New Media

I loved what I read! Not only am I caught up on McLuhan, but I knew Hayles’ “embodied virtuality” (something I consider Very Important To Consider) too. For me, this was a great overview of what I’ve already been reading over the last few years. And as a virtual producer of many posts and projects, I’ve been aware of the capitalist bend of network for awhile too. (The density of interconnectivity needs to be weighted against the number of weak ties. Lighter curation among nodes carries greater emphasis than highly connected ones. That is, personal connections often mean more than robot gathered responses.)

If nothing else, I’ve been lamenting the shortness of the chapters. By the time I’ve been making notes to myself and feeling like I’m really digging into the material, the chapter has ended. That’s been my big problem at the moment: it’s not enough reading! I want more! (Although, obviously, not more homework, though. I want to be clear about that.)

Hacker Pedagogy

It’s hard for me to not see the bindings. When reading something like the Hacker Pedagogy, I constantly see the errors, the little bits of the paper that stand out as something not quite right. (And in some occasions, actually wrong. Shame on them for comma splices!) Part of who I am is someone who notices those details, who sees the parts that match up to the unexpected input. It’s part of what makes me me.

Yet, in light of the hacker mentality, this should be a Bad Thing.

The recognition is right. I should be aware of my own bias and assumptions for much as I can be, after all. Yet, I should also seek to see these constraints as a way to achieve more. As the essay later brings to an emphasis, the reflexion is as much part of the process as anything else. Realizing the meta-cognitive aspect (the thinking about the thinking) is vital to later understandings of other contexts. The skills learned as part of using “image manipulation” carry over to other programs and learning environments, as the paper mentions as an example.