At a recent Annenberg Research Park Colloquium session at the University of Southern California, UCLA’s Design | Media Arts professor Peter Lunenfeld said that his graduate media design students, given the task of depicting the future, could only show apocalypse. “If you’re working with students who have the ability to render worlds, and they can’t imagine that world, we’re in trouble,” he argued, adding that while students may harbor personal utopias, social visions of the future are invariably dystopian. Lunenfeld dubs this “the vision deficit,” and argued passionately for educators to find ways to help students create a new imaginary, one that isn’t driven by fear and disaster.

We need to take seriously the significance of a vision of the future, not so much with regard to fantastic scenarios – the stuff of science fiction, which as we know, does play an important role in envisioning the future – but instead in terms of tangible, real-world realities. Why? Because when we talk about “the future” these days, we’re no longer thinking about a long, gently winding road disappearing into a distant horizon, but instead a window (or screen?) pushed up close against our noses. The temporal horizon has shrunk, and the future, as Bruce Sterling said recently at Reboot, is really about a transition happening right now. That transition centers on the shift of power as technologies become pervasive and increasingly portable, and at its most powerful, it’s a transition that can best be furthered through a tactics of technology, when people take their tools and use – or misuse – them to suit specific, and often urgent, needs.

Where do we see a tactics of technology? I see it all around me in Los Angeles, a city divided with regard to technology access, literacy, power and privilege. Examples? Here’s one: Mobile Voices is a participatory storytelling platform based on mobile phones that lets users take pictures and record audio with their phone, tag these with descriptions, and send them to a Web site (http://vozmob.net/). The users of Mobile Voices are low wage immigrant workers who are part of the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit organization serving low-income Latino immigrants. IDEPSCA partnered with researchers and grad students at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in an intensive participatory research and design process dedicated to finding out what tech needs these workers might have. Working together, they came up with a way for this group – so often talked about in the media but lacking an easy way to speak publicly for themselves – to have a voice. Using the often overlooked multimedia messaging service on most phones, even inexpensive ones, participants upload images and voice-over commentary, creating their own news, poetry, and critical analysis. In this way, the group found a way to mobilize an existing tool toward more expressive and potentially political ends with attention to the specific needs of the community of users.

Take Action Games is another LA-based initiative representative of a tactics of technology. The design collective best known for Darfur Is Dying, the award-winning serious game that raised awareness about Darfur in 2006, Take Action Games is currently working on a new project titled In the Balance: The Death Penalty Game, which examines the plight of youths subject to the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The project incorporates visceral documentary footage of a group of rural teenagers sentenced to life imprisonment into a multi-player game exploring the criminal justice system as it pertains to disenfranchised youths. The project is led by Susana Ruiz, who is a first-year student in the Media Arts + Practice Ph.D. program at USC, and her partner Ashley York, and reimagines the video game as a powerful and productive force for social change.

The Healthy City Project also deploys basic technologies tactically, working to support a better future. Using data analysis and GIS mapping techniques, the HealthyCity.org Web site (http://healthycity.org/) provides access to important information, including social services and demographic details, that can be mobilized by LA citizens who, in the past, lacked easy access to this information. Data traditionally analyzed by professionals can now be examined by communities, who are able to visualize and coordinate this material based on their own needs. This resource takes advantage of GIS mapping technology, but the brilliance of the initiative is not the tool but how it’s deployed, and toward what end.

These projects are alike in that they meld tools and needs; they represent the power of situational technologies, ones that strike a balance between needs and possibilities, refusing to fetishize technology in favor of letting users determine uses and creative desire.

And what about the future? As Sterling says, it’s now. And the vision deficit? Maybe it’s better to think less about a vision of the future and to think about a haptics – something embodied, performed, enacted, and brought into being through use. It’s mobile storytelling. It’s gaming for social change. It’s mapping your city according to your needs. It’s a tactics of technology, when users claim the tools as their own.

originally posted at http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=887

If the exhibit at Baylor's Mayborn Museum had it right, none of Leonardo's flying machines actually worked. The notebooks in which he sketched them were untidy, disorganized to the point of apparent recklessness. Sometimes he was so far off in terms of scale or proportion that one has to wonder what he was thinking. To cite but one example: how could a parachute too heavy to carry up a hill ever be tested?

Yet Leonard's breathtaking powers of invention and visual expression continue to inspire us. Such powers set the standard. In a way, they guarantee their own success, if not in their time, then certainly in the time that follows. If we take the long view, Leonardo's inventions did in fact work. All of his flying machines flew. His vision would not let us be satisfied with anything less. We created to the standards he helped to set, and that's one of the big reasons we remember him with gratitude, though I'm confident he was a pain in the neck to be around most of the time. Never content, always off in another galaxy, never facing facts.

