Media Ecology - Technogenic Cultures

Copyright © 2014, Peter Jones

Technogenic Cultures How Innovation Regimes Reproduce Culture

Peter Jones, PhD OCAD University, Toronto

Redesign Network

Media Ecology Association

June 20, 2014


What seems to be the problem?

No Growth: We’re All

Greek Now


Are startups the answer?

We have been enchanted by the cultural furnishings of startup culture: Energy, youth, lifestyle, get-rich drive, freedom, opportunity.


Globalization has exported and socialized the technological culture of economic growth values associated with Silicon Valley venture capitalism.


We are all advised to become as entrepreneurs • The once-protected: Universities, researchers, profs • The “social”: Non-profits, “Sharing businesses” • The vulnerable: Emerging economies, immigrants

Placing the outcomes of research, and increasingly culture, into the realm of global markets & competition.


Embedded quickly in new curricula … • Universities are promoting entrepreneurial careers • (Not a critique in itself, but - when did an MBA become the

key to small business?) • IP regimes designed to commercialize student inventions • Do we (academy) offer guidance

on the social value of innovation?

• We defend ethical research. Do we defend “good business outcomes?”


The Evil Genius - Voice of Silicon Valley Culture “Strangely, it is the very implausibility of straight talk that makes it astoundingly effective for disqualifying all the other modes (of existence). Once one makes the mere supposition of a transfer … of information without any transformation, of displacement without any translation, all the other ways of speaking are suddenly subject to deep suspicion. And, even more strangely, the other modes start to doubt themselves and their own capacity to distinguish between truth and falsity. (Including and especially, Science)” modesofexistence.org

If Double Click managed to discipline political speech, to rectify it, he would only produce a much worse monster, since one could no longer obtain the proper curvature that outlines the collectives in which we learn to protest, to be represented, to obey, to disobey—and to start over. Add some transparency, some truth (still in the sense of Double Click), and you still get only dissolution, stampede, the dispersal of that very agora in which the fate of all categories is judged.” (Heading & text from) Bruno Latour An Inquiry into Modes of Existence


Cultural shifts?

Enhances The Pitch Selling Solutions “App tasking”

Reverses into The Answer Networks as instrument “Yo”

Obsoletes Community Intimacy Service Clubs “Tenure”

Retrieves Founder as Great Man Initiative Cottage industry


Yet we have real concerns this

culture doesn’t cope with.


Entrepreneurial Social Systems

Entrepreneurship as “skill of cultural innovation”

• A deeply democratic approach to innovation

• History making – from the everyday to new futures

• Exploiting anomalies discovered in practices Jane Jacobs – Diversity-enhancing, import replacement & shifting within current economic regime

• The small business has solidarity with its community, supplier networks, customers

• And must achieve some level of “sustainability”

Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus . (1999). Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity


Gunderson, LH and Holling, CS. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations In Human & Natural Systems.

Panarchy as Tetrad.


Sustaining a true place-based

SME ecosystem.

• Can we envision the adaptive cycle in social systems of small enterprise?

• With hundreds of startups & new small firms …

• How can we develop supportive ecosystems?

• Rather than just rewarding individuals with profit – Can we reward business risk-takers with support?


Thank you. Peter Jones, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Faculty of Design, Strategic Foresight & Innovation program Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab)

@redesign

Media Ecology - Technogenic Cultures

Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Transcript of Media Ecology - Technogenic Cultures