I'm pretty sure that all of you received the email from Sian, but just to refresh your memory: this week there is no class, nor tutorial.
If you really can't wait to see me or James for some reason just feel free to email us.
Have a good weekend.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Thursday, 5 February 2009
Nationalism
DISCLAIMER: The course staff, and SOAS as a whole do not mean to support or advertise the opinions expressed in these videos and/or the individuals expressing them. The video material has been posted for illustrative purposes only.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Question
Do you agree with Smith’s definition of myth (p.2: ‘myths are neither illusions nor mere legitimations, they may perhaps be regarded as widely believed tales told in dramatic form, referring to past events but serving present purposes and/or future goals’). Would it apply to myths more generally or just to nationalist myths? How does it apply to his characterisation of instrumentalist approaches to the study of nationalism as a ‘myth of the modern nation’? Do you agree that the instrumentalist approach should be rejected on the grounds that it does not explain the deeper ethnic roots of nationalism or is Smith constructing yet another myth? What would this myth be?
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
ubuweb
hello.
Though this might be of interest to the group.
www.ubuweb.com
Archive of some really good film, video and audio. One of my favourites is Island Song by Charlemagne Palestine. He straps a video camera to his head and drives a motorbike around an island whilst chanting "gotta get me outta here" and harmonizing with the engine. enjoy.
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Question
In what ways do you think that scholarly demythologisation is in fact a form of mythologization? How does the difference between Jones and Newton demonstrate the difficulties that Enlightenment rationalism had with 'mythic materials'? What does this tell us about rationalism? Do you agree with Lincoln that we need to recognize discriminatory tendencies implicit in scholarship about myth?
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Tariq Ali builds on Said's analysis
Sorry bout the wobbly filming-i was trying to juggle 2 camera's!
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Links to Parts One of some Adam Curtis films
The Power of Nightmares:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2798679275960015727&ei=J0O2SazULpLO2QLwiYSNBA&q=the+power+of+nightmares&hl=en
Century of the Self:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151&ei=zIR4SYH-AYeGjAKdp6izCQ&q=century+of+the+self&hl=en
The Living Dead:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1758338679527790685&hl=en
The Trap:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085&ei=8YR4Se_1N5PSjgKmzbilDw&q=the+trap&hl=en
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2798679275960015727&ei=J0O2SazULpLO2QLwiYSNBA&q=the+power+of+nightmares&hl=en
Century of the Self:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151&ei=zIR4SYH-AYeGjAKdp6izCQ&q=century+of+the+self&hl=en
The Living Dead:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1758338679527790685&hl=en
The Trap:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085&ei=8YR4Se_1N5PSjgKmzbilDw&q=the+trap&hl=en
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Question
i know, I'm late with this:
In what ways does folklore, at least as conceived by Herder, promote patriarchal scripts? Is the 'Volk' a patriarchal concept? If so, why and how? What other subtexts might there be to Herder's ideas? Finally, is Romanticism gendered and what might the implications be for our understanding of it if it is?
Tutorial Questions
In what ways does folklore, at least as conceived by Herder, promote patriarchal scripts? Is the 'Volk' a patriarchal concept? If so, why and how? What other subtexts might there be to Herder's ideas? Finally, is Romanticism gendered and what might the implications be for our understanding of it if it is?
Saturday, 17 January 2009
Critical Reflections (Johnathan Crary)
'For all the claims that our contemporary technological culture constitutes a decisive exceeding of modernity, it is striking how much critical writing on virtual reality, cyberspace, and interactive computer networks is riddled with enduring myths of modernization. In particular, there continues to be a powerful and reciprocal relation between discourses on technology and themes of universality and emancipation, and this is especially so in work that seeks to dramatize how epochal cultural shifts are driven by technological "revolutions." Even analyses of the most local and subjective technological effects so often, inadvertently or not, are universalizing in their assumptions about technological change and at the same time uncritically presume a direct relation, if not a coincidence, between new technological capabilities and possibilities for social progress.
