Growing up

Because narrative is essentially temporal it draws attention to how people, and the events they are caught up in, change. Of course, they rarely change beyond all recognition - except perhaps in myths and fables. Slow, unexpected or even inevitable change is more often the norm. Change usually happens in a network of relations and one of the things that I admire about writers like Joan Silber is a way of dealing with a tapestry of characters and events whose lives intersect and change in different ways, along multiple timelines. Everything is in flux, just as it is in life. Silber's artfulness lies in her ability to draw attention to cross-cutting themes in this flux, and that's what makes her writing distinctive. But I'm also drawn to her writing because it conjures up places, events - even lifestyles - that I'm familiar with. She's very much a writer of my generation. But this kind of specificity isn't strictly necessary to the success of narrative. I've never trained to be a boxer or worked on a building site, but that doesn't stop me from relating to stories in which such things are important. Narrative also transports one into different times and places - and that's part of the magic - but probably we all need some point of contact, some anchorage or reference point. I think that's the allure of coming-of-age stories, part of the attraction of romance, and so much more. Narrative has to be relatable. Coming-of-age stories are accessible in that sort of way. Stories of young men coming-of-age are particularly relevant in times in which there is widespread concern about the possibility of alienation, about different routes into masculinity and, at least in some quarters, a concern for what constitutes masculinity itself. Two recent French films - both from 2025 - explore this territory from thought-provoking but slightly different points of view - Carnoy's Le Danse de Renards and Campillo's  Enzo. Carnoy's film, set in a residential sports academy for young boxers, dwells on the relationship between these young men, their rivalry, their jealousy and - occasionally - their tender friendship. But there's also some painful loss of status and ostracisation, set against the brutal backcloth of a particularly violent, macho sport. If there's anger, frustration, confusion and alienation in Enzo it works differently, by depicting a young man's struggles with his own bourgeoise background, with his loving parents, who are sometimes just a bit overbearing in a permissive, progressive sort of way and some growing uncertainty about his own sexuality. Le Danse de Renards packs a punch through its exploration of strong emotions, some of which erupt into violence, whereas the dissatisfaction at the heart of Enzo is more insidious, speaking to issues of identity, wealth and even global conflict as Enzo falls under the spell of a charismatic Ukrainian worker. They are both narratives of their time and well worth watching alongside one another.

Writing migration

Helping us to reflect on our particular position in the wider sweep of social and cultural life is something that literature does well. I don't mean that all literature does or indeed should do that, but it is often the case. It was a pre-occupation of nineteenth century novelists, who often constructed dynamic localised narratives against the backdrop of social and political change. The parochial or provincial drama played out on a larger canvas. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is subtitled 'provincial lives'; Eliot's Middlemarch  'a study of provincial life'. Nowadays it doesn't get spelt out in the same way. Go, Went, Gone could be about anything, from the title, but what you get it is a chilling blast of what it might be like to be an illegal migrant in modern day Europe. Jenny Erpenbeck's novel centres on a recently retired professor and his encounters with a group of African migrants in Berlin. Pause for thought. What is it with these recently retired professor types? Is there an offer on at the Writers'R'Us character warehouse? I'd only just recently retired the recently retired professor in Orkney for heaven's sake! They're full of ideas, and good intentions, not quite sure what to do with themselves, well-read and disturbingly adrift in their cardigans. Do they themselves represent something - tell us something about ourselves, our comfortable, rational, cloistered, male ineffectiveness, perhaps? In stark contrast the migrants in Erpenbeck have each in their own way become ambiguous, hurt or in some sense erased. They live in limbo. When Erpenbeck isn't being pedagogical - feeding us snippets about sub-Saharan politics, religion, culture and conflict, she's being rather clever. The retired professor is a character formed in pre-unification Germany and this adds depth. So here, identity, nationality, and the effects of political extremism create a shadowy backdrop to the story. What's clever, is that Erpenbeck doesn't have to tell us all this, she just gestures towards it. She doesn't need to tell us because we know it. We are her readers, after all, not the migrants that she writes about. And this is the problematic bit of Go, Went, Gone - even as she is helping us to empathise with the lives, the stories and the hardships of the migrants she is objectifying them, she is othering them, at just the point at which she's trying not to. I think this is partly a structural problem. She zooms in on the main characters one by one and gives each their individual story. It's almost as if she had found a similar group of migrants and interviewed them. You end up with something like a collection of pen portraits. But Erpenbeck is too sophisticated a writer to hang her story on this alone. Richard, that's the name of our retired professor - the same as the retired professor in Orkney, unfortunately - Richard has his own story, his own suffering, and this is partially resolved towards the end of the novel in a way that the plight of the migrants isn't - and thank goodness, because that's true to life. There's also a clever metaphor at work throughout the novel - something about surfaces, and what's beneath the surface. A quote at the beginning informs us that 'surfaces were invented by the devil'. The novel ends with Richard saying 'the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can't possibly endure'. But what exactly is it about surfaces, when staying on the surface seems so vital in some of the dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean that Erpenbeck also writes about? Go, Went, Gone will stay with me because it's a story about nationality and migration in contemporary Europe, and it's a story that should be told more often.

