Last month TorrentFreak had an article about Professor John Stinchcombe of the University of Toronto explaining how he uses the concept behind bitTorrent to explain DNA sequencing. You can see the slide below (which even includes an image the Pirate Bay logo 
) where he draws the comparison.
What’s so cool about this to me is not just that prof Stinchcombe is using new, relevant technologies to explain biological concepts like DNA sequencing, but more broadly how this exemplifies how important it is for all of us to explore and imagine the contemporary conceits that surround us with this new technological moment.
Language is how we will make sense of this stuff, it’s how we will both question and directly challenge the determinism that is often concomitant with new technologies. The poetry of the 21st century will be written, filmed, or designed through these new, de-centered technologies that connect a new world, while at the same time control and expose it like never before. It’s a multi-headed hydra (to push a metaphor) that we need to play with both conceptually and linguistically just as much as we dictate its uses and abuses pragmatically.
But–
The dangers of deterministic cut both ways. There’s nothing about the new conceits and media on offer that automatically entail progress, transparency, sharing, and All Good Things. That said, I agree (of course I agree!) that there is potential here for a vast array of expressive languages, and unprecedentedly powerful meta-languages, that could actually bring us closer to the dreams of Engelbart and Kay and Turkle and Murray (and many others).
What I fear is not politicization–it’s all about the polis, sure–but poor, old, bankrupt politicization (I include Foucault here, sorry!). We need new political paradigms, or maybe a return to older political paradigms, that can help us imagine abundance and reaffirm the potential each of us have for truth- and symbiosis-seeking (latter phrase courtesy of Phil Long). Fewer diagnoses and more invitations, something the bava is uniquely good at, by the way….
Happy New Year, Jim.
Thus we must guard against the whole ‘digital native’ misconception about the current generation of students - be prepared to explain your technological image, rather than assume its transparency. Don’t assume they understand web2.0 any more than assume they know the classics. Be ready to explain that a hydra is, indeed, ‘multi-headed’. The death of canonical knowledge is both freeing and also generative of this kind of patient explanation of everything we use to refer to everything else.
There is poetry in the creatively deployed metaphor, yes, and also often comedy and other virtues. There is also a lot of hard, basic pedagogical work.
But the power of the oblique and revelatory analogy? You’ll get no quarrel from me there!