[iDC] Strategic usage of folksonomies: a case study

[Simon Biggs]

Hi John

Of course what you say is the case, and there are tragic consequences. If
you read Garcia or Ortiz you will find that their arguments emerge out of
their concerns about colonial and post-colonial cultural imperialism. Ortiz,
in particular, writes eloquently about the impact of the tobacco and sugar
trades on Cuban society. In my referencing these authors I am also taking
into account these concerns.

Regards

Simon


On 14/1/09 22:36, "john sobol" <john at johnsobol.com> wrote:

> On 11-Jan-09, at 5:51 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 
> A central premise of pluriliteracy is that people are becoming polyglot not
> just with spoken/written languages but also other linguistic forms, such as
> those associated with a mediated world and that for each individual the
> function of each language they employ can have very different value. So one
> language might be the one through which they socially interact, another
> through which they exchange goods and yet another the means by which they
> navigate power and governance. Garcia does not argue that these value
> relations are necessarily heirarchic (although they might be) and he points
> out that such value is motile. We see this evidenced on the streets of our big
> cities and in the geo-political collisions that typify our age. In this
> respect pluriliteracy is a useful concept for approaching the more general
> idea of globalisation and can even be seen as linked to some aspects of
> post-modern relativism (eg: Foucault¹s argument that power, and its use/abuse,
> is exercised by us all ­ established as primarily a linguistic activity).
> 
> 
> Hello Simon,
> 
> your articulation of pluriliteracy is interesting. Here's my take...
> 
> 
> You say:
> 
> A central premise of pluriliteracy is that people are becoming polyglot not
> just with spoken/written languages but also other linguistic forms, such as
> those associated with a mediated world...
> 
> People 'are' becoming polyglot. But the story is much more conflicted, much
> more tragic, and much less new than this. For example, the historic
> colonization of orality by literacy is reaching its climax as we speak, as we
> write. In our lifetime half of the world's oral languages will disappear.
> Something like 3,000 languages, cultures, histories, geographies, knowledge
> systems and sacred worlds will vanish in the next few decades.
> 
> It's cultural genocide on a massive scale but almost nobody cares to notice
> 
> (note that we are losing not only these specific peoples, languages and
> cultures 
> but also ways of knowing that have shaped us over 99.9% of our history as a
> species
> losing forever our primordial ways of knowing beyond the bookish world)
> 
> today literacy is triumphant
> and it calculates the end of the ancient irrational 
> the last breaths of countless gods and goddesses
> 
> although as we know the irrational 'will' win out
> for we are human after all
> 
> in fact science turns out to be the unlikely culprit responsible for
> literacy's looming fall
> via the coming conflagration of our industrially overheated planet ­
> for though writing's powers of abstraction have enabled a vast rationalization
> of the earth's resources
> they are also pathologically inward-looking and self-consuming 
> 
> the factory belches smoke
> and death
> as we have known for centuries
> 
> and it is a creation of paper and ink
> the mechanical drawings the ledgers the blueprints the maps the money the
> inventories the deeds
> they unlock it all
> without writing the system fails everywhere
> 
> so we are living in a great literate age 
> experiencing at once
> its most glorious vanity and hegemony
> in architectures of space and thought
> but witnessing also the twin threats 
> of its own worldeating tail 
> and the patricidal infant it has birthed through its mathematical mouth ­
> the Internet
> whose destiny is to usurp literacy's hegemony with hyperefficiency
> just as literacy extinguished original orality with superefficiency
> 
> it is important
> i think
> for people to understand this story
> to see how we are poised at this very strange and potent moment in the history
> of our species:
> the end of bluesology
> the apex of printopolis
> and the dawn of digitopia
> 
> the 3 great killer apps of human evolution in crisis
> and we with them
> 
> and to understand that 
> if anything is to be done to change our most likely future
> (ecocide i.e.the end of the world)
> then it may well start 
> with finding compelling ways and reasons for members of these very divergent
> cultures 
> that 'are' becoming polyglot
> that 'are' in need of each other's knowledge and ways of knowing
> but which cannot collaborate because they do not understand each other
> to work together 
> out of a sense of common interest, common need 
> and common advantage
> 
> instead of being driven
> as they are now
> by distrust and hostility
> towards mutually assured destruction
> 
> So to me that is a useful model for pluriliteracy. Can you sing, write and
> code? Then maybe you can make a difference, build a bridge, be an
> interactivist.
> 
> That is where I am trying to work, or at least to strike a light.
> 
> Cheers,
> John Sobol
> 
> --
> 
> new website soon
> 
> 



Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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