Liberation Technology, Popular Uprisings, and Neoliberal Ideology

Plenary Session (3:30 PM in RH 446) - Liberation Technology, Popular Uprisings, and Neoliberal Ideology
Ulises Mejias, Ed. D. (SUNY Oswego)
(About the Plenary Speaker, Ulises Mejiasis an assistant professor in the new Media and Communications Studies Department at the State University of New York at Oswego. He earned a doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the communications, computing, and technology in education program. Previously, he was the director of learning systems design at Cornell University, where he was the principal architect behind the company's approach to online learning systems design and production, Learning Molecules. His research interests include Critical Internet Studies, network theory, and science, philosophy, and social studies of technology and political economy of new media. He is finishing a book tentatively Unmapping the Net: The Limits of the Digital Network as Social Template.)


[For this section, it was long and he moved very fast through the presentation, so I honestly don't remember much of it so I'm just going to type out all my notes verbatim with any side notes or comment in brackets.]




"23rd Annual Peace Studies Conference: Globalized Restructuring, New Media, and Mobilization" [Reads the first page of his Powerpoint. He obviously made this just for today, or at least tailored it for today.]
Context: - book -
     How do networks include_______?
Nodocentrism - distance between a node and something outside the network is infinite.
not a node = cannot be rendered in network

[I think he was trying to make a few points here. There were four, but I only had the time to write down two of them...]
1  -  the two faces of liberation tech
2 - monopsony the dominant tech why?
3 -
4 -
[Maybe those of you more learned in the subject will know what he was talking about there. Comment to fill in the blanks if you think you know what is suppose to be there! Thanks!]

Liberation Technology: how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development and pursue a variety of other social goods.
* "You don't control production on the news platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." - Jay Rosen, The People Formerly Known as the Audience (2006)

* Old Media      =            (Monopoly)            =     One-to-Many
* New Media    =     (Perfect Combination)    =    Many-to-Many
* New Media    =           (Monopsony)          =     Many-to-One

* "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer - you're the product being sold." [Either he didn't post who said it, or I didn't have time to write it down.]
Social Media increases the means of participation in society while simultaneously increasing inequity.

*Informational - Neoliberalism (Neubauer, 2011)
not possible without ICTs:
 - Transnational flexible production
 - Financial deregulation
 - Dismantling of Public Services

Neoliberal & ICT same ideology
 - Promise of unlimited wealth
 - Death of "old" institutions
 - Raise of Racial Individualism (Pressured to be neutral)
 - Belief in the inevitability of change; failure to imagine alternatives

* Communicative Capitalism (Dean, 2009)
(link: http://owni.eu)
"the materialization of ideas of inclusion and participation in info... global capitalism." [umm... I think I may have missed a couple words there?]:
 - Inequity through participation
 - Surveillance and Loss of Privacy (eg. Repressive Regimes)
 - Loss of Freedom of Speech
 - Suspension of Service
 - Crowd-Sourced State Security
 -  Disabling of Devices

Paranodality: the outside of the network is not empty, but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network
the peripheries of the network represent the only sites to unthink/unidentify to the network

[He has his own blog...]

This post was written by: Korean Lovers

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