[3] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course 'Digital Cultures', part of the MsC. in eLearning from the University of Edinburgh. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

This map tracks some key moments, locations and people involved in the evolution of what is often called 'the first modern conspiracy theory' - that is the anti-semitic literary forgery commonly known as 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. In addition to giving us a window into the mechanics by which a conspiracy theory is created, we might also pause to note that these are the same mechanics by which a digitally-mediated, post-foundational learning experience or 'narrative' are constructed - from fragmented, multi-located sources.

Click the option to view the larger map so that you can properly see the embedded content.


View Tracking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a larger map

What I want for Social Media Christmas

I want to be able to leave audio comments on a blog as easily as I can on something like Audioboo.

Anyone know how to do that?

Hello? Is this thing on?

Is the VLE Dead?

Found at Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog � Reverse engineering

Digital Cultures Course Lifestream Summary

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

Technologies

Where to start? I've just spent the last 40 minutes or so editing the lifestream and have been amazed at the amount of stuff that got lumped in there. There was stuff in there that I'd forgotten I'd added, which brings up perhaps my first point; that although the lifestream may be a viable way of evaluating a learner's engagement with course content, it may have some way to go to improving as an aide to a learner - a semantic, tag-based arrangement of all lifestream entries might sort that. But that doesn't solve the problem of how you'd tag them at the source.

Truth be told though, my main aid in gathering up resources was not the lifestream itself, but the Tumblr feed which I set up to post into it. Tumblr is a fantastic tool for a course like this - especially when utitlised on an iPhone. Half of the stuff in my lifestream was added via my iPhone Tumblr app - a fantastic on-the-go learning tool for someone like me who has to do a fair bit of study 'on the run' from one place to another.

Experience

But what of the experience of using the lifestream? For me, this lifestreaming was both reassuringly familiar yet novel enough to surprise me. Familiar in that I am an avid Delicious user and have been accustomed a while now to 'storing' large parts of myself online - this through my own blog. Through here I have a twitter feed, a Delicious tag cloud, university and work posts, Last.fm playlists and at one point my Flickr feed. In a sense I've kind of been wanting a 'lifestream' for a while and used Blogger as the conduit.

As to being novel, I enjoyed seeing the connections crop up as I posted, 'liked' and favourited my way around Google Reader (the other crucially useful tool for me), Youtube, Twitter and the university blogs. I enjoyed the sense of 'the pieces falling together' when you viewed the lifestream page: conversations, blogs, feeds, pictures and videos all sloshing around in a great big soup of links. In a very simple and powerful way, my Tumblr feed became more than my 'online scrapbook'; instead it was the central artery of my lifestream and course learning.

Content

As to content - well, it's a weird bag. This is a reflection of the stranger junctures of the web which I've been choosing to hang about in these last 12 weeks. There's 9/11 conspiracy theories material, analyses of UFO abductee accounts, summaries of anthropological process and theory, studies of semingly feral discussion forum teenagers, videos of rock-star cyborgs and web-star ethnographers, quotes from university professors and random twitterers, pictures of books I've tried to dip in to, clips from sci-fi movies which the readings made me think of, examples of game-based learning that sprang to mind when the literature turned to 'cyborg pedagogies' and probably a few ill-tempered remarks about my struggles to play the PC version of Modern Warfare 2.

Cyborgs and Ghosts

Looking back at it all now, I find myself giggling a bit - amused at the twists and turns of web-mediated learning, how a quote from one writer can lead to a video from another, to a podcast about conspiracy theories, to an angry conversation about online movies resulting in giving a talk at the Dublin Paranormal Conference and the excruciating experience of seeing yourself on Youtube. I can honestly say that when I started this semseter I didn't see that coming.

How wonderfully odd that a course which makes such explicit references to 'hauntology' and 'ghost-like' online presences should see me wind up speaking in a Dublin hotel full of UFO-hunting, ghost-busting, poltergeist-whispering, Yeti-chasing, paranormal activity fans, in a scene akin to something from a recession-busted Hunter S.Thompson novel.

As to 'cyborg pedagogies', looking back over the lifestream now it seems a suitable example of the re-aggregation, re-assembling and re-modelling of information and meaning-making suggested by the cyborg pedagogy literature. What initially looks like a car-crash of data, upon slightlly closer examination shows patterns of thoughts and concern, avenues of investigations, fruitless rummages down dead-ends of online madness and overall the seemingly random, manic linking between one subject area and another - the connections between disparate writers, disciplines and mediums all merging back in to one big story.

