Texting characters

In the study of writing we often overlook the fact that the most commonly spoken language in the world is Chinese. Using characters - a form of logographic writing, is the most obvious choice for a population of over 1.5 billion. And so associating literacy with the alphabet is both limiting and inaccurate. In fact, there is no better illustration of how political and economic power intersect with the development and propagation of writing than the character-based system of Chinese writing. The technologies of writing that developed with industrialisation from mid-nineteenth century telegraphy, the invention of the typewriter through to the personal computer have all favoured alphabetic writing. Jing Tsu's wonderful book Kingdom of Characters - A Tale of Obsession and Genius in Modern China traces the struggles of inventors and language reformers who have fought against alphabetic domination. The inequities of telegraph tariffs, the design challenge of Chinese language typewriters and the innovative development of the 'digital sinosphere' are carefully charted. Understanding that an educated Chinese speaker can recognise and reproduce somewhere between two and three thousand different characters, gives an impression of the magnitude of the challenge. The massive take up of mobile communication has resulted in a sort of compromise. It seems as if the majority now use pinyin (a modified alphabetic system) to write, supplemented by the software's predictive text which translates their message into characters. If I had one criticism of Jing Tsu's book it's that she doesn't give enough space to the complexity, innovation and variation of text messaging in Chinese - (and Japanese-) speaking communities. The prevalence of mobile instant messaging in these communities and the heavy use of WeChat and WhatsApp means that this is now an important site for semiotic work.

In a state

If my name still counts for something it is in the way it associates with my passport number and my license plate. Increasingly I get the sense that these details are less important than my location and credit card number. I am now less name more number. And on my mobile (number) a screen represents me as a pulsing blue dot on Google Maps. My number moves along the grid as I move. I imagine a data stream ballooning out of that blue dot, with strings of actions, preferences and all the footprints of my transactions. People like you went this way. Yes, I remember a time when I used to read texts, now they read me. This all begins to sound like the 'fear that people become readable pieces of data, without any recognised interiority' that William Davies writes about in 'Nervous States'. You might call it surveillance paranoia, neoliberalism, quantification or governmentality. It's the same thing. Read this against eco-disaster, cycles of poverty, mass migration and economic instability, and you can easily run out of hope. The slow advance of human civilisation seems like a big mistake, even golden ages are quickly dismissed as golden ages. The trouble with humans is that they are far too anthropocentric (exit stage left). This is the bitter fruit of several years reading post-humanism. On the other hand, no-one writes better about humans than Michel Serres. Reading 'Hominescence' is an antidote to pessimism. If anyone can write and think like that, there's something to live for. I've even started writing like him myself. Let's think slowly about where we are and how we got here and use this is a solid basis for action.

No future

A lifetime of reading has done little to improve my word recognition skills. I often misread signs and notices, repeatedly confusing push and pull on door signs (after all context is everything - isn't it?). In short I tend to distrust what I thought I read. For example, driving through Nottingham the other week I thought I saw a poster that said 'The future can be thought', and that interested me enough to google BT posters - you'll notice that I didn't misread the colours thanks to my multimodal sensibilities - and of course that search quickly revealed my mistake. BT claims that the future can be taught. Just another bid for the digital future as it turns out, and unfortunately just a little late to make it into our new book 'Undoing the Digital' which will be out next Spring (if there is one). As you might gather from this one of our targets in the book is to problematise the notion of a 'digital future'. And that's part of a larger argument about the notion of a monolithic 'thing' called the digital. But it also could be a critique of future itself. Paul Valery had it about right when he said 'The future isn't what it used to be'. Being of a particular generation I grew with fancy visions of the future. A utopian Age of Aquarius was dawning, and when this stalled it was replaced by a vision of social and political progress influenced in no small part by Marxism. Lurching into the 21st Century watching new Labour's idea that Things Can only get Better run aground did little to revive optimism. And now we seem to be standing in a place in which the future is unknowable in all sorts of ways - socially, politically, nationally, environmentally, economically and even technologically. There is clearly an urgency in the need to reckon with the past, with the excesses of industrial expansion and colonialism and to acknowledge the mess they left us in as well as the ways in which they continue to form the present. But there is also a need to relocate ourselves, with an ethical sensibility in the present. That, I think, leaves us enough to get on with without teaching the future.

What technology?

