I found your page from google but i like it so much

Thumbnail Gallery

Realy good site!

Los Angeles Jobs

Chris,

I have to agree with Dion. Your post is very confusing. Are you for Dean? Are you for the internet? Or are you for Dean because you perceived him to be the most effective user of the internet?

I don’t think you should support any candidate becasue the are the master of any particular communications tool.. be that the internet, TV or direct mail. I think you should support someone in large part for their position on the issues and then throw in a couple of points for maybe character, energy, experience, etc.

I think Dick Morris was right when he pointed out in your recent interview that Dean may have 500,000 email names but that the Republicans have been quietly collecting 20 million addresses. As Morris intimated, Karl Rove knows how to use the internet.

Dean doesn’t play to the dinosaur TV people, and they don’t like it. He plays to those who like their TV dissonant. Dissonance ho!

From where I sit, there’s an uncomfortable conflation (and reification) of both Internet-based communication technology and personality in Chris’ condensed embrace of Dean and aspects of Internet culture. Dean is not necessarily the best nor the worst the candidate because of his deployment of Internet resources. But I’m sometimes uncomfortable with Chris’ position precisely because of an implicit technological reductionism in his advocacy of Dean’s candidacy, as if an aggressive embrace of this technology is sufficient criteria for an enthusiatic endorsement. It’s probably not fair to Dean, as well, to reduce his bid to a referendum on the political implications of this form of political communication and organization.

As the late Gilles Deleuze noted, new technologies have a dual effect. First, they deterritorialize, breaking through old boundaries (as the Interstate Highway System, the telephone, jet travel, and other modes in recent history). But there is always, according to Deleuze, a definite impulse reterritorialization (gated communities, surveillance technology, datamining, the rise of actuarial/preventive techniques across society, etc.)

I’ve always been somewhat troubled by Chris’ relatively uncritical embrace of the deterritorializing effects of technology, at the expense of looking at the alternative face and effects of technological development. My own work has looked at some of the more disturbing aspects of technological displacement and reterritorialization, whether in the recent “The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class,” (at http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=402) or in 1999’s “Late Boomerology and Beyond,” (http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=118)

The trick is to recognize the complexity of effects, and to careful sort out and develop practices of freedom, among them.

Sincerely

Dion Dennis

_____________________________________

Dion Dennis
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Bridgewater State College
131 Summer St.
Bridgewater, MA 02325
________________________________________