Fake profiles

The Pinterest algorithm got to know me pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it knows when and where I was born but it must be narrowing it down. The app feeds me old photographs of where I grew up, some are even in the black and white of old memory. I spend time on these images. Then I get poster art from the sixties and photos of the bands I used to follow back then. Pinterest serves me up with ideas for creative projects. Card models to make with the grandchildren and, more annoyingly, it shows me a brand of slippers I quite like. So it's not exactly got a full or nuanced idea of me and my interests but its still uncanny what Pinterest learns and knows about, how it gives me more of what I like. It's an example of how the internet has captured desire at the level of immediacy. You like this it says, emphatically. And it seems to say it before you've had time to think about it. Yes, that fast, particularly with push notifications. Speed is both its power and its promise. Faster processors, faster broadband. See-it like-it quickly converts into buy-it. See-it, like-it, buy-it simply produces frictionless consumerism. No frustration, no time for a (second) thought, just get it, delivered to your doorstep. It's tempting to experiment with a counter profile, to search for things that don't (p)interest you, things that you don't like or don't want to buy, to feign interest in different places, different people, different things. If I maintained a factitious interest in say Frank Sinatra, in old Amsterdam, in pre-Raphaelite painting - whatever, how might that change my online experience? Would Pinterest get confused or think my account had been hacked? I doubt it. Would it worry about my mental health? I doubt that, too. Or would it continue to serve up the things I'm not interested in? Or worse still, might I start to get interested in what I'm not interested in? Probably, but really why would I want that? Fake profiles aren't really that interesting in the first place.

A hall of mirrors

Narrative fiction has become an important site for exploring interiority and the complexities of self-reflection. The conscious separation of author from narrator always present in fiction opens possibilities that twentieth century writers have been keen to exploit. Think of the unbelievable narrator of 'The Good Soldier' or the pathological one that tells us all about 'Lolita'. Stefan Zweig is a master of this art of separation. In his short stories and novellas he taps into psychological revelations by creating a series of layers of narration. Sometimes in this hall of mirrors we wonder who is who. In 'Fantastic Night', for instance, the narrator opens a sealed packet that contains the story of a Baron who has just died. The Baron's tale is something of an epiphany, but the way in which it is told allows for a forensic exploration of the self. Initially, or so it seems, the Baron is as hesitant about his writing abilities as he is about himself - but, of course, this is all beautifully written by Zweig. Take this, for example, 'But once more I feel I must pause, for yet again, and with some alarm, I become aware of the double-edged ambiguity of a single word.' Who is it that is really experiencing this ambiguity we wonder? Is it our Narrator, the Baron, or the author himself? The reader is destabilised. And a couple of sentences later, this sense of separation is extended further 'I have just written "I" and said that I took a cab at noon on the 7th of June 1913. But the word itself is not really straightforward....'. Well, no, it certainly isn't - however you think about it! He goes on '...I am by no means still the "I" of that time, that 7th of June, although only four months have passed since that day, although I live in the apartment of that former "I" and write at his desk, with his pen, and with his own hand'. All this is elegantly crafted - but we can't help but think of Zweig himself, sitting at his desk in Vienna, or wherever he was in 1922, writing about pretending to be a man who has opened a package containing the story of someone who has experienced a dramatic shift in his sense of self. Our attention is drawn to what writing is and what writing can do, at that same time as asking us who we really are. In this sense I can see parallels with Foucault's extended commentary on Velazquez's 'Las Meninas'. Zweig's 'Fantastic Night' disrupts our certainties about the world as well as being an excellent storyteller.

