week 5 A good resource

Time is flying and so are the students. Projects are rapidly coming together…

A great resource I came across enactment research:

Forum: qualitative social research

And this program sounds very interesting:

Philosophy – Narrative, enactivism and embodiment

 

Urban Sensing

Interesting I wonder what the implications of moving from participatory research to a participatory sensing framework are going to be.

Is decentralized sensing an emerging dominant hierarchical structure?

As the authors explain:

Persuading individuals to engage in such constant self-surveillance and then subsequently to
share that data pose nontrivial hurdles entirely independent of the privacy claims raised by third parties. This is so even in the world of JennyCam and YouTube exhibitionism.

In this context, services become mechanical choice making and negotiation devices that become responsible for protecting our privacy. And people say cybernetics is dead?

For these authors, the data commons are also a shift in ideology:

In going beyond science, urban sensing has the potential to generate a “data commons.” By this, we mean a data repository generated through decentralized collection, shared freely, and amenable to distributed sense-making not only for the pursuit of science but also advocacy, art, play, and politics. (…)

Whether we view these new developments as an outgrowth of the open source
movement or of the success of a few participatory models (Wikipedia, YouTube), the applications on the Web today and the way data is structured and shared are fundamentally different than they were a decade ago. We think of the evolution of the data commons as an extension of this movement, offering a host of new applications, new data types, and data
processing tools. As Natalie Jeremijenko contends, every sensor in the environment is a question. The data commons and citizen-initiated sensing will provide answers, pose new questions, and open new opportunities for public discourse.

The data commons resembles what we have previously called a public sphere [7]. In prior work, Kang and Cuff provided a minimalist definition of the public sphere with four principal attributes: the public sphere must be accessible to diverse members; provide opportunity for multiple uses; encourage some sort of (and not always political) exchange among participants
(in the case of a data commons, this implies both the sharing and consumption of information); and be recognizable as such a space. Although these attributes were used to describe physical realms and social practices, they can also be usefully applied to the data commons.

Their views that our political sphere is changing is shared by sociologists who see political consumerism as an emerging activist strategy.

They too see data tagging, indexing as emerging creative forms of engagement.

are data commons the technological evolution of participatory and collaborative practices?

 

Why these three articles?

Penny talks about the body time,

Hellsten, Wouters and Leydesdorff talk about data time,

while Cuff, Hansen and Kang talk about a hybrid version of time that combines both human and machine embodied time.

 

Multiple presents: how search engines rewrite the past

Well, here is a great example of pluralist theory in practice.

Not only does our culture now focus on the idea of pluralist perspectives, but now with synchronous information and communication systems, we are entering multiple timeframes.

As the authors explain:

‘the concept of a single time axis which is moving forward like an arrow is broken in the postmodern appreciation of a variety of time horizons in different social systems and for the different actors involved(Coveney and Highfield, 1990; Prigogine and Stengers, 1988).’

What a powerful shift. Time and space are now being redefined within a pluralist and relativist perspective.

These researchers introduce an interesting notion: that the culture of simultaneity of the Homo Interneticus relies on a balance between linearity and cyclicality.

As they explain, search engines are tied to the updating cycles of the web and the
internet, rather than to the historical development of its structure.
In other words, cycles replace linearity as the main structuring element. The notion of temporal hierarchy is shifting from linear to cyclical at the meta level, but one you enter a module of data, linearity allows us to understand the data.

The idea that search engines are a collections of extended presents that exist in parallel is fascinating to me as it implies that reality and therefore the notion of truth is relative to its context and one’s position within the cyclical structure of time. It also implies that conflicting views coexist within the network, where does the ideological battle take place? In the semiotic symbols they position on the network or in the indexing of their presents?

 

Simon Penny: mind-body relationship in a mediated world

Simon Penny’s position in this article reminds me of the transhumanists philosophy positions.

The crisis he articulates when he discussed our cartesian approach to media has lead to the emergence of new ideas pertaining to mediated communication. My research is starting to see the coexistence of multiple philosophies in networks.

The following diagram gives a sense of large categories that coexist.

Simon states:

‘The privileging of ‘mind’ over ‘body’, the abstract over the concrete, is a strong continuous thread in western philosophy, from Christian Neo-Platonism to Descartes and beyond.’
What is occuring in a globalized world is that other type of philosophies are starting to influence western thoughts. Asian philosophies and approaches are finding homes in experience-gaming theories. In these movements aesthetics and narrative structures emerge from the relationship of the entire human to another, let it be another human or mechanical being. All senses become part of meaning making.

Simon Penny also would agree that media represent specific ideological values. But the article shows its age in that contemporary thinking brings the idea of hybrid hierarchies, within a pluralist perspective. Social constructivists tend to argue that we adapt our values to emerging systems and through time create unique forms and systems appropriate to that environment.

Dualism versus pluralist

Penny argues that the dominant streams of that discourse are predicated on dualism and privilege the abstract and transcendent over the embodied and concrete. Looking within education theory, his point is echoed in constructivist learning theories.

Perry created a learning development model that identifies dualist models as the first satge of development within humans.

What is interesting is that the notion of depth in such learning varies from accepted definitions. He argues that the ability to make connections and establish relationships between various belief systems while being grounded in ones’ self is one of the final stages of learning, what he refers to as the commitment within relativism positions. Perry echoes Penny in that they both challenge dualism as a central paradigm. But they differ greatly in that Perry remains within a cartesian model of existence.

I would argue that his model is missing another stage, which is self-awareness within the body. I wonder what asian theorists have to say about that?

 

kac reading: shift in image

According to Kac:

The role of the image, Virilio says, is “to be everywhere, to be reality (19).”
He distinguishes three kinds of logic of images, according to a clear historical development. For Virilio, the formal logic of the image is the one achieved in the eighteenth century with painting, engraving and architecture. In traditional pictorial representation it is the composition of the figure that has primary importance and the flow of time is relatively irrelevant. Time is absolute. The age of the dialectical logic is that of the photograph and of cinematography in the nineteenth century, when the image corresponds to an event in the past, to a differentiated time. At last, the end of the twentieth century with video, computer and satellites is the age of the paradoxical logic, when images are created in real time. This new kind of image gives priority to speed over space, to the virtual over the real, and therefore transforms our notion of reality from something given to a construct. Virilio says that to some extent the lesson of the new technologies is that reality has never been given, it has always been acquired or generated. Our images never really duplicated reality, they always gave it shape. The difference is that previously a functional distinction could still be made on more solid grounds.

How does such a transition in time change the notion of documentary? I noticed some of you mentionning i your manifestos that documentary refers to a past event…. How does that apply to the new image Kac refers to?