Much of the preoccupation with VR and cyberspace is merely a sign that we are at another of those recurring moments in the 20th century when one of the masks of political failure and paralysis is an eager avowal of the transformative force and cultural centrality of technological innovation. Many evocations of an emerging "on-line" world assume as a matter of course, or else never question, that a more or less uniform and available information and communication culture is now being installed globally. Generalizing language of the following sort is depressingly pervasive: "In the near future we may all be on-line." Beyond the curt and brutal exclusions of the words "we" and "all," this class of statement, in its sweeping untruth, resonates with both a complacent faith in the certainty of modernization and a banal anticipation of its posthistorical fulfillment. That Western patterns of technological consumption could ever be extended to a world of now six, soon ten billion people boggles the most elementary economic, not to mention ecological, common sense. The inescapable yet continually evaded truth is that participation in the emerging information, imaging, and communications technologies will never (in the meaningful future) expand beyond a minority of people on this planet. Before supposing "we" will "all" soon be in cyberspace, consider an isolated statistic: less than 20 percent of the world's population today have telephones.(1) Despite relentless claims that the new computer networks are somehow egalitarian, in the next half century somewhat fewer than that 20 percent are likely ever to have economic access to the capabilities of these systems. An argument for a higher estimate would depend on projected growth rates that are historically unprecedented and are unsupported by even the rosiest long-range economic forecasts. To avoid misunderstanding, my argument here is not for or against any given technological arrangement. Rather, it is against the fictions, mystifications, bad faith, and worse in critical analyses that ignore the immensity, and the violence, of this disequilibrium. For our new electronic communities and digital subjectivities, whatever their local value and however subversive they might seem, are also part of an intensifying process of global polarization, segregation, and impoverishment.
The cyberspace mirage of a fiber-optically unified humanity interacting electronically became a charged set of images and terms just as events in the '80s were disclosing an increasingly striated world--a world in which a mosaic of expanding populations and depleted localities has only obsolete or fractured routes, if any at all, into the planetary net of telematics. During the last few years this bifurcation has taken shape more clearly: the stream of technological breakthroughs and of structural and commercial innovations in communications, biotechnology, and image- and information-processing within certain markets and territories will coexist relatively easily with escalating social barbarism, famine, plague, and fascism. The sleek cyberdream of a collapsed global surface of instantaneity and dematerialization persists only by erasing the waking actuality of a world that is increasingly unlivable for most of its inhabitants. Some critics have celebrated the advent of an era of "generalized communication" in the belief that new technologies will open up a multiplicity of "local rationalities," a multicultural world in which ethnic, sexual, religious, and other minorities would all have voices. But such a multicentered pluralism would depend on the universalizing and impossible idea of a relatively even distribution of technological culture. Instead, we have a global division in which a small sector of the world's population is acquiring increasingly potent, supple forms of technological expression while the majority continue to inhabit radically dissimilar "off-line" spaces and temporalities (or machinic "creolizations" that will never mesh on equal terms with the most powerful networks).
//
With the growth of telecommunications and information systems in the West, Japan, and elsewhere (along with the corporate scramble to control and reorganize this arena of exchange), what used to be thought of as "consumption" is increasingly synonymous with "communication." Within this field, where "interactivity" is a new word for "shopping," it is becoming harder to distinguish effective resistance from what are merely alternate fashions of consumption. The "grand narratives" and authoritarian perspectives may to some extent have collapsed, but the new proliferation of voices, truths, and subject positions has as much to do with the logic of an electronic marketplace as with the inception of any new public sphere.
A valuable achievement of some recent work on technology has been to demonstrate how thoroughly new machinic arrangements have become dynamic components of the user's subjectivity. An emerging universe of reference and affect derived from E-mail, Internets, cellular phones, medical imaging, multimedia, hypertext, computer sex, and so on is modifying all levels of social exchange, desire, and memory, and is thus transforming a whole set of assumptions about what it means to be "human." It is not a question of a decisive rupture but rather of an incremental accumulation of habits, patterns, and relations whose sedimentation must eventually constitute an environment so unfamiliar as to effectively preclude significant interchange with those outside or remote from the spaces and temporalities of these new milieus. Nor is it a question of some new, monolithic model of the human but of a proliferation of many hybrid, often interconnected modes of subjectivity. What is crucial about the experiential nature of technological culture in the West is its layered and patchwork texture. It is an uneasy mix of new and older perceptual modalities--for example, of itineraries and durations within zones of Euclidian space continually interspersed with the shifting dimensions of digital and video simulation. Late-capitalist material life comprises immense numbers of ephemeral "micro-worlds" that are at once seamlessly connected but also piercingly disjointed.
