#lifeworld — Public Fediverse posts

A crisis of social reproduction

“We are living in a world that is the most cognitively demanding world that there has ever been...So it is unsurprising that people feel that they are overwhelmed. They can’t focus. They can’t concentrate because that is the world we live in.”
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-21/women-adhd-medication-overtake-men-australia-data-four-corners/106583242
#zeitgeist #CareWork #CrisisOfCare #women #gender #ReproductiveLabour #DoubleBurden #CareDeficit #austerity #overwhelmedness #speed #ClimateCrisis #lifeworld #pharmaceuticals #medication #SocialTransition

Film:
A retired woman moves into an apartment building in Reykjavík, Iceland and domesticates the neighbours. In her #neighbourhood she takes on
#SUV lovers,
#fossilfuel machine 'gardening’,
indoor doof doof parties,
roaming #pets,
teen pregnancy,
screen-warehousing children,
domestic #violence,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
addiction and much more.

TRAILER >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89tiHi4wM8Q

The Danish Woman (2025) premieres Thursday 19 February at SBS On Demand.>>
https://www.sbs.com.au/whats-on/article/top-new-tv-series-to-watch-this-february/ai32i2zoq
#film #women #care #lifeworld #EverydayLived #experience #climate #pollution

What I mean when I talk about ‘LLMs in the lifeworld’

It’s a conceptual vocabulary I’ve slipped into which tends to make Archerian realists cringe slightly, but it’s essentially what Mark Coeckelbergh is talking about here in his book Self Improvement:

Using terms from Wittgenstein, I have argued that technology is embedded in games and in a form of life. When we use technologies, this is part of our activities and of the ways we do things in our society and culture. For example, when I use AI to do a search, this search is related to my activities (research, playing music, cooking, etc.) and the ways these activities are done in our society and culture: the rules, games, habits, norms, values, and so forth that are related to the activity. AI feeds on these, indirectly via data, and our interpretations of the results are embedded in those games and form of life. Similarly, humanist activities relied on a range of technologies and media—books, letters, the printing press—that were a crucial part in processes of making knowledge and interpreting, and that made sense only within a particular form of life.

#lifeworld #LLMs #MarkCoeckelbergh #realism #technology

I just encountered this notion via Tusting et al’s Academics Writing and it immediately helped me clarify the sense in which Claude now shows up in my professional lifeworld:

Professional writing practices may be acquired and sustained as much through engaging with “sponsors of literacy”, as through formal training or education. Brandt develops this idea, defining sponsors of literacy as: any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, supress or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way. (Brandt, 1998, p. 166) In a higher education context, literacy sponsors include colleagues and mentors who support academics’ writing efforts, as well as publishers, reviewers, and editors who act as gatekeepers.

In contrast I don’t believe copilots could ever be sponsors of literacy. My concern is that panicked commercialisation strategies will lead to conversational agents being fine-tuned to resemblance copilots. Even if I took to them pretty organically for fairly idiosyncratic reasons (intellectual curiosity, being a long-term blogger, being a generalist, intellectual scaffolding about technological reflexivity etc) I’m realising their weird and open-ended character makes them hard to use.

I think Ethan Mollick’s rule of thumb that you need to use a frontier model for at least 10 hours to get any real sense of what it can do is broadly correct. It takes much longer than that to integrate it into your practice. I’m worried that conversational agents in their current form will be engineered out of existence because they’re not a commercially viable product.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/06/conversational-agents-can-be-sponsors-of-literacy/

#claude #conversationalAgents #generativeAI #lifeworld #sponsorsOfLiteracy