Don't lean on me man

Scribbled notes on a scrap of lined paper sold for £89,000 the other day. They were the draft lyrics for Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City – complete with the added revisions ‘Hey man!’, ‘Don’t lean on me man’ and ‘Outasight’. The everyday nature of the materials and the rather unremarkable addition of those words might seem trivial or even banal if it were not for the huge impact of Bowie’s songs on popular culture. That scrap of paper, those hastily scribbled jottings are like visible traces of a creative process in vivo. Those songs echoed around bedrooms and shared houses, bedsits and squats, family homes and student flats. They were sung along to, played, replayed and performed time and again, spooling outwards, as it were, from those hastily scribbled lines. Of course, it wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the voice and the music too, the distinctive sound of that particular recording, distributed on vinyl, in its instantly recognisable cardboard sleeve. And it goes without saying, the RCA supply chain ensured that copies were there, ready and available in the racks and trays of LPs that like-minded people habitually flicked through when they went to their favourite record store, back in the day. Matter of little significance has, over time, become a much sought after collector’s item - the value of that scrap of paper far outstrips the value of the raw materials it’s made from, and the ways in which the words themselves wound their way around the feelings and impulses as well as the hopes, beliefs and dreams of a generation of listeners is difficult to capture because of its inevitable multiplicity. It may well have been the soundtrack of many people’s early lives - but then what lives? How did the lyrics come to mean in different contexts, how were they understood - how were they heard, misheard, disliked, detested? Material history can be a bit like that, for although we might agree on the importance of a particular artefact, its meaning is fundamentally unstable inviting interpretation, re-interpretation and misinterpretation. Music in popular culture seems to inhabit the outer reaches of such instability because of the way in which it is often woven into significant personal events, stitched in to one’s particular state of mind, the recreational drugs, relationships, lifestyles and ambitions of the time. Perhaps music in general does this, seamlessly attaching itself to the memories and affects, the distinctiveness of a life. After all this is key to the success of Desert Island Discs, now 81 years old. The 8 track format is such a convenient hook to tell the story of one’s life - or at least a version of it. With an aspiration to be a writer, poet or wordsmith and a nascent literary sensibility I was drawn to the words that punctuated the soundtrack of my early life. That soundtrack was made of vinyl. Singles and EPs that span around at 45 rpm, LPs at 33.3 rpm. Mostly I first heard stuff on pirate stations, on a transistor radio, on Top of the Pops or round at friends’ houses. But the LP soon became something to own. The record sleeve had the all-important supplementary information. The aesthetic of the art work, the names of the musicians, the way they looked, the way they dressed and how they had their hair - the instruments they played, who sang, who wrote the songs and of course, the lyrics themselves. No longer inaudible or misheard, there they were, nearly always on the back of the sleeve or on a pull-out, and you could read them, sing along or just pour over their meaning, if you could fathom it out. Some were more self-consciously poetic than others, some were just rubbish, but nonetheless huge clouds of creativity billowed out of that early flowering of rock music. It seemed at the time that the lyrics carried valuable messages. If they were not poetic they might gesture towards expressions of lifestyle, of taste, of belief and in doing so fashioned the habits of mind of a generation. Whimsical and romantic, uncompromising and rebellious, conceptual, quirky, hedonistic, we were served up with a range of possibilities, a wardrobe of identities that might distinguish us from the mainstream. Only a few at the time saw how the subtle threads of capitalism were part of this, establishing a marketplace in which even the costumes of anti-capitalism could be bought. And now, just the words remain – like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan (it’s all there somewhere, even if the melody is hard to sing!). Skeletons, threadbare outfits. At an earlier auction the lyrics for Bowie’s Starman sold for £203,500. Unlike Suffragette City, these look like neat copy – presentable handwriting on graph paper with misspellings corrected, probably provided for publication of the official lyric sheet. They don’t have quite the same feel as the Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City lyrics – they’re more polished, more self-conscious, but their market worth is still interesting, and given that an early demo of the song went for £41,000, a fifth of the price, it seems like the material trace of writing is an important marker for the collector, being closer perhaps to an autograph than a ghostlike voice, written by the hand of an icon, don’t lean on me man.