The consequences of unequal exchange and development are manifested not only in political and economic crisis but, perhaps just as important, in the phenomenon of radically dissimilar perceptual and cognitive lifeworlds. The north/south or center/periphery split (wherever those peripheries might be) needs to be examined in terms of the psychic and social hierarchies being created by extreme disparities in the machinic arrangements that constitute everyday life. For example, some current research in the neurosciences suggests that prolonged use of new image technologies will produce physical remappings of neural connections in the brain. When one considers what is on the near horizon in medicine in terms of unequal access to new kinds of prosthetic, transplant, genetic-selection, and longevity medical treatments, the prospect is for medicobiological elites and castes of a sort unimaginable even in the most archaic premodern societies. But when faced with the possibility of a global disequilibrium heightened by such unbridgeable perceptual and cognitive divides, many, including some who champion "difference," and the idea of the human as a construction, fall back onto a "family of man" essentialism or the quasi-transcendent notion of a communicative rationality. Along with the assumption that access to communication and information technologies will coincide with emancipatory social praxis goes the idea that inner and outer peripheries both desire and will benefit from increasing technological penetration. Samir Amin and others have shown starkly how this is Eurocentrism at its worst--that is, it is a question of capitalism proposing and promoting a homogenization of the world that is structurally impossible to achieve. Once the "logic" of this process is accepted, moreover, what follows only perpetuates and intensifies unequal relations. Here is the familiar pattern of purporting to solve "underdevelopment" by emulating Western levels of modernization, even though the possibility of "catching up" is doomed from the start.
//
These fantasies of development are nourished by an acquiescence to the fictions that specific technological apparatuses are "empowering." Take the personal computer--how often we hear the legends of its hacker origins, and of its allegedly antiauthoritarian and decentralizing role. Rarely, though, do we hear that most people who use PCs do so within a regime of machinic subjection and surveillance as rigid and deadening as the most extreme Taylorist production setup. And this is hardly likely to change as the PC becomes a component of the "virtual workplace." Much critical thinking of the last decades has been nourished by various post-1968 notions that power is its own dupe, that it produces its own modes of opposition, that any space of domination always contains its own outside. However valuable these ideas continue to be, they have also deteriorated into formulaic alibis for political resignation and have led to silly overestimations of the spaces of resistance within media culture. For example, in the critique of television, most discussion is structured around themes of communication, narrative, ideology criticism, and semiotic codes. What rarely occurs is a parallel understanding of television as a set of techniques of the body, of strategies of immobilization and separation, of methods for the production and disciplining of attention, for the fixing and narrowing of the range of consciousness. Obviously television is not a system that is exercised on behalf of some consistent authority or center, but it is a powerful constellation of interlocking effects, including addiction and control. But in part because of criticism that refurbishes nostalgic notions of popular culture (posing certain kinds of TV viewing as acts of resistance, and Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue as facilitators of a new, participatory public sphere), some types of statement about television are effectively excluded from much critical discourse.
One of the most difficult tasks facing us today is to imagine strategies of living and acting that may well be within the terrain of the image and information marketplace but that are discerning and mobile enough to identify and elude its ever changing consumerist and productivist imperatives. Part of what is needed is to conceptualize technological culture in terms of the larger, turbulent geographies and flows in which it is embedded, and to realize that the actual and potential violence of global polarization will have more of an impact on the future of our material lifeworld than anything we assume to be internal to a process of technological change.
//
It is more and more crucial to challenge fraudulent neofuturist visions of a "wired" world. If new social ecologies (to use Felix Guattari's term) or novel convergences of the biological and the mechanic are ever to flourish independently of the market's laws of equivalence and exchange, they will emerge only through the creation of ways of listening to and learning from that majority of voices and bodies that are outside the circuits of compulsory communication and "augmented" realities.'
1. "Telecommunications," The Economist, 23 October 1993, p. 5.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Jonathan Crary "Critical reflections". ArtForum. . FindArticles.com. 09 Jan. 2009.
