[NetBehaviour] Iteracy And The Digital Humanities

[Andreas Maria Jacobs]

Agreed

but apart from being able to oversee the more complex structures dealt within and surrounding the coded environment, programming skills are more a starting point than a goal in itself

I also was dissapointed by the meager observations your previous link led me to i.e. the introduction of the term 'iteracy' more or less a word play with 'literacy' and 'iteration' a much used softeware practise

I honestly think that oppositional thoughts regarding the establishment and societal future influences of studying and trying to define 'Digital Humanities'  is necessary and certainly valuable not only for its eventual progress but also for the pitfalls it implies

For instance the connection between computing and voting is nowadays common practise in almost all 'democracies' , although in India a Dutch scientist is prosecuted because he proved the system to be easely forged. In the EU a Dutch minister fought for the introduction of open source software replacing the MS dominated softwares used before, she succeeded!

Software Studies as a science to investigate and explore the broader ways in which people, corporate power and individuals use software on a more or less daily basis sure looks interesting enough to undertake as research subject the connections between software and politics but to say that it is a distinctive and wholy seperated field of study is not a reality

As I am more inclined to express myself in a more hermetic kind of language I conclude with a piece of experimental poetry I wrote a couple of weeks ago:


crypto grafitti


writing on the inner walls of the internet

spamming between the sockets of not so well known ports


disconnected once solid junctions

redefining the non obvious paths

leading from no one to no where


the location of insurgency in the inner cells of the machine

the cybernetic war has its frontline in the microprocessor


unfolding the last strongholds of erratic digital warriors
in the locus of proven technology

the last post is replaced by the last email

Andreas Maria Jacobs

Sent from my eXtended BodY

On 13 okt. 2011, at 19:24, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:

> On 13/10/11 16:14, Andreas Jacobs wrote:
>>> Do we need to programme to have a say in contemporary democracy?
>> 
>> Well, definitively NO!
> 
> Absolutely.
> 
> But society is increasingly affected by code, so to *effectively*
> participate in democracy as an informed citizen, it *helps* to know how
> to program.
> 
> You'll notice I don't say "it helps to have a critical appreciation of
> code". It doesn't, at least not in the sense of being able to talk about
> Deleuze instead. Being able to program brings a more fundamental
> critical insight - what code can and cannot do and how it does it. This
> is vital to evaluating political claims that involve code.
> 
> Programming is part of contemporary literacy (Rushkoff's point). So is
> statistics. So is visual literacy. It's interesting that these three
> forms of literacy are being fought against so hard by the non-digital
> humanities at the moment.
> 
> Rushkoff's talk is a precis of his book "Program Or Be Programmed",
> which I found disappointing but would still recommend as it has some
> very good ideas despite not really pulling them together. (With it,
> Rushkoff becomes part of the generational trend of recanting cyberprophets.)
> 
> http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/program/
> 
> If people want to learn to program, there are many fine languages and
> ways of learning them. Python is probably the least worst language for
> beginners at the moment -
> 
> http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
> 
> Processing is more confusing if it goes wrong but lots of people like it
> and it's more graphics oriented than Python -
> 
> http://www.processing.org/learning/
> 
> If anyone wants to learn on list or if a Furthercode emerges I'd be
> happy to help. :-)
> 
> - Rob.
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