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why cyborgs are education

In writing my way through the drafts of what I hope will eventually be my dissertation proposal, I keep coming up against what appears to be a glaring absence, a hole in my work. When I talk about what I’m doing, the hole gets reflected back at me: politely but quizzically, a frequent “yes, but…” response.

The name of the hole is education.

I’m in a doctoral program in Educational Studies. I identify as an educator: I’ve been at this professionally since I was 22 years old. I’ve been a high school teacher and a special ed teacher and a travelling ESL professor and a sessional lecturer in academic writing. I’ve done educational project management and educational program development, written curriculum, designed rubrics. I’ve worn all kinds of different hats in my work life, but almost all of them have been in some sense or other education-related.

Then I enter a Ph.D in Education, and I stop.

What I’m writing about? Subjectivities. Cyborgs. Identity in social media. Technologies and reputation and social capital and cultural capital and money all circulating within social media networks, all of them shaping us just as we shape them by tweeting about our breakfasts. It’s big and messy and interesting and I haven’t even gotten to the part where I talk about knowledge or learning. It’s philosophy and sociology, with a nice smattering of psychoanalysis thrown in for good measure. I can’t blame anybody for asking where the education is.

It’s there, though, I’m convinced of it.

In the opening lines of The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway claims that her cyborg is faithful to its origins “as blasphemy is faithful” (1991, p. 149).  The next time somebody asks about my research’s location within the field of Educational Studies, I’m going to claim blasphemy. My research emphasizes – and critiques – the theoretical underpinnings of current educational practices, though its scope is not contained within notions of classroom or curriculum. And any work wherein education intersects with technology is vulnerable to visions of post-institutional worlds and DIY education. Yet as Haraway points out, “blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously” (191, p. 149). I have two children on the cusp of entering the public education system: there is not much I take so seriously.

Haraway called The Cyborg Manifesto “an ironic political myth” (1991, p. 149). I aim to make my exploration of the branded cyborg subject an ironic educational myth, one that visions possibilities for the public trust of education through a more detailed understanding of social media.
***

My almost five-year-old son did his first dinosaur podcast this past weekend, with his dad. Charlottetownosaurus, Episode One. Because if you are Oscar and you’ve been busily devouring all things dinosaur for almost two years now, you’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge to share with the world. And because when you’ve accumulated knowledge or ideas or just plain passion for something, whatever it is, sharing it and getting feedback from other people on it? Matters. Even if you’re not yet five. He found out his babysitter listened to it and tweeted me about it and you would have thought he’d won an Academy Award.

He has been in full-time preschool now since September, in the daycare attached to the French school he will attend come next year. He went in with only a cursory vocabulary in French: now, he’s almost comfortable in the language. He’s certainly comfortable correcting my stilted Anglo pronunciations, and I grin at him and try again to match the sounds that suddenly, wonderfully, roll off his tongue.

His teacher’s experienced, and kind, and I think she’s good at what she does. But even after six+ months in a French class with only ten kids, this boy who’d happily eat and sleep dinosaurs all day long and has picked up five-syllable Latin terms just from having books read aloud to him still doesn’t know any dinosaur names in French. Nor the words for fairly familiar concepts like “herbivore” and “carnivore.”

Not a deal-breaker.  Not a personal criticism of his teacher, whose (underpaid) job it is to teach themes of seasons and foods and holidays, to organize and facilitate (rather beautiful) crafts with the kids, to read stories at circle time (which Oscar inevitably interrupts because he wants desperately to tell about the things he knows).

She is a good teacher. She makes homemade play-doh. He is learning from her.

But he is not learning that the things that drive him and the things that he can do are exciting and engaging, things to be built on. He’s not learning that his interests are valid or worthy of creative attention. He’s not learning how to participate in a produsage or prosumer world, where consumption and creation blur.

And that’s okay, I think. He’s not five. And he’s learning some of that stuff at home. And learning to take turns with the play-doh matters, absolutely.

But in terms of his subjectivity, his sense of himself in the world and the stories he belongs in, school – in this traditional model of learning to engage on externally-set terms – makes me a little sad.

He’s a pleaser and a connector, by nature. That’s where the interruptions at circle time come from, however misguided: he’s a kid who will offer up every last thought he can think of in hopes of gaining the engagement and attention of another human being. When that happens, and a positive reflection of himself shines back at him, his world’s complete.

We all need to learn to deal with our worlds not being complete all the time. I work hard with Oscar on a daily basis to help him see – and seize – moments when others might be open to engaging, and when they’re just busy with the damn dishes and getting him a glass of milk, thank you very much.

