Re: [xmca] Friesen Article

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Good to know!
Welcome norm.
mike

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

> I have been copying Norm Friesen on the messages coming on this list.
> Cheers, michael
>
>
>
>
> On 10-May-09, at 6:27 PM, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> David--
>
> Thanks for getting us directly connected with this article.
> I have a question, the answer to which is presupposed in your term,
> technology. One of the aspects of the study of communication as I
> experience
> from a department so named is that technology is a term that applies almost
> exclusively to electronically powered digital devices.... by my
> *colleagues*,
> who also treat "media" as a singular noun and a "cause" in the positive
> sense of "the media are responsible for the degeneration of our moral
> order."
>
> Put aside my parochial question about media and focus on technology. What
> is
> a technology? I trace my own, vague understandings to the idea
> of technea in ancient Greece where teoria referred to the audience at a
> dramatic performance. I am guessing you have thought about this a lot.
> Can you help me out here? I think it is relevant to the article because of
> the everyday interpretation of "educational technology" .
>
> I hope that someone knows how to reach Norm Friesen so that he can join the
> discussion. I think that discursive psychology is an important intellectual
> enterprise and would like to understand its relationship to the issues we
> are used to discussing.
> mike
>
> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 4:37 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> >wrote:
>
>  Yes, xmca is a bit of a three ring circus: when there isn't a tiger loose
>> on the other thread, then he's either backstage--or prowling the audience.
>> I've got some non-rhetorical and non-display questions about the Friesen
>> article:
>>
>> a) My first question has to do with "interdisciplinarity", a recent thread
>> that snapped befoer it could get as far as "Discursive Psychology and
>> Educational Technology". In applied linguistics we used to think we were
>> inter-trans-disciplinary: we thought we were language teaching plus any
>> discipline you need to make language teaching more fun, effective,
>> affordable, useful. Then we discovered that we were really just a
>> TECHNOLOGY. It's not the same thing. For one thing, being a technology is
>> more fun, effective, affordable, and useful. For another, it's not nearly
>> as
>> prestigious, which means good riddance to an enormous amount of careerist
>> baggage. Isn't "cognitive science" (and even CHAT) just in the process of
>> discovering the same thing?
>>
>> b) My second question concerns p. 133, where Friesen has this to say:
>> "Discursive psychology does not understand (?) discourse or conversation
>> in
>> terms of communication in its conventional technologized (??) meaning as
>> the
>> transmission of information; instead, it understands discourse above all
>> (as?) a kind of activity--a type of action or work through which the
>> social
>> field of interaction itself is constituted". I can think of a lot of ways
>> in
>> which you could transmit information without "action" or "work" or even a
>> social field of interaction (involuntary signals). I can't think of a
>> single
>> way in which you could constitute a social field of interaction without
>> transmitting information. So am I to conclude that discursive psychology
>> is
>> a narrower notion than the convental technologized one?
>>
>> c) My third question has to do with a sentence later in teh same paragraph
>> that goes like this: (...Mind, computer, and other terms and categories
>> woudl emerge from this type of analysis not so much as causes or tools to
>> produce certain results but as rhetorical and interactional resources
>> for discursive, social action." To me this suggests that they are not
>> tools
>> but only potential tools. Given that I am a proud technologist with no
>> pretensions to interdisciplinarity, why is that a step forward? It looks
>> like a giant leap backwards from where I am standing.
>>
>> d) Finally, I wonder about the whole exercise of analyzing a tidbit of
>> interaction between a human and a chatbot for evidence that the human is
>> responding to the chatbot as we humans are supposed to, that is, as a more
>> or less successful performance of a perverse kind of role play. The
>> particular role play that chatbots are supposed to enact is NOT, however,
>> a machine pretending to be human, but rather a human pretending to treat a
>> machine as a human. Isn't the missing precondition for real (as opposed to
>> potential) social action the ASSUMPTION that the other person has a
>> genuine
>> intention to interact?
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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