Much of the preoccupation with VR and cyberspace is merely a sign that we are at another of those recurring moments in the 20th century when one of the masks of political failure and paralysis is an eager avowal of the transformative force and cultural centrality of technological innovation. Many evocations of an emerging "on-line" world assume as a matter of course, or else never question, that a more or less uniform and available information and communication culture is now being installed globally. Generalizing language of the following sort is depressingly pervasive: "In the near future we may all be on-line." Beyond the curt and brutal exclusions of the words "we" and "all," this class of statement, in its sweeping untruth, resonates with both a complacent faith in the certainty of modernization and a banal anticipation of its posthistorical fulfillment. That Western patterns of technological consumption could ever be extended to a world of now six, soon ten billion people boggles the most elementary economic, not to mention ecological, common sense. The inescapable yet continually evaded truth is that participation in the emerging information, imaging, and communications technologies will never (in the meaningful future) expand beyond a minority of people on this planet. Before supposing "we" will "all" soon be in cyberspace, consider an isolated statistic: less than 20 percent of the world's population today have telephones.(1) Despite relentless claims that the new computer networks are somehow egalitarian, in the next half century somewhat fewer than that 20 percent are likely ever to have economic access to the capabilities of these systems. An argument for a higher estimate would depend on projected growth rates that are historically unprecedented and are unsupported by even the rosiest long-range economic forecasts. To avoid misunderstanding, my argument here is not for or against any given technological arrangement. Rather, it is against the fictions, mystifications, bad faith, and worse in critical analyses that ignore the immensity, and the violence, of this disequilibrium. For our new electronic communities and digital subjectivities, whatever their local value and however subversive they might seem, are also part of an intensifying process of global polarization, segregation, and impoverishment.
The cyberspace mirage of a fiber-optically unified humanity interacting electronically became a charged set of images and terms just as events in the '80s were disclosing an increasingly striated world--a world in which a mosaic of expanding populations and depleted localities has only obsolete or fractured routes, if any at all, into the planetary net of telematics. During the last few years this bifurcation has taken shape more clearly: the stream of technological breakthroughs and of structural and commercial innovations in communications, biotechnology, and image- and information-processing within certain markets and territories will coexist relatively easily with escalating social barbarism, famine, plague, and fascism. The sleek cyberdream of a collapsed global surface of instantaneity and dematerialization persists only by erasing the waking actuality of a world that is increasingly unlivable for most of its inhabitants. Some critics have celebrated the advent of an era of "generalized communication" in the belief that new technologies will open up a multiplicity of "local rationalities," a multicultural world in which ethnic, sexual, religious, and other minorities would all have voices. But such a multicentered pluralism would depend on the universalizing and impossible idea of a relatively even distribution of technological culture. Instead, we have a global division in which a small sector of the world's population is acquiring increasingly potent, supple forms of technological expression while the majority continue to inhabit radically dissimilar "off-line" spaces and temporalities (or machinic "creolizations" that will never mesh on equal terms with the most powerful networks).
//
With the growth of telecommunications and information systems in the West, Japan, and elsewhere (along with the corporate scramble to control and reorganize this arena of exchange), what used to be thought of as "consumption" is increasingly synonymous with "communication." Within this field, where "interactivity" is a new word for "shopping," it is becoming harder to distinguish effective resistance from what are merely alternate fashions of consumption. The "grand narratives" and authoritarian perspectives may to some extent have collapsed, but the new proliferation of voices, truths, and subject positions has as much to do with the logic of an electronic marketplace as with the inception of any new public sphere.
A valuable achievement of some recent work on technology has been to demonstrate how thoroughly new machinic arrangements have become dynamic components of the user's subjectivity. An emerging universe of reference and affect derived from E-mail, Internets, cellular phones, medical imaging, multimedia, hypertext, computer sex, and so on is modifying all levels of social exchange, desire, and memory, and is thus transforming a whole set of assumptions about what it means to be "human." It is not a question of a decisive rupture but rather of an incremental accumulation of habits, patterns, and relations whose sedimentation must eventually constitute an environment so unfamiliar as to effectively preclude significant interchange with those outside or remote from the spaces and temporalities of these new milieus. Nor is it a question of some new, monolithic model of the human but of a proliferation of many hybrid, often interconnected modes of subjectivity. What is crucial about the experiential nature of technological culture in the West is its layered and patchwork texture. It is an uneasy mix of new and older perceptual modalities--for example, of itineraries and durations within zones of Euclidian space continually interspersed with the shifting dimensions of digital and video simulation. Late-capitalist material life comprises immense numbers of ephemeral "micro-worlds" that are at once seamlessly connected but also piercingly disjointed.
