the bottom-up dynamics. Even when we believe that there is only the bottom-up, there is a hidden top-down that regulates emergence. The real peer is one who can explain the top-down to the bottom-up.

Q. Why is it more important today than it was 20 years ago or will be in 20 years time?

B.S. We are entering a new stage of automisation, of a different nature to that which has taken place thusfar. It is the continuation of what began 200 years ago, but automisation has shifted register. In many sectors, manual labour is no longer necessary, or will be superfluous very soon. Amazon has recently announced it is working towards this, the elimination of all of its jobs and their replacement by machines.

Currently, the elements are in place for automisation to move into a new stage, only the cost of robots limit its progress. One could suppose that when actors such as Amazon announce that they are tackling such a problem that the industrial ecosystem would produce economies of scale that make robots less costly than humans. When that happens, the Fordist model is dead. For without jobs, or purchasing power there will be nobody to buy what the robots produce. It will be a major, violent and systemic crisis. If we do not change regulations now we will have great difficulty coping.

Q. It can be noted that these models are being developed and that there are many initiatives but one often has the impression that they are struggling to sustain or develop themselves – what might be the reasons?

B.S. It is true that the precariousness of contributory models and the high failure rate of these initiatives raise questions.

There is an explanation, it lies in the ecosystem, the macro economy. At the level of the micro (individuals and organisations) these initiatives emerge and spread. We can see that without a macro politics they cannot prosper. When I speak of the macro economy I refer to the labour laws, taxation, social security, and territorial infrastructures. All of these elements do not favour an economy of contribution. Unless they [the macro economic elements] can be changed there is no chance of it [an economy of contribution] developing. Or, perhaps, it is a certain kind of contributory model that can succeed, such as Facebook.

This is the economic project and contemporary politics that we must change. The debates about the minimum subsistance income are interesting in this regard. I prefer to speak of a contributory wage. For me, the contributory wage should be based on the minimum subsistance income but it should not stop there. The contributory wage should be designed to promote the involvement of individuals in contributory projects. It should encourage contributions in order to create social enterprises, they can be monetised businesses but they do not have to be.

Q. Beyond the [structural] systems and the macro-economy, what sort of levers are available to develop contributory logics?

B.S. It is necessary to develop a contributory culture and and education, such that individuals engage in one way or another with contributory projects, making it more and more likely for them to do so. In developing such a culture we would develop the capacity of individuals to detect the toxic aspects of the pharmakon that is the economy of contribution.

On another plane, designers have a major role to play. They are called to become the visionaries and forerunners of contributory systems. A fablab cannot function only with the building and the machines, it functions because there is a social architecture of contribution, this is the work of the designer.

Research will also enable progress, if it becomes more contributory. The pace is so fast, the level of complexity is so pronounced that it is necessary to cooperate in order to understand and analyse [anything]. To open research to those beyond its immediate originators today would allow us all to keep abreast of the latest advances.

Q. You often talk about the libidinal economy when you talk about the economy of contribution, how does Freud come into models for contribution?

B.S. I have a Freudian vision of the economy. The libido is a social link, it is the capacity to channel the [base] drives [pulsions] into what Freud describes as a social investment of desire. Drives function positively when we are able to defer their satisfaction. To defer reaction is to make an action. The libidinal economy is the idealisation (in Freud’s sense) and the sublimation of drives. We can say that free and open source software [logiciel libre] is nurtured by this [kind of] sublimation, in other words by this striving beyond ourselves [ce dépassement 2].

Notes

You can find the interview in the original French on the Without Model website here.

1. I have translated organe de soin rather literally because it speaks to Stiegler’s conceptualisation of organs in the mode of technics and the ‘organon’ (in Greek – tool, instrument, prosthesis, organ) – a supplement to the body, through which it (the organ) and the individual are co-constituted. In his philosophical project, Stiegler has proposed a ‘general organology’ that articulates bodily organs (the viscera), artificial organs (instruments, tools and so on), and social organs (groupings ~ organisations).

