Other musings:

I’ve been thinking around what digital culture means to me as a person and have been having a little count up of all the things that make me digital.  I’ve got numerous profiles on different web services and use a number of them quite heavily to enhance my personal, social and working lives.  I’ve got around five memory sticks of various sizes, each with different information on them.  I’ve got a more than one computer.  My CD collection is now digital.  I carry  a pretty large amount of data around with me.  My phone has GPS, can talk to the internet, can send emails and tell me what stars I’m looking at as well as sending text messages and making phone calls.  At least it did, until an unfortunate accident with a cup of tea last week.  Not having all the facilities of my phone at my fingertips isn’t good.  How will I find my way from A to B?  How will I stay in touch with family and friends?  Probably the same way I used to – but having got used to having everything in my pocket or bag it’s not an easy adjustment to make.

H0w does that relate to being a digital learner?  I’m used to everything coming to me, or me going to find things, through the Internet.  I can view content on mobile devices from almost anywhere.  The tools I use are not particularly personal – I’m told which ones I will make use of – but a big part of my personal learning environment is the easy aggregation of all my digital feeds.  Something the EDC module has made a lot easier because of the tools we’re using.  Everything can come to me on my iGoogle homepage, rather then me going out to find it at a number of different websites.  In many respects I can see the messages independently of the media.  This kinda makes me think about the chats we were having on Twitter last week about agency and how in some ways people are more receptive of messages that come to them through technology – whether the message is to eat this, buy that, upgrade to the latest one of these or whatever.  Technology as a mediator kind of masks the agent sending you the message, be it ideological, consumerist or whatever.

This was echoed in the Bendito clip and I have already blogged about this.  The other two clips I found a little strange.  I’ve never watched 2001: A Space Odyssey but I’m familiar with Hal and his work.  Is the dystopian point here the issue of putting too much trust into a machine?  I think so.  The machine lives and wants to control.  And doesn’t want Dave to do whatever he was doing in the clip.  OK.  And the other one, ‘the Internet’s for porn‘ just made me think of the Daily Mail and there recurring attempts to ban the Internet.  And pretty much anything else their readership doesn’t like.  Are they more clued up to the issue of agency than the rest of the population?  I think not.  But they are very dystopian in their view of the Internet.  It’s a bit like mixing John Donne with technology.  I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from watching these.  I’m struggling as ever to pull these threads together into some kind of coherent whole, so I guess I’ll have to see what happens after I’ve watched the next batch.

I read Hand. He writes mainly about the political aspects of digital culture – decentralisation, pushing governance to the masses, encouraging participation. Something I particularly liked was his highlighting a qute from Alberto Melucci:

Knowledge is… less a knowledge of contents and increasingly an ability to codify and to decode messages (199: 416-7)

Having seen the Bendito film I wonder if that’s what’s really going on?  In this short film it’s not clear if the messages are being decoded – in one scene the people are worshipping a screen showing them images of war.  To me this suggests they are not decoding the messages.  The images on the screen are somehow not seen as powerful – the screen itself has the power, as illustrated at the end when someone comes along with another machine and shoots the first one.  At this point the film makes obvious the link between the message and the agency behind it – control the screen, control the people.  Feed your ideologies through a popular medium to achieve the most effective way of having them accepted.  It’s like Hand’s observation (drawing on Castells), when he discusses networks, about some people being able to “choose between multi-directional circuits of communication, and those who will be provided only pre-specified packages.”  His idea of the ‘interacting’ and the ‘interacted’ sums this up – the locus of power, and who has power over you, comes with the indivdual choice of read only or read/write.  Is the world in it’s digital form something that you allow to be done to you, or are you going to choose the channels you tune in to?