Blog #1

T.V. Reed’s, Digitized Lives:  Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era, is a 10 chapter text dedicated to Reed’s son, Hart, whom Reed acknowledges as the “best kind of digital native.”  My assumption about this dedication is that Hart is deemed “the best” because he approaches the tool with an open and critically inquiring mind.  This assumption is based in Reed’s preface where, quoting both Gertrude Stein and Theodore Sturgeon for emphasis, he makes it clear that he values questions more than answers.  In this spirit he asks the reader to, “ask the question that leads beyond what you think you already know…ask the next question that neither you nor I have thought of yet” (xiv).

The first five chapters of Digitized Lives make it clear that Reed does not imbue digital technologies with super hero or panacea qualities, but sees them as tools that smart people can use smartly or cruel people can use cruelly.   Basing his definition in the Greek etymology of the word, Reed offers that technologies are “practical things that extend our human capacities” (5).  He suggests that digital tools will and are changing human identities in “unimaginably diverse ways” (5), and that, as tools, digital technologies are only “as good as the imaginations of the people that will put them to use” (5).  Reed explains his belief that all knowledge is situated knowledge (entrenched in culture); and that “digital devices are never culturally neutral”(13); he makes it clear, however, that this is not an excuse to argue from a position of cultural relativism, but an attempt to arrive at a “deeper level of objectivity” (6).

The most dominant of the framing questions for the first five chapters of this book are, “Who benefits from digital cultures and who doesn’t”? (8), and “What can it do for us, but also what can it not do for us, what are its limits, and what do we not want the tool to do”? (11).  Reed asserts that the ability to analyze the technology, and our uses of it, is instrumental to answering the important over-arching questions (or at least instrumental to knowing what questions are next to ask). He organizes the analytical frames into four main categories: production, textual, audience/user, and historical (13).   From this framework, Reed proceeds to interrogate technology all the way from the material plane to the imagined ether by asking questions that range from, What kinds of waste do the gadgetries of our technologies generate, and how do pollutive metals and plastics affect the quality of people’s lives? to What kinds of people do our techno-diversions privilege and who do they exclude?  What is the world demographic relative to technological access?  How has the virtualization of spaces allowed for freer identities or less racialized or sexualized attitudes and environments?  And how has digital technology made it worse, or made no difference at all?

While Reed makes it clear to the reader that he will be overt about his biases (6), I did not notice a place in the first five chapters where I see this bias revealed (except perhaps with his unequivocal, and in my view, accurate, assertion about how media representations of women have set feminism back decades).  For the most part, I found the first five chapters to be an even-handed unveiling of the many areas we need to be investigating to see how these tools we have shaped are now shaping us (McLuhan’s concern pg 10).
 Speaking of our tools:  this below link is to an article about fake cell towers (my chosen meme to symbolize the drama of living digitized lives).  While the towers, which no one is sure who they belong to, are creepy reminders of the constant potential for privacy violations, what is far creepier are the overt assertions that they probably don't belong to the government or the military (despite proximity to military bases), because those institutions don't need to pretend anything by using mock machinery.  They have carte blanch to do whatever spying on the American people that they want to do.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-intercepting-162645809.html
This leads me back to the main issue in Reed's opening chapters that resonates most powerfully for me: "digital devices are never culturally neutral" (13).   What is the main message that is being sent by our culture's mediums?  To me, the message is that we (Americans), as bodies and minds, cannot be trusted.  This issue of trust: What does it mean to not trust yourself--your power to remember, to intuit, to entertain yourself with your own stories or songs, to relate inter-personally in elevators or airports, or to moderately consume food, drugs, material items?  How is this lack of trust in ourselves extending out into our intentions for what the police, the military, and the state are responsible for controlling?  (When there is time I will tell you what the field of Prevention Science is all about.) The Panopticon is upon us.  It is no longer a metaphoric vision of Foucault's.  It is a habitus we are wiring our minds to embrace.
If our technologies are only “as good as the imaginations of the people that will put them to use” (Reed 5), then as educators we have a lot of work to do.  Ours is the work of re-invigorating the American imagination so we can inspire our students believe in themselves more than in their  technologies. How to do best do this is something I will keep thinking about. :-)