The consequences of unequal exchange and development are manifested not only in political and economic crisis but, perhaps just as important, in the phenomenon of radically dissimilar perceptual and cognitive lifeworlds. The north/south or center/periphery split (wherever those peripheries might be) needs to be examined in terms of the psychic and social hierarchies being created by extreme disparities in the machinic arrangements that constitute everyday life. For example, some current research in the neurosciences suggests that prolonged use of new image technologies will produce physical remappings of neural connections in the brain. When one considers what is on the near horizon in medicine in terms of unequal access to new kinds of prosthetic, transplant, genetic-selection, and longevity medical treatments, the prospect is for medicobiological elites and castes of a sort unimaginable even in the most archaic premodern societies. But when faced with the possibility of a global disequilibrium heightened by such unbridgeable perceptual and cognitive divides, many, including some who champion "difference," and the idea of the human as a construction, fall back onto a "family of man" essentialism or the quasi-transcendent notion of a communicative rationality. Along with the assumption that access to communication and information technologies will coincide with emancipatory social praxis goes the idea that inner and outer peripheries both desire and will benefit from increasing technological penetration. Samir Amin and others have shown starkly how this is Eurocentrism at its worst--that is, it is a question of capitalism proposing and promoting a homogenization of the world that is structurally impossible to achieve. Once the "logic" of this process is accepted, moreover, what follows only perpetuates and intensifies unequal relations. Here is the familiar pattern of purporting to solve "underdevelopment" by emulating Western levels of modernization, even though the possibility of "catching up" is doomed from the start.
//
These fantasies of development are nourished by an acquiescence to the fictions that specific technological apparatuses are "empowering." Take the personal computer--how often we hear the legends of its hacker origins, and of its allegedly antiauthoritarian and decentralizing role. Rarely, though, do we hear that most people who use PCs do so within a regime of machinic subjection and surveillance as rigid and deadening as the most extreme Taylorist production setup. And this is hardly likely to change as the PC becomes a component of the "virtual workplace." Much critical thinking of the last decades has been nourished by various post-1968 notions that power is its own dupe, that it produces its own modes of opposition, that any space of domination always contains its own outside. However valuable these ideas continue to be, they have also deteriorated into formulaic alibis for political resignation and have led to silly overestimations of the spaces of resistance within media culture. For example, in the critique of television, most discussion is structured around themes of communication, narrative, ideology criticism, and semiotic codes. What rarely occurs is a parallel understanding of television as a set of techniques of the body, of strategies of immobilization and separation, of methods for the production and disciplining of attention, for the fixing and narrowing of the range of consciousness. Obviously television is not a system that is exercised on behalf of some consistent authority or center, but it is a powerful constellation of interlocking effects, including addiction and control. But in part because of criticism that refurbishes nostalgic notions of popular culture (posing certain kinds of TV viewing as acts of resistance, and Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue as facilitators of a new, participatory public sphere), some types of statement about television are effectively excluded from much critical discourse.
One of the most difficult tasks facing us today is to imagine strategies of living and acting that may well be within the terrain of the image and information marketplace but that are discerning and mobile enough to identify and elude its ever changing consumerist and productivist imperatives. Part of what is needed is to conceptualize technological culture in terms of the larger, turbulent geographies and flows in which it is embedded, and to realize that the actual and potential violence of global polarization will have more of an impact on the future of our material lifeworld than anything we assume to be internal to a process of technological change.
//
It is more and more crucial to challenge fraudulent neofuturist visions of a "wired" world. If new social ecologies (to use Felix Guattari's term) or novel convergences of the biological and the mechanic are ever to flourish independently of the market's laws of equivalence and exchange, they will emerge only through the creation of ways of listening to and learning from that majority of voices and bodies that are outside the circuits of compulsory communication and "augmented" realities.'
