To an increasing extent, social movements such as those ongoing in Spain –and
elsewhere in Europe and the world- are becoming a conscious opportunity
for exploring new paths for democracy. These explorations seem not to
be the result of any technological fate, but rather a feat of
sociotechnical change, with some concrete antecedents.
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
  Categories
ArchivesContributors
|
Posts in Internet
You may have not heard about it yet, but you´ll probably hear about it
soon: there are civil protests going on in Spain, and they’re getting
bigger and louder each minute, on and offline.
The internet looks different in different places. We think of it as this universal resource, but it’s not. Its ethereal contents change depending on where you are physically and politically. I’ve been experiencing this a lot on my last few international trips.
A friend of mine in Singapore believes my work
on anticipatory governance of emerging technologies barely cloaks an ingrained hostility to
science. Science is science, she thinks
and, like Max Weber argues in “Science as a vocation,” democracy doesn’t have
much place in it – unless it is perhaps through do-it-yourself approaches like garage
synthetic biology.
Several weeks ago, a colleague and I discussed
what constitutes technological determinism and why it is problematic. I argued that, colloquially, technologically
deterministic arguments are often implicit and subtly erase human agency from
social interactions with technology.
To
tell you the truth, my biological clock exploded a long time ago, and I have no
desire to reproduce. But after the explosion of weddings in the last couple of
years, most of my friends are becoming parents. Inevitably, our conversations
turn toward child-rearing, and linger around the host of anxieties that
accompany the prospect of bringing new life into the world.
I recently read Neil Postman's excellent Amusing
Ourselves to Death. Postman offers a
critique of the corrosive effect of television on American discourse, education
and culture.... What does Postman’s
theory imply when extended to the defining media of the 21st century, the Internet?
I’m co-teaching a class
this semester at the Law College, entitled “Governance of Virtual Worlds.”
Similar courses have been taught at Harvard’s and Stanford’s law schools, but
ours is the first that we’re aware of to take a graduate, interdisciplinary
approach to the subject. We’ll be holding course sessions in World of Warcraft and in Second Life, a popular game and social
virtual world, respectively.
Displaying 8 posts. View all Soapbox entries! |
||||||||
