Hey Guys,
So this is what we came up with at our group meeting today:
Tomorrow our digital detox starts and we will not be communicating digitally until Friday.
The digital free time will be from tuesday the 1st of April from the time we wake up, until Friday the 4th of April 6 pm. Within this time we will attempt to abstain from the digital devices we have decided upon in our personal manifestos. In order to document the process we will each keep a handwritten daily journal in which we reflect upon our experiences and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the digital age. We will also utilize this time to research our specific issue area in relation to digital devices further we will attempt to each gather ideas and concepts for our final event which will be held on the 15th of April. We will have our next group meeting on Monday the 7th of April at 2 pm to put together the journal and discuss the event.
Good luck with the abstanation, see you guys next monday!
Becci
P.S. If you cannot make it for any reason, please let me know via text over the weekend!
Monday, 31 March 2014
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Moving forward
Team. Great meeting today. Amazing energy and collaboration.
We've evolved from our original idea of then negative impacts of 'Digital Detoxing'.
Our Digital Detox is scheduled for TUES-FRIDAY next week.
Our event is scheduled for 15th April 2014 (subject to date-change if problematic))
We will give a presentation to our class tomorrow (FRIDAY)
We've had a stance change. Rather than looking at the entire negatives of DIGITAL DETOX, we're making our intervention more expansive. We want to take the POWER BACK FROM SOCIAL MEDIA. We want to look at the power of the digitalized future. What is a Digital Detox in a Digitalized Future.
We assigned different areas of research for each person. By opening up different debates we want to look at the reactions to Technology from a Social, Political, Economical (and so on) perspective.
Megan will be exploring 'Employment'
Livvy will be exploring 'Relationships'
Tracei will be exploring 'Post-Human'
Anthony will be exploring 'Privacy'
Becks will be exploring 'Violence'
Elecctra will be exploring 'De-centralization'
Hannah - TBC
PLEASE ADD WHATEVER NECESSARY TO THIS POST! too much love x
We've evolved from our original idea of then negative impacts of 'Digital Detoxing'.
Our Digital Detox is scheduled for TUES-FRIDAY next week.
Our event is scheduled for 15th April 2014 (subject to date-change if problematic))
We will give a presentation to our class tomorrow (FRIDAY)
We've had a stance change. Rather than looking at the entire negatives of DIGITAL DETOX, we're making our intervention more expansive. We want to take the POWER BACK FROM SOCIAL MEDIA. We want to look at the power of the digitalized future. What is a Digital Detox in a Digitalized Future.
We assigned different areas of research for each person. By opening up different debates we want to look at the reactions to Technology from a Social, Political, Economical (and so on) perspective.
Megan will be exploring 'Employment'
Livvy will be exploring 'Relationships'
Tracei will be exploring 'Post-Human'
Anthony will be exploring 'Privacy'
Becks will be exploring 'Violence'
Elecctra will be exploring 'De-centralization'
Hannah - TBC
PLEASE ADD WHATEVER NECESSARY TO THIS POST! too much love x
Tuesday, 25 March 2014
ELETTRA'S (LATE) MANIFESTO
I am a digital native, I was born in the technology era. I managed my first computer when I was around ten years old, and my first phone not much later than that. As such, I belong to that generation of digital literates who are accustomed to being constantly engaged with devices, communication and technology. This phenomena is exponentially growing to the extent that society has to deal with issues that were unthinkable a decade ago. The creation of subjectivity through social media is for example one of the problems that this modern hyper-device driven society has to face.
In my experience today with devices and connectivity I find that the most scary of all backdrops of the WWW is that as one of the platforms with the highest potential of containing spaces for democratic and equal grounds, we face an increasingly top down, enterprise-profit driven, marketised space where people are once again left powerless. I believe that this project can be useful to center and highlight these issues. Alongside creating the opportunity for a digital detox, we need to look for what the digitalized future will look like. One where people are automatons, where their subjectivity is jeopardised by the social media or one where they have the possibility of regaining a center role in the process of decision making?
In accordance with the group manifesto I will aim to reduce to zero the use of devices and connectivity during the pre-established week. However, since I have a long distance relationship, I will leave a space of maybe one to two hours every day where I can either skype or use the phone to call. That is unless the week that we decide will be when I am in Rome, in that case I will not need to do so.
