Call me Al: Alison Powell on Community and Technology

To my gentle readers . . .

. . if there are more than three of you. Yes, this blog is backwards. I began it as a place to publish the working paper you can read below, by chapter. But like most blogs it took on a life of its own. So, until the ever-patient and frighteningly talented flink reverses it, you will have to scroll to the bottom to read the new bits. That's what you get when the luddite builds the blog . . .

changing the world

I talked to two great friends yesterday. One is building water pipelines in Haiti; the other is starting to work for a human rights law prof on a project to help migrant workers in Quebec. At the same time, I am trying to develop the theoretical relevance of my thesis topic , which seems so far from this kind of direct, hands-on action as to be almost meaningless.

This is the burden: we know the world is a fantastically unequal place. If we have any sense of justice, we feel responsible for alleviating, in some way at least, that inequality (or guilty at participating in it). But for me, and I think for many people, this responsibility/guilt is frustrating. How to alleviate the inequality? I am not a lawyer, nor an engineer, nor even particularly skilled in much of anything. What to do? I have been wallowing in guilt so far, but this doesn't seem very productive.

So, as part of the beginnings of a new year, I resolve to find a way to make my own community a less unequal place. If any of you know of good volunteer opportunities for the verbose but unskilled, please let me know. And to my friends who are on the world's front lines, take heart. I am proud of you.

UP! To Provence

I am off next weekend to a hilariously titled conference: the UPFING! Actually, it's subtitled the EntreNet, and is a one of these "UN-conferences" where everyone is thoretically a participant. But the thematic looks interesting -- what happens in between the dynamics of "bottom up" and "top-down" and how do associative technologies play an ambivalent role in mediating these dynamics. Also, it's in Provence, which will get me out of the city.

In the rest of my life, I see a daily opposition between the rigidly bureaucratic structures imposed by the last vestiges of a French aristocracy, and the inclusive, chaotic "manières de faire" of people forced to live with a public service that is not interested in providing service but in providing stable jobs. With an unemployment rate of 12% there is enormous pressure to get in to the bureaucracy, and enormous stress for the rest of the people on the margins. So the tension between "top-down" and "bottom-up" is really lived, everywhere from the swimming pool the the post office. More on this later.

Is code beautiful?

This week, I thought a lot about beauty and sublimity in technological production. I am coming back to Winner's idea that the sublime is the moment of imagined potential but also the moment of imagined terror. Nuclear reactors and surveillance technologies hold this moment, the moment when the world will either be much better or much worse. But there is another kind of beauty, too -- one which I don't think I yet understand. The informational equivalent of the perfectly designed glass carafes at the Louvre, in the tiny hot room on the way to the Venus de Milo. The mysteries of computer code, embedded and enfolded upon itself.

My problem is how to see that as beauty - it is so abstract and distant. I feel almost that saying code is beautiful is like saying that the insides of a refrigerator are beautiful. Of course they are beautiful for those who know how a refrigerator works, but it is hard for us to consume them as beautiful objects in the way that we consume the carafes at the Louvre - as aesthetically lovely outside of their functional capacity. My question is, for those people who maybe sometimes read this blog but never dare to comment, how can we see that beautiful (or elegant) code is beautiful?

Media Policy - Publics vs. Celebrities

In this crowded room in Memphis, at the Media Policy Pre-conference just before the National Media Reform Conference, we are talking about policy, about media, about the essential overlap between activists and academics, but mostly about the public .

Craig Calhoun (who was apparently once a preacher and still speaks like one), argued that the challenge of articulating a public or community good requires a necessary knowledge. Further, for "those of us with less money and power, we need knowlege even more". This knowledge is meant to assist with the opposition of what Calhoun calls, "the priviatization of everything".

These comments are inspiring for someone who has always valued knowledge, but I wanted to take them in the context of the promotion of the Media Reform conference. Across town, in the mass media and online, the faces and names of celebrities: Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Geena Davis, are working to attract attention to the "media reform movement". But celebrities are *not* the public, and the "celebrity government" and celebrity philanthropy (Oprah and Bill Gates as major investors in African education) that attract attention might actually be deeply problematic for the development of knowledge.

Celebrities, and the necessity of using celebrity to get attention within dominant media, is, I think, a major barrier for creating knowledge. Celebrities are the accidentally mighty -- they have wealth and power in some cases, accidentally. They attract attention, but Calhoun would call the appeal to celebrity a "forced choice" that reveals the arbitrary limits of our current media system.

We need strategies and tactics to make change. If more people come through the door to find out about media reform because they want to see Jane Fonda, great. But this tactic still opposes the overall strategy of producing, developing, and inspiring "necessary knowledge"

PS I will be guest-blogging the NCMR over at Media@McGill the next couple days

Sticking points in the global flow

I went to the bank today, to cash a cheque. The cheque was written in US dollars which meant that I could not cash it directly: instead, two separate forms had to be filled and sent to the central bank office, where the cheque would be negotiated or sold for US currency. The whole matter would take one to two weeks, and likely involve several levels of bureaucracy for an amount that would buy me one decent pair of shoes. I experienced the same issue when trying to transfer money from Canada to the UK: for personal banking between two countries, paperwork and tax laws multiply to confusion. The thing is, I have three chequing accounts, in three countries. In the past year I have earned money in four different currencies. By all rights I should be one of the “network elites” moving fluidly around in the global space of flows (that’s Manuel Castells – 1996 and 2001). After all, international finance companies are transferring billions of dollars across the world every second in a network of operations constructed from transportation, information, and communication technologies.

But as I (and presumably others in this situation) find, the network flows are not always so easy to navigate at the personal level. Oh yes, we are mobile – but we can be suddenly made immobile by bad weather, human error, mechanical breakdown, passport control, banking imbroglio. I wonder if other frequent travellers find, as I have, that multiplying one’s identity is easier than carrying a continuous self through the flow? So my addresses multiply to minimize transfers overseas, and each jurisdiction is likely unaware of my identity in the other. In many ways, this makes me painfully aware of where I live at any moment (for example, I’m quite incensed about the bad planning for cyclists in West London) and also ferociously interested in what’s going on elsewhere (I read much more Canadian news when living abroad).

Mimi Scheller thinks that mobility and democracy don’t recombine in a network or flow. She argues that things like mobile people and communication devices make up more of a gel, where some movements between public and private are smooth, and others are held in place and space. Public life doesn’t suddenly appear in “official” public space: instead it emerges around and through and alongside people’s movements through all kinds of spaces and in all kinds of places.

I think Scheller’s right about the gel – for individual people, the flows of mobility and capital don’t move smoothly. We keep getting caught in the sticky parts of the gel, where we are reminded of where we are and challenged to make the actions we take as citizens relevant. Castells’ main criticism of the network society is that it isolates the influence of actions in local places. But if what connects us is not a rigid network but a slippery gel, maybe we can determine a way to connect local actions to global events. For those of us with different lives in different places, maybe this means thinking about the connections, not the barriers, between these spaces and places.