The spread : breadth and depth

Having a personal library could well become a thing of the past - and it's certainly a luxury, a rarefied form of consumerism and something that can function like an identity marker. I say this because I've often been more interested in the time or place that associates with a particular title than the content. And along with this there's the strange business of the scraps of paper that have been used as makeshift bookmarks before that book was abandoned and its restless reader moved on. I've found everything from train tickets to old computer punchcards and postcards lodged in mine. And amongst these ephemera I've also come across my own notes on paper and card. In one book I recently found half a card which said 'Wishing you a speedy recovery'. It wasn't clear who was being wished a speedy recovery and from what, but on the reverse side I'd scrawled the following: 'mechanistic theories of learning individual treatment that a comp. programme may not provide.' I think it's the kind of compressed study note that's often served me well. It doesn't really mean anything at all to me now, but at the time it was something that I was taking from what I read. I do the same sort of thing now, and I imagine it as a helpful way of distilling the essence of what I'm reading. Essence is probably the wrong word, because I'm actually referring to the meaning that I'm taking away, which is a more personal matter. And this meaning may be very different to the one intended by the author - for a start it's much narrower. But so much academic work depends on this process of narrowing down, the process of selecting from, and reducing another source. This is relatively easy in a small, focused area in which a body of literature can be read, analysed and synthesised but I think that there are always problems of scale. When the output is diverse and rapidly changing this is altogether harder to achieve. It would be a real challenge to do this across my personal library, for instance. Which brings me full circle, in fact, to the latest addition to my library which is Ben Lerner's acclaimed novel 'The Topeka School'. I enjoyed reading 'Leaving the Atocha Station' but this is altogether a more complex, more ambitious work of auto-fiction. The theme that concerns me here is what he calls 'the spread'. Briefly, in Lerner's world of high school debating 'the spread' is an important tactic. The spread, in the narrator's words, is 'to make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time'. As the novel unfolds the spread becomes an important trope and it stands in for the way in which we can feel paralysed by torrents of information, complex demands on our attention and so on. The popular idea of 'overwhelm' is something similar. And it is rather different from the personal library and the notes on scraps of paper which are attempts - and only attempts - to select, simplify and perhaps to go deeper into things. The spread is wide, overwhelming, destabilising and, in Lerner's world at least, it characterises the times we live in.

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!

Slippery subjects

It must be symptomatic of something that the most searching questions that one can ask can often be met with a dismissive cynicism if not outright derision. Dan Fox, in a new book, nails this as the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism or dumbing down (see here for a review), and he could well be right. So that makes me all the more determined. Determined to return to the identity topic, and turn to the picture next to this and ask 'is this me'? Not, I hope, to provoke the reaction that by opening the topic I'm engaged in some sort of pretentious navel-gazing - although perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing after all?  But to interrogate what all this activity of capturing images, taking selfies and textualizing these online is all about. Really. This is not me. It's as if layers of difference have been tightly pressed together, fusing them in a process you could call lamination. Whilst there is resemblance or representation, there are also bits, bytes, and pixels. There is framing not to mention posing, cropping, colour enhancement and so on. The result may be an image of me, but that's all. Here, it's recontextualized. It enters another space, another time, juxtaposed with writing, squeezed into a template, worked into a particular form and recruited in a particular way for a particular purpose. Showing the image here becomes part of a performance, a performance that may be read off by an audience. But this me business is slippery. The image holds all sorts of other resonances, an affective dimension, a motley collection of shifting memories, the sharpness of the air, the Himalayan rock beneath my boots, the paucity of oxygen and so on - all of which may or may not be me. In current social theory this could all be seen as an emerging entanglement of affective, socio-material and discursive practices - a mouthful I know, but a sort of flowing together of bodies, things and ideas. A state of affairs in which constructions of me-ness are always contingent. If we live in times of space-time compression, of context collapse or whatever, it seems to me that we have also become slippery subjects. But perhaps I should just speak for myself, because that's what it looks like from here. I'm also aware of power geometries at work, creating conditions that allow for or provoke this slipperiness (a certain age, class, gender configuration for example). And that leads me to wonder whether some subjects are more slippery than others?