2. There isn’t really a direct translation of what is written in the final sentence – dépassement means ‘overtaking’, which I have taken as a metaphor for a moving forward beyond ourselves and our present by channeling desires through positive processes of sublimation.

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Reblog > Hybrid assemblages, environments and happenings – Eric Paulos

Eric Paulos reflects on a wealth of experience of interdisciplinary and participatory research, particularly in relation to the maker movement. Eric offers some great reflections on Mark Weiser’s interdisciplinarity and the importance of creative practice.

Hybrid Assemblages, Environments & Happenings -Eric Paulos

Abstract: This talk will present and critique a body of work evolving across several years of research at the intersection of computer science and design research. It will present an augment for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. It will explore and demonstrate the value of urban computing, citizen science, and maker culture as opportunistic landscapes for intervention, micro-volunteerism, and a new expert amateur. Finally, it will present and question emerging materials and strategies from the perspective of engineering, design, and new media.

https://twitter.com/epaulos

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The Digital Future of the University – Stiegler

Towards the end of last year, Mediapart (a cross between an association for co-learning and an online publisher concerned with digital media) published a blogpost by Bernard Stiegler concerning the role of digital technologies in the ongoing transformation of the university. This line of argument will be familiar to those that follow Stiegler’s work (especially if you read French) and if you have read some of the short pieces by Stiegler that I have previously translated concerning MOOCs and participatory education. What is heartening, especially if you are already in the open education conversation, and are a wee bit cynical about the hyperbole surrounding MOOCs, is that Stiegler argues for a debate around how to foster and open out education, not how to monetize it. As ever, the fundamental (pharmacological) relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology’ is at the heart of the issue for Stiegler. As he argues in the final paragraph:

The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context.

Again, an argument that thoughtful practitioners of ‘open education’, like Martin Weller, will be very familiar with.

The sharp-eyed reader will pick up something else from this article too. The Institute for Research Innovation (part of the Pomipdou Centre in Paris), directed by Stiegler, are now using their online tools for collaboration ‘in the wild’. So, the vidéolivre that Stiegler points us to, towards the end, is more sophisticated than the embedded YouTube video and is a kind of online mini-course (unfortunately, only in French) hosted on the Digital Studies website (on which you can read the ‘call for Digital Studies‘ in English). Another interesting tool mentioned is Polemic Tweets: a kind of add-on to twitter through the use of basic syntax (much like RT, MT, etc.) in order to amplify, disagree with or question things (see the explanation in English here). For example, you can see the use of these tags in combination with the documentation of a recent conference Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel [#ENMI13] (something like: ‘Investigations into the New Industrial World‘), where there is a recording of the video stream with annotations that temporally synchronise tweets (with the hashtag and ‘polemic’ syntax) in a timeline below – worth a look, here.

This starts to get at some of the pedagogical tools Stiegler and IRI are offering as a means of beginning to think about what it might mean to ‘rethink knowledge and its relationship with its media/supports’ within the domain of (open) education. It is in this context that one might read the article that follows…

As usual, original French and clarifications are in square brackets. I am indebted to Patrick Crogan (former colleague, translator of some of Stiegler’s work, and a speaker at the conference mentioned above) for his proof-reading.

The digital future of the university

07 November 2013, Mediapart

The digital constitutes a new épistémè: it is the very nature of knowledge in all its forms that will be affected. This technology will function for our epoque in the same way that writing did for antiquity (and it is in this way that we can say that it put antiquity into decline). This was suggested thirty years ago in The Computerisation of Society:

“From the moment that Sumerians wrote the first hieroglyphs on wax tablets, they embodied, probably without realising, a decisive mutation of humanity: the appearance of writing. Yet, it was this that changed the world.”

It is inconceivable that universities and large research organisations do not have at their core of their concerns and the top of their priorities the digital transformation of knowledge: the deployment in all disciplines, as in all dimensions of human existence, of what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing clearly constitutes the major challenge for 21st century knowledge.

As for online university courses, they have become at Harvard small private online courses, which has led Robert Lue to suggest that “we are already in the post-MOOC era“. This statement testifies to the fact that the transformations at the sidelines of education are the visible effects of the mnemotechnical milieu of knowledge, which is in the process of changing its nature, is upsetting [bouleverse] knowledge itself, from research all the way through to the most elementary aspects of education.