But humans who need to connect aren’t well-served by systems that externalize what happens to us, that are structured to emphasize compliance and passivity over the scramble to share all the wonders that flit through our brains. It is human to clamour, but it is particularly hard to pay attention to clamour in systems where the audience for the clamour is smaller than the number of clamourers. School is an anti-clamour system at least in part because there are almost always more students than teachers, and human engagement does not thrive in that climate of division, nor on demand.

Human engagement can survive division, however, if it is not required to physically respond to multiple demands at once. Particularly if it has some agency over what it engages with. Clamour, I would argue, is alive and well.

It’s online, in social media.

My Twitter feed is full of people scrambling to share the wonders flitting across their brains. I learn from some of it. I am moved by some. I tune some out – but I don’t need to hush anyone for demanding anything of me, because they’re not. They’re just putting their stuff out there, in a forum where others can engage or attend if they want. That kid who was always waving his hand around in preschool circle time, the one the teacher probably wanted to throttle? He may have grown up to be one of the richest resources out there in his field, connecting and sharing and repackaging what he knows, just in case you want to know too.

He’s a cyborg, and social media is the world’s biggest circle time.

And so that gap between my emerging dissertation and education? I don’t think it’s there. I have a lot of work ahead of me to try to understand what it means, subjectivity-wise, to engage and live and learn in the clamour, but I hope eventually to be able to show that the clamour is not the enemy of learning, only of a model of schooling which need not be the alpha and omega of the field of education.

That would be an ironic educational myth, indeed.

 

a gift horse in the mouth

So, why are you so attached to capitalism?

He’s smiling when he asks the question, though he’s not joking. He asks, more or less, if I see myself married to Bourdieu in my framing of my dissertation project.

I know how to spell Bourdieu, and I have a longstanding casual acquaintance with the idea of cultural capital. Less so social capital.

I Google. “Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” – Bourdieu, 1983.

I shrug, equivocally. Dude has a point.

I use the term social capital – along with reputational capital, an idea I initially (ha!) thought I’d been genius enough to just conjure up as a description of my experience – to talk about what is exchanged in social media; in our blog interactions, our Tweets, our wiki contributions. The notion of this sociality as capital, and thus as capitalism, is a deeply embedded part of my concept of social media.

I suddenly want to explain to him that I’m NOT attached to capitalism, per se, but think it’s important to reflect the ways it shapes the online environment that my dissertation will argue shapes US.

Then I realize he gets that. That he’s having fun.

A thesis committee might as well be fun.

He notes that Bourdieu, to an extent, reduces social activity to an economic relationship. He mentions Marcel Mauss and the idea of gift economy. I nod, note that I’d started down the gift economy road in our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) research back in the fall. Started remains the operative word. Let’s face it: in both philosophy and social science, I am an academic hack, eternally on the learning curve. I suspect I will feel this way even if I die at the ripe old age of 103, having memorized the entire canon of Northrop Frye and Foucault, both.

I wonder if my preliminary writing has over-emphasized the capital aspects of an environment in which my own experiences have been largely, overwhelmingly non-monetary. For Mauss, it’s not like the gift economy precludes exchange or even the obligation of exchange: as I understand it in these early forays, it’s an honour system, but not a quid pro quo one. Customs govern the future benefits derived from actions, and both status and trade are part of the system. It sounds, to me, a lot like the blogosphere I knew back in 2006 and 2007, vestiges of which still beat at the heart of a great many of my online relationships.

And so I take it to the place where all my intellectual inquiries into the veracity of social media representations begin – to the crowd. A Twitterary Salon, of sorts: do you see social media as a gift economy or a social capital economy? In 140 characters or less.
***

Here, in highlights from five or six overlapping conversations, is the beginning of what I think is a great and unfolding debate on the nature of our communities and our interactions online.

@SaraHamil: My inner anthropologist just squee’d over you even asking that question. Also, I’d argue social capital.

@SaraHamil: I think we desire for social media to be gift, but in reality I feel the value of connections outweigh giving (not to sound negative)

@suefisher: A social capital exchange combined w/ the consumption/boasting of cultural capital. Status by affiliation & being in the know.

@Quadelle: Both. Some people/media will always fall higher on the gift spectrum, some on the social capital, but most will do some of both.