Threads

Social networking sites and the ways in which they are folded into the socio-technical arrangements that frame the everyday lives of an ever-growing population are situated at the confluence of new forms of social organisation and a cultural imaginary that now extends beyond the limits of nation states and jurisdictions. Although to a large extent this is attributable to the adoption and reach of technologies it is also the product of a desire for new or enhanced practices of communication and connection, in its turn dependent upon the spread of a particular ideology of connectivity in the guise of an aspiration to be always present in the lives of others, and to be continually producing a sense of identity through a sort of restless activity of consumption and self-publication. It might almost seem that to be in the 21st century, is to perform a continually present and continuously updated social identity dependent upon making visible one's connections with others (boyd & Ellison, 2000). Take Instagram as a case in point. Here the image-trail that we leave is addressed to the other, is validated by family and friends, and is wittingly enacted on a canvas that is patently larger than the connections themselves, always cognisant of the wider network in which it is located. In this sense those who participate are repeatedly improvising and embellishing the @ reference point that they inhabit, that blue dot on the virtual map, always in relation to other @s and from time to time in relation to #things, #places, and #events. This may be the brave new world that we have created, but in itself it does not give us a full enough picture of contemporary social networks, because these are inherently promiscuous and perhaps best conceived as an assemblage of activity, a restless updating of lived experience, attitude and belief in textual threads that meander across multiple sites, and platforms both on- and off-line.

Synthetic phonics

It could be said that the biggest irony in our current obsession with phonics teaching is in the naming of the brand - 'synthetic phonics'. For most people, unless they happen to be Hegelian philosophers, the word synthetic connotes with an artificial imitation of the real thing. In fact the Oxford Online Dictionary has 'not genuine', 'insincere' as well as 'imitation' in its definition. Of course, when that's paired with the word 'phonics', now synonymous with the direct teaching of sound-letter correspondence, we might end up with teaching routines that lack a genuine sense of what reading is all about. The current interpretations of synthetic phonics are an interesting illustration of how a particular interpretation of evidence-based practice impacts on policy and how this policy gets translated into training and eventually plays out in the classroom. Knowing the creativity of teachers, I suspect that some are making the best out of this - and all credit to them. But I've also been hearing some of the concerns. Here are just two. Firstly, there is the notion that in order to make progress in sound-letter correspondence children have to learn to speak 'like Southerners' - ie: imitate the accentual features of RP. This, of course, simply recycles the old North-South divide, replays the old asymetrical power relationship, and subtely undermines the way many people speak English. Let's hope the regional features that give distinctivenes to the voices of Jarvis Cocker, Tony Harrison or Arthur Scargill (to name but a few), and their future successors, are not compromised! Secondly, and this a much more fundamental classroom concern - it seems that success in synthetic phonics, as it is currently conceived, may not necessarily transfer into authentic reading and writing contexts in the classroom - and if this is the case the whole synthetic phonics bandwagon might come off the track. The whole initiative could well end up being a costly error in policy implementation. Only time will tell. My contention is that skill-teaching routines will always look as though they are synthetic (not genuine) unless they are fully integrated into an informed model of reading and learning to read.

Wagga Wagga

Wagga Wagga is a great little place. There's a picture of the Lagoon I took yesterday evening. I'm so fortunate to be so well looked after. Today I've been up to the university and in between meeting people I've been reflecting on Stephen Turner's ideas about emulation. They've got rather mixed up in my mind with something from Philip Roth, which I think is so neatly expressed. He's introducing the central and charismatic character, Mr Cantor. Here goes: 'His athletic, pigeon-toed trot was already being imitated by the playground kids, as was his purposeful way of lightly lifting himself as he moved on the balls of his feet, and the slight sway, when he walked, of his substantial shoulders. For some of the boys his entire bearing had become theirs both on and off the playing field.' (Nemesis:13) There goes my role model!

Identity blues

Dorothy Holland and William Lachicotte have a great chapter in the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. They identify two tracks in identity theory, one is organised around the idea of a coherent sense of self and can be traced back to Erikson - with obvious connections to notions of psychological well-being. The other runs back to Mead, the formations that take place through social interaction and symbolic communication and suggests the possibility of plural identities. This allows the crafting of identities that may be a sort of bricolage of different social roles, a more creative way of inhabiting the various postions and roles afforded us by society. I don't know how far that confers us with agency, but it makes me quite happy to be a 50-something academic who attends conferences and loves live music. The video of Little Freddie King was taken at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans on my Blackberry as I went (?) from one meeting to the next.

