Significant to my research and teaching is my solidarity with John Dewey’s argument that political participation is an inventive and creative activity. Like Dewey, I believe that democracy is a way of life with education being a source of effective participation. This way of life requires taking responsibility for learning about the political process, policy analysis, strategies for exercising influence, conceptualizing arguments, communicating effectively in a transmedia environment, listening, building coalitions, negotiating competing interests, maintaining civility, and finding common ground. Engaging in this inventive and creative activity is described by Douglas Lummis as “performing democracy.” Like Lummis I view democracy as more than a set of institutions. It is about being and doing. Democracy is a performance. Democracy is performed by working with others, building consensus, designing inclusive decisions, resolving conflicts, acting on common concerns, and planning for the future.
Last Spring and this Fall term John Fenn and I taught / are teaching Art and Society. The course is designed in such a way as to encourage creativity, invention, and the performance of democracy. Performance occurs in the classroom and online. Gardner Campbell’s lecture yesterday, “Digital Citizenship in a Networked World,” affirmed for me the importance of what those of us associated with Art and Society are doing.
Campbell talked about higher education as a “platform” for spreading ideas – ideas that are socialized and spread through networks. This network he likened to Sebastian Seung’s conception of the “connectome;” the neural connections in the brain. Digital citizens are those who know how to perform democratically within this network. It is the responsibility of educators to assist students in engaging in this performance. Campbell reminded us that the design of the internet is deliberate. You don’t have to have a license to be on the web and Campbell argues that like democracy, a free internet is a risk worth taking. It is a place where publication and collaboration can’t be divided. This he calls the “quantum entanglement.”
Campbell described the steps leading to digital citizenship as 1. information (knowledge) literacy, 2. digital fluency, 3. meta-medium thinking, 4. building a personal cyberinfrastructure, and 5. participating as a digital citizen. His efforts to assist students in moving through these steps is informed by his use of C-Panel, a server platform that students can adapt to their own purposes. It is through the use of strategies, such as C-Panel, that Campbell believes his students are able to participate in the types of liberatory practices first descirbed in the zine Computer Liberation/Dream Machines in 1974.
Campbell quoted Jaron Lanier on the use of technology in the classroom. “Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances.”
I am confident that those of us participating in Art and Society this term, and last spring, are among those tenacious oddballs building a virtual spaceships. As we ride this virtual spaceship, we should remember and celebrate Dewey’s assertion that the “free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions…which develops and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge of things as they are…Need and desire-out of which grow purpose and direction of energy-go beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They continually open the way into the unexpected and unexplored and unattained future.”
