Democracy, Governance, and the Digital Network » video

Derrida and WoW for Thursday

dave — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:22:04 +0000

For Thursday read “Paper or Me, You Know” by Derrida in Paper Machines and watch Prometeus (online video). (The Derrida article is only about 20 pages, please do not spend more than an hour reading it, but please give it an hour.) You should also post to your blog, in a similar fashion as you did with Foucault before this, where you try to summarize what you understand Derrida to be saying, and what you are confused about.

And just for reference here is the World of Warcraft video of which I spoke:

YouTube and Foucault

dave — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:52:54 +0000

As a demonstration of the Panopticon and related to the Smart Mobs assignment for next week, consider the following: A professor at Pitzer now teaches a class on and thru YouTube. In other words all of the assignments, class meetings, etc are posted for all to see. The class page can be found here on YouTube.

On the one hand I am drawn to this idea, make the classroom space totally public and open to all who have a high speed internet connection and want to participate. This corrects one of the significant problems of academia: The way that it has been used to close or gate off knowledge, allowing only a few access. Indeed one of my complaints about academia, America is particular, is the term “public intellectual” as if an intellectual being public is something extra. Here the professor, Alex Juhasz, forgoes this tradition and opens up the space of her classroom, calling pedagogy itself into question.

But on the other hand, this opens the whole class up to critique and discipline. Watch the video from the first class where the professor explains to the students that they are being filmed. Now this is one level of control, but the second more insidious level is that in posting to the net, students subject themselves to critique from a range of sources, including rather harsh critique by YouTube commenters.

You can also read some of my longer comments on this over at the EMAC blog.

The Spectrum

dave — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:25:57 +0000

One of the things that Rheingold discusses is the issue of “spectrum” specifically “spectrum regulation.” This is a fairly complicated political/historical issue. You might want to check out the following video, which is a slide capture of Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig. Lessig is well known for his participation in this debate, and we will read stuff by him later. Not only does he know the material but he has a rhetorical gift for presenting this information (all those who use powerpoint should be forced to watch this as it demonstrates how to effectively use slides). Who knew that the U.S. has a 1.5 billion dollar industry in hotdogs? and that this relates to wifi technology? (And anyway it demonstrates for Ben that I am not anti-freedom.)