1. "Telecommunications," The Economist, 23 October 1993, p. 5.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Jonathan Crary "Critical reflections". ArtForum. . FindArticles.com. 09 Jan. 2009.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Question
To what extent do you think Tacitus' text provide German nationalists with a 'usable past'? Do they constitute evidence for a 'golden age' of ancient German nobility? Do you agree with Smith that nations need a 'golden age' and that its verifiability is necessary? How does verifiability relate to authenticity? What are some of the problems with the claims to a golden age?
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
Orientalism
I'm sure that as the good SOAS students you are you know this book by heart by now, but still I think these video interviews are a pretty good overview of Said's work. Plus as I said many times before, its good when you get to see and hear a writer.
Poor Edward is probably rolling in his grave dunring these troubled times.
Poor Edward is probably rolling in his grave dunring these troubled times.
Monday, 12 January 2009
Internet and Teaching
You are aware of my passion with internet-"based" means of spreading culture (see Wikipedia, see iTunesU). Just to prove that I'm not the only one, this is Chris Anderson's reply to the EDGE annual question 2009: 'What will change Everything?".
To give you a reason to be interested at all in all this (as if it was necessary...): I believe that a case-study essay on the mythmaking powers of the web would be a great idea.
A WEB-EMPOWERED REVOLUTION IN TEACHING
Today when we think of the world's teeming billions of humans, we tend to think: overpopulation, poverty, disease, instability, environmental destruction. They are the cause of most of the planet's problems.
What if that were to change? What if the average human were able to contribute more than consume? To add more than subtract? Think of the world as if each person drives a balance sheet. On the negative side are the resources they consume without replacing, on the positive side are the contributions they make to the planet in the form of the resources they produce, the lasting artifacts-of-value they build, and the ideas and technologies that might create a better future for their family, their community and for the planet as a whole. Our whole future hangs on whether the sum of those balance sheets can turn positive.
What might make that possible? One key reason for hope is that so far we have barely scraped the surface of human potential. Throughout history, the vast majority of humans have not been the people they could have been.
Take this simple thought experiment. Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same in-built-but-unlocked abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the contribution they made? Of course not. They would never have received the education and encouragement it took to achieve what they did. Instead they would have simply lived out a life of poverty, with perhaps an occasional yearning that there must be a better way.
Conversely, an unknown but vast number of those grinding out a living today have the potential to be world-changers... if only we could find a way of unlocking that potential.
Two ingredients might be enough to do that. Knowledge and inspiration. If you learn of ideas that could transform your life, and you feel the inspiration necessary to act on that knowledge, there's a real chance your life will indeed be transformed.
There are many scary things about today's world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences.
Driving this unexpected phenomenon is the fact that the physical cost of distributing a recorded talk or lecture anywhere in the world via the internet has fallen effectively to zero. This has happened with breathtaking speed and its implications are not yet widely understood. But it is surely capable of transforming global education.
For one thing, the realization that today's best teachers can become global celebrities is going to boost the caliber of those who teach. For the first time in many years it's possible to imagine ambitious, brilliant 18-year-olds putting 'teacher' at the top of their career choice list. Indeed the very definition of "great teacher" will expand, as numerous others outside the profession with the ability to communicate important ideas find a new incentive to make that talent available to the world. Additionally every existing teacher can greatly amplify their own abilities by inviting into their classroom, on video, the world's greatest scientists, visionaries and tutors. (Can a teacher inspire over video? Absolutely. We hear jaw-dropping stories of this every day.)
Now think about this from the pupils' perspective. In the past, everyone's success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years' time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world's great teachers. She will get a chance to be what she can be. And she might just end up being the person who saves the planet for our grandchildren.
To give you a reason to be interested at all in all this (as if it was necessary...): I believe that a case-study essay on the mythmaking powers of the web would be a great idea.
Sunday, 11 January 2009
Catch up
Given the small number of people at last week's tutorial/lecture, I suppose that few of you actually did the reading for that week. It would of course extremely good for you to do it (since we'll get back to narrative identity again and again) but given that I somewhat doubt that and that it was a tricky one, you can find here a review of the book written by Butler with the same title (Giving an Account of Oneself) which does a good job in (briefly) summarizing the main points of the argument.
Thanks Fabio.
Thanks Fabio.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
