#philtech instructions and ebook PDF link
Sorry I've been delayed with getting this all together; I've recognized that the Haraway book was terribly difficult to acquire so I took a little extra time to scan it and upload it as a PDF. I have not been able to OCR the text, so if anyone has access to OCR software and wants to do this please let me know and I'll relink the PDF. For now, the PDF is at http://drop.io/xyxafi8 .
As I've discussed before my intentions for this reading group are to explore some readings in the philosophy of technology. We've decided to start with Donna Haraway's seminal 'Simians, Cyborgs, and Women' (PDF linked above). I don't want to lay out restrictive rules or instructions, but I do have a sense of how I think the Twitter-based reading group should go.
1) The group is composed of a diverse range of people with different linguistic skills, philosophical skills, technical skills, and a wide range of interests.Given this, I think it's important to recognize this diversity in all communication. I hope we can cultivate a loosely federated community that follows a pretty anarchic set of guidelines (i.e. make it whatever you want it to be).
2) The primary form of communication ought to be Twitter. The benefit of communication through Twitter is that communication will be kept short and frequent, and thus (I hope) open-ended rather than terminal. I hope we can explore the texts rather than shut them down with completely air-tight argumentation. The problem with Twitter=based communication is obvious: it's rather too short to say much, and sometimes hard to follow. I hope that through the use of hashtags (#philtech) and the twibe (http://twibes.com/philtech) we can track the conversations. If slightly longer correspondences are needed, services like posterous and other microblogs can probably suffice.
3) We'll start slow and see what works. We are starting with chapter 1 of Haraway. Please read it and post comments and questions to twitter using the #philtech hashtag. Follow the hashtag and respond to others. In a week or so I'll reassess and we'll likely move on to chapter 2.
That's it! I've already written far too much. This is going to be my last meta-discourse about the group.
Cheers,
Quinn
