School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe MIT Media Lab: techno dream factory or alienation as a way of life?( 2003)This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab's products to 'fill in the gaps' left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized 'chronoscopic' temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative 'start-ups', lead not to a world of 'diversity' as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.
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ItemNet results: knowledge, information and learning on the Internet( 2001)This paper considers the rapid uptake of information technologies in the higher education sector, in particular the increasing use of the Internet as a resource for academic research. It argues that very little fundamental research is currently being undertaken into the consequences of Internet research, and poses some serious questions that may arise unless serious efforts are put into assessing the nature of the process. The paper puts forward arguments indicating that Internet researched papers in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly devoid of reflexivity and criticality. The author puts forward the argument that in a worst case scenario, the higher education sector in the developed economies is producing not only a generation of students who lack ‘cultural literacy’ and the problems that arise from this, but over the long-term this will pose serious problems for the functioning of a healthy civic-democratic society.
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ItemTime and knowledge in the information ecology( 2002)This article considers the affects of neoliberal globalisation and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge within the university. More broadly, it argues that the nexus between globalisation and computerisation is creating an ‘information ecology’, a growing environment of interconnectivity that has speed and commercialism as its principal dynamics. The paper argues that such an environment is creating a new ‘knowledge epoch’, one that valorises, more than ever before, instrumentalised knowledge over critical forms, and is producing a society that is increasingly unable to think reflexively about the issues and challenges that confront an increasingly complex world.
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ItemLiquid space and time( 2006)This article theorises the effects of the mobile phone phenomenon upon the spatial and temporal dynamics of everyday life. It contends that more than any other connectable networkable device, the mobile phone transforms the experience of space and time for individuals and collectivities. Moreover, its importance seems set to become even more central as it rapidly transforms from simple voice-carrier to powerful communicating device that will allow the transmission and reception of increasingly rich data that includes video, Internet and data-processing uses. This transformation, I argue, serves to liquify time and space. The mobile phone, as a part of an array of networkable devices and applications that make up the ‘network society’, brings what David Harvey calls ‘space-time’ compression to new levels of intensity. In so doing it is shaping a new form of subjectivity – a ‘virtual self’ – that has the potential to either trap or liberate.