Tsering Dolma is not at home. Although the house and outbuildings are abandoned, provisions are stored away for the coming winter. So although the place has a Marie-Celeste atmosphere, there is perhaps no mystery - just a temporary absence. Water comes from a six inch pipe running all the way up to a cistern fed by a mountain stream below Shade. But the pipe has long since fractured. There is no water. Tsering Dolma's possessions remain, despite the locked doors. At first they're hard to make out amongst the dirt and mud bricks, but slowly they reveal themselves. This building is well stocked. In fact it is bristling with technology - farming implements fashioned from wands of willow - a rake, a hoe, a basket weave cradle for flattening the earth after ploughing, all carefully stowed in the roof space, or jutting out from holes in the brick work. This is the technology of subsistence farming, of a low impact bonding with the land. the only absence is Tsering Dolma herself, but you can see that she is held in a network of relationships - with locals, the monks from Phuktar, her yak, the sheep her companion species, these tools and the land she scrapes her living from. What we call technology, our phones, our cameras, and our tablets would be of little use to her. They would play no part. And besides there is no electricity, no signal, no internet. And if you imagined what might improve her quality of life it would be none of this. It would be more likely to be a pair of thick woollen socks for the winter. That and someone to fix several miles of six inch pipe. But with no utilities, public or private, that would require an attentive and caring regional authority. Or very generous neighbours with nothing else to attend to. So perhaps now that we have more or less abandoned that Victorian notion of human progress, of cultural development, of economic growth and the relentless march forwards, our place in the world in all its diversity needs to be re-thought. You see Tsering Dolma has a different relationship with the world. Better? Worse? These evaluations hardly seem appropriate. Zanskar is a very different world and one that is separated from ours by a wide margin, and this gap throws ideas of wealth, of relationship and of technology into confusion. Care has been taken in amassing a good collection of juniper that is piled on a makeshift table in a small room near Tsering Dolma's house. A celebratory light breaks through the simple window. Does anyone have what they need?

Straight carrots

A while back there was a spontaneous outcry about what was happening to our vegetables. Through some sort of consciousness-raising process, people had noticed that all the carrots in the supermarket were getting to be more or less the same length, the same colour, clean from soil and so on. What had happened to the earth, to the dirt that usually clings to them? And more importantly where were the misshapen ones? Well they just didn't fit, did they? Given a choice of vegetables Deleuze and Guattari would have favoured the mushroom because of its rhizomic character, but the fate of the misshapen carrot would I'm sure have worried them too. In fact it is carefully described in AntiOedipus. The misshapen carrot is in fact 'trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society' (p. 37), referred for therapy or simply consigned to the mixed vegetable soup factory. It is surplus. Let's face it, supermarkets are homogenising the food shopping thing. Tesco is anywhere; just like Whole Foods Market and all the rest. Everything looks the same. A carrot is a carrot  wherever you are. And is it such a leap to think about how this sort of conformity, this market standardisation or whatever applies to us, too? Does the architecture of social media force us all to be certain kinds of carrots on display - and if not carrots, shiny aubergines, or even 'exotic fruit' of a certain size and shape (and country of origin). It doesn't stop at social media, though. Time and again we are required to perform certain kinds of identities and not others. And certainly not troublesome ones. Heaven forbid! But slowly though, we reach our use-by date. We become reduced. That is if we have not already been removed!

Digital literacy in the classroom

In a current piece of writing we've been asking why an expansive view of new literacies is hard to realise in practice. We note that some innovative teachers are able to incorporate 21st Century literacies in their classroom practice whilst others find it hard. Part of that difficulty comes from competing curriculum priorities, the extensive blocking of websites, and conflicting messages about the role of technology in learning. For example, media discourses continue to polarise opinion, reporting here on the positive influence of banning mobiles in school, here on the negative effects of video gaming and here on girls' online reading. As always the studies are more nuanced than the headlines suggest, but the media reports still bolster dichotomous viewpoints. In the face of this it is timely to consider something a bit more sophisticated than the old 'is technology good or bad' question. We should be asking how particular digital literacy practices relate to activity, interaction and engagement, and then how they might benefit (or disadvantage) their users. New literacies won't go away - and anyway we're rather powerless to check their advance, but we can as educators help in promoting efficacious uses of hardware and software.

What's on it?

