legitimacy

The very fact that your eyes rolled (just a little bit) at the title tells you that it is absolutely true. So true its obnoxious to proclaim it. Perhaps cable news died when CNN made a hologram of  Jessica Yeller  and beamed her into the “Situation Room” just to talk horse race bullshit during the 2008 election. Or maybe it was as far back as 2004 when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and shattered the fourth wall by excoriating the dual hosts for destroying public discourse. The beginning of the end might be hard to pinpoint, but the end is certainly coming. Fox News had its lowest ratings since 2001 this year, but still has more viewers than CNN & MSNBCNEWSWHATEVERITSCALLEDNOW combined. Even if ratings weren’t a problem, credibility certainly is. Imagine if CNN stopped calling themselves the “Most Trusted Name In News” and used the more accurate, “A Little Over Half of Our Viewers Think We’re Believable.” By now it is clear that the zombified talking heads of cable news are either bought and sold, or just irrelevant. Cable news channels’ hulking, telepresent bodies have been run through and left to rot on the cynical barbs of political bloggers and just about anyone at a comedy shop’s open-mic night. This last series of screw-ups in Boston (here, here, here and unless it was avant-garde electronic literature, here) begs the question if cable news channels can even tell us what’s going on anymore. Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse. more...

This is the full Augmented Activism essay. The two parts provide prescriptive tactics for how to incorporate technology in activist work. Part 1 was originally posted here and part 2 was here.

Part 1

Academics usually do not talk about “tactics.” There are theories, methods, critiques, but we -as professionals-rarely feel comfortable advocating for something as unstable or open to interpretation as a tactic. In the latest edition of the Science, Technology, and Human Values (The flagship journal for Society for Social Studies of Science) three authors threw caution to the wind and published the paper “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey” [over-priced subscription required]. While the content of the paper is excellent, what excited me the most was their decision to describe their new “bag of tools” as a set of tactics. Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish take a moment in their conclusion to reflect on their decision:

We call our results tactics, rather than methodologies, strategies, or universal guarantors of truth. Tactics lead not to the true or final design solution but to the contingent and collaborative construction of other narratives. These other narratives remain partial and approximate, but they are irrevocably opened up to problematization. more...

One of the things I find most striking about discussion around technology’s “place” in schools is that adults treat technology as if it is a hot-potato bomb tossed around among young people.  In some senses, I think it is a bit of a ticking bomb: when used in schools, new technologies show that society’s norms about their “appropriate” use are still being formalized. Moreover, when new technologies are used in the classroom, they reveal how both teacher authority and the construction of childhood are themselves unstable – schools are charged not only with the role of enforcing appropriate use of technologies, but they must also maintain that they offer an ideal learning environment for children. In classical sociologist Max Weber’s terms, schools’ current use of technology reveal cracks in teacher legitimacy, fueling a panic whereby parents and teachers suggest these technologically-infused settings are contrary to the needs of young people.

In a recent series of op-eds in the New York Times, Greg Simon argues that a Silicon Valley Waldorf School, one of a number of esteemed and very expensive K-12 schools here in the U.S., is a model for education because it privileges creativity and imagination over the infusion of technology in classroom instruction.  For Simon, technology and childhood are dichotomous entities: technology serves only to debase kids’ need for free-spirited play. Moreover, because computer images, games, and ubiquitous technology dominate in the adult world, they serve as distractions to children and cannot “fit” in schools. more...