ulises mejias

Last year, Andrea Batista Schlesinger interviewed me for a book project (our exchange is posted here). The book is finally available! Check it out:

Here’s the book blurb:

We exercise our power as citizens by asking questions. Inquiry is less valued today, however, as our society demands quick and dirty answers. We see this play out all around us: in the increased ideological segregation that divides us, the outsize role of Google, a news industry that opines rather than investigate, and the decline in value of civics education where young people are taught to question their democracy. In The Death of “Why?” Andrea Batista Schlesinger, a prominent progressive voice, offers a passionate defense of the role of questioning in fulfilling the promise of democracy. And she profiles those individuals and institutions renewing the practice of inquiry–particularly in America’s youth–at a time when our society demands such activity from us all.

More info (including a free chapter): http://thedeathofwhy.com/

This is from our back yard. Very unusual clouds. Moments later there was a gentle rain, the deer was gone, and now it’s sunny.

I have been invited to give a paper at the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, organized by Medialab-Prado (in Madrid). The meeting will focus on “an analysis of ‘peer-to-peer’ networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.”

I’ve heard good things about this workshop, and it looks like an interesting selection of papers. My own contribution is titled Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly. The proposal is below.

In theory, P2P networks embody a model of collaboration that spells out the end of monopolies of communication. Like the Inclusiva-net Call for Papers states, P2P exemplifies principles like “equality of power among participants, free cooperation among them, putting into circulation or forming what are considered ‘common goods’, and participation and communication ‘from many to many.’” While all this has been empirically confirmed in isolated cases, we need to question the ‘goodness’ of these premises at a large societal scale.

Even if we are to accept the claim that P2P network architecture engenders publics instead of markets, we should not put aside Kierkergaard’s critique of publics as nihilistic systems intended to facilitate the accumulation of information while postponing action indefinitely. While Kierkergaard was putting down newspaper media, his critique couldn’t be more fitting in the age of Web browsers, RSS aggregators and bitTorrent clients. Another way of putting this is to say that while P2P networks may indeed democratize access to cultural contents, we still need to ask: Whose cultural contents? The whole piracy debate revolves around the fact that the statistical majority of ‘pirates’ are using P2P networks not to disseminate radical countercultural products, but to share the latest Hollywood blockbuster or teen idol musical hit. We need to question how network processes normalize monocultures, and to do so we need to theorize what form of resistance is embodied by existing in the peripheries of networks.

In my work, I argue that digital technosocial networks (DTSNs) function not just as metaphors to describe sociality, but as full templates or models for organizing it. Since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node, DTSNs are constituted as totalities by what they include as much as by what they exclude. I propose a framework for understanding the epistemological exclusion embedded in the structure and dynamics of DTSNs, and for exploring the ethical questions associated with the nature of the bond between the node and the excluded other. Contrary to its depiction in diagrams, the outside of the network is not empty but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network. Thus, I put forth a theory for how the peripheries of the network represent an ethical resistance to the network, and I suggest that these peripheries, the only sites from which it is possible to un-think the network episteme, can inform emerging models of identity and sociality.

This is important because we are perhaps entering an age when deviation from social norms will only be possible in the private, non-surveilled space of the paranodal (the space beyond the nodes), away from the templates of the network as model for organizing sociality. Subjectivization, as Rancière argues, happens precisely through a process of disidentification: parts of society disidentify themselves from the whole, and individuals and groups recognize themselves as separate from the mainstream. Thus, to paraphrase Rancière, the paranodal is the part of those who have no part; it is the place where we experience—or at least are free to theorize—what it is like to be outside the network. Articulating this form of disidentification, of imagining and claiming difference even in relation to ‘democratic’ P2P networks, is an important step in the actualization of alternative ways of knowing and acting in the world.

I’ll be presenting a paper at this year’s SUNY Conference on Instructional Technology (CIT 2009).

Active Learning, Social Media, and Serious Games: Case Studies
Dr. Ulises A. Mejias
Friday May 22, 10:15 - 10:45 am
Alternate Reality Games, played with everyday communication and information technologies, can be used as forms of active learning and research that involve students in analyzing a real-life problem, collectively articulating a multitude of realistic and possible responses to it, and addressing the ethical imperative for action.

