Week 1 – review
I’m curious about the rhizomatic nature of this course. In searching for an appropriate opening image, I happened upon the Rhizome Radar. It fired off connections with this course for many reasons including: the reliance on technology; the input of a physically disparate group of people; the visualisation of information.
Hand’s commentary on the political dimensions of digital culture (the promise of ‘social inclusion and empowerment, interactive citizenship, and participary democracy’ (p.16) and the threat of individualism and rejection of the state) led me to link into commentaries on the recent Arab Spring movement. The commentator I selected presented an alternative to the utopia/dystopia binary – cyberrealism – which seemed not to tell the whole story, perhaps presenting a more dystopic sense of ‘inevitability’ than the author intended.
The film review postings were a whistle stop tour of notions of digital cultures that Hand introduced, blended with ideas put forward in the Synchtube tutorial. I made connections to themes of digital culture in societal and economic spheres – sometimes bending the the themes to fit my readings of the pieces.
Finally, while watching a BBC documentary about the emergence of the railways in the industrial revolution and I was struck by the similarities in attitudes towards promise and threat of technology and in particular the view point of Carlyle. The struggle and tensions for the acceptance of technology into everyday culture seem to me to be timeless.
Steph, you might be interested in one of the EDC final assignments from 2011 – Carol Collins’ ‘occupy e-learning’ essay – http://occupye-learning.weebly.com
You remind me of the importance of the railways (the Berlin-Baghdad in particular) that were a factor in bringing about WW1 (German threat to British trade etc). And also AJP Taylor’s theory that the railway actually led to an unstoppable set of events at that time!
Technological determinism indeed!
Hi, I´ve a problem, I can´t watch the videos. I do not know that already and I enrolled synchtube however I still have the problem.
Can you help me please?
Hey Francia, are you on the EDC MOOC? If so there is a forum which may be able to help you with techie stuff.
https://class.coursera.org/edc-001/forum/list?forum_id=20