@SaraHamil: I totally agree about ye olde blogosphere being more gift culture though, for sure

@dougsymington: my vote is for ” social capital exchange” — particularly when more than one social media space involved in consideration

@Quadelle: gift = IVF online board. Everyone there to give (& receive) – mostly encouragement, but also ideas, info, stories, knowledge, etc.

@suefisher: Excellent point about discussion boards & their purpose. Yes, more like a gift economy there.

@dougsymington: was thinking one’s social media capital or “stock” rises (potentially) in proportion to number of “spaces” inhabited

@courosa: See there can be a problem of dilution, however.

@courosa: i think weight has to be unbundled from visibility – some correlation, but not necessarily positive.

@Quadelle: I think there’s three factors to consider: the individual (their motivation, which can change over time), the medium

@Quadelle: (some way more gift, others way more capital) & the network/community they form/join in them (peer influence).

@suefisher: In a certain respect, Wikipedia is the ultimate online gift economy.

@dougsymington: I see consistency of one’s conduct over time, and across spaces, most important factor when assessing social media resources

@AureliaCotta: I think the FB movie kind of answered that, no?
***

There you go. An informal, entirely unauthorized and entirely voluntary focus group of sorts, made up of people with a multitude of vested interests and histories online, some professional, some entirely personal, most a mix of both.

Apparently, I’m not alone in leaning toward the social capital idea, especially in the “matured” blog world of 2011. Apparently though, too, there are still ways to congregate online – wikis and discussion boards being the primary ones mentioned, though I think of a community like Glow in the Woods, and nod – wherein the interaction is still ostensibly and primarily less about reputation and potential capital gain, whether monetary or no, than about simple participation, or sharing, or contribution. And at the same time, social capital online is apparently no simple equation. I figured. Apparently, I need to think through how this matters, and what the distinctions mean.

Apparently, I need to see the Facebook movie.

Thanks, to all of you who threw your two cents in to the Twitter conversation. Everyone else, please consider it still open here: how do you see the economy of the online world in which you interact? In what ways do you experience it or perpetuate it along the principles of a gift economy?

And in what ways – even if not for money or love of money – are you attached to capitalism? Do you think I need Bourdieu?

 

the branded cyborg manifesto: identity in the public domain

It’s just me.

A person isn’t a brand.

If “online” is just another place to manage identity, why does digital identity deserve special treatment?

Thanks – big thanks – to all of you who gave me input on digital identity and how you think of it and name it. The paraphrased quotes from the last post’s comments all helped me dig deeper into the specifics of what I’m aiming to explore with this dissertation-in-the-making. I both agree and disagree with each: the conversation hones my thinking and my writing, and I am grateful.

Here’s what I think: the specific kind of cyborg identity that interests me is new. People have, arguably, depended on technologies to construct and perform identity for thousands of years: the wheel created social structures that shaped who people were and how they saw themselves, and writing – to Socrates’ chagrin – enabled a persistence of self over time that has deeply shaped our notion of what it is to be human.

But what I call – for now, at least – the branded cyborg is a particular hybrid of human and social media platform that creates a circulation of identity different from previous incarnations or understandings of self. It is a reputational identity with tangible, visible, measurable attributes, and the economy in which it operates makes demands on the entity who generates it.

In this sense, I think the branded cyborg – for those of us who are one – is us and reaches beyond us, at the same time. It is identity in the public domain. And I think how it operates matters.

That’s why I think digital identity deserves special focus, even if it is perceived by social media users as a simple extension of themselves. Operations of power and interaction are not actually the same online as they are in so-called “real life,” no matter whether we try to conduct ourselves the same or no. The speed of connections, the flattening (to an extent) of hierarchical relations, the reputational and corporate economic aspects of social media, and the ways in which power circulates and allows for different performances and different recognition of performances all change the subject positions that the environment creates and privileges.

Donna Haraway first wrote her particular version of the cyborg into being in 1985: a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” A couple of years ago, in response to the irritatingly popular mythology of the digital native, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek cyborg momifesto, on the cyborg nature of mommybloggers. We perform aspects of self for each other, intimately, but accept that the whole is seldom represented. We often parody notions of what motherhood should be in an effort to resist the discourses that frame our identities. We are hybrids of human and technology just as surely as our children are touted to be.

My ‘we’ has expanded since then, but I still find the figure of the cyborg valuable as a representation of the particular kind of digital identity I want to explore. In my dissertation, I’ll revision Haraway’s late 20th century version of the cyborg as a 21st century digital subject; an entity of social media.

