Slideshow for my presentation at the 10th Anniversary Symposium of Media@LSE (June 16, 2013), focusing on (digital) media literacies, media life, and the necessity of (media) play and experimentation as contemporary survival skills.
7. “digital media and
contemporary technogenesis
constitute a complex
adaptive system, with the
technologies constantly
changing as well as
bringing about change in
those whose lives are
enmeshed with them.”
Katherine Hayles
media life living in media part of tradition in theorizing nature/ society/ technology as integrated, fused:Bruno Latour: nonmodernismKaren Barad: agential intra-actionJane Bennett: vital materialismKatherine Hayles: posthumanism & technogenesiseerst: media definedartefacts: larger/smaller/smarter/natural/organic (incl standards/protocols)activities: more/concurrent/disappearing/lifestylearrangements:inseparable/self as source (Time's YOU in 2006)key to definition:invisible/disappearautomatic- ambient & embedded/ecological- affect/intimate- creative worldviewwhy living in media?= orientation to media / mediatization= (self) presentation / (networks of) mass self-communication/expression= thymotic self-assertion / media as 'super peer': if I get recognized in media, I super-exist: hyperreal?= stretched social grooming (across time/space) and bonding (social support)avatar examplesmedia revolutions: occupy, Arab spring, UK riots & cleanup, indignados, white march (Dutroux), etcnew questions: - identity: multiplication, private=public?- community: mediascape vs mediasphere?- identity: changed, fluid, uncertain?silent disco: dancing with myselflove: easy, temporary, meaningful sex: mediated closeness, ambient intimacydeath: stretching of concept / meaningall in all: media life is coming to terms with malleability, personalization, ecology= characteristics of MEDIA: reality as the "worst game ever"4 possible games/realities to play with (Flusser's "homo ludens"):- matrix - wikiality/googlization of everything - panopticon / omnopticon- TSDlife after the zombie apocalypse:- no ego/leader/hierarchy- no categories- no goals (but always driven)- impersonal socialityto create a passionate media life:- ideal of self-creation (Nietzsche)- plus ethics & aesthetics- a life worth living (Simmel)- life as a work of art (Foucault)- take responsibility for the art of life (Bauman)
media life living in media part of tradition in theorizing nature/ society/ technology as integrated, fused:Bruno Latour: nonmodernismKaren Barad: agential intra-actionJane Bennett: vital materialismKatherine Hayles: posthumanism & technogenesiseerst: media definedartefacts: larger/smaller/smarter/natural/organic (incl standards/protocols)activities: more/concurrent/disappearing/lifestylearrangements:inseparable/self as source (Time's YOU in 2006)key to definition:invisible/disappearautomatic- ambient & embedded/ecological- affect/intimate- creative worldviewwhy living in media?= orientation to media / mediatization= (self) presentation / (networks of) mass self-communication/expression= thymotic self-assertion / media as 'super peer': if I get recognized in media, I super-exist: hyperreal?= stretched social grooming (across time/space) and bonding (social support)avatar examplesmedia revolutions: occupy, Arab spring, UK riots & cleanup, indignados, white march (Dutroux), etcnew questions: - identity: multiplication, private=public?- community: mediascape vs mediasphere?- identity: changed, fluid, uncertain?silent disco: dancing with myselflove: easy, temporary, meaningful sex: mediated closeness, ambient intimacydeath: stretching of concept / meaningall in all: media life is coming to terms with malleability, personalization, ecology= characteristics of MEDIA: reality as the "worst game ever"4 possible games/realities to play with (Flusser's "homo ludens"):- matrix - wikiality/googlization of everything - panopticon / omnopticon- TSDlife after the zombie apocalypse:- no ego/leader/hierarchy- no categories- no goals (but always driven)- impersonal socialityto create a passionate media life:- ideal of self-creation (Nietzsche)- plus ethics & aesthetics- a life worth living (Simmel)- life as a work of art (Foucault)- take responsibility for the art of life (Bauman)
“Human evolution is ‘technogenesis’ in the sense that humans have always evolved in recursive correlation with the evolution of technics.”
“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw quotes (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1856-1950)
Douglas Rushkoff
example loved ones communicating at the airport: calling every couple of seconds: empty communication, micro-coordinationas compared to the dancer in Pedro Calderon’s story: to an external observer this seems to be an empty (meaningless/purposeless) activity – like our immersion in media seems meaningless. however, one could see this as the dancer explains when asked: as a form of pure thinking, a pure being-in-the-worldthe world is hypercomplex in part because of media, yet we strive for redundancy - which can be seen as a harmony of all parts (“this makes sense; this is beautiful”)so for example in relation to this particular presentation: I am trying to give you an aesthetic account of media life perspective – telling a good/harmonious story – I am alos trying to do this within the set limits of this conference (within 10 to 12 minutes), which is an ethical account of the MLP.this position – ethical as well as aesthetic, praxeological as well as ontological and epistemological – is what we see as the solution to the so-called “emptiness” of our hypercommunication: the position of the super-observerthe super-observer is a solution to Luigi Pirandello’s dilemma that every human being shares: we cannot see ourselves live. however, in our current media life, we CAN. we can, because media make visible what is invisiblelike art, as Merleau-Ponty observed, media put at a distance what is otherwise too close: and today this means: our lifeworld, ourselves.
In such a realm of existential absurdity, where could freedom lie? Flusser argues that photographers, especially experimental photographers -and in Leonardo we can surely understand this to include all of us working in the field between science, art and technology -are the key. Those who play in and with the terms image, apparatus, program and information in the effort to produce the unexpected are playing against the camera, and against all apparatuses bedded in it. That is the meaning of freedom in the photographic universe.
aim of education is radical transformationempowermentdialogueproblems and solutionsreflection and actionno education is neutral