Whether we consider these issues from massive open online courses, small private online courses [both in English in original], or the many other already existing or possible models of digital education they all constitute a major issue. But this issue logically comes after research and digital studies–which the Minister, and the National Research Agency under his purview, have furthermore adopted in their agenda under the name of ‘digital studies’ without which this could have remained unnoticed.

It is only possible to implement new forms of education related to the development of digital technologies and to experience them collectively on the condition that they are designed and practiced in a close and explicit relation with a policy for researching the deeper layers of epistemic becoming and the new disciplinary epistemologies required by digitisation. Without such a structured and openly acknowledged connection, the initiatives taken in all areas alongside [established] education can only emerge as superficial fashions and effects, subject as ever to all of the ebbs and flows of media excitement in the contemporary world: they always seem to belong to an age that has already been superceded by the lastest novelty in an area where there is no lack of imagination–sometimes at the risk of lacking reflection, if not knowledge.

The university appeared a little over one thousand years ago, conditioned then by the copying of canonical texts, which led to the interpretation that is engendered in the process of copying, which experienced a second era with the republic of letters created by the printing press, which originated in the university of Berlin, and which lasted until the 20th century.

In 1993 the university entered a new age, with the arrival of the web making reticular writing accessible to all. It is this important, if not massive and amazing, fact that necessitates the development of digital studies. Whatever its form, knowledge is a form of memory shared by a community, according to the rules practised, and sometimes explicated and theorised, by that community: which is thus, in general, a community of peers. These scientific and critical knowledges appeared with alphabetic writing, which, in all its forms, creates a mnemotechnical and techno-logical milieu that conditions [conditionne] the development and transmission of knowledge based in peer review.

Neither for knowledge in general or scholarly institutions in particular, are the written alphabet, the printed word, data, algorithms and digital networks simple mediums of education or research: these are the domains [milieux] of knowledge in which is founded the open and constant criticism of the rules of interpretation in which the knowledge formed by these communities of peers consists.

The digital deeply transforms such forms of knowledge principally because it constitutes a new means of recording [surface d’inscription] and publicly formalising the debate between peers by which all rational disciplines are constituted, through conflicting interpretation and scientific controversy. The characteristics of the digital (automation, speed of calculation, vast planetary access, cooperative networks, new processes of formalisation, new models, visualisations, interactions and simulations etc.) constitute new possibilities for knowledge, for significantly widening accessibility to more diverse audiences, which will redefine the conditions for equal access to knowledge [qui redéfinissent les conditions de la parité], which also involves the requirements for certification as a form of legitimation.

Peer-to-peer, which is increasingly discussed since the advent of software and websites described as P2P, appeared over 27 centuries ago with the first land surveyors [géomètres]. This is why amongst the announcements made by the minister for higher education and research, the most significant was the support for research into the impacts and opportunities of the digital in the development of knowledge as a form of emancipation [comme de telles parités est la plus significative]. The digital mnemotechnical milieu makes possible and requires new heuristics, new hermeneutics, and new epistemologies which must foster teaching and pedagogies in which the purpose is precisely the enrolment of the maximum number of students into these communities of peers.

From the infinitely big (astrophysics) to the infintetly small (nanoscience), physics is reconfigured by digital instrumentation through mathematics and statistics notably in the guise of “big data“. Linguistics is under the effect of what Frédéric Kaplan has called linguistic capitalism. Geography is in the era of geographical information systems and GPS, through which territory becomes functionally and normatively digital. Genetic biology that made possible computerised biostations, etc. No form of knowledge escapes the new demands [nouvelle facture] of the contemporary mnemotechnical milieu configured by the categorisation machines that are networked computers.

This digital categorisation totally redefines the conditions of production of the rules of categorisation, which form the foundation for what is ultimately knowledge produced through peer review: this is a fundamental point that it is not possible for me to develop here, and it is for this reason that the reader can consult a short interactive video [vidéolivre] which has been prepared to complete this article, and which focuses more extensively on these concerns in order to illustrate how the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), which I run, designs and practices investigations of these issues.

