Educommunication

Lyotard warned several decades ago in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition, about noun_225280 science’s lack of legitimation. At least, about the lack of a “beautiful” legitimation, as he noticed that instead of searching for the truth or trying to improve mankind’s living conditions, science is nowadays ruled by what he called the performativity principle. In brief, science must be lucrative, returning money to investments in the same way other businesses do. Or returning more, if you want to assure a regular money flow to research. For those to whom “performativity” sounds like cryptic philosophy, Feyerabend provided (why not Plato?) a straightforward explanation:

20th century science has resigned to have any philosophic pretension to become a big business. It is no more a threat to the society, but one of the firmer pillars.

Yep, a threat to society sounds bad … except if you think about society as an ideological system with the function to reproduce inequality by supporting and transmitting the scheme that maintains few people in the zenith of the social pyramid: those who own resources and retains power relationships.
There are lots of examples of how science is no longer mankind’s progress weapon but a way to perpetuate the status quo. Here is one of my favorite examples: citation indexes.

Citation Indexes? What’s that?

Citation indexes (CI) are essentially lists in which scientific journals are ranked according to their impact factor, or the measure of how important their articles are for the scientific community. Sounds nice and helpful as this shows

‘a journal’s true place in the scholarly research world’ and ‘Measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels’ (Thomson Reuters, the editor of the JCR ranking, dixit).

Perhaps it sounds nice, but it isn’t. In the same way JCR qualifies journals, these journals transitively pinpoint good researches –whose works are published in these journals – and exclude the others.

C.I. Rankings promote inequality

First, top-list journals are expensive, so there is not global access to these, and this becomes a powerful source of inequality. «There are countless researchers without access to most impacting articles because journals abusive price: each paper costs about $30 and you should read lots of papers. If these articles are, arguably, the best scientific works, those people without access to them would have more difficulties in developing brilliant, innovative results, thinking science as an accumulative process.
Additionally, citation indexes make countless researchers all over the world systematically invisible as they are misrepresented. Their works are excluded from mainstream research not even because of their quality but because of where they are published and, indirectly but not less important, because of the language (the vast majority of journals in the first quartile are in English) or researchers’ relationships.
Of course, those researchers are not explicitly excluded. But the symbolic violence of this segregation is brutal, first because it is explained and legitimated in terms of quality of the research work, and second, due to the relative invisibility of this segregation.

An alternative to citation indexes?

Criticism has been dethroned by pseudo-democracy or pseudo-intersubjectivity mechanisms to focus literature or entertainment contents consumption. Habermas complains about the intellectuals’ lack of authority to direct public discussions. Science, a change engine by definition, seems to be one of the few places resisting this democratizing wave by maintaining authority argument in the form not only of peer review committees with shamanic powers to interact with Knowledge deities to decide what’s good or not.

That’s even worse when you know that sometimes those peer reviews can be fabricated or just hilariously stupid, made only to justify picking money from young researchers’ pockets.

I’m overtly not in love with mass pseudo-democratic mechanisms, easily influenced and cooked by advertising constructions or filter bubbles. But it is clear that we need to give voice to horizontal and open peer-review systems where anyone can be a peer. And national research certification systems could also take into account more open and modern impact measures, more aligned with what science and research should mean.
Is there anything like that? There is.

What do you think about Academia.edu, for instance?

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Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research.

Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 32,590,050 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 9,815,878 papers and 1,817,127 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.

[https://www.academia.edu/about]

Raúl Antón Cuadrado

Isolated individuals zigzag over system limits.

Isolated individual zigzags over system limits, and even if he doesn’t understand it because they were enculturated in competition values, he needs the others.

“You cannot fight alone without tiring yourself” (Story of a Stairway, Buero Vallejo).

Yeah! Long time ago, Buero wrote this awesome narration –I fervently recommend you- anticipating market economy impacts on unstructured social cells. A disturbingly accurate description even nowadays… By the way this book is a good example to understand the difference between art and mere serial light entertainment. Just think about who is gonna cite ‘The pillars of the earth’ in 60 years’ time?

The Internet is like Buero’s stairway, but projected into a planetary scale.

CC-BY flickr.com/photos/21847073@N05/

Stephenson’s (Snow Crash) was a clairvoyant. His foreseen network scheme, whose epicenter was homogenous and uniform, makes already sense. And it is possible that Internet conspicuous area continues infra-representing minorities as Leung (Virtual Ethnicity) pointed.

But it has rained a lot since then. Yes. Fortunately.

At this very moment relationships between horizontal content producers and the streamline, is not what you would expect from any technology where there is a breach between those who rule production and distribution and those who don’t (Virtual Ethnicity, Leung). Why? The key point seems to be Internet ability to catalyze new cooperative intelligence systems as those preconized by Levy, ‘more flexible, more democratic, funded upon reciprocity and singularity respect’ (Qu’est-ce que le virtuel?)

The individual, who was a mere audience element, can now emancipate himself / gain emancipation thru his action, integrated in participation networks. But, how is it possible to achieve this ubiquitous action ‘anywhere distributed, continuously valorized, and synergized in real time?’ (Again Levy). This could only be realized by merging a new relationship network scheme and extended interactivity capacities, unavailable before Internet participative maturity. A ruthless jump from a technological point of view, but which needs even more in-depth conceptualization efforts to embrace new social and mental institutions. A jump requiring an opposition to ‘the obvious’ dictatorship, unlearn the reproduction scheme destroying participation horizontality (From a Bourdieu point of view).

Internet and counter-hegemony.

CC-BY flickr.com/photos/ergonomic/

Internet is a non-conventional mass-media. It’s true: huge opinion creation conglomerates are taking the lead. But it’s equally true that an alphabetized in new storytelling and technological posibilities society, could appropriate this media to re-write a new unstable equilibrium in which power relationships were not so suffocating.

This is exactly the reason for the convenience of an effective media literacy education. Although some others will judge it inconvenient ;), taking into account this will make us to become ‘dangerous people’ for the system (R.I. Correa).

And, here is the good news: this appropriation is taking place right now. Counter-hegemonic networks, created offline, have migrated a significant part of their activities to the Internet, making them more robust, enhancing their mobilization and goal-reaching ability. Network organization as well as ideas, doctrines, strategies and technologies aligned with it, boost goals achieving in charity orgs as well as in cybernetic guerrilla gangs.

Let’s go to barricades?

It seems the Internet belongs to all of us. And for the very first time we have an open field to experiment… this if educational leaders (politics, programmers, center directors or teachers) persuade themselves that just sporadic ‘advertisement language analysis’ is not enough. The whole reality is built with advertisement techniques by broadcasting corporations and it requires in-depth media literacy programs without complexes.