my digital artefact
TRANSCRIPT
What have I learnt from E-Learning and
Digital Cultures?
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How to be creative…
Understand the differences between
utopia and dystopia
Discover other social media to
express yourself
Being philosophical again!
Learning new ways to create artistic photos
Joining in the discussions on Twitter feeds
Finding out what is still out there
Learning to overcome other tech boundaries
Utopian claims Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on electronic computation possess intrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies possess intrinsically de-democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to democratizing global forcesof information creation, transfer and dissemination.
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.
Cyber-politics is essentially one of resisting and perverting the anti-democratic effects of the technology in question.
A Day made of Glass 2
Ideas and interpretations
CoreJohnston, R (2009) Salvation or destruction: metaphors of the internet. First Monday, 14(4).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2370/2158
Johnston draws from the key work of Lakoff and Johnson to highlight the important work thatmetaphors do in shaping our thinking. She identifies two broad categories of metaphors drawnfrom the titles of editorials about the internet in late 2008 - those that take a utopian perspective(salvation - transformative and revolutionary) and those that are dystopian (destruction -attacking and supplanting). Last week we explored how to identify and consider deterministpositions about digital cultures and e-learning. Noticing the sorts of metaphors that are used todraw comparisons between the unfamiliar and the familiar, or the abstract and the concrete, can beanother very useful way of understanding the assumptions that people are making about e-learning (the ‘native’ and the ‘immigrant’, for example). In the next ‘perspectives’ section, we willlook at some MOOC-related articles, and this will be a great opportunity to do a bit of metaphoranalysis of your own. What examples of both ‘salvation’ and ‘destruction’metaphors can you find inthese, or other MOOC reports and editorials? How does Shirky’s metaphor of the MP3, forexample, create a certain kind of story around the MOOC?
Transhumanism is very different from the more critical modes of posthumanism that were touched on
last week, in the Badmington article in particular. Where critical posthumanists see posthumanism
primarily as a philosophical stance which, among other things, draws attention to the inequalities
and injustices often wrought in the name of ‘the human’, transhumanists in general see ‘human
values’ as a good, though incomplete, project. For transhumanists, ‘humanity’ is a temporary, flawed
condition: the future of human evolution is in the direction of a post-human future state in which
technological progress has freed us from the inconveniences of limited lifespan, sickness, misery and
intellectual limitation. Transhumanism, in summary, is to a large extent based on the extension of the
humanistic principles of rationality, scientific progress and individual freedom that critical
posthumanists would question.
This article by Nick Bostrom (Oxford University) - whose work is at the more academically
respectable end of what can be a fairly uneven field - does a good job of summarising the
transhumanist position, though it’s important when reading this to understand that he does not use
the term ‘posthuman’ in the sense that, for example, Badmington does. What is your own response to
the ‘values’ he proposes? Do you find them attractive or repellent? On what basis? Bostrom mentions
education a few times here: what might his vision of transhumanism mean for the future of education?
What would a transhumanist theory of education look like?