I am looking forward to seeing the results of our DETOX WEEK in order to being able to work towards the final event which I would also see as a space to talk about the issues I mentioned in this manifesto.
GOOD LUCK TO US :)!
In my experience today with devices and connectivity I find that the most scary of all backdrops of the WWW is that as one of the platforms with the highest potential of containing spaces for democratic and equal grounds, we face an increasingly top down, enterprise-profit driven, marketised space where people are once again left powerless. I believe that this project can be useful to center and highlight these issues. Alongside creating the opportunity for a digital detox, we need to look for what the digitalized future will look like. One where people are automatons, where their subjectivity is jeopardised by the social media or one where they have the possibility of regaining a center role in the process of decision making?
In accordance with the group manifesto I will aim to reduce to zero the use of devices and connectivity during the pre-established week. However, since I have a long distance relationship, I will leave a space of maybe one to two hours every day where I can either skype or use the phone to call. That is unless the week that we decide will be when I am in Rome, in that case I will not need to do so.
I am looking forward to seeing the results of our DETOX WEEK in order to being able to work towards the final event which I would also see as a space to talk about the issues I mentioned in this manifesto.
GOOD LUCK TO US :)!
A view on social media
Hey guys,
I found this video through a friend which attempts to explain society's dependency on social media and the change in inter human relationships that get caused by it. I am not entirely sure whether I agree a 100% with the analysis made in the video, because I still think that chanels of communication through social media are not necessarily as negative as portrayed here, but it definitly gives a good insight in one of the various viewpoints we can apply when looking at new systems of communication! Enjoy!
I found this video through a friend which attempts to explain society's dependency on social media and the change in inter human relationships that get caused by it. I am not entirely sure whether I agree a 100% with the analysis made in the video, because I still think that chanels of communication through social media are not necessarily as negative as portrayed here, but it definitly gives a good insight in one of the various viewpoints we can apply when looking at new systems of communication! Enjoy!
Monday, 24 March 2014
Anthony's Manifesto
The explosion of technological advances in the past 20 years has been staggering, and either by design or not has managed to become an integral part of our daily lives, be it in our social interactions or even our economic ones. The aim of this project, to abstain from all aspects of digital media that we possibly can, is surely to assess not just the advantages or disadvantages of technology but to examine the ways with which life without technology in a technological age is vastly different and maybe more difficult than we believe.
Although social media has never gripped me, I still find my self reliant on technology alien to an older generation. The use of games as both a tool of procrastination and as a mode of entertainment robs me of many hours, and many more are lost to films and TV shows that seem to be at times more appealing than leaving the house for a night out. The use of a digital media player also allows me many hours of enjoyment, although the use of this is more fractured, mostly in half hour bursts or so. My main use of digital media though, and most others I assume, would be the use of communication devices such as mobile phones and Skype, which have given me the opportunity to communicate with loved ones regardless of location.
The benefits of Digital media are at times clear to us all, but without permitting ourselves time away from our greatest obsessions the disadvantages become blackened from sight. As such, the devices that I will in all possibility abstain from are my:
Although social media has never gripped me, I still find my self reliant on technology alien to an older generation. The use of games as both a tool of procrastination and as a mode of entertainment robs me of many hours, and many more are lost to films and TV shows that seem to be at times more appealing than leaving the house for a night out. The use of a digital media player also allows me many hours of enjoyment, although the use of this is more fractured, mostly in half hour bursts or so. My main use of digital media though, and most others I assume, would be the use of communication devices such as mobile phones and Skype, which have given me the opportunity to communicate with loved ones regardless of location.
The benefits of Digital media are at times clear to us all, but without permitting ourselves time away from our greatest obsessions the disadvantages become blackened from sight. As such, the devices that I will in all possibility abstain from are my:
- Mobile phone, save for emergencies
- My laptop, including the use of it for essay writing unless grossly inappropriate
- My MP3 Player
- TV
- Radio
Saturday, 22 March 2014
Friday, 21 March 2014
Technics, Technology & Being Human
A few members of our group were away last week so here is a compilation of my notes. The theme of the lecture was directly linked to our project with some fantastic links to authors and some brilliant ideas surrounding Post-Humanism. Thank you Bernadette for a fantastic lecture.
