This week has been a busy one. I started by reading Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, and Bayne’s critique of the phrase ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’, both of which put in me in mind of the relationship between criticality, dissent and digital culture. As a result, I started ‘Googling’ digital activism and came across the documentary ‘We Are Legion‘; which explores the origins, activities and values of the radical hactivist collective Anonymous. I finished the week by joining the Togethertube session on Friday, when we looked at three clips (HAL 9000; Gumdrop; and We Only Attack Ourselves). Unfortunately, due to work and family commitments, I wasn’t able to follow up this session with a blog post (which I hope to address this coming week).
What unites these disparate elements? One unifying features connecting Bayne, Haraway and the emergence of digital ‘hactivism’ is the opposition towards essentialism, individualism, and grand theories in cyberspace. As such, interwoven within certain facets of digital culture are distinctly post-modern, post-humanist epistemic and ideological values. These are somewhat at odds with the humanist, and distinctly Enlightenment-leaning notions of Transhumanism, which I began exploring last week. This prompts me to question whether the term ‘digital culture’ is a reductionist, over-simplication i.e. that it is not possible to talk of ‘digital culture’ as a single entity. Rather, there are many digital cultures (complementary, contradictory and oppositional to each other) and many forms of ‘sub’cultures within them.
PS: I’m finding it quite difficult to find time to blog (almost) daily but I would like to blog more about the readings and what I am watching/identifying on line.
References
Bayne, S. (2013) What’s the matter with technology enhanced learning? Learning, Media & Technology 40(1): 5-20.
Haraway, D. (2007) A cyborg manifesto. In: Bell, D, Kennedy, B. (Eds.) The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge. Pages: 34-65.
Excellent summary here Nick, you’re reflecting on specific lifestream content and relating these choices back to the readings and course themes – nice work. Good to see Pinterest as well as Twitter feeding in – I’m investigating Pinterest embedding at the moment, so will get back to you.
‘One unifying features connecting Bayne, Haraway and the emergence of digital ‘hactivism’ is the opposition towards essentialism, individualism, and grand theories in cyberspace.’
Yes, that is good way of summarising much that we’ve encountered in this first block. I like how you have situated the Transhumanism as a continuation of humanism, and this gets to some of the fundamental differences between the ‘posthumanisms’, itself an umbrella term for some quite different positions.
If ‘digital culture’, at least in some of its forms, is interwoven with ideas that oppose humanism, where does that leave us with the question of education I wonder. Is the project of education tied to humanism in a way that makes ‘digital culture’ a problematic intervention?