Also, some of you might be interested in the webcast of the keynote by Liz Lawley (of mamamusings fame). Dr. Elizabeth Lane Lawley is Director of the Lab for Social Computing and Associate Professor of Information Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She will be giving two talks on Thursday May 21 (free and open to the online public, as far as I can tell): Technology - Technical, Tangible, Social (10:15am ET) and Gaming and Learning (2:15 pm ET). To watch, go here.

I’m currently coordinating a second (s)ARG. Here’s the info:

What would you do if you were not able to graduate because of cuts to SUNY Oswego’s budget? Stop panicking…. start acting!

Save Oswego! is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developed as a class project for the courses Social Networks and the Web and Videogame Theory and Analysis at SUNY Oswego. It could be called an experiment in collective storytelling, a radical new media project, or an internet ‘hoax’ with a social message! Anyone can play, and the whole Internet is the playground (participants interact with the narrative in real-time using a variety of communication technologies such as email, blogs, SMS, video and audio podcasts, etc.). By framing the experience as an ARG, this project seeks to involve various members of the Oswego community in analyzing a real-life problem, collectively articulating a multitude of realistic and possible responses to it, and examining the ethical question of what form action should take after the game.

This ARG is entirely produced by students and is being coordinated by Prof. Ulises Mejias of the Communication Studies department. The project is not officially affiliated with any SUNY organization, and the content does not reflect the views or opinions of anyone other than the authors. You can play the game by going to saveoswego.wordpress.com from April 7 to April 16, 2009. You can also join us for a wrap-up discussion during Quest on April 22 at 4:00 PM.

I’m going to be coordinating a couple of ARGs this Spring. Here’s the announcement for the first one. Please join us!

‘Stop Gold Farming!’ is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developed for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. It could be called an experiment in collective storytelling, a radical new media project, or an internet ‘hoax’ with a social message! Anyone can play (participants interact with the narrative in real-time using a variety of communication technologies such as email, blogs, SMS, digital video, podcasts, etc.), and therefore anyone can shape the outcome. The game revolves around a fictional controversy unfolding at Ithaca College related to the issue of gold farming, or the practice of selling virtual goods that can be used in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. These goods are often produced under sweatshop conditions in developing countries for the consumption of First World clients. ‘Stop Gold Farming!’ is the story of a student organization demanding that an IC student engaged in the distribution of virtual goods be expelled from the college. As part of the ‘Trade’ stream of FLEFF, the goal of this ARG is to engage students and festival participants in an exploration of gold farming as an embodied economic practice in a gaming context characterized by virtuality and disembodiment, and in the context of globalization and trade as a process that reinforces “unequal human relations rather than merely intensifying connectedness” (Biao, 2008). By framing the experience as an ARG, this FLEFF LAB involves various communities in analyzing a real-life problem, collectively articulating a multitude of realistic and possible responses to it, and examining the ethical question of what form action should take after the game. This FLEFF LAB was conceptualized and is being coordinated by Prof. Ulises Mejias from SUNY Oswego, and produced in collaboration with FLEFF interns. You can join the experience by visiting stopgoldfarming.wordpress.com. You can also join us on April 3 from 9:00 to 10:30 AM in the Park soundstage (Ithaca College) for a discussion that will include a gold farming demo and a live conference call with a team of researchers in China.

Best wishes for a peaceful and joyful 2009!

Milan Kundera wrote that the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Let’s hope this year we remember some useful things. And by ‘remember’ I mean more than just information retrieval, which is actually just a license to forget (as Langdon Winner would say)!

Anyway, some announcements:

• The wiki for my Fall 08 course Theory, Culture and Technology is open to the public. It contains some great work by students. Check it out.
• Wikis for my upcoming Spring 09 courses (Videogame Theory & Analysis and Social Networks and the Web) are also available, in case you are interested (nothing there yet but course materials).
• If you are a RSS subscriber to my blog, you probably haven’t seen the (somewhat) new Photography section (it’s actually just a collection of panoramas I use for my blog header)!
• In an effort to divest from del.icio.us, I recently started my own social bookmarking site, which I will be using mostly with my students for school work (although you are more than welcome to join). It’s actually a free Drupal environment called Drigg, which took some tweaking to set up but seems to be working fine.

I hope to post more announcements about current work as they year progresses.

Saludos!

