[Xmca-l] Re: Article for discussion: Facebook in Brazilian schools

[David Kellogg]

So in the fifteenth century, Gutenberg exapted extant technology already
widely available in China and published a single text using moveable type
which started a profound intellectual, cultural, and social revolution
whose effects we still feel today: the rise of Protestantism, the
Counter-Reformation in, among other places, Brazil, the Wars of Religion in
France, the vicissitudes of a multii-confessional (political) State and
ultimately those of a multi-confessional (psychological) state, In the
twentieth century, Ford similarly exapted extant technology, this time
nearly two millenia later than China, and mass-produced automobiles using
Taylorism, forcing everybody to buy an identical product with
interchangeable parts made by factories with interchangeable workers.
The automobile "revolution" did not even give us new roads, and in Seoul
today traffic moves notably slower than it would on horseback. Clearly,
there are some forms of technology that are actually semiogenic--and others
which merely circulate capital at a faster rate and actually slow the
movement of people and new ideas.

So my question is very simple. How do we know that "Facebook" (which as the
name implies was originally designed to help Harvard freshmen decide which
classmates were sufficiently hot to "like") is really one of the former
technologies?.There are very clear signs , beyond the obvious ones
surrounding the American origins, that it belongs to the latter category,
and not a few of them appear in this very article. First of all, the
authors are honest enough to associate Facebook with reactionary,
xenophobic, populist movements like the clowns who run the "Five Stars"
movement in Italy. Second, on the very first page, the authors try but do
not really seem to be able to distinguish between the "post first and
organize later" technologies of Occupy Wall Street and the use of social
media by the four movements in the article (including one actually called
"Occupy Everything"). And thirdly, it is very hard for me to pinpoint any
actual new form of thinking or new form of speaking which was made possible
by Facebook. If anything, Facebook seems to narrow semiogenic power to a
single consumer/computer menu. Ford said, you can get a Model A in any
color you like so long as it's black. Facebook tells us the same thing, but
makes the verb "like" intransitive.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 7:30 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> Dear xmca'ers,
>
>
> it is (bit over) due time for introducing the article for discussion from
> MCA's 2018 Issue 1, before Issue 2 comes upon us soon.
>
>
> The selected article, by Monica Ferreira Lemos and Fernando Rezende da
> Cunha Júnior, is about two topics that were thematised in the last ISCAR
> congress and that ought to be of much relevance to current and future
> CHAT-related research: Social media and social movements. In particular,
> the article examines how students use social media for the organization and
> development of 4 social movements in Brazil.
>
>
> The article is attached and is Free access during the discussion period.
> It can be accessed free in the following link:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2017.1379823
>
>
> The authors have kindly agreed to participate in the discussion and they
> will be introducing themselves soon. I hope you  will find the article
> interesting and please don't be shy to share anything you might have
> learned reading it, anything you might wonder about it or that you would
> like see discussed. Having authors engage in dialogue is a great
> opportunity that this community offers and that makes sense the most when
> many of you participate. Good reading!
>
> ?
>
> Alfredo Jornet
>
> New article in *Design Studies* "Imagning Design: Transitive and
> intransitive dimensions"
> Free print available: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WhHg_,KmyN6Dr
>