Now, I don’t think everyone online is a cyborg, or at least not a branded cyborg, not really. It depends on what we DO online. Those of us who live “in the open,” to an extent, who engage in the creation/consumption sharing cycle of the produsage economy and who put our own work out there to our networks and actively try to grow audience for those networks under a particular name (or names) that represent us? WE’RE branding. If you have a Facebook account and the rest of your online activity is mostly surfing, maybe you’re not branding. It’s about level of engagement in that reputational, rhizomatic economy. It’s about sharing, putting aspects of self out there, seeking recognition and being open to new connections in the network. It’s about reciprocity, as well: sharing the work of others, leaving comments, participating in the circulation.

So the digital identities of cyborgs are multi-faceted representations, contributed to and amplified by others as part of the etiquette of social media. Cyborg subjects involved in social media produsage networks ‘create content’ such blog posts, tweets, video work, slideshows, or comments attached to a particular digital identity that circulates in the open, building social – and potential financial – capital for its creators in the process. Traditional media appearances or in the online work of others will sometimes factor into a person’s digital identity: the traces that register with Google as a part of our digital identity are not always fully under our control. However, as Google’s page rank works on scale of views, longterm commitment to a particular digital profile or identity means that sites or accounts managed by the user will usually end up outranking random facets of identity originating with other subjects. The identity can encompass many platforms: depth and frequency of use lend gravitas, as do statistical data like blog pageviews and public rankings like Klout.

For Judith Butler, we are called into being as subjects by the operations of power and discourse, and our agency is concommitant with our subjectivity. What does this mean for digital identity? Cyborg digital identities are the product of already-formed subjects: the traces of us that circulate online are deployed in that environment by subjects always already navigating discourse and power. The digital identity may be constructed the same, psychically and discursively, but operates in a different environment. It is the agency of the digital subject – and whether the digital environment offers alternative opportunities for agency not previously available to the subject in embodied form – that interests me.

As an educator, I’m also interested in whether these potentially new digital subjectivities and their agency then impact the embodied subject and his or her expectations. In other words, what does it mean to teach a branded cyborg in an educational system premised on very different subject roles and agentive constructions than are available here online?

This is why I don’t believe that your online identity is simply ‘you.’ When a subject chooses to engage in the produsage economy, creating and sharing content and contributing to the consumption of others’ content as a means of connecting and building visibility and reputation, a cyborg digital identity comes into being. This digital identity, I will argue, cannot be identical to the subjectivity of the embodied person creating the content, even if the person intends it to be. The digital identity will almost invariably end up being recognized and interacted with differently than the embodied person, because the medium allows for and privileges different types of engagement. Few people, even if they write for a living, walk into an office in the morning and are told outright what a wonderful writer they are. Few students can walk into schools, even with the most well-intentioned teachers, and say Hey! This really amazing/terrible/striking thing came across my radar last night and I’d like to take this morning to respond to and share it creatively. Not everyday. And I’m not sure school should be about that every day, though I’m not sure it shouldn’t. But most students learn from their earliest years that schooling means a set of power relations that tend to preclude and sanction statements like that. They learn a different subject position, one with a very different sort of agency than they will encounter online, as cyborgs.

In this context, then, new forms of agency and specifically digital subjectivity are indeed jointly called into being. The discourses and power relations that create the specific subjugation that calls each individual into cyborg identity would, I assume, be individual: I will want to explore Butler’s work on desire and on giving account of oneself in order to consider the myriad of ways this may operate. Certainly, in my own experience, it was subjugation to and representation by a discourse of motherhood that I felt excluded my experience of loss and attachment that led me to try to narrate my own story online, visibly: in creating cribchronicles, I created my own agency to speak a counter-discourse.

This all sounds delightfully, misleadingly emancipatory. I don’t mean it to. I see change as carrying good and bad, cultural gain and cultural loss: I want to explore both. Social media is neither saviour nor sin, in my mind. And lots of people, I’m sure, go online mostly for the porn.

My read of both Haraway’s original cyborg and Butler’s notions of subjectivity and performativity is that the messiness is okay; that clean trajectories are to be mistrusted, interrogated, that porn – and all the aspects of humanity that it stands for – are part of the package I’ve taken on here, in looking to study identity in this public domain of the digital.

My hope, really, is that in exploring what it means to be a branded cyborg I will stumble and grope my way to a more complex understanding of what it means to be human, here and now.

the man who sold the world

We passed upon the stair, we spoke in was and when
Although I wasn’t there, he said I was his friend

– David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World, 1970

(Of course Bowie makes me think about identity.)

I need a word.