-Ulises

Andrea Batista Schlesinger is executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (a non-partisan, non-profit think tank founded during the Civil Rights Movement that generates ideas that fuel the progressive movement). She is currently working on the forthcoming book The Death of Why, to be released in Spring of 2009. After looking at my blog and reading what I had said in a 2006 panel (the MacArthur Online Discussions on Civic Engagement, PDF transcript here) she contacted me to ask some questions about the role of the Internet in promoting civic participation. Our email exchange, reproduced with her permission, follows:

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: You write that “We should be less concerned about designing technologies that will afford young people ’satisfying participation opportunities’ and more concerned about ensuring that new generations can challenge and question the opportunities that are ‘offered’ to them. The goal –for young people as well as old– should be the self-critical individual.” Do you think that the Internet — either as a medium, or as an environment — inspires/encourages such self-critique? Do you think that digital natives are more or less likely to be interested in and have the capacity for inquiry and/or self-reflection? [Read more →]

Ambient Dominance and the Public — An Interview with Rob van Kranenburg

(Photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

For the last interview in this series, I sat down to talk to Rob van Kranenburg. Rob works at Waag Society, a new media think-tank that “wants to be on the forefront of developments by creating a consensus among as many of the stakeholders as possible (companies, government, citizens, European laws and professionals) to anchor values [such] as solidarity, sharing, learning to learn, creativity, beauty and a sense of change and innovation as deep as possible within the code and infrastructure.” Rob is head of the Public Domain program. A large part of his work deals with the problematic shift (evident in technologies such as RFID) from “privacy compliant applications to privacy compliant technology.” We met at the Waag offices in Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, on June 17.

THE OUTSOURCING OF MEMORY AND AGENCY

Ulises Mejias: Since a lot of your work has to do with Ambient Intelligence, why don’t you start by telling us what that is? You have a phrase here, in one of the essays you gave me, about “outsourcing memory and agency to an ever more seemingly controllable environment on an individual level that is perceived as convenient.”

Rob van Kranenburg: Let’s start with the example of a pencil. As you write things down, you are outsourcing your memory into the environment. That’s how the Western notion of technology has worked. But now the idea is to hide all these functionalities into our environment. Like electricity, basically. It’s been hidden. All we see is the On/Off switch. Nobody knows how it works. If there is a power break, everything breaks. The same goes for our computer. The idea behind Ambient Intelligence, Pervasive Computing or whatever you want to call it, is to take the intelligence out of the computer box. I should make my environment ‘intelligent:’ I should make my clothes intelligent, my chair intelligent, so they recognize me. The walls in my house should sense whether I’m depressed. So this promise that the world can recognize you every step of the way, and give you everything you need, is very powerful. But the thing is that this notion of Ambient Intelligence can only work on a very stable environment. If the environment changes, it has very big consequences, on an interface level. Change must be minimal. It’s a totalitarian logic, within the whole system. Because it assumes it needs to be stable in order to “live.” We will have new generations growing up dumber in their interfacing activities with these environments, because there’s no need for them to think otherwise; they are being taken care of. [Read more →]

Digital Cultures and Research Practices — An Interview with Anne Beaulieu and Sally Wyatt

(Anne Beaulieu (left) and Sally Wyatt. Photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Anne Beaulieu (bio, publications) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS). Sally Wyatt (bio, publications) is Professor of Digital Cultures in Development at Maastricht University and also a Senior Research Fellows at VKS. The Virtual Knowledge Studio “supports researchers in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the creation of new scholarly practices and in their reflection on e-research in relation to their fields.” My interview with them took place on June 6 at the VKS Amsterdam offices, housed in the International Institute of Social History.

Ulises Mejias: Why don’t we start by you telling me what the VKS does?

Anne Beaulieu: The Virtual Knowledge Studio has a dual mission of studying new research practices and also supporting researchers who want to ‘play around’ with new research practices. We are called upon to play three different roles: The first is as broker, as someone who can translate between the different groups who are active in this new area of e-research–between humanities scholars and people who are actually building tools, for instance; and the requests for us to play that role can come from both kinds of actors. Another role we have is to document what these practices are, whether it means new kinds of collaboration, or new kinds of communication, or new ways of producing data or sources. That work is of interest to people in technology studies, but also to people in the field, where we are studying the practices. The third role is really to think and try out new practices, and sometimes these are things we do in-house, in our ‘collaboratories,’ but it can also be very concrete contributions in ongoing outside projects.

Sally Wyatt: One of the main ways of collaborating with researchers is through what we call campus sites. We now have one at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the other at Maastricht University, which I’m responsible for and which we just started a few months ago. So that’s a way to extend our reach. [Read more →]