Technoculture(s)

Readers and writers. Users and designers?

When technologists and policy makers discuss about the interest of completely changing the way we are currently making technology known, I tend to stress the need for an active way of passing knowledge on to people. That is, to initiate processes that will result in active users, builders, designers not just mere passive user, receivers, consumers (link source in Spanish). 


(foto http://flickr.com/photos/jenwaller/)

This is why I was happy to come across this excerpt from a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. I hope their read/write analogy is enjoyed as a present by those who believe in active, practical, learning and skeptics alike. Let's see if it helps make understandable what we are after in places like Citilab. We walk with citizens along the path that leads into the kernel, the center of technology, of its code and what you can do when we you learn to write that code and to assess what it implies.  

In their set of interviews, philosophers Jacques Derrida and Bernard  Stiegler discuss how different kinds of media allow, more or less, certain  kinds of participation.

Their model is the alphabet, suggesting that “it  is hardly conceivable that the addressee of a book could successfully  read it without knowing how to write.”

Stiegler in particular anticipates that the increasing availability of video, audio and other software  will create a cultural politics in which people classically formatted as  receivers become agents of production. Derrida responds by differentiating between the ability to use something and knowing how it  works, a technical form of knowledge which he might be read to imply is superior.

(foto http://flickr.com/photos/joyoflife/)

Sunday Quote: Bauwens and Marx or the World and Manchester

Michel Bauwens in his keynote presentation at  UrbanLabs argued quite convincingly that peer to peer production modes represent a truly systemic change.

The next quotation may be taken just as a rethorical trick but nevertheless it is still useful to get a hint of the moment we are living, about what lurks behind the slit that peer to peer is opening as well as behind other metaphors that stem directly from the digital ways of working, from the digital culture in general.
 

"Marx looked at several hundred workers in Manchester and said, 'this is a new system'; today, we can look at thousands of software developers all around the worl and say this is clearly a new system of production".

Then he added:

"What is coming is neither capitalism nor communism nor socialism. It is commonalism: no one wants to go back to coercitive systems of production that have not work in the past".