Arthur's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

…highly kaleidoscopic week… now you see it… now you don’t… have l I really deleted that column… how did I manage that… I wonder where’s the best place to look for…

Ah reassurance; I turned to the blog postings and sensed the anomie that others too are feeling. It helps me to sense this in [...]

Bell’s interweaving of  the material, symbolic and experiential reflects for me the the soft face of analysis, interestingly contrasted with Hand’s hard analysis. The former a joy to read; the latter a chore. History then runs as a unifying thread through Bell’s warm approach. I find it really worthwhile to sense the mind at work [...]

Hand’s balance sheet doesn’t look too promising:
some engines of digital culture

promise
threat

social inclusion
institutional liquefaction

empowerment
cultural information confusion

interactive citizenship
power control through globalization

participatory democracy
citizen consumership

communitarian civic culture
meaningless choice

affluence for all
controlled digital information

customized consumer choice
policed digital information

global mobility
rapid flow; flow obsolescence

global/glocal marketization
fragmentation

information commonwealth
dislocation

net interactivity
anomie

technical devices as change agents
stratification division

interacting
interacted

information poverty

panoptica prison

No wonder then that [...]

It suddenly occurred to me that maybe Sian or Jen or both are playing the imp in the ether to provoke our curiosity.

imps at work

By this I mean, we are handling a text of extreme density of terminology (Hand), a text that by ‘my’ definition has minimal redundancy, through the medium of the [...]

Years ago I gave up going to parties where, to quote Eliot as Prufrock,
” In the room the women come and go
talking of Michelangelo”,
(sexist bit fitting in with the Zeigeist).
Tweeting reminds me a lot of this. I think one needs to be highly skilled and expert at Tweeting in order to communicate a modicum [...]

I had to read this twice. At first reading it was too dense for me; involved too much context (thematic) specific vocabulary. On the second reading I could relax and begin to distill meaning from the text. In essence I feel that Hand wants us to consider the unfamiliar, uncomfortable side of a potentially brave [...]