I was born in Mexico City, but I’ve been living in the United States since 1990. I am Assistant Professor of New Media in the Communication Studies Department at SUNY Oswego. I did my Ed.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education program. Previously, I was Director of Learning Systems Design at eCornell, where I was the principal architect behind the company’s approach to online learning systems design and production, Learning Molecules (download a white paper here). My wife is Asma Barlas, a leading scholar in Qur’anic hermeneutics, recently appointed the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam for 2008.
You can download a copy of my CV here.
Research Interests (short):
My work focuses on the use of the network as a model for organizing social realities through information and communication technologies. I theorize the epistemological exclusivity engendered by networks which results in nodes being capable of recognizing only other nodes. I argue that the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, so that only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire meaning only by becoming part of the network. In this context, I am interested in exploring how the paranodal—the space between nodes—becomes an important site for disidentification from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of the network and providing alternative models of subjectivation.
Research Interest (long):
The network has become a favored image for explaining the social realities of our age. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) and the structures they engender have greatly influenced not only how we imagine the individual and the social, but how we order and organize them. But how does the metaphor and model of the network limit our understanding of the social?
A defining characteristic of networked sociality is the overcoming of physical space. Thanks to ICT’s, social groups have evolved from densely-knit location-based communities to sparsely-knit networks unbound to any specific physical space. Thus, the network introduced what has been heralded as the ‘death of distance.’ But when nearness is defined in terms of availability within the network, and farness in terms of exclusion from it, what results is a shift from physical proximity to informational availability and commodification as the principal measure of social relevance.
One of the questions we might then ask is: What kind of social significance does the space outside the network (the paranodal) acquire under this redefinition of the near? Networks are not anti-social (they thrive by the links that nodes form within them), nor are they anti-local (nodes can link to other nodes in the local just as easily as they can link to other nodes beyond the local). In fact, networks can facilitate new forms of engaging the local. But the mediated near that the network delivers is a slightly different local space, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
This is because nearness in a network is constituted on the basis of nodes recognizing only other nodes. In other words, social reality is mediated through a nodocentric filter, and since the distance between the node and something that is not in the network is—for all practical purposes—infinite, only elements in the local that are available in the network are rendered as near. While networks are extremely efficient at establishing relations between nodes, they embody a bias against knowledge of—and engagement with—anything that is not a node in the network.
If we rely on the metaphor and model of the network to explain and organize social reality, we need to be aware of the reductionism that eliminates everything but the actuality of the node. Nodocentrism, the tyranny of the spatially and temporally immobile node, is an obstacle to a deeper appreciation of the process of becoming (in a Deleuzian sense). The network is fundamentally an expression of and response to the ‘terror of becoming,’ the unpredictable diversity of the paranodal. Currently, the network metaphor is being used to rationalize a model of progress and development where those elements that are not in the network may acquire value only by becoming part of the network. Thus, ‘bridging the digital divide’ is normalized as a goal across all societies. In my work, I explore opportunities for incorporating the paranodal into our design and use of networks as a site from which to resist the technological commodification of the social.
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