Too many topics, too little time » Information Society

Learning Infrastructures in the Social Sciences

buridan — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:04:24 +0000

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j71744175u47/?p=3f5a0f5dfb6f4525bd4edc98129977d1&pi=0
The final issue of the journal learning inquiry has been published.

The topic was Learning Infrastructures in the Social Sciences.

The contributions are:

Article
Introducing learning infrastructures: invisibility, context, and governance
Jeremy Hunsinger

Article
Virtual office hours as cyberinfrastructure: the case study of instant messaging
Jeren Balayeva and Anabel Quan-Haase

Article
Transforming learning infrastructures in the social sciences through flexible and interactive technology-enhanced learning
Philipp Budka and Claudia Schallert

Article
The Brisbane Media Map: participatory design and authentic learning to link students and industry
Christy Collis, Marcus Foth and Ronald Schroeter

Article
Learning to succeed in a flat world: information and communication technologies for a new generation of business students
Alex Ramirez, Michael J. Hine, Shaobo Ji, Frank Ulbrich and Rob Riordan

And one article not in the special issue, but included in the final issue:

Article
The educational (im)possibility for dietetics: a poststructural discourse analysis
Jacqui Gingras

Jason Nolan and I wish to thank you for your interest and submissions over the last few years.

The Political Economy of Information in an Age of Speed and Excess

buridan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:25:16 +0000

When information explodes, systems fail. In our current age, the ability to govern is predicated on the control and distribution of information. This paper confronts the inability to do that, it examines the techniques and systems of informational governance, notes some their defects, demonstrates the incapacities and draws the conclusion parallel to Virilio’s Information Bomb, we are due for a failure.

Informational power is a power of control, control of distribution, control of origination. It is a power of establishing borders, territories, and limiting access. It is predicated on assumptions of normality, and when the normal becomes too fast, too informationally productive, and generates enormous surpluses of capacity, like a bomb, the excessive power; the excessive information explodes. It breaks the boundaries, overwhelms the territory, and forces humans to develop new tactics for management, for governance. I argue that this is the state we are in, a state of excess, of being overwhelmed by information and power, because we have built an informational infrastructure based on speed and power.

There is no end in sight for the progressive development of this infrastructure. With terabit/sec speeds already in place, it is likely already beyond the limits of real human understanding, and we are beginning to see how it manifests itself as a tool of transformation or weapon of destruction of the institutions built on fordist and post-fordist understandings of information, such as music, movies, banking, which have strong informational ties, but this is just the start of a more pervasive creative destruction.

Faced with these issues and their immanent explosion, I look at the proposals for governance, for creating a sustainable political economy that governments are using around the world, such as defining information as artifacts and allowing patents, redefining copyrights, and developing international trade regimes surrounding information. I contrast the governmental systems with the growing cultural awareness of the issue and introduce the question: what if governments fail? how does society reterritorialize information, and what cultural toolkits seem to be arising in the face of speed and excess, such as open source, open content, and related movements that arise out of and restructure the excess into new cultural systems.

Powers of code: software cultures

buridan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:24:23 +0000

This panel is located at the interface between social studies of science and technology and the emerging area of ‘software studies.’ Code, from binary machine language to its readable form, takes on numerous powers in the information society. It structures, orders, and governs relationships between humans and amongst technologies, allowing certain actions while preventing others. While information technology and software development have been the focus of intensive study in STS work over the last few decades, the area of software studies has emerged in response to a proliferation of code or software-related cultural and political processes. These include wide-ranging changes in the character of media and communications, the mobilities of code across legal, institutional, economic, national and infrastructural boundaries, the proliferation of discourses of code in many different domains, and the way in which code has become the tool of a comprehensively transnational knowledge class identified in part by the relationship to code in everyday life.

The panel will coalesce around questions concerning the modes of change associated with software, computer code in various senses, and its adjacent practices. It conceptualises code as a hybrid, mobile construction of a technical-culture industry. Code is understood as a political and empowered social construction, which is not purely focused on the enablement of a singular group or social movement, but is systematically distributed across networks spanning nationalities and cultures. The increased visibility of code as cultural-technical entity, and as an object of public attention will be one focus. In the context of massive proliferations of unwanted or ‘junk’ code (viruses, operating systems, ‘bloatware’), the legal struggles over the difference between code as speech and code as technology will be a second focus. Finally, the panel will explore questions concerning the increased visibility of software or code (understood in a range of different ways) as cultural, political, economic and technical entities. Among questions to be addressed by the panel: how have code, programming, ‘cutting code’, hacking, scripting, etc. moved from technical practices carried out in ‘centres of calculation’ to generalised, popularised and politicised techniques? Do code objects challenge existing ontologies of technology and politics? How can we understand the mobility of code and coding practices without reducing them to standard accounts of ‘information society’?