[iDC] Strategic usage of folksonomies: a case study

[john sobol]

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:  
Foucault’s 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

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