Quote, quote

Oh that was what I meant by the YouTube video. I don't think he went commercial or anything like that. Here's one of my favourite quotes from his chapter 'Slacking off' in the Counternarratives collection: 'Shopping malls, street communities, video halls, coffee shops, television culture, and other elements of popular culture must become serious subjects of school knowledge. More, however, is at stake here than just an ethnography of those public spheres where individual and social identities are constructed and struggled over. More important is the need to fashion a language of ethics and politics that serves to discriminate between relations that do violence and those that promote diverse and democratic public cultures through which youth and others can understand their problems and concerns as part of a larger effort to interrogate and disrupt the dominant narratives of national identity, economic privilege, and individual empowerment.' (Giroux, 1995: 74)

Questions of identity

Wandering around the Lodo district of Denver is like remembering a past with its imposing warehouses which stored the spoils of intense agricultural and industrial activity. Each of these brick-built buildings now repurposed as loft accommodation with boutiques and smart cafes at ground level bears the fading painted sign of the former proprietor - each an identity lost in time. It seemed like a fitting end to a conference in which identity was often mentioned yet never fully explored. And that set me thinking that apart from developing more powerful theories of identity we need to ask why it so often enters the contemporary discourses of social and cultural theory, of literacy and education research. Is it simply a circulating discourse with no identifiable origin, or is it part of the post-modern condition, a state of affairs where we no longer have religion to tells us who we are, in which we no longer play a part in the grand narratives of the industrial age, where we are no longer embedded in close-knit communities, and increasingly less anchored to time and space? This is the sort of position that Giddens articulates in his conception of late modernity and provides the conditions for the obligation to continuously perform narratives of the self. A considerable amount of the commentary on youth online and analyses of new digital literacy practices appears to provide evidence of this as studies reveal how their participants produce and perform identities in remixes and collages of popular culture. But this sort of activity clearly varies across populations, and in some cases the real identity work is a struggle to enter this world whilst remaining faithful to a more deep-rooted sense of one's social position. For me, the idea of identity and particularly identity and meaning-making remains central, but it seems to invite further interrogation.

Pivotal point?

Flicking through duGay’s OU text 'Production of Culture/Cultures of Production' gives a great insight into fin de siècle media studies. I’m interested in the way in which the emphasis comes down heavily on cultural practices rather than texts, and this is particularly relevant with respect to yesterday’s ramblings. In fact there’s very little direct analysis of texts in the book. The closest thing is Gendron’s entertaining critique of Adorno which uses plenty of examples from doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll to problematise ‘On popular music’. The pivotal point, for Gendron, is the construction of meaning (and identity) as he talks about ‘a constant struggle at the meeting point of production and consumption between the evocation of entrenched codes and the insinuation of alternative meanings.’ (in duGay, 2002: 117). Leaving aside for the moment the blurring of production and consumption in some new media environments, this pivotal point easily generalises to a whole range of encounters with texts.

What's on your mind?

I think SNSs are under-theorised. So as I turn my attention to some of the data collected last year on teens' social networking, here's some first thoughts on the big F.....I'm suggesting that Facebook provides contexts for the social construction of relational meaning. An individual personalised profile page resources and constrains this social construction in the way in which it presents multiple invitations and a limited set of opportunities. If we take the view that identity is always dialogic and performed in relation to the other, then there is a sense in which you are called into being by your profile page. Here the process of interpellation, used by Butler (1997:5)and drawn from Althusser (1971) is helpful. Interpellation is mobilised by Butler to illustrate how people accept and internalise social relations and norms. On Facebook the busy screen that updates you on activity in your social network already positions you, but the site's prompting question 'What's on your mind?' hails you into being as a particular kind of subject, to use Butler's expression. In this process of interpellation you enter into a universe of textualized selves in which your own self-narrative is developed, modified and repeatedly performed in relation to others. Social relations and friendships are rehearsed and more or less publically enacted in a heavily mediated environment. But of course this environment intersects in complex ways with life outside Facebook - life in what we sometimes call the 'everyday world', in which freindships are also enacted, but also in life in other mediated environments and life as experienced in relation to other popular narratives.

