philosophy

I just realized that Cathy Davidson wrote this book! I read it years ago...

one dimensional thinking avoids focusing on the hard questions

The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."

danah boyd interviewed her mentor Henry Jenkins in a panel entitled Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins with the adoration of one who truly had learned a lot in her studies with him and was adept at maintaining the flow of questioning even after one of his incredibly long pronouncements on fandom, convergence culture, or the transformation of pop culture over the last twenty years. jenkins now finds himself at the vanguard of an intellectual movement studying the transformation of what was fringe culture into the mainstream and it’s democratic potential for positive social change. While not being convinced that the investments in new media do not bring their perils, he nevertheless calls for the continuos participation of fans (and thus users) in the build-up of the greatest parts of the web and their nascent potential for transformative action in the real world (although where this has yet occurred he didn’t state).