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.
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.
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