-
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and
Time – How being immersed in a culture like this changing our experiences of
being human? How are our perceptions being changed? Our sense of time and
space? Since 1950’s this has been around so we know have a history of this.
How our interactions with this has had
effects on us as humans?
Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Routledge, London,1999;
Mark Poster, Information Please : Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital
Machines, Duke University Press, London, 2006
What’s the matter with the Internet?
University of Minnesota Press,
Lot of PRO-TECHNOLOGY & ANTI-TECHNOLOGY
We’re never really offline. The speed of
development that this has occurred is going to increase rapidly. Digital
culture involves a lot more than sitting at a computer screen.
Historical
Context:
Television x(1953) people were also very
worried about the introduction of this technology
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology
and Cultural Form (1975)
-
Television was invented as the
result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and
entertainment was then so great that it altered all preceding media of news and
entertainment.
-
Has unforeseen consequences on
some of the central processes of family, cultural and social life.
-
Is it turning us into this
passive audience, exploited and emphasized elements of a passivity, a
cultural and psychological inadequacy, which had always been latent in people
Humans have no ability to shape their
futures, Twitter. The extent to which technology shapes social change. We see
ourselves as being the drivers of technologies.
Culture is a passive agent in comparison to
technology which is an active agent.
Technological Determinism?
-
Suggests that, in the
relationship between technology and culture, culture is passive agent and
technology active
-
Or that culture and society
‘react’ to technological developments in a cause-and-effect
-
‘ Electronic culture promotes
the individual as an unstable identity in a continuous process of multiple
identity formation.’
Mark Poster, The Second Media Age
Rene
Descartes
-Discourse on the Method, 1637
- One of the principles architects of
humanism
- Reason is “the only thing that makes us
men and distinguishes us from the beasts”
- “This innate power of judging well and
distinguishing the true from the false…is naturally equal in all men”
My capacity of things that makes me human.
Essentially different from the non-human. I think therefore I am .
Humanness is potentially something more
distributed that we potentially previously thought. “The Body Without Organs”
Post-humanism
“Before
the next 21st century is over, human beings will no longer by the
most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. Actually, let me take
that back. The truth of that last statement depends on how we define human…the
primary political and philosophical issues of the next century will be the
definition of who we are” – The Age of Spiritual Machines, London, Orion,
Ray Kurzweil
-
These remarks aren’t so
outlandish when we look at the world we live in now.
-
We’re already post human.
Continuity of self. We can’t assumed
that there is a continuity of oneself.
-
Judgements can not be
motorized.
Katherine Hayles – How We Became Post-human:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatism
Thinking is difficult to define. This
agenda has driven the technological developments. Can we tell the difference
between the digital device and a machine?
Didn’t think embodiment was important. This
induced an intense debate about what intelligence is. Does not have to be
human. Can be embedded in circuit body. How do we manipulate information, not
the way that bodies interact with each other.
We are able to be in two places at ounce.
Able to distribute ourselves that we’re previously thought unthinkable. This
logic is now so embedded in us.
CAPTCHA – to tell humans and machines apart.
This is a massive innovation.Shifting that
the human is at the centre of everything. Nothing exists any more or any less.
We as humans interact with things
“From
Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been
associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject.”
Hayles
and “Regimes of Computation”
“ If
biology is really just pattern code and sequence then how does this fact change
the conventional property relations surrounding biological materiality? How has
our understanding of the relationship between organism and environment changed
in light of recent networked forms of information?
Is
technology providing materials for new ways of life?
“Whether
we consider the extension of the stone age human;s appendage through the grasp
of a hunting tool; the mobile entity constituted by a bipedal organism mounted
on a quadripedal organism; the ocular-solar/celestial interaction of Earthly
human navigation, or the human ingestion of other species of plants and animals
for sustenance- the inscription of ‘human’ has always been marked by liminal
encounters.”
We are the children of computers. We see
the universe through the eyes of computers. Our understanding of the world is
formed through the way we interest with the computer. We’ve always been parted
crafted by one another. Adapted and changed by technology. Technology needs to
be thought of as the thing that defines the human. Aknowledging this sense of
shift and disvaluing it at the same time. we’ve always been post-human*
Digital is not an attachment of the real.
We interact with it in a complex dynamic which we need to be aware of.
The boundaries are permeable.
Foucault
“A normalizing society is the historical
outcome of the technology of power
centred on life.”
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