Making Literacy, Media, Technology

The idea of celebrating the materialisation of a book in print form might at first glance appear to be rather anachronistic. After all, in this era of online publishing, most of our words are 'out there' before any publishers' ink hits the page. But somehow or other receiving one's advance copy is still a rich experience. Not only does it represent completion, that it is, at least in some sense of the word, finished, that the labour is over - perhaps even, in retrospect, that it was worth it after all, no matter what one felt at the time, or at various stages on the way, but also and perhaps more importantly that it has become a thing, something more tangible, something with a particular heft, a particular look and so on. I feel the same about journal articles, and even though I have my name on a number that I've never seen as published, in amongst other contributions, or in the particular issues in which they 'appeared', I usually have a print-off, because that's the next best thing. Julia Gillen has teased me about this in private, but I suspect that she might agree that somehow online first is a bit of a shadow - more correctly a foreshadow, of the real thing. Or perhaps real is the wrong word altogether, it's maybe just that we live in a world of different kinds of objects, and that print forms have their own place in this order of things. This is a key point in the book Literacy, Media, Technology that I'm referring to. The book is an edited collection, and the subtitle: Past, Present and Future presented an opportunity for Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett and myself to interrogate that linearity, the slow and inexorable passage of time or the mad dash into the future - or whatever version of the progressive modernist narrative that you might subscribe to. Things can only get better? Maybe. But actually things co-exist, they resonate back and forth in interesting ways. And so, we take a stand against that popular phrase 'the future has arrived', opting instead for a view that it just hasn't happened yet. In a way we're more interested in the present and the way it is infused by the way things were and our ideas of what they might become. But apart from all of this, the excellent chapters, written by some of the finest academics in the field, are in conversation with one another, and in the final stages of the editing process it seemed as if they had something new to say about the inter-relationships between literacy, media and technology, at least to gesture towards a new conceptualisation of their interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that was always there but had to be found, and had never been fully articulated before. It feels good to hold on to that, and at least as good as holding the book itself, as a thing.

Social networking book

I was pleased to be asked to contribute to Kurylo and Dumova's volume Social Networking: Redefining communication in the digital age and flattered to be in as Chapter 1, apparently acting as a 'launching pad' for the rest of the book. In my chapter Together and Apart: social and technical works, I attempt to locate social networking in the much larger network of material, discursive and semiotic practices in a way that some have suggested is more like actor network theory. In fact I draw on Latour's work to make some points about the wider ordering of things in which social networks, and particularly online social networks, sit. But I'd shy away from calling that an ANT approach, but let's not get into that here! Anyway there's some great chapters in the book that explore a range of contemporary social networking issues including self-disclosure, social movements and networked activism. This makes this whole topic area very live and very relevant, and as far as I'm concerned - the more scholarship on this, the better. Buy the book!

Deep reading

I've not been posting for a while because I've been on a long break in Nepal and Tibet - but somehow or other a complete break isn't quite as complete as you might think. Noticing the impact of the digital on everyday life seems to have become a way of life, and I found myself observing and photographing the different ways in which devices and texts are woven into lives that on the surface at least seem rather different. This is a monk at Boudanath, Kathmandu reading  a Tibetan scripture on an iPad as part of a devotional practice - one of many examples of how digital texts become absorbed into cultural practices. Reading Will Self about the impact of new technology on what he calls 'deep reading', I found myself recalling this image. Is this 'deep'...or did it suddenly become shallow because its read on an iPad? Clearly not. But of course, in an otherwise intelligent and nuanced piece, Self is actually equating the immersive experience of reading fiction with depth. Although he offers a balanced account, and is certainly not bemoaning the rise of digital text, there is a sadness in his tone. He thinks we have lost something. If he's right, though, its not depth we've lost, but a way of accessing imagined worlds.

