Mediating a 'world on the brink': Lucas, my son, and a friend interacting with a 'climate change' visualisation at Bournemouth's Oceanarium
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I've been feeling quite dispondent about my relationship to technology and our networked media world of late. Through the timespan of this blog, this relationship has (d)evolved. An early advocate of free, participatory online culture, I've long grown disillusioned by the constant techno-babble of us technocrats, in our social networks. What are the benefits of being networked together 24/7 at a speed that refigures conceptions of spacetime, individually and communally? What of the hunger for the up-to-the-nanosecond-latest gadgets, apps and apis? What of the twitterverse? What of international technological divides? What of Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (Prensky 2001)? What of Digital Emmigrants? Must we be pulled by the centripetal force towards technological advancement?
This isn't a new loop on my chain of consciousness necessarily. As I wrote in my first blog post, 'Quit Staring at my Navel' v3.0, 'exploring the possibilities for activism online does not preclude that the way forward is not the refusenik's.' (15 October 2006) My exploration of techno-activism (of the value of online networks for activist purposes) seems (increasingly, if only partially) redundant, living as we do in a small Dorset market town, set on two rivers, surrounded by farmland on which we grow our own fruit and vegetables, with the New Forest to the East and the Isle of Purbeck to the South West. It seems redundant in contrast to other pleasures in my life: my local community, students, friends and family, communicating face-to-face[1], the sun, splashing in sea and river, camping, climbing trees, trampolining, touching hands, dancing to 78s, parties, gigs, festivals; my 'First Life'. Pickerell's take on 'Negotiating the tensions of techno-environmentalism', in Cyberprotest: environmental activism online (2003) outlines the quandary in which many of us find ourselves.
Is it just me, or do the tweets below from Yoko Ono give us clues about just how awry our networked culture has become? Context: I was ecstatic when Yoko Ono decided to return my follow on twitter (Yoko does appears to follow everyone that follows her, but that still put me several degrees closer to Lennon). After repetitive tweets of this kind, I stopped following her on twitter. I think she may have returned the complement. It's not just me: it was my partner that made me think about this form of online activism ever more closely.
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Yoko Ono, twitter, 1:08 PM Sep 21st [@yokoono]
Yoko Ono, twitter, 9:43 PM Sep 15th [@yokoono]
Yoko Ono, twitter, 10:12 PM Mar 24th [@yokoono]
My perspective on digital culture (d)evolves as my environment (d)evolves. Just as living in Brighton did beforehand. And so way back, to a time when the superhighway was the all-American-übermotorway, when webs were made by spiders and words beginning with an i-before-the-P were limited to a post-Alexander-the-Great battle, tropical American shrubs, morning glories, bronchodilators, antidepressants and a Latin pronoun meaning '(it/her/him/them)sel(f/ves)', revered by lawyers, Catholics and 'scholars' exclusively. The relations of i to x are relatively 
. E=mc². That this may be a truism, doesn't make it any less worthy of consideration.
What is my place in networked culture? Why teach interactive media practice when I question this premise: the advancement of the internet and associative cultures (hell, the advancement of technology) = a better world and society? How do I help my students carve out a future in interactive media in this context? Why teach wider media and cultural history/sociology/philosophy when I then re-think the goal of better-ing the world itself? Of course, this questioning of purpose is not helped by my diminished belief in 'Higher' Education and its bureaucracies. Jensen's dystopian but pertinent question in today's Z Space - Can journalism schools be relevant in a world on the brink? (16 September 2008) - reminds me that many of us are at odds with media education generally.
But moving towards techno-environmentalism itself may be the key. Several texts have recently helped me re-conceive my relationship with technology, none more so than Miller's incisive critique on e-waste and defense of techno-recycling, in 'Ecological Ethics and Media Technology' (2008). The crux of the matter: 'The eco-crisis presents media studies with an eco-ethical choice: either continue to document and assess the growing consumption of media technologies without understanding their ecological context, or advocate policies and influence polities to reduce the consumption of media technologies - not an easy choice for a field hooked on iPodpeople and PCers' (Maxwell and Miller 2008: 335).
Lest I get too caught up in the seriousness of our current 'world on the brink', as Jensen refers to it (16 September 2009), CreativeCloud's humorous (and haunting) ecotech parodies lighten the mood a little.
I continue to ponder on this, my thoughts only partially thought.
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[and rethought, revised 25 September 2009]
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[1] Even the use of f-2-f here seems understatedly turgid
