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Swarming Plato's Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies

Event Interactive 2010
Format Panel
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
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