Description

By Robin L. Zebrowski

Sitting in my basement, a Zoom workshop about compassion for student trauma while teaching online during a pandemic on one screen, and a livestream of day 70 of well-equipped, highlytechnologized, militarized police violence enacted on journalists and peaceful protestors in Portland Oregon on another, I can’t help but feel the weight of the technological matrix in which I find myself already embedded. Much like the early empiricists understood our senses to be the fundamental mediator between us and the world, it makes just as much sense to point to our technologies as the meaningful mediator of our everyday lives. Of course, this idea is hardly new or generally insightful on its own, but when the world shuts down almost overnight and many schools
and businesses transfer their operations to peoples’ homes, with vast wealth inequality reflected in who must remain in the risky, uncontrolled pandemic world and who gets to sit comfortably back and interact with the world safely from a technology-mediated distance, these questions press more heavily on all of us.

page: 309 – 314
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 36, Issue 3
SKU: 360313