Who needs pockets?

Denim used to be a signifier of rebelliousness, and that may partly explain why I’ve been wearing blue jeans for the last 50 years. Not the same pair I hasten to add, but successive variations on a theme. Small but important shifts in length, leg-style and waistband have reflected the various whims of the fashion industry, but really they’re more or less the same thing. Perhaps no longer so edgy - in fact they’ve somehow accrued a sort of staid, conservative image, unsurprising perhaps, given how little they’ve changed compared to everything around them and in them. The other day, though, it occurred to me that the pockets seem to be getting shallower. Either that or my hands are growing, which seems extremely unlikely. And that reminded me of how pockets used to be stuffed with loose change, a rarity these days when all you need is plastic. Nearly everything I buy goes on a card. And apparently there are places now that will only accept card payment. Phone, watch and contactless transactions are on the rise - your pockets may be empty, but you can still pay. It’s part of the sublimation of everyday interaction, the cashless society. But pockets are here to stay. I mean where else would you put your hands when slouching against the wall? And where are going to keep that all important rectangle of plastic?

Builders' stilts

I often think that discussions of new media place their emphasis on either representation or technology but rarely both. Thinking about the technological function of so-called everyday objects can therefore be an interesting point of departure. Colleagues whose work focuses on the digital tend to overlook the fact that technologies are implicated in such basic things as food preparation and consumption, domestic chores, and so on - indeed in the full range of daily activity. And as Latour's work implies, non-humans are therefore active in all aspects of our lives. These builders' stilts work well when plastering a ceiling and certainly reduce the labour of climbing ladders and trestles, saving on both time and effort. Whether or not they turn plasterers into cyborgs is debatable, but they do serve as an illustration of how our relationship with the world is constantly modified by the things we make and use. The plasterer isn't particularly concerned with meaning making - he's just getting the job done. Well, we might well ask whether a smartphone or laptop is any different, and why. After all, it's all stuff. In the closing minutes of the film 'Transcendence', when the internet goes down, there's a lovely image of someone using a keyboard as a doorstop. Is that act about giving new meaning to old stuff or just getting a job done? In an early paper, Latour refers to the way in which we delegate to non-humans. From this point of view, re-purposing a keyboard as a doorstop is perhaps just an act of delegation. One that uses the physical affordances of a piece of plastic with letters on it to keep a door open. On the other hand, I could thing of many other uses of builders' stilts - but keeping in touch with colleagues in Australia or Canada wouldn't be one of them!

New writing

At the moment I'm writing about textual toys and the commodification of early literacy. I've noted before how a wide range of games and activity centres designed for young babies now have digital components - as do baby walkers, play mats and plush toys. Embedded in these toys are digitally-reproduced nursery rhymes, counting games and alphabet songs providing ‘edutainment’ for infants and toddlers. Although toys and toy manufacturers have always played an important part in early childhood, their role in young children’s learning is ill-defined,and under-theorised. This is especially true for early literacy in which everything from alphabet building blocks and jigsaw puzzles to  educational tablets like,the LeapPad, carries an implicit message about what literacy is, how it develops, and what roles adults, care-givers and children themselves should adopt. What is more, these implied roles blend in with current conceptions of parenting, defined by ‘social investment’ initiatives that reach into the relationship between children and adults to underscore the significance of what is done with as well as what is provided for the very young. Scollon's idea of a nexus of practice is proving to be a useful way of articulating the confluence of play practices involving literacy that are singular and situated, whilst at the same time acknowledging that play objects themselves are part of a political economy located in a global mediascape.

Commodification

As a sort of postscript to yesterday's piece on the commodification of early learning and literacy, I wanted to underline that this isn't a new phenomenon at all. From Dinky toys and Meccano to Helix geometry sets, Chambers pencils and Beacon Readers, my own childhood learning was strongly patterned by commercially-produced artefacts that often enjoyed global circulation. What has changed, I think, is the extent to which the tools of edutainment are scripted, mediated and marketed to consumers - both parents and their children. In a sense some of the products are more specialised and they tap into curriculum discourses about what early learning should look like, and an increasingly high-profile set of messages about the home as a site for influential early learning. Most of us in the field would agree about the significance of early learning, but the backwash effect from narrow models of curriculum could end up with narrow models of early learning - a toddler's home curriculum which is characterised by endless and unimaginative routines based on the alpahabet, the cardinal numbers, and shape - all driven by digital toys. If I'm right then it's important that we champion those toys, media products and apps that are informed by a more diverse, expansive and flexible view of literacy and learning.

