Tag Archives: OII

What was Web 2.0? Versions past, present, future and the development of Internet historicity

  By netcrit | April 22, 2011 - 20:45 | Speak
Leave a comment

Upcoming Seminar at oii, Oxford   What was Web 2.0? Versions past, present, future and the development of Internet historicity 4 May 2011 UPDATE: my paper is slightly different, now that it is finished. I have concentrated more on detailing the particular way in which versions came to the web, the consequences of that, and generally exploring the way ‘versions’ work as a particular kind of (popular) historiography. I will work on the historicity stuff next! In this paper, I discuss the emergence of the historicity of the Internet – that is, the explicit sense with practical consequences that the Internet has a history, and that it occupies a place in history which, through our use of it, also defines us as beings in time. While the term historicity has a long tradition within religious scholarship, marking efforts to determine the factual (as opposed to mythic) status of various ‘historical’ figures, I use the term with a more postmodern perspective. From this perspective it might be said all facts are myths and all myths are facts except that the politico-cultural discourses within which we know the world determine for us very clear, if contingent, boundaries between fact and myth. Historicity … Click to read more →

Beyond the Edgeless University

  By netcrit | April 21, 2011 - 17:41 | Speak
Leave a comment

An extended introduction to the workshop I will be running soon on the Edgeless University, focusing on the question: what exactly should a modern comprehensive university do that will unleash the creativity of students and staff and maximise the potential of distributed, edgeless learning while, at the same time, also making the most of the physical spaces which will remain critical markers of ‘a university’?. In other words, how can we utilise digital technologies and networks to fashion ‘new’ edges — temporary boundaries, if you like — that assist us in making education a collaborative, collective experience? Click to read more →

OII Summer Doctoral Program – Historicising the Internet Presentation

  By netcrit | July 10, 2009 - 10:53 | Speak
Leave a comment

Recently gave a presentation to the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Program on Historicising the Internet; it involved both me talking, and a brief group activity – which would have been better, if longer – about personal histories of the Internet. Briefly, I argue that we need to use history so as to: Such awareness aids in contextualizing how things came to be the way they were, exploring the contingency of present action (thereby to discern more clearly what might be its causes and real effects), reviewing differences which emerge by temporal comparison, and always being conscious of the historical locatedness of the scholarship on which you are drawing. But there are dangers because of the mythic nature of ‘origin’ histories; and the arbitrary periodisation which appears to create discrete ‘times’ linked to causes and effects in the past. In the end, I advance some ideas about the novel uses of history around historicity; and history as discourse. Presentation available at http://www.netcrit.net/writing/