Filed under: memory and forgetting
i’ve been thinking quite a bit about this view of social and collective forgetting for a proposal that i’m putting together on the current debate surround sexual predators and i’m strugging with it quite a bit. legislation like Propisition 83 aka Jessica’s Law (with similar iniatiatives in Florida, Wyoming, Iowa, Texas, and the UK) is contingent on the kind of surveillance, tracking, and data capture that leaves no room for collective forgetting. there has been growing discussion on the ethical and moral argument for forgetting (1, 2) but what i’m most confused about right now, in the case of sexual predator tracking to reframe the debate beyond the the view of forgetting, forgiveness, and clemency. i think this is just part of the picture. there are additional issues with regard to information overload with the burden of tracking, but how would one evaluate forgetting? forgetting, by nature disappears and so how do you identify traces of forgetting? does the anne galloways argument of “too much memory” or notions of “information overload” necessarily fit within this context? i don’t disagree with the the role of forgetting as a social and personal mechanism for change and growth however it remains unclear just how we would begin to put these frameworks into practice and research.
Filed under: information culture
in my bourdieu seminar today i had a vague epiphany about a lot of the discussions on social software environment. one of the ever elusive dialectics in social theory concerns the ongoing relationship between structre and agency; that is, how much of our decisions, and actions can be attributed to social, institutional structures versus our own volition and choice?
i got to thinking a bit and it seems that a lot of the current discussion surrounding social software (and a lot of the hype surrounding web 2.0 in general) is contingent on privileging individual action, in the spirit of “openness” and freedom. while i’m not opposed to these as values that we should stive towards however, this view has always made me a little uncomfortable it assumes that all of us using “social software” and “web 2.0″ tools as black-boxed agents.
while social scientists and philosophers still have not fully figured out this relationship between social structures and human agency in other domains (you have people on all accounts asserting one over the other, or trying to empirically measure how they interact with one another), nevertheless i think this view is particularly compelling within current digital culture as a lot of the rhetoric surrounding it tends to collapse the two altogether. i mean what does the “social”in social software really mean? does social in this way just mean an aggregation of individuals?
to stick my neck out there and offer my two cents: the social dimension of social software couples individual action and social structure, in a way that individual agency is reified…i mean, we’re still talking about ego networks here right? this still leaves that social question unanswered….there just seems to be this weird collapse of the two that’s still unclear to me. i feel that a lot of the current work in social networks and network theory more broadly is trying to get at this question…any answers?
Filed under: general musings
it’s been awhile since i have posted anything. christmas and new year went by in a blur. over the break, i moved and am now moved am living in koreatown and loving my new place aside for my douchebag building manager. i also went up to the bay for a spell, helped ryan move, went to a show, saw some friends, and now school has started again and i am extremely excited about my new classes. nevertheless, i still find myself struggling with disparate concepts across traditional library and information science work and post-critical social theory. there are fairly wide-ranging disciplines with their own internal tensions and i find myself repeatedly butting my head against these, let alone the disjunctions in trying to synthesize these broad swathes of literature. i recently came across this review of a book that discusses the limitations and struggles of doing doctorate work and needless to say it’s fairly bleak and stark.
not to sound like a total buzzkill, but i do see these struggles as necesarry to the intellectual space i live in, so that’s alright.
continuing with the self-help tip, here is a book that ryan got for me that is the bomb.
make like the kitty…
