November 13, 2006
Listening to Fernando Flores, Chilean Senator
The final speaker of the first day at the Encounter I am attending in Santiago, Chile is Senator Fernando Flores. As that Wikipedia page demonstrates, Flores has been very active in cognition, philosophy, and even human-computer interaction. He has become a huge advocate of blogs as a means for encouraging broader Chilean discourse.
Anyway, he just name-checked French philosopher/sociologist/intellectual Bruno Latour. And artificial-intelligence theorist Ray Kurzweil.
Why can't the United States have geek senators who blog, who cite international intellectuals? Why do I think if a US senator were to do that, he'd be pilloried in the press as out of touch with the common person (see: Kerry, Gore). Flores is all about empowering the common person, through technology.
(Looking over his blog, he talks about, among other things, Second Life, MIT media theorist Henry Jenkins, MySpace and Youtube, Web 2.0...)
Anyway.