A year or so ago, long before I started this theoryblog lean-to on the side of ye olde cribchronicles, I started groping my way towards exploring something, trying to capture something I’d never heard named. I assumed it had been named, somewhere, probably a few times over, but was both amorphous enough and fast-moving enough to have refused reification, mass currency under a single title.

I called it brand, half tongue-in-cheek. I’ve always found brand a vulgar word, flagrant and blatant in its commercial intent. The online universe – especially in the education and narrative blog circles I run in – is not always so open about its own embeddedness in the capital exchange process. I chose the word to provoke, to try to force that conversation.

But mostly I chose it to keep me honest.

It forced me to look at my commercially lilywhite self and own that I am as embroiled and invested in online circulations of capital and power as the trashiest review pimp out there. Because you cannot use social media and not be embroiled. As you connect and share and have your work recognized by others, your social capital is amplified. As your social capital is amplified, your capacity to leverage it increases, often exponentially. You don’t have to: the monetization of the sphere is not obligatory. But ignoring it doesn’t mean it’s gone away.

I wrote three posts in quick succession on the subject. In the last one, I said it like this:

be it beauty or ideas or humour, it matters not. if you put it out
there and it works, it builds reputation. reputation can be leveraged,
sometimes into capital, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes
simply  into connection. we all have our eyes on a prize; we are
none of us pure, without want.

branding is what is read on to you, how you are perceived, what
you signify in the eyes of everybody else. it is not you, but a version
of you. it is an act, and a group act, one that does not exist without
a network of some sort to reflect and amplify it. it is ephemeral, a
wisp on the wind. it is not about content or truth.

it is about image and perceived capacity.
(own it, cribchronicles.com, June 8th, 2010)

I think of all of us out here using social media in our myriad of ways as branded selves, branded cyborgs whose online and offline lives blur. Within the walls of the academy, where the branded cyborg is my dissertation topic, I tend to use the words digital identity or digital subjectivity to describe the idea, depending on which discipline I’m addressing. I see them all tied together in Butler’s idea of the performative: that subjectivities are created by the constant and ongoing citation of the (gendered) societal norms that circulate in discourse. What makes me different from you is how I perform myself – online or off – in relation to those norms.

And what makes me a branded cyborg is that the circulations in which I reference and identify myself include the spheres of social media and concommittant capital. And some version of me – my brand, or my digital identity – continues on performing me in circulation even when I’m not there. Ahem. That’s all. But that’s not an easy thing to explain.

It’s hard to name a social aggregate, an “it” in circulation. As Bruno LaTour puts it in Reassembling the Social, “…Social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition – like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger – but only of a performative definition. They are made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist” (p. 34).  The performative definition of a group draws attention to the means necessary to keep it up, and also to the contributions made by the fact of it being studied or analyzed.

Goody. I need a word to cover the performative definition of performativity in the world of social media.

Amber Case (here at TEDWomen) is a cyborg anthroplogist, which basically means she studies human life as a product of humans and technologies, or objects. She calls the ephemeral us-ness that others interact with online our “second self.”

I’m wary of this term. The idea of a second self ignores the fact that the identity distinctions between online and offline life are increasingly minimal and blurred and often meaningless: tomorrow, for instance, I’ll travel to another province to hang out with a bunch of bloggers, word made flesh. The transition from screen narratives and flurries of Twitter conversation to clinking glasses will not be particularly jarring: in fact, because the group of us interact far more regularly than most of us do with friends we know only in the flesh, the awkward stage of polite catching up will be largely bypassed. We are intimate, because we are regularly online together. Are you listening, Sherry Turkle?

Nathan Jurgenson of cyborgology – who adeptly critiques the binary implicated in the second self idea here – calls it a Profile, an aggregate sum of all the data out there about you. I think we’re on the same page conceptually. There’s something fluid about the word: its connotations are less laden than that of brand, or identity. Yet to me it suggests something flat, surface-like, easily tied up. Does it allow for complex performances of digital identity? Does it represent who we are when we’re not there?

I need to talk this out. Last time I asked – when I asked who you think you are online – I got an extraordinary collection of responses and discussion. This is part two, the simpler question, really: what would you call this you I know out here, your online doppelganger, your disembodied you? Profile, brand, second self, digital identity…what works?

the backbone of a digital economy

Canada has a problem.

It’s a real threat to the country’s so-called digital economy, and certainly to its competitive advantage across sectors. It’s a problem that shouldn’t exist in a 21st century nation that commissioned a big fancy paper on Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage just nine months ago, and then poured significant grant money into furthering Canada’s edge – and knowledge – on all things digital.

