ulises mejias

UPDATE: For a response to some comments by James Farmer, Stephen Downes and Ian Kallen, see the bottom of this post.
Subtitle: A postscript to my work on Distributed Textual Discourse (DTD)
At last year’s 16th Annual Instructional Technology Institute Conference at Utah State University, I presented a paper on Distributed Textual Discourse. DTD is a model [...]

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Introduction:
Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. [...]

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[The following comments were presented during the War and (Computer/Video) Gaming session at the Occupied Spaces Symposium, Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College, April 8 and 9, 2005.]
First, I want to thank Patty Zimmerann for inviting me to this symposium. Patty played a vital role in my intellectual development when I was an [...]

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In Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress (2003) argues that the image is displacing writing as the main resource for communication in Western societies. This does not mean, obviously, that writing is disappearing. But as Kress would put it, the world told is increasingly being replaced by the world shown—with all the social [...]

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Bookmark, Classify and Share:
A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community
[Note: This is a project I did for a class on social and communicative aspects of the internet, taught by Chuck Kinzer. Not a 'real' study, but you might find some of the literature review and listed resources helpful. You may also [...]

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An ongoing theme in this blog is the question of how communication technologies can enhance or distort our understanding of the world. The mediation that technology introduces into the process of communication, I argue, can yield worldviews that increase the degree of integration between individuals and their environments, or conversely, that increase the degree [...]

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In his essay Technization and Civilization, Norbert Elias discusses how technologies can bring about more civilized as well as more barbaric behaviors…

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The use of electronic means of communication for expressly political ends is creating a lot of buzz about eDemocracy, Emergent Democracy, eCitizenship or whatever one wants to call it. Opinions about what exactly eDemocracy will engender range from narratives about enhancing the current democratic process with new ways of engagement and participation, to a total reconceptualization of how society should govern itself. In general, most proponents of eDemocracy assume the following:

-eDemocracy will increase participation in politics and will make politics matter again.

-The power of eDemocracy will lie not in its ability to connect average people to their representatives, but in allowing average people to collaborate, organize, and help themselves.

-eDemocracy will work because we finally have access to low-cost tools to manage the volume and complexity of information that we must pay attention to in order to act as well-informed citizens.

-We are just waiting for the next eDemocracy killer app, the Napster of internet politics, to bring it all together.

Now, behind most of these assumptions is the idea that eDemocracy will revolutionize politics because it will re-empower the public. If the public consists of individuals in dialogue with each other, it stands to reason that the internet–which we are discovering is a great tool for communication–can greatly enhance the democratic process.

Unfortunately,

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Surely there is no more blatant sign of dehumanization than the inability to react to suffering. And yet, underscoring technological progress throughout the ages is the drive to obliterate the experience of suffering. We want to be immune to the suffering of others, and we want to be immune to our own suffering.

Pierre Flourens, a French physician living in the times of Victor Hugo, wrote the following about the effects of anaesthetics:

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But are technology and virtuality inherently oppressive? Can they not be instruments of subversion, even while partly complicit in capitalism? To believe that technologies cannot be re-appropriated and subverted would be to yield the power of human creativity to the will of multinational corporations. Somewhere between Audrey Lorde’s belief that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house, and Ani DiFranco’s opinion that every tool is a weapon if you hold it right, there must be a productive space for technology and virtuality within praxis. If that is a possibility, we must begin by critiquing the unsustainable practices of virtuality: mainly, it’s refusal to “get real.”

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