Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

This keynote presentation was delivered live into Second Life to an audience of 90+ attendees of the NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication.

The presentation will span from the time of speech and collective defense and collective food-gathering among primate ancestors on the African savannah; to the emergence of writing on clay tablets as empire-cities began to grow out of agricultural settlements; to the invention of the alphabet and the restriction of alphabetic knowledge to elites chosen by the emperors and popes; until the printing press enabled a rapid and broad expansion of literacy. At each of these stages, people began to do things together in the social, economic, cultural, and political realms that they were not able to do before a significant population of literates existed -- empire, science, democracy. And now, we have questions about the role of literacies and education in the era of participatory media, from Second Life to the blogosphere to YouTube -- and the kinds of collective action we see emerging today, from Wikipedia to smart mobs to open source production. What is the connection between participatory media literacy and the public sphere that is supposed to be fundamental to democracy? Join this special keynote presentation to discuss the answers!

We are working on getting a transcript of this presentation and the Q&A session that followed (the audio quality was not high enough to keep in the vldeo). And we will release it in a similar commentary online format we developed for the Evolution of Communication white paper published for this conference.

Participants in the session responded quickly with questions for Howard, of which he was able to respond to the first 6- this too will be included in the archive of the session, so anyone can join in with their ideas on how to answer these excellent thoughts.

• Bryan Zelmanov: did early communication make organized religion possible? Or vice-versa? or both, dialectically?
• Need Writer: question for howard: do you think that avatars are an extension of human capabilities, and if so, can we see virtual worlds as extending possibilities for social justice (Martha Nussbaum argues, for example, that social justice is the maximization of human capabilities)
• Desideria Stockton: Will the nature of communication ethics change with new media formats and virtual worlds?
• Pepto Majestic: Do you think our ability to adapt to change in how we communicate, initiated by our own actions, is keeping up with the rate of those rapid changes?
• CJ Carnot: How do we ascertain who or what ideas are socially important or beneficial now that the media available to us no longer defines or filters them as they did in the past ?
• ZacharyLark Zhangsun: How has English language use in online communication affected non-English lang speakers? is this another aspect of the so-called digital divide? I'm wondering what we English-only communicators are missing out on, and whether this is the new imperialism.
• Kah3na Falken: You stress the democratizing imperatives inherent in the development of print, but in fact, print was also quickly split into class forms, "high art" and "Low art." Our postmodern time translates this into access: upper-class has access, while the poor and underclass often does not. How does this impact collective action in your sense?
• Meridelle Mauvaise: What size of a community is a "functional" commuity and how will intimacy and friendship change accordingly?
• Maor Quimby: the mobile- the lines between the digital and physical space are being 'blurred'... can you speak to the public vs private identity issues of the user ?
• Bryan Zelmanov: Question about literacy and elites: is the proportion of the population with the power to use the tools recurrent?