Digital Literacies: Siva, Intro
Shades of earlier readings...SV's extremes are sounding familiar: the "oligarchy vs. anarchy" debate sounding somewhat like the "us, now vs. them, later" distinction established by Lessig, authority being the power behind the switch that transforms a society from dreads-n-squats anarchists to a regulated, top-down market. Dialectic or polarized ideology? You decide!
I'm not sure, however, how the "collapse of inconvenience" maps neatly onto the two-sided struggle SV attempts to describe. Certainly we live in a digital ecosystem/network in which plenty of good stuff is "inconvenient to find, distribute, or deploy." LL's point, for instance, is not that inconvenience has collapsed, but that it has become a full-on business plan. On the other hand, for every technology that removes the friction implicit in earlier systems, SV claims technologies are also produced that engineer different varieties of friction. The problem (beyond the slightly competitive nature of these twin claims) in these arguments is the simplicity of the technologies that SV imagines: both "blunt" and "simple," the technological tools are presented - as perhaps the earlier information systems were reduced - in fairly autonomous terms, ignoring the social values and contexts within which they work. But the social context is what makes these sorts of argument work; if SV is going to treat p2p systems as tool instead of concept, then he's got a technical argument on his hands, when he actually wants to make a cultural argument about the effects of regulating p2p on a conceptual level.
By this I mean that, in the case of information systems, one argument that LL and SV must prove is that, beyond the technical specifications and use-value of such systems, that they promote and provoke information exchange as a form of public discourse. In other words, the files we send through the network are not simply valued as data or objects, they are valued as discourse. "Human deliberations," as SV puts it - and, as such, our understanding of self really takes shape as a function of the media we work with. So, while SV attempts to understand regulation as technology and p2p as tool, SV also wants p2p as discursivity and regulation as embodied by specific technologies. So there are series of mediations: between these antinomies, concepts and tools, practices and ideals. The tension rises out of SV's desire for mediation at these levels and the presence of "unmediated communication" - when the software and hardware level disappears, how do we understand deliberation as a function of technology, and how do we develop and foster critique? This is the original point of the digital literacies concept: how do we make the rules and negotiations of discourse apparent while engaging in discourse itself?
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