It's a great big mess, but I love it and will be continuing to use my Tumblr as I work my way to the final assignment. Put simply I can't work without it now.

I've immensely, immensely enjoyed this 12 weeks and find myself sad to start winding it all up. And wondering how I can ever go back to a 'mainstream' learning model again.

'What has been seen cannot be unseen'.

I've been Chromed

There's probably no need to tell you what Google Chrome is - the search giant's browser, which they launched about a year ago. What you may not know is that Chrome is now quite useful. They've added a gallery of extensions, much like the thousands of free plug-ins that you can get for the Firefox browser.

As of today I'm a fully-fledged Chrome convert. For a guy who spends way too much of his life hunched over an internet browser, this is a big thing. Why have I changed? Well, in addition to the myriad extensions which bring delicious, gmail, twitter, gcal (which can sync to your Outlook), Wave and Google Reader into the browser with teeny-tiny little icons informing you if you have a new mail, wave, tweet or tag, Chrome also allows you to sync your bookmarks, toolbars and assorted tools across multiple machines.

So, import all your bookmarks into Chrome from wherever you have them stored (whatever browser you are currently using) save them, and then simply synchronise on another machine when you're elsewhere. No more laboriously adding favicons and importing bookmarks one machine at a time.

Fabulous stuff.

Oh and it seems to be about 30-40% faster than any other browser I've used.

Download here.

Fembots, Latex, Haraway and Hayles

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

References:

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25

I've been rather quiet of late - this last two weeks - partially because Modern Warfare 2 arrived (disrupting nearly everything in my life) but largely because (and I have to be honest here) I found the Harway and Hayles readings quite alienating. As I've said before on this course, I struggle badly with certain types of language used by academics in this field and have wondered if that language and those accompanying narrative structures wouldn't be worthy of a mini-ethnography itself.

Going back to Hine's assertion that the job of the virtual ethnographer is to discover how our informants create 'truth', I can't help but (somewhat snidely) observe that for many in this field 'truth' seems to be created by use of an elitist, hyper-real vocabulary. Whilst such pointedly playful language is perhaps part of the point which Harway and Hayles are trying to make, there were moments when (with Haraway in particular) some of the writing seemed like an exercise in linguistic masturabtion. Although, I'm aware that that probably says as much about me as it does Professor Haraway.

All of that said, I appreciate that such things shouldn't discourage me from course participation, but rather spur me on to try to form a greater understanding. To that end, I'll try to work my way through the five discussion questions which Sian and Jen posed to help us work through these readings.

1. What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?

The short answer: I really don't know. But some ideas did slosh around in my head whilst reading these pieces: perhaps Haraway's cyborg is a celebration of the fusion of man and machine, a position which revels in the ambiguity caused by the union of organic and artificial. By contrast, Hayles' identification of the narrative of 'the posthuman' seems to be something else - where the materiality of the human condition seems to be considered a design flaw of evolution; something which we may soon be in a position to rectify with unspecified, unknown technologies which allow human consciousness (now reduced to a mere mathematical equation for the storage of information) to be 'downloaded' and 'uploaded' into another physical host.

My first thoughts ran to Warren Ellis' Spider Jerusalem stories (the Transmetropolitan series), in which one of the stories showcases a future technology where humans download themselves into a cloud of particles - unshackling themselves from the limits of their bodies. Naturally, I also found myself thinking of James Cameron's forthcoming 'Avatar' - in which a wheelchair-bound war veteran is offered the chance to download into the engineered body of an alien (an eight-foot smurf by the looks of it) in order to... oh, who cares why? The whole thing seems an excuse to showcase some nifty new 3D technology, but the same notion of humans as 'downloadable content' seems to pervade here - as though corporeal existence is simply an irrelevance and we are destined to be reduced to nothing more than a DNA driven RSS feed.

2. Is our thinking about – and beyond – cyberculture still too structured by the kinds of binaries Haraway critiques (promise/threat, for example, or utopia/dystopia)? How does Haraway’s cyborg myth disrupt these?

