Sat March 10th: Erika here:

None of you have presented me with a research proposal that I can work with. We need your research proposals.  The conference organizers need to create a name and a theme for our conference so that they can set up our webspace - they can not do their job until each group has a research proposal.  So - please go to your journal pages and complete this assignement according to my guidelines today. 

Back to Henrique's Group

Sun March 11th: Henrique's Research Proposal

    In societies where access to the internet and other means of digital communication are available with ease, individuals have been found to suffer from grave information overload problems. The constituents of digital divide, in this sense, could be sorted into three parts: the information rich, the information poor, and the information burdened. With this in mind, how has access to information changed since the advent of computers and digitalization? Has access to immediate information made people come closer together, or has it made us more disoriented and disconnected? With this in mind, should ways of circumventing this information overload be taught in schools so that information may be used constructively, or would a return to traditional forms of teaching literacy (without computers) - where the access to information tends to be slower and thought-through - be the only way to avoid the creation of a disoriented population?

Works Cited:

Goulding, A. (2001). Information Poverty or Overload? Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://lis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/3/109

    This article by Goulding inspired me to ask the question of whether easier access to a greater variety of information makes us better citizens or more disoriented. My hunch is that yes, our generation is more disoriented and less politically engaged than in the 1960's, for instance. In attempting to answer this question, I plan to look at a variety of research which attempts to answer the impact of too much information on the population, and whether working with computers is a progress or a retrogression. In general, I will question whether what is new is necessarily good. Some of the articles I plan to use in my research are the following:

Horihula, J. L. (2003). Los 10 Paradigmas de la E-Comunicación. Retrievec March 9, 2007, from http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/paradigmas/

Boswell, G. (1997). Non-Places and the Enfeeblement of Rhetoric. Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://enculturation.gmu.edu/1_1/boswell.html

Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.

Short summary:

Non-Places and the Enfeeblement of Rhetoric in Supermodernity.

By Grant Boswell

Enculturation, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1997

In his article, Boswell emphasizes the historical importance of a “place” in the art of rhetoric and dialogue. He mentions the contextual importance of the place where an argument or a text is being read, which can be traced back to the works of Plato and Aristotle. Boswell mentions a term, coined by Descombes, called “rhetorical territory”, where one is at ease with the people with which one shares rhetoric.

Boswell also cites the work of Marc Augé, who argues in “Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”, that in supermodernity, by means of high-speed digital communications (the internet, e-mail, text-messaging ect…) these contextual “rhetorical territories”, once spread over large areas, can be reduced to one’s home, and that the impact this can have to a person may be one of disorientation and incapability of making sense of reality and the world one lives in.

Boswell also makes the distinction between the modern concept of “place”, which is where there is semiotic coherence amongst the members of the place, and the supermodern concept of a place where “identity, relations, and history are only marginally significant”. Are users of the Internet, such as bloggers, who, for the most part are anonymous people, navigating in a non-space? Have digital environments developed in such a way as to create a non-place within people's homes?