The seminar will take place in room 5.6a of Bosworth House on Wednesday 6 May 2009 from 12.30 to 1.45pm. As in previous years, a buffet lunch is provided and all staff and postgraduate students are welcome to attend.
To book a place on this seminar, please contact Suzanne Walker sswalker@dmu.ac.uk or telephone Ext 7780."This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity and finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting.Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship.The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting."Digital Citizenship" examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century."
The Wordle tag cloud matched my interpretation to some extent through how highly I rated particular key words that stood out from reading the paper. Some of the words, although not used frequently, stood out from my interpretation of the context in which they where used. The words raised where 'conspiracy', 'Marxian', and 'rhetoric-police',whilst decreasing 'reading','writing' and 'professionalism', which were used frequently. My interpretation of the paper itself was that it was written by a person who is enthusiastic about the 'reader-response theory' and is dismayed by the 'grand conspiracy' against it by 'the elite' scholars who do not see the value of such a 'popular' theory such as the one she supports. Is there a conspiracy against the Reader-Response theory? I cannot tell from reading just this paper. I could tell that Harkin is entrenched into the idea that Reader-Response is the theory that should be taught more, but the way the paper was written makes me immediately question the validity of this through the way the point was argued for. 'Reader-Response' was described as populist in the 1970's and 1980's and was, and 'still is' shunned by the scholarly elite whilst those elitists hold up more newer or more established theories. I feel that it was more about 'apathy' than 'conspiracy' that lead to the decline of reader-response. A theory that was once made popular by an enthusiastic 'underclass' and its figureheads declined because of its figureheads dieing off and not being replaced and driving the benefits home. No matter what its benefits, a theory still needs proponents who voice them, in the case of 'Reader-Response', the proponents left seem at first reading, more desperate by siting 'Elitists', 'Conspiracy' and 'Marxism' to forward their views rather than just focusing on the benefits of such a theory. This then results in my views, although not fixed, of disregarding the paper with my own 'apathy' as I was not really won with the argument. I also would like to agree with the points made by the previous blog posts by Paul and Rachel and the remarks they made about the theory and 'Common-Sense'.
"... ce qui m'a toujours préoccupé [...] c'est le problème de la signification des objets culturels."
"Dans la vie quotidienne, j'éprouve pour tout ce que je vois et entends une sorte de curiosité, presque d'affectivité intellectuelle qui est de l'ordre du romanesque."
Like Barthes, we're interested in exploring and questioning the perceived *naturalness* or *objectivity* of culture (its objects and codes). We talked about Barthes view (in "Operation Margarine") of French bourgeois culture. Interpriting an ad for margarine Barthes finds negatives or problems associated with a product (like margarine) are raised in order for its benefits to be revered which then outweigh any cons. Barthes explains that this technique is mirrored in discourses of religion, capitalism, and war. To put it simply, drawbacks are noted only as a way of further demonstrating the crucial significance the object or discourse has for culture.
"The episode always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine: 'A mousse? Made with margarine? Unthinkable!' 'Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!' And then one's eyes are opened, one's conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: 'Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!"
“Given that every object must occur in some state of affairs or other (2.0121), we know that given all states of affairs, all objects are given as well. But we have already seen that given the totality of objects, all possible states of affairs are given (2.0124). In other words, given all existing states of affairs, we can construct, by way of the objects they contain, all possible states of affairs — both those that exist and those that do not exist. It is in this way that the structure of reality is implicated in the structure of the world. For quite trivial
reasons, the structure of the world is implicated in the structure of reality. Of course, it still remains a mistake to identify the world with reality, but, in the end, this is something that can be set right without undermining the basic principles of the Tractarian ontology.”
"We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original."
"The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The explanation of a work is awlays sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us."
(where is the apostrophe?!)
Reading for next week: Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media.
"If I hold up a primary cubic form, I release in each individual the same primary sensation of the cube; but if Iplace some black geometric spots on the cube, I immediately release in a civilised man an idea of dice to play with, and a whole series of associations which would follow. A Papuan would see only an ornament." (1920)