Again, I just don't know. I do certainly see some of the binaries which the questions suggests in operation every day: debates around 'real' friends and 'online friends', virtual and real, actual and imaginary, corporeal and data-based information and the endless online firestorm over authentication of information as 'real' or 'false' (see Wikipedias' ever-present problems).

But, speaking with friends, family and colleagues I think that the 'utopian/dystopian' binary of the web is rather reductive. People who have serious grievances with social networks like Facebook (over issues of authenticity of interaction, stalking, bullying and privacy) are still using it - no matter how much they may profess they dislike it. If their view of such technologies and the resulting interactions were that dystopian, I don't believe they would engage as they do.

I'm not all that sure that Haraways' Cyborg does actually disrupt these binaries all that much. I know that it's hardly scientific, but I find myself looking (again) at the narratives, stereotypes and presentations of cyborgs within contemporary science-fiction and feel that not all that much has changed. Star Trek: Voyager's latex-clad, baloon-breasted 'Seven of Nine' character seemed like nothing more than a fairly routine geek-boy fantasy - all curves, doe-eyed, kittenish misunderstandings about sexuality, arched eyebrows and the ever-present threat of repressed sexual desire exploding out of its spandex jumpsuit to consume the nearest unsuspecting male crew member. Although not a cyborg per-se, the next Star Trek show (Enterprise) replicated the formula with the charecter T'Pol - a similarly Lara Croft-shaped Vulcan crew-member, whose detached, unemotional behaviour made her seem like nothing more than 'Seven of Nine 2.0'.

A more recent example might be Summer Glau's portrayal of a female Terminator in 'The Sarah Connor Chronicles' (pictured above) - a behaviourally submissive, lethally dangerous killerbot sent through time to protect the male hero, whose duties seem to involve brutally murdering people whilst looking sexually suggestive and wanton. It's not the first time Glau has done this either - her portrayal of River Tam in the fan-favourite 'Firefly' was remarkably similar in places: a precociously talented young woman, fiddled with by nefarious government scientists whose intention was to use technology to turn her into a lethal killing machine - placing a murdering automata in the body of a hot teenage girl. And let's not stop there - Joss Whedon's latest offering, The Dollhouse, sees an array of interchangeable models posing as empty-headed government assasins - their minds a series of blank slates awaiting downloading of new orders to murder assorted bods whilst looking like they're posing for the cover of Vanity Fair.

If Haraways' cyborg was an attempt to break-down standard male-authored sexual fantasies, gender narratives and older, more rigid binary constructions of sexuality, it has been, in the field of mainstream sci-fi anyway, a manifest failure.

3. Is Cartesian mind/body dualism, as Hayles argues of posthuman embodiment (p5), the ultimate opposition that structures all of our debates about subjectivity and online identity?

I'm not that convinced that the Cartesian duality referred to in the question is the ultimate opposition, but it is one which I see debated and enacted almost every day. The seeming paranoia which sat at the heart of James Harkins' 'Cyburbia' seemed to stem from the linking of human beings to a 'feedback loop' - in which virtual comunication becomes an exercise as addictive as the most powerful drug, leading to the illusion of 'friendship', authenticity and meaningful interaction. Social networking's detractors, it seems, suggest that there is an inherent artificiality about such interactions - that the lack of embodied discourse renders the interactions trivial, meaningless and devoid of substance. 'Friends' in Facebook, this narrative suggests, are not real friends at all. But why? Because data sent down a optic cable cannot carry the same meaning, the same nuance and same 'authenticity' as an exchage of data between two people in the same room.

4. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?

Placeholder answer: I don't know. Sorry! I appreciate that this is probably the most crucial of the five questions, and a short answer declaring my ignorance is less than ideal, but I'm being as honest as I can. I've just failed to see the obvious connection between these readings and the design of e-learning materials. And I'd very much like to know what they are.

5. Do cyborgs really resist the structure of sex/gender, as Haraway claims?

In short, no. I don't think that they do. I shan't repeat my earlier assertions about female cyborgs in current sci-fi shows except to say that it seems as though many are merely play-things for male writers - blank slates upon which rating-gathering, hyper-sexualised, yet emotionally dead female archtypes are projected. Rather than resisting, usurping or inverting structures of gender, it would seem that cyborgs perpetuate certain archetypal fantasies, and may, in fact, lead to even more stereotyped depictions of gender and sexuality - a body without a brain, a set of curves to be observed without guilt or conscience because, after all, she's 'only a machine'.