It’s a problem of ignorance – and partially of corporate greed and short-sightedness. But it’s mostly a PR problem, people.

This digital sphere that most of us reading here are involved in? It’s participatory.

Digital innovation and connection and creativity occur in what Axel Bruns (2007) calls a produsage economy, one in which creativity and consumption are combined. I write posts, you read ’em. Vicey-versy. You make a YouTube video, I click the link on Twitter & leave a comment. You announce your start-up venture, consolidating info I think might be handy? I share that with 1400 followers. Or 12. or 63,000. The size of individual networks matters less than their interconnectedness, their capacity to intersect and create reciprocal audiences. It’s not broadcasting. It’s a messy, participatory, collaborative venture. One Canadians are pretty active in. Leaders, even, in areas like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) and other cutting-edge digital advantage activities.

These areas of digital advantage and engagement have the capacity to increase Canada’s economic and intellectual capital exponentially over the coming years, as the platforms and tools on which participation is built are becoming increasingly open and simple to use.

If Canada doesn’t go hide in the digital dark ages, that is.

Last week, the regulatory CRTC decided, essentially, to cap internet usage. Their decision will force independent ISPs to match the proposed usage and overage rates of the big incumbents like Bell. What this means, effectively, is that as of March 1st, unlimited internet packages in Ontario and Quebec will disappear. Instead, usage will be capped and overage – any usage above and beyond the proposed 25 GB per month in Ontario and 60 GB in Quebec – will come at a coupla dollars per GB. It’s called Usage-Based Billing (UBB). The rest of the country, it’s assumed, will follow suit.

In other words, thanks to Bell being allowed to buy up rather big bits of the publicly paid-for fibre optic cable across the country, they now have a stranglehold on our digital capacity. They’d like to charge for bandwidth usage, on a network already paid for by Canadians. And they have enough power to convince the CRTC to do so. Save the poor struggling cable giants! Ma Bell, my scritchy whiskers.

There’s no great surprise or drama in a large monopoly pushing to save its own interests in a capital economy. The surprise is in a government agency like the CTRC handing them the entire country’s digital advantage – the one the government pays such lovely lip service to wanting to foster – on a platter.

Or I wish it was a surprise. But after reading the Digital Economy consultation paper last spring, and working on one of the grants that came forward out of it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of decision-makers in Ottawa truly, simply don’t get it. They don’t understand the digital. They don’t participate, and they neither understand nor respect the ways in which this participation is changing our culture.

The narratives of Bell and the CRTC suggest that only porn fetishists and illegal downloaders and online gamers – who, after all, are considered more or less on the same level as the porn people – will suffer under UBB.  Fair punishment, they sneer, for those nasty bandwidth hogs who’ve been using more than their fair share of our (ahem, publicly-paid-for but now-market-strangled) common resource.

The consultation paper on the Digital Economy released by MP Tony Clement on behalf of the Government of Canada last May stated, “Arguably, the backbone of the digital economy is a strong, globally competitive information and communications technology sector” (p. 5).

I think this is the problem behind the problem on all of our hands right now. Decision-makers still think that the information and communications technology (ICT) sector and technologies themselves are what’s driving the digital. They see our national competitive digital advantage as tied to a 2001-era view of the world. They don’t really get – or accept – that Twitter and Flickr and blogs and YouTube and Elluminate all involve the capacity to build and leverage both financial and social capital. They don’t see how industries like publishing and the arts increasingly demand participation because the old top-down models of promotions aren’t funded anymore. They don’t get – I hope, I really, really hope they don’t get – the ways in which education and small business and collaboration and connection are deeply tied in this country to the kind of free-flow exchange and participation that the unlimited-bandwidth model used by THE REST OF THE WORLD makes possible.

I don’t think they get that the digital is no longer the sole purview of the ICT sector, and hasn’t been for about, oh, seven years.

But it’s time they got the message. The UBB decision by the CRTC needs to be repealed, or all the consultation papers in the world won’t be able to drag Canada’s so-called digital advantage out from its dungeon.

We can use our digital advantage to address this PR problem, folks. We can try to explain to the government how the digital works. What it is. What they’re actually threatening by supporting MaBell, whom they seem to think of as the only backbone of the digital economy.

I think we’re part of that backbone. And we need to show some.

OpenMedia’s StopTheMeter campaign has over 228,000+ signatures already, and apparently caught the ear of the opposition parties yesterday. Participate. Lend your voice. Please.