Social ties

I've been investigating what it's like to keep up with my friends in what Mimi Ito describes as lightweight contact. Using mobile messaging and microblogging you end up with some rather portable friends who are doing their own thing in ways which interweave with your own everyday activities. As in more traditional forms of networking there seems to be an fluidity and an aggregation of communication, and something more substantial may emerge from that. I guess that's the sense in this post about the social web. Twitter's microblogging service, like Facebook prompts you to talk about the everyday in terms of what you are doing, giving you a semantic frame. But this is easy to subvert as friends tweet about the sites they're looking at, the projects they have in mind, and their more abstract musings. In a way, I suppose, these too are kinds of doing; kinds of doing, or ways of knowing, that form social ties in the particular kinds of networks we are anchored to.

Participation and active consumption

Today this wonderful visual ethnography book arrived from Hong Kong, along with a beautiful card (thank you so much, Alice). It all played in so well with the James Farrer article that I mentioned in Friday's post, because the bar staff in Eric Ma and Ducky's work are using a public space to perform versions of a modern Chinese identity that recontextualise a global practice. The same happens in Farrer's account of the disco culture of Shanghai and elsehwere. Farrer's account is subtle in that it shows the stratification and differential participation that arises in the marketisation of China. There's also an interesting critique of Appadurai's notion of flows. Farrer argues that the metaphor implies that there are no obstacles or boundaries, whereas the disco work shows there are. What an interesting diversion!

It's not about anything really

Roots Manuva returns to school to rewrite his identity as someone who might just be described as an exponent of British conscious rap. There’s an intriguing bit at the end where Roots says 'That school gave me so much really. It’s not about.' And then the fade out, but you can just hear 'It’s not about anything really'. So after a whole day on Wednesday re-examining the resistance through rituals material (John Clarke was excellent), this could just be the postmodern response. Anoop Nayak however has a more sophisticated stance on youth, and an interest in the reworking of global narratives in local contexts. I must have been inspired because I went right off and looked up Farrer’s paper, Disco Super-Culture: Consuming Sex in the Chinese Disco, but I won’t be reading it till Saturday evening! Is that the kind of thing that professors do?

Anticipated identities

Reading Karen Wohlwend's wonderfully-titled Damsels in Discourse in RRQ, I remain uneasy with the idea that identity positions are inscribed in material objects (such as toys). Yes, identity is born out of expressive practices such as play. We perform identity through play and the narratives of play are at least partially produced for us by wider discourses. But these narratives are not inscribed in the objects themselves.