Strange Correspondences and Grand Harmonies

Like D’Arcy Norman in his post “Bags of Gold”, I have been pondering over Gardner’s figures of speech. Over the 48 minutes the video lasts, I was constantly reminded of how “American” the pitch and rhetoric sounded to me and wondered how given cultural icons/inferences influence this particular edtech sub-culture discourse and practice and how they strengthen/weaken it.

In order to have a better picture of the whole , I have noted down the words by subtitling the video at Universal Subtitles (corrections welcome) and jotted the main points, which now I transfer to the wiki I opened for ds106 in case someone is interested in/has time to deconstruct it.

Instead of responding “on the fly“, I decided to “switch off” the blasting radio :-), engage in other things that were “programmed” to be done and , in the meantime, observe the reactions of others. Under the pressure to produce and consume, it is difficult to find slow time to sit back, watch and reflect.

David Gallagher and Professor Noise well-illustrate how all this personal buzz and the constant flow of recursive, self-congratulatory messages tend to provoke cognitive overload. In addition to this, they hardly bring to attention those who have a different perspective or do not post very often. Exposure by quantity of posts and the use of marketing techniques seems to be one of the attributes of Web 2.0, a piece of business jargon to hype up services over products. Some posts that have caught my attention:

Jabiz Raisdana remixes some of Justin Hall’s angst and breakdown from this hysterical video to illustrate “the dialectical relationship and tension between hope and desperation” that accompanies our exertions in art, at work and on the web itself…

Megan Eichenberg’s New Digital Storytelling Project, which records her grandfather’s stories and perspective on life being stretched or reshaped by Alzheimer’s Disease, is a great example of how digital storytelling moves away from narcissism.

Leigh Blackall’s post on Lucrative Teaching and illustration on Flickr has definitely hit a nerve, which is positive as it makes people justify their positions by looking deeper at the variables involved and discuss issues which are often not taken into account when you focus on technology alone without considering a wider social and cultural context. One cannot deny social media does encourage a cult of personality and profiteer marketing. Not saying this is the case of the people involved, but as Chris Lottmentions, the incident provided a teachable moment in critical thinking and is a useful reminder of what may happen when an “outsider” challenges the group’s mores.

So, almost two weeks late on the assignments, I decided to merge the second and third in this collage, borrowing ideas from O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0, what other participants have written, cutting up sentences from Gardner’s presentation : No Digital Facelifts, matching them to snippets of songs, finding pictures to illustrate them and finally reducing this to a 3.0 minute video snippet which I have posted to my server and YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwzyMOqIryQ

I have used Peter Shank’s Flickr CC to find photographs under a CC License, Audacity for the song and presentation clips, Open Office presentation slides with text converted into jpg to be thrown into iMovie and songs (mostly snippets of proprietary ones..argh..hope it’s fair use as it’s for educational purposes) as musical backdrop. Videos were converted into music and/or mp4 with Miro Converter. Also used Inkscape to remix Hokusai ‘s Koshu Kajikazawa net art.

Credits:
Gardner Campbell – No Digital Facelifts presentation
Songs (chronological order)

Star Spangled Banner – Jimi Hendrix (Woodstock Festival)
Moduless – The SlapHappy Bee III IP – 8bitpeoples
Music of the Spheres – Icarus at the Edge of Times – Philip Glass
Somewhere Over the Rainbow – Judy Garland
Running on Faith – Eric Clapton

Photos (two or three were on my computer for ages and cannot find the attribution link)

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