It's getting quite common to hear about how technology can solve all our literacy issues in one fell swoop. But this story about using e-readers in Ghana as a way of raising literacy levels was inspiring, and an outcome of the work done by the Worldreader charity. So it begins to look like e-readers can be a relatively simple way of enhancing the reading experience of students of all ages. But yet it seems to me that there's two crucial things that are missing in this largely technocentric debate, and they are - perhaps inevitably - to do with the social dimension. Firstly, we know that something like a Kindle or an iPad is simply a platform for digital content. What counts then, once you've got over the love of technology, is the quality and values of that content. Is it a commercially-bundled curriculum? Is it worthwhile reading material, and does it really explore the multimodal (and other) affordances of digital content? Secondly, what happens when you insert this kind of device into everyday pedagogical situations? What sorts of new roles and routines develop (or could develop) for teachers and learners? There's a significant research agenda here, and we need some answers to avoid being blown away by technologists, or bundled into oblivion by commercial publishers.

Your books are reading you

The flurry of concern over data harvesting has taken up quite a few column inches lately. It seemed that no-one was particularly concerned when Amazon first started recommending books to you, or when it was revealed that Tesco collected smart data on local shopping trends, but now a more general paranoia has set in. This is mass surveillance and where will it all lead, say some; what about personal freedom they ask. Now there's renewed concern that your books are reading you (see here, for example). Electronic devices know where you are, what you bought, what page you're on and so on. Do I care? Not really, to be honest. I don't think I've ever once bought what Amazon recommended - it's clever, but not that clever. After all smart databases are only as good as the people that design them, and I challenge anyone to design one that fits my fickle taste. And if they could design one, I myself would be the first to be interested. The police only seem threatening when you're involved in some wrong doing, and by the same token surveillance only becomes problematic if you've got something to hide. But the root problem lies in those definitions 'wrong doing' and 'something to hide'. If you live in a democratic and genuinely open society those things are relatively unproblematic, reflecting principles like freedom of speech, freedom of movement (and in a market-led economy - freedom to consume), but as soon as that changes, data harvesting turns into surveillance. That's the time to start getting worried.

Movement

When you're travelling it sometimes seems that the whole of humanity is also involved in this restless journeying, burdened by luggage and the unpredictability of their arrangements, the regrets and sadness of departure, and the anticipation, or otherwise, of arrival. Dragging their stuff, rushing, waiting, trying to negotiate complex information, dealing with other languages, unknown currencies and the inadequate approximation of translation. This movement of people is a communication - in fact transport systems are often described in this way - and the exchanges that occur as a result of it involve sharing stuff, giving stuff, getting new things as well as loosing or forgetting what is dear to you. The communication of human travel is embodied and materialised. It also takes place across space and time, and this is so eloquently captured in Doreen Massey's essay 'Some Times of Space '. It is similarly comprised of convergence and divergence as well as by the inclusions and exclusions wrought by the distribution of power. And yet, when we return 'home' , what have we got to show for it? Well we may return with something substantial, something we purposefully went to get, but more often than not it is with a small souvenir, or perhaps just a jumble of recollections, the feeling that we've changed in some subtle and indefinable way. The communication was often an end in itself; the subtle change, the intangible was a little like learning, hard to define, difficult to articulate a shadowy form in the mists of memory.

Mass personalisation

If the high era of industrialisation was driven by the logic of mass production, it could be argued that the digital age is driven by the logic of mass personalisation. In the former, Fordist model the single product was endlessly replicated as it expanded into new markets, whereas the digital economy depends upon hyper-personalisation, tracking the tastes and characteristics of individuals and niches. It sells multiple products to individuals rather than individual products to multiples. Popular music is a good way to think this through. The rise of the vinyl LP was a bundled package of music which, when things went well (as they did, for example for the Clash) albums like London Calling traveled well and reached diverse markets. In the era of iTunes, music looks different - it's unbundled and delivered direct to your playlist. And mass personalisation is helped along by services like Spotify, LastFm and BlipFm which help to feed you more of what you like. As education becomes increasingly marketised, we'll have to imagine what hyper-personalisation might mean for the knowledge economy. Two possibilities present themselves: niches and new levels of specialisation born out of what Gee & Hayes (2011) call passionate engagement; or, incoherence and fragmentation in which continuity is a chance occurrence. In my reading of mobile technology, I seem to be turning up stuff on the Tesco club-card, which I previously thought was a rather an innocent piece of plastic that I used to scrape ice off the car windscreen...but now I know it's track-and-trace technology that may be used for sinister purposes (persuading me to buy fairtrade butternut squash for instance). So now I'm wondering about the educational equivalent of the club card. What, I wonder would it do? It might give you feedback 'These were the courses you passed - here are some more at that level?'; 'Other people who studied Marine Biology also studied Plankton Migration'; 'Three of your friends liked Media Studies'....or maybe instead when you visited your university's treasured VLE it would only show you what you needed to do next, after that is, you'd swiped a pass on your student card!