Turn on ye ole Javascript to add ratings in this low-budg app.

Link to this page
← All panel ideas
Title:

Swarming Plato's Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies

Your vote:
Yes No
Organizer:
William Burdette, Department of Rhetoric, The University of Texas at Austin
Description:
Technology has always been packaged with promises of better democracy, media, education, minds, and bodies. An intellectual tradition, from Plato onward, questions whether technology can actually deliver on these promises. Working from--and questioning--this tradition, we will examine how material technology is inextricable from fantasies of an ideal world.
Questions
Answered:
  1. What does the allegory of Plato’s cave have to do with technology?
  2. Why should we read Plato alongside social networking technologies and their associated fantasies?
  3. Why do so many new communications technologies play into the fantasy of perfect democracy?
  4. Does technology break down the divisions between elite and common knowledge in the public sphere?
  5. Does social media give us news and information that is closer to reality than traditional media?
  6. How are RL current events challenging our assumptions about how news is gathered and disseminated?
  7. How does our evolving understanding of cognition change our concept of social networks?
  8. Why do social networking technologies based on the concept of the swarm fall prey to the fantasy of “the one”?
  9. Is human vitality located in meatspace or cyberspace?
  10. What do electronic memorials and forensic mechanics suggest about the fantasies surrounding death and immortality in the digital age?
Level:
Intermediate
Category:
Community / Online Community, Education, History of Technology, Other / Out There, Social Networking
Type:
Panel
Event:
Interactive 2010
Leslie Poston
on 17/8/09
Not only do I want to go to this panel, I want to interview you for the book that is the basis of one of my three panel ideas. Fascinating premise.
William Burdette
on 17/8/09
Great! We would love to start a conversation about this (outside the academy, that is). I'll check out your panels.
William Burdette
on 17/8/09
Once again, I'm just the organizing dude here. The brains behind the panel are Trish Roberts-Miller, Jim Brown, John Jones, and Jillian Sayre. They are the folks who made last year's "Is Aristotle On Twitter?" panel so rad. They are likely to be back this year, too. But we also want to hear from people outside the ivory tower. To that end, we're leaving some panel spots open for those involved with the nuts and bolts of digital technology.
nikki moore
on 29/8/09
stellar idea, so many interesting ramifications... thinking about derrida and/or judith butler reading this performative-speech-wise. i.e., plato's cave sets a fixed context... something, as your panel topic points out, is a trickle down to the way we think about media today... but what happens when context cannot (as it never can be) fixed or even focused?
looking forward to this panel...
iphone ringtone maker
on 13/11/09
I'd be super into learning from Kris. Dig it!
Link to this page
← All panel ideas
Developed for SXSW by Lindsey Simon