— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (via findingagency + lalilster + curate)
ckck:
The protective cover of the Voyager Golden Records, which contains instructions for how to play the records, as well as a map to our solar system in relation to 14 pulsar stars.
“Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music “actually sound better”—presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions—the organization “pleasure” feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to “get things done.” Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society—i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.
Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: “Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths…. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.” In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of “little bits,” as he calls them—memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.
[…] The point is, we want our identities—our cultural investments—recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, “share” our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication—the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.
Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing—it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.”
I used to agree more often with Horning. What happened?
This much is true: “Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing—it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products.”
But I just don’t think we’re coherent enough to make much instrumental sense to the marketers. Or maybe I’m just a slave-drone unhip to the pleasure-prisonment.
Whatevs.
— Barry Curtis, Dark Places (via dissemination)
“Of course, it is not any type: language needs special conditions in order to become myth: we shall see them in a minute. But what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form. Later, we shall have to assign to this form historical limits, conditions of use, and reintroduce society into it: we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.
It can be seen that to purport to discriminate among mythical objects according to their substance would be entirely illusory: since myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones. Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self- indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.” from Myth Today by Roland Barthes, h/t @dimalb
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The Coming Insurrection (via typicaltaylor)
theguywhoinventedfire writes: This is what I plan to open my discussion on the cosmopolitan ethos with tomorrow. before launching into a tirade against post modern and post idelogocial doctrines that have wooed the university - the peddling of superficial ideas and narratives which allow academics to sit in comfortable offices peddling a few journal articles each year - never actually practising what is preached - instead exploiting themselves through the turning of their intellectual property into another capital generating service. prostitution
“With an estimated 1,733,993,741 users and a global growth rate of 380% since 2000 , it is easy to think of the internet as a free-flowing cloud of information accessible by all. However, unlike popular belief, our connection to the internet is not mediated by an uber high-tech network of satellites (or any of the other usual suspects). In fact, satellite links account for only 1% of all internet connections. Automatically, and incorrectly, thought of as a complex metaphysical network of information, the Internet consists of a highly physical network of lines and nodes; a simple system with inherent complexities. […]
The lines and nodes of the internet, much like any other physical infrastructure, are prone to an array of politico-economic issues. Closely related to the politico-economic reading of the hierarchical structure of the world, much of this understanding of internet has to do with its very physical backbone. Areas with the least number of users get the best connections and others, like most of Africa, get nothing. We can clearly make out the users from producers. The redundancies of the submarine lines to North America and Europe have caused internet prices to plummet, which in turn has encouraged not only higher usage of internet but an active participation in the information world. Meanwhile, you can count the number of lines feeding Africa on one hand. As a result, prices are so high that even the lines that are already in place become meaningless, because of lack of use.” /via @endlesscities
From ‘Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude’ by Nicholas Thoburn (author of Deleuze, Marx & Politics) in Deleuze and the contemporary world by Buchanan & Parr
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/via katoleary + lavenderlines + notemily + amandaw + jadedhippy + guerrillamamamedicine
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The Nine Types of Text Messaging Monsters - Texting - Gawker
oh that is me. to a tee.
(via madeleinepascal
)
I am one of those people. But let me explain something to you. The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting. it was never okay. It’s less okay now. Telephone calls are rude. They are interruptive. Technology has solved this brief aberration in human behavior. We have a thing now called THE TEXT MESSAGE. It is magical, non-intrusive, optional, and, just like human speech originally was meant to be, is turn based and two way. You talk. I talk next. Then you talk. And we do it when it’s convenient for both of us.
(via rickwebb)
The Academic Video ManifestoFor hundreds of years, scholars have been limited to the written word and the occasional 2D illustration, but today, the revolution in affordable audiovisual technology is challenging the dominance of text as the primary means of communication and expression. We believe that scholars should also have the right to express themselves and their research and ideas in any (and as many) formats and media that they see fit.
In this respect we see Audiovisual Thinking as a laboratory for experimentation in new forms of academic analysis, discussion and presentation.
To encourage us to think in an original way, as well as to rethink what an academic text can be, we would ask that contributions to this journal adhere to the following rules. Submissions should:
- be (audio)visual
- disseminate new observations, knowledge, insights or theories, thereby adding to the existing body of knowledge
- acknowledge previous knowledge, insights or theories, and build upon this existing body of knowledge
- credit all sources and references, be they visual, written or oral.
- be self-critical and self-reflective
- form a coherent piece of media, that is possible to store as one computer file which can be easily shared.
“The politics of impatience; the politics associated with a minority disparaging the majority for not being advanced enough—for not being “revolutionary” enough—is a politics that is inherently undemocratic. It is undemocratic because it demands that individual satisfaction be placed above the collective needs of the movement. Above all, this is shown by the contempt “the insurrectionists” have for “‘boring’ rallies and ‘boring’ meetings, and listening to ‘boring’ speeches.” Only a politics that is fundamentally anti-democratic in outlook could find a base opposition to sitting (or standing) with other activists in a space where ideas are debated out and where the opportunity to convince others of a way forward is treasured. Only a politics that is fundamentally anti-democratic in outlook could disparage a rally—where there are always new people who may not have politically engaged at all previously, and where there are always people who have sacrificed time and effort to try and reach out to get others involved.
By virtue of the fact that it is undemocratic, this political outlook is—ironically for those who hold to it—non-revolutionary. As Raymond Williams noted, “To be truly revolutionary is to make hope possible.” True hope is forged out of a sense of real power; and real power comes through active participation. People come to participate through genuine engagement, not by being spat on for not being “revolutionary” enough (whatever that actually means). “Insurrectionist” politics is the extreme edge of liberalism—radical elitism. It is a dead end for anyone wanting to see real change—rather than those just wanting an “exciting” night out with themselves and those who already agree—because it disparages the majority as a political impediment. Those who fight for real change recognize that it can be delivered no more by an enlightened few senators than it can by an enlightened few activists. Our power comes from the fact that WE are many and THEY are few—not the other way around.” /via clingtomymouth
“Could the most reliable futurist of the digital age be…Johannes Gutenberg?
Possibly. Or, definitely, if you subscribe to the theory of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the discursive architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality — conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture.
It’s a controversial idea, but a fascinating one. And one whose back-to-the-future sensibility (particularly now, with the introduction of the iPad and other Potential Game-Changers) seems increasingly relevant: When you’re living through a revolution, it’s helpful to know what you may be turning toward.” via butterflyhunt
— Michel Foucault: ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’ (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
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Richard Rorty: ‘Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition’ (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
but what if they are & we just can’t hear them?