Multiple things

Research Story from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.
We all  have to juggle with competing demands and priorities, and it seems to get even worse when we start to research things! I was moved by this digital story produced by one of my Masters students - it illustrates the cost, the struggle and the emotional underlife in an elegant way, but also it highlights some of the benefits that accrue from doing this sort of work. It's well worth keeping all this in mind as we go on. In my own work, I've been wrestling with ideas about pleasure, everyday life and the commodification of early learning and literacy. In the light of this I returned to Helen Nixon's piece  'From bricks to clicks.' and the more recent piece, with Erica Hateley in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture which ends with this: 'As children are inducted younger and younger into particular modes of literacy, and particular dispositions as 'consuming citizens', researchers committed to learning from and contributing to young people's agency and social opportunities need to pay attention to what is happening culturally when reading and playing and literacy and learning means tapping, touching, swiping, and scroling and combining online and offline activities.' (2013:39)

All fingers and thumbs

I've just been writing another paper about toddlers and touchscreens, and it returns to the same themes about gesture that I explored before. Essentially, looking at the video data we have, you see how hand gestures and pointing are woven into adult-child conversations and that they also appear to extend quite naturally into taps and swipes on the touchscreen. Often someone starts off pointing at something on the screen and then ends up tapping - it becomes part of the interactional flow. And the toddlers (see index finger in pic) often seem to have their trigger fingers at the ready, perhaps mimicking adult gestures or maybe in readiness for when they need to deploy them. I'd been using the word 'index finger' so often in the writing that I began to wonder about its origin. For one feverish moment I thought it was connected to print literacy, being the finger that turns the pages at the index. But in the end I was convinced by this account, which simply connects it with indicating or pointing. Well even that is enough to confer on it a very significant place in human communication. I reckon there's a book to be written about the role the first finger plays in human culture. Someone's probably already written it, though.........no, just got lost at Amazon only to discover that someone called Al Fingers has written a book on Clarks in Jamaica (bring on Vybz Kartel). How random!

Paperless?

Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead on influencia.net ! from INfluencia on Vimeo.

I always thought that the idea of the paperless office was somehow flawed, and this video really brings home the point! Last week I was involved in so many discussions that helped to cement the view that the relationship between literacy and digital technology is additive rather than transformative. By that I mean, that it's not really a question of either pen and paper or keyboard and screen more 'both...and'. Literacies just got more complex, that's all! So rather than being digital, I'm enjoying a really good book at the moment (and I'm reading it on my Kindle and my iPad in turn, depending on which device is closer to hand - oops digital, sorry). It's by one of my favourite writers Michael Chabon. I thought that 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' was a wonderful exploration of the world of early comic book artists and that got me hooked. Chabon has this wonderful ability to weave narrative around strong themes of popular culture in contemporary American life. Telegraph Avenue follows a similar pattern, based in and around a record shop - a purveyor of second-hand vinyl with a community-oriented feel to it, that's Brokeland Records. Collectors, fans, and the sort of loose (and tight) affinities that emerge are lovingly explored. I always like to quote and there's a bit set in trading card fair that I thought was brilliant (and also very funny) - but this, spoken by one of the characters sticks out: 'Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubblegum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson'. Why? Because, I think it captures multiple meanings so well. The cards, part of children's culture, can just as easily be taken seriously as they can be re-purposed in creative play; but at the same time, when they are re-contextualized at a card fair, there's an economy of circulation that takes place in a hallowed atmosphere of reverential seriousness liberally mixed with nostalgia. The same dynamic seems to lie at the heart of the vinylist culture as well. Let's hear it for Chabon - nice website, too. Paper, too could one day become a collectors' item. Imagine that.