Self accounting

A couple of quotes from Butler that have set me thinking: 'I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.' (2005:15) and 'An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing....the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our 'singular' stories are told.' (2005:21). So our individual identity is the product of social interaction, is confirmed through recognition and framed through similarity and difference. I guess that's what I mean when I say identity is relational. Work in progress....

Identities

Well I finally got recognition of some of my multiple identities. How postmodern is that! So the doorplate saga rolls on, but it brought to mind all that stuff about anchored and transient identities which seemed to go down quite well. I want to revisit the ideas, particularly with respect to the data I have on teens’ online social networking. The original idea was really motivated by a need to underline the fact that whilst many were arguing for the levelling effect of the internet and suggesting that you could be who you wanted to be in an online community, the weight of one’s historical and social past is actually still present, and that performances of gender, class, and so on are still very much in evidence. Of course I was not arguing for an essentialist self, but merely suggesting that strong, structuring forces continue to exert an influence. These could be seen as discourses to which we are strongly anchored. On the other hand the kaleidoscopic identifications (often media-related) and more temporary I saw as transient identities, easier to remake and by definition easier to discard. Perhaps the division was too strongly made, because it has since become clear to me that the sort of things I referred to as transient could actually be closely related to or even expressions of anchored identities, the TV shows we like, the toys children choose, the sport we feel passionate about and so on. So I’ve shifted my ground in the direction of a particular kind of relational performativity. I particularly like Butler’s idea of interpellation but I am also still working with what the ideas of transience and anchorage might add. In the interim I’ll just mess around with doorplates.

Hypermediated selves

Upload your photo. I did. Again. And thought about how many images of me are splashed around the internet, on Flickr, my blog, my home page, allconsuming, wikispaces and so on. There's a sort of chronology, too. One of the oldest is my icon on allconsuming, taken in the Gaudi park in Barcelona on my fiftieth birthday, whereas one of the most recent was taken last year in Sheffield just below the bar in this blog. (And yes, if you're reading this through a Safari or Firefox browser you don't get my forehead; wheras if you're using Explorer you get some extra space. I blame Blogger.) I'm confronted with representations of myself on a regular basis. The headshot has become a very popular identifier. Here it is a hypermediated self located, as Bolter and Grusin would have it, in a shifting network of affiliations. Each self is differently defined, both constructing and constructed by those networked contexts in a different way. Maybe they are only tied together by a likeness. Which brings me back to the photo of my surrogate self on a skiing holiday that heads this post. Perhaps you didn't recognise me. I changed my mouth shape a bit (cosmetic surgery). I added hair (a wig). And although you can't see I went for an earpiercing (just because you could). It's one of those quirky little things you can do online. But it's interesting because it hybridises the icon-headshot and the start-from-scratch avatar - the sort of thing you develop in Second Life. I wonder if I'm any different as a hypermediated self, but I guess one of me already knows I am.

Layered cuts

Seminar 3 of the ESRC Seminar Series raised lots of interesting issues about overlapping 'worlds', 'spaces', or 'realities' associated with technoliteracy practices. Speakers included Christine Greenhow, Paul Coulton, and Keri Facer. Although we'd billed the session as addressing the topic of mixed reality, that term soon got pluralised, augmented and generally pulled about. I was left thinking about ways in which reality is layered with varying amounts of textual mediation, with the textual including all modalities. Now I'd normally feel more comfortable talking about multiple realities in the plural, but in this instance I am unconvinced that virtual or technosocial spaces actually constitute separate realities. So, provisionally I'll stick with the singular layered and textually mediated description. Virtually (!) at the same time we engaged in the familiar identity debates - another easily pluralised concept. Here I find myself moving away from any conception of fixity (the core difficulty with the performance metaphor) drifting ever closer towards what Gergen describes as 'relational being'. To quote: 'The bounded and centred self is undone.' (Gergen, 2002:6)

Making it #1

This is a bookcase my brother made when we were teenagers at home. He followed a plan from a DIY magazine he subscribed to, using the instructions (more or less) with a few improvisations on the way. He was always at his happiest making and doing. The bookcase ends up being an object that has outlasted him. I think its got an authentic sixties feel to it, and now it works well to store my back numbers of JECL: now ten years old. Still thinking about objects and material culture, I wanted to document this because it was a performance of something or other: and now its performing something else. It's useful. The object doesn't carry the story, or represent anything, it's just caught up in everyday events; a bit like Stan Ogden's glasses.