This interactive video–designed to become a social book [in English in original], by which I mean a support for a network of readers constituted as a community of plural interpretations-is one example amongst many (such as polemic tweets, also developed IRI and implemented by Mediapart in the recently organised debate about the rise of the National Front), which are all new forms of editorial media that have emerged since the arrival of the web.

These digital media will become new apparatuses [dispositifs] of public debate which always come from university learning, and with which it is essential to enrol and involve the students as much as possible. For over a thousand years, universities and research activities as well as the teaching thereby developed were made possible originally by manuscripts and then by printed books. Which is why a thesis, regardless of the discipline in which it is submitted, is always presented as a book. This situation will fundamentally change in the course of the coming years. This does not signal the disappearance of the book: it means that, like the knowledge they carry, they will transform.

New conditions of publication, disputation [confrontation], certification and editorialisation of knowledge are coming into place. They correspond to new regulations and new methods for heuristics, interpretation, teaching and pedagogy, which are arising, forming and capturing the 21st century épistémè. This is taking place through a dynamic process that the public authorities should strongly encourage, pushing academic institutions, industry and the markets to cooperate in the production of a long-term vision–which must be a vision of the role of France in Europe in the 21st century.

The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context. This is a good question for which it is not only healthy but essential that a public debate is held–providing that the grounds for that debate are not the claim that everything should be left to the market nor the denial of the very need for such a debate.

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Reading Bernard Stiegler

I am slowly but surely working my way through Bernard Stiegler’s writings, and really enjoying doing so. These notes are just a way of distilling some the themes I’ve encountered and I haven’t posted anything for a while on this blog.  My understanding of Stiegler’s work, such as it is(!), is in large part thanks to my colleague Patrick Crogan, with whom I have been convening a Stiegler reading group at UWE.  We have a blog at: technophilia.wordpress.com – which is worth checking out! Continue reading “Reading Bernard Stiegler”

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7 templates for self-promotional tweets

In the year-long period I have been using Twitter I feel that there a few trends to how to not-too-subtley promote oneself as a person whose opinion on life, the universe and everything the world ought to follow.  The seven sentences listed below are a sort of deconstructed set of templates that illustrate how to employ this form of self promotion. Simply fill in the [square bracketed] sections with an example of what is described between the brackets. Enjoy! –

  1. The thing that bugs me about [contemporary cultural phenomenon] is [vacuous self-interested navel gazing]
  2. Why hasn’t anyone created [app on one platform] for [other platform preferred by opinionated twatterer]?
  3. Looking for [anally specific thing]. Wasn’t there [something similar] done by [vague allusion to something else]?
  4. You know that thing where [I demonstrate I want to be pithy but just show I’m a bore]
  5. When I was [somewhere I think demonstrates that I’m cultured and/or wealthy] I met [first name of a person I don’t really know but I think this shows I’m connected] who [does this thing that everyone must believe is terrribly worthy in my post-colonial Western view] – please support them! [link]
  6. [Random inane quote] – [person you’ve never heard of] #[hashtag of conference that shows quite how important and well travelled I think I am]
  7. [Random phenomenon in the world] in [place that shows I travel] is [annoying or delightful]

NB: This is a bit of fun… please don’t take it seriously!!

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[Repost] Transliteracy: techniques for navigating and understanding user-generated content

The growth and diversity of media and those using them to disseminate their point of view has, in that process, required the development of new literacies for information consumption, gathering and production. Some of the resulting practices have been instrumentally driven, i.e. they have been led by particular tools (such as RSS and Bloglines/Google Reader). However, and perhaps more interestingly, with the growth in the production and availability of ‘content’ the spectre of ‘information overload’, or as Richard Saul Wurman calls it ‘information anxiety‘, new strategies for engaging meaningfully with the glut have been developed. At a level slighlty abstract from such strategies we might identify new forms of literacy. The transliteracy research group have usefully described this as:

‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.’

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