[NetBehaviour] Iteracy And The Digital Humanities

[ruth catlow]

Nice!

I watched a video of Doug Rushkcoff talk to a gathering of Etsy folk 
about establishing peer to peer economies.
http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/9/22/toward-a-peer-to-peer-economy.html

As part of his talk he said that it has taken over 2000 years (after the 
invention of the alphabet) for mass literacy to take hold.

And that in order to participate fully in contemporary democracy we all 
now need to learn basic computer programming (he reckons most people 
would need 2 weeks for a basic grasp of principles and elementary 
programming ability). On the principle that otherwise we are handing 
over the power to programme our societies to an elite few.

What does everyone else think?
As a remedial level programmer (I learned some php once, used to be able 
to build Drupal sites, could cut and paste javascript and perl, know my 
way around HTML and ccs- with ref to the web) I'm interested to know 
what people who do it all the time think.

Do we need to programme to have a say in contemporary democracy?

: /
R



On 12/10/2011 19:06, Rob Myers wrote:
> David Berry (whose excellent "Philosophy Of Computing" I reviewed for
> Furtherfield recently - ) has blogged about "iteracy" as a form of
> computational literacy -
>
> http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/09/iteracy-reading-writing-and-running.html
>
> "I would like to suggest that iteracy might serve as the name for the
> specific skills used for understanding code and algorithmic culture – as
> indeed literacy (understanding texts) and numeracy (understanding
> numbers) do in a similar context. That is, iteracy is specifically the
> practice or being able to read and write code, rather than the more
> extensive notion of digital Bildung"
>
> And his next book looks really good as well -
>
> http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/09/understanding-digital-humanities.html
>
> - Rob.
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