6: Mediated identities

Week 6 (October 2)

What is the relationship between our identities and the technological infrastructure which mediates them? How might learning about that infrastructure or playing with it in school create new possibilities for freedom?

Weekly video

Notes

Logistics:
- This week, the video is divided.
- Ethnographic fieldnotes assignment: details coming.
- In some cases, a little more detail would be helpful. Check out other groups' discussion reports.
Week 5 discussion reports
- Thinking about critical incidents:
  - These should be emic, not etic. That is, things that might be felt by the people, not things that we, from the outside, think they should be thinking about.
- Identity in school
  - Schools should be humble--realize you're only part of students' lives.
- Multiple identities
  - Coordinating situated identities
  - How can you make one curriculum culturally-relevant to all students?
    - TikTok in particular is likely a common ground and you could incorporate ideas of being a good digital citizen into this kind of project.
- What is the difference between identity-in-computing and identity-with-computing?
- Counterstory / counternarrative
  - Angela Reyes example
- Putting this into practice
  - Interdisciplinary computing: Feels important, but how would this work?
  - No teacher has ever used an identity-with-computing approach for teaching... I was never given free reign with a concept, but we were not at the level where we could have free reign.
    - Maybe the projects should come first?
  - We’re so worried about building identity in computing, but will students even feel comfortable building an identity in a classroom? There are few classes in my experience that I felt comfortable building an identity. Group-work is superficial. I built identity in other extracurricular activities through school, but not through class. I have never been in a class where I’ve felt comfortable building identity.
  - Is computer science the best place for identity-building?
Mediated Identity
- What is mediation? If we see identity as a performance, something authored, then we can say it's mediated because the creation happens with stuff. The stuff--the media--is what mediates identity. Concretely, our identities today are mediated by digital technologies. TikTok, FaceTime, SMS, are where you do you. How does the mediating stuff affect our ability to be ourselves?
Modernity and Technology
- What's the essential characteristic of the infrastructure? Modernity.
  - What is modernity?
    - "the values of order, regularity, system, and control"
      - Airports
    - “[A]gainst the backdrop of the Enlightenment, modernity is associated with the release of the individual from the bonds of tradition, with the progressive differentiation of society, with the emergence of civil society, with political equality, with innovation and change. All of these accomplishments are associated with capitalism, industrialism, secularisation, urbanisation and rationalisation.”
      - Arguments for CS
      - Digital serfdom
- Is infrastructure oppressive? Habermas’s opposition of “lifeworld” and “system,”
  - lifeworld is “a background stock of cultural knowledge that is ‘always already’ familiar." family life, everyday life, and civil society
    - Is authentic identity rooted in lifeworld?
  - System: "macro-level processes that stabilize complexes of actions via steering mechanisms"
    - "This apparently smooth, silent functioning of networks of networks, or systems of systems, constitutes an infrastructure of daily life, choreographing the members of modern societies in an intricate routine."
    - CP idea: Identity as interface.
  - Where do we go from here?
    - Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
- diSessa
  - Easier to operationalize? Closer to practical designs for technologies and education.
  - "Computers can be the technical foundation of a new and dramatically enhanced literacy, which will act in many ways like current literacy and which will have penetration and depth of influence comparable to what we have already experienced in coming to achieve a mass, text- based literacy."
  - Three pillars of literacy: material, cognitive, social.
    - First, there is the material pillar. That is, literacy involves external, materially based signs, symbols, depictions, or representations. The material pillar of literacy has two immensely important features: the material subsystems of literacy are technologically dependent, and they are designed.
      - technology and modernity.
      - design.
    - The second pillar of literacy is mental or cognitive. Clearly the material basis of literacy stands only in conjunction with what we think and do with our minds in the presence of inscriptions.
    - The third pillar of literacy is social, the basis in community for en- hanced literacies.
  - material intelligence: an intelligence achieved cooperatively with external materials.
    - Synonym for literacy
    - Possible way forward.
  - Back to Turkle's contrast between PC/Mac users: "users of IBM-DOS personal computers (PCs) tended to use modernist images in their effort to understand and relate to their machines (Turkle 1995). These users wanted detailed understanding and absolute control over their ma- chines." By contrast, users of Apple Macintoshes often used postmodernist im- ages in describing their machines. Early Macs were literally factory- sealed beige boxes that not only frustrated users eager to know what was “going on inside” (you needed a special factory tool just to open them) but also discouraged reductive understanding and detailed con- trol. Whereas PC users found satisfaction in controlling their machines directly, by typing inscrutable computer codes at the “command line,” few Mac users ever experienced this level of their machines. Instead of plumbing their machines’ conceptual depths, Mac users surfed the con- ceptual “surface” of their machines with mouse clicks, windows, and icons.

Focus Areas

I posted a video summarizing possible focus areas for our research this semester.

Readings

diSessa, A. A. (2001). Chapter 1: Computational Media and New Literacies—The Very Idea. In Changing minds: Computers, learning, and literacy (pp. 1–28). MIT Press. Note: Please read pp. 1-14, through the paragraphs on Turkle.

Misa, T. (2004). The compelling tangle of modernity and technology. In Misa, T., Brey, P., & Feenburg, A. (Eds.). Modernity and technology. (pp. 1-MIT Press. pp. 1-30). MIT Press.