If one thinks of Leonardo's vision as a kind of song, a music that challenges us to shed our mannered attention to the grinding and broken processes of our wonderless calculations, it is a music that may well shake us out of our grim and measured comfort zones.

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

In "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland," Yeats reflects on the hazards of vision. Sentimental? Only if the emotion is out of proportion to its object. And who is to make such a judgment? Is a cabinet of wonders or a rag doll a waste of time? Are all matters of consequence obviously so?

You see where this is going. Stubborn visionary optimism can seem pretty naive, even dangerously so. Perhaps it is both naive and dangerous, some of the time. But I will say that the better part of our highest accomplishments as a species has been driven by stubborn visionary optimism, insistent hopefulness of Engelbartian proportions. Half measures and incrementalism just don't seem to get us very far, certainly not when it comes to education. The "grammar of school" is simply too vigorous and resilient.

What am I advocating? Nothing in particular beyond  a commitment to the highest hopes and grandest ambitions. Within my lifetime I have seen things you people wouldn't believe: if not quite C-Beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate, then certainly wonders on a scale nearly as large. I type these words and send them to you in a blog-shaped bottle upon a sea of articulate connections that depends on daily miracles born of technological innovation. Many of those miracles need tending. Probably not all of them are sustainable, at least not in their present form. But I am grateful to live among them now and to be part of the effort to understand and use them in the central activity of any civilization: the transmission of culture, and the tools to modify that culture and innovate within it, through education.

Whatever we call this age we live in–the information age, the computer age, the network age–I think we do live in a great age, with the chance to be part of a world-changing moment. We may be forced in the circumstances of our various lives to work on smaller scales, but even a modest contribution may change the world if one is inspired by the vision of that possibility.

Sometimes in the middle of reading Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene, or after we've watched Citizen Kane or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control together, my students will turn to me and voice their incredulity that a human being actually made that thing, imagined it and realized it in conversation and collaboration with others, to be sure, but nevertheless in a way that only they could do, and that no one else would have dared. Sometimes, overcome with wonder myself at the vast accomplishment of these artists, I can do little more than shake my head and say, slowly, "You know, there are extraordinary people on this planet. You've just seen something of what our species at its best can do." And though I know these marvelous information and communication technologies we live with every day are fraught sixteen ways from Sunday, I believe they are also a kind of poem we have written together, a film we have made together, a medium that has enabled what Clay Shirky identifies as "the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race" (Here Comes Everybody). That increase happened because we wanted it to, because we have not yet found the boundaries of our ambitions for connection and expression. I have high hopes for the results of this increase in expressive capability, not because I am a techno-utopian (or any kind of utopian, for that matter), but because of what I have learned and will continue to teach of the great expressive accomplishments, in every discipline and domain, of humanity's history.

I believe I am called to such hopefulness, though there are many days that call sounds faint or ridiculous. You may have a word other than "vocation" for your sense of your own answerability to this moment. Either way, a great age beckons, and I'm glad we can answer together.

]]> http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/gardner-campbell/feed/ 7 http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/danah-boyd/ http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/danah-boyd/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:47:21 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/future/?p=8
by danah boyd (Microsoft Research)

It is easy to fall in love with technology. It is equally easy to fear it. In a setting like this Symposium, many of us fall in the passionate lovers camp, dreamily accounting for all of the wonderful things we've experienced through and because of technology. All too often, our conversations center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we're seeing can be explained away by issues of access. Push comes to shove, most of us know that there are problems with this model, but in a world filled with dichotomous rhetoric, it's easy to get into the habit of being the proselytizer in the face of fear-mongering.

I want to push back against our utopian habits because I think that they're doing us a disservice. Technology does not determine practice. How people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded. Those who are immersed in a techno-savvy, technophilic community are far more likely to embrace technology than those whose social world is shaped by other patterns of consumption and communication. People's practices are also shaped by those around them. There are cluster effects to socio-technical engagement. In other words, people do what their friends do.

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It's really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn't know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don't use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do. We each approach technology based on our own needs and desires and we leverage it to do our bidding. In this way, we actively repurpose technology as a part of engagement such that rarely does one technology fit all. Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you're polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently completed her PhD in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley.

Dr. boyd's dissertation "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics" focused on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. She examined the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and social relations. She was interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. This work was funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.

At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to work with companies and non-profits to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. This Task Force was formed by the U.S. Attorneys General and MySpace and is being organized by the Berkman Center.

Dr. boyd received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University and a master's degree in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She has advised numerous other companies, sits on corporate, education, and non-profit advisory boards, and regularly speaks at industry conferences and events.

danah maintains a blog on social media called Apophenia - http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

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