Generating data

I've been looking closely at video footage of toddlers on iPads using a coding frame of my own design to try to understand what's going on. This is fascinating work, but as I'm doing it I've become aware of how the limitations of the video have already reduced and transformed the 'real' world into something else. The real has been transformed into data. Then in attempting to make sense of this data, my so-called analysis is actually creating a new kind of data - data which may well be the raw material that I end up writing about. From some points of view even that writing process itself is generating further layers of data - successive accretions or reductions, depending on one's preference. In the thick of all this there's a trajectory, a telos, an attempt to make sense of something. And only time will tell how that works out!

A story?

Oh hell, I'm stuck in The Room - or to be more precise I'm stuck on a puzzle in an impressive iPad app. It's enough to while away hours of one's life. Anyway, I had to break into that this evening to talk to some students online about research, or to be more precise about stories. I took the tack that good (social science) research is a good story well told. And, of course I didn't mean that it's fiction, but that it's a well-crafted account that has a 'story-like' arc or development. I also leaked the fact that I've been working with a colleague on the idea of storying as a research method. I'm quite excited by that. The idea is that producing multiple stories from different points of views helps to uncover new insights. Rather than trying to triangulate, or what Haraway (1988:581) called 'the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere', these stories stack up - interconnecting in unpredictable ways. I'm looking forward to seeing how that all shakes down. There will be a paper - soon.

All good for new books

It's still a thrill to get your hands on the book you wrote or edited. Last week we (that's me, Julia Gillen, Jackie Marsh & Julia Davies) heard that Virtual Literacies had been delivered from the printers. Although one contributor has already received a pre-ordered copy from Amazon, none of the editors have actually seen a copy yet, although the publisher has them on dispatch. Nonetheless it was great to get a celebratory email from John Potter who actually touched his book 'Digital Media and Learner Identity: the new curatorship' for the first time today. I was honoured to do an endorsement for John - it may have been edited, but I originally wrote: 'This book makes an original and important contribution to the study of new media. Based on a study of children’s autobiographical film-making, John Potter vividly illustrates the explanatory power of the metaphor of curatorship. Essential reading for those interested in new literacies and media studies.' But what is all this about holding our work? Is it just born of our print-centric upbringing, or is it more to do with the way in which its materialisation signals some sort of closure, or a sense of completion? Perhaps we believe that it is in some way more real, when it has become a physical object, when we feel its weight or reach it down from the shelf to share with someone else? I've written a fair bit digitally (and I'm not counting blogs, wikis, tweets, texts and emails here) - I mean in ebooks, open textbooks and the like - and they never have the same feeling of completion. But perhaps, underlying it all, the print-book still has some authority for us. For all we may read on Kindles or iPads, or surfing online, maybe the print copy is still the real deal.

Method allegory

After spending several hours in a virtual world on Friday I again found myself reflecting on the way in which the virtual provokes me to re-think the actual. Influenced by John Law's 'After Method' I realized, perhaps for the first time, that these reflections are in a sense methodological in character. Law offers 5 assumptions about reality. They are; 1. what he calls out-thereness, 2. independence, 3. anteriority - it was there already, 4. definiteness, and 4. singularity. Well, you can examine each of these assumptions with respect to a virtual world - one like Barnsborough or Second Life. For instance, do such places actually exist 'out there' and in what sense? When we click on the shortcut, does the existence of that world, that point of view in virtual reality precede our experience of it? ....and so on. Well, I can almost see how one might use Second Life as a learning environment for a methodology course - maybe such a course might actually be conducted in Second Life, who knows? Might an investigation of the virtual, then, provide some sort of allegory for other kinds of work: an allegory that we simultaneously create and inhabit?

Writing about trash

I'm currently writing a piece based around The Trashmaster. The Trashmaster is of interest from several points of view: it is an example of ‘machinima’, a movie made with videogame engine, and it is also the first of its kind to cross-over into mainstream cinema. Like anime music video (AMV), in which anime cartoons are edited and dubbed with rock music, machinima has its roots in DIY fan video production. It is is an 88 minute movie made from the popular, and in some contexts notorious, Grand Theft Auto IV videogame, and features a ‘vigilante sanitation worker’ involved in a battle against corruption and crime.