Notes for David White’s Webinar are in Miro here
Visitors & Residents Paradigm
We propose that our Visitors and Residents paradigm not only describes the lived experience and practice of technological engagement in a more accurate way than Prensky’s Natives and Immigrants, but it is based on a more secure foundation. (White & Le Cornu. 2011)
I agree that this continuum is a helpful paradigm for understanding how we engage with the lived experience of technology. It was a useful way of mapping this out in Miro (link).
I wouldn’t say this continuum was more ‘accurate’ than Prensky’s natives / immigrants taxonomy, it’s just a different perspective and, as such, generates and then models a different ‘field’.
I accept the critique of Prensky’s natives / immigrants taxonomy. This could go further and draw on how social anthropology would tackle a (false) native / immigrant dialectic (emic / etic, etc.)
What else could I say about this? Visitor and Residents seems to be predicated on ‘presence’, which is helpful as a means of understanding what we are doing online but it seems to be, utimately, a humanist approach based on a comparable (behaviourist) desire to classify people. This means that, methdologically speaking, it’s not a million miles away from Prensky’s natives / immigrants (an example of what Salter 2020 refers to as ‘making up people’). As such, it’s likely to lead to a comparable alternative in future (here’s a different model for classifying and quantifying people based on behaviour and experience).
It’s perhaps missing a posthumanist consideration of ‘absence’. What happens to our digital presence when we aren’t actively managing it. Quite a lot. To understand the “presence of absence” we need to engage an awareness of the ‘quasi-biological model of artificial intelligence – mathematically organized and computed neural networks that recognize, discriminate, back propagate and bias as well as generate faces, images and actions.’ (Salter 2020: 155)
As half of the Confraternity of Neoflagellants, I have an avid research interest in GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and the Weird Machine (Anantharaman, et al. 2020). Human subjectivity is increasingly entangled with both, as well as with ‘wet’ microbial parasites (See: Confraternity of Neoflagellants 2021) As such, our digital presence and our ‘becoming’ isn’t something we ‘control’ in the way that we think we are able to manage our physical presence (which we don’t do on our own either). Our ‘presence’ is managed by a series of actants that – increasingly – live lives independently of what we (erronously) think of as our ‘central control system’.
I’d recommend watching Chris Salter summarise this in 15mins or so:
References:
Anantharaman, Prashant, Vijay Kothari, J. Peter Brady, Ira Ray Jenkins, Sameed Ali, Michael C Millian, Ross Koppel, Jim Blythe, Sergey Bratus, and Sean W Smith. “Mismorphism: The Heart of the Weird Machine.” In Security Protocols XXVII, 113–124. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020.
Confraternity of Neoflagellants, pan-pan, Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2021. 208 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-60-8. DOI: 10.53288/0304.1.00
Salter, Chris. ‘When are We: Adventures in the Machine Readable Self’, in Grau, Oliver and Hinterwaldner, Inge. Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020 (140-158) https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1515/9783110670981
White, David S., and Alison Le Cornu. 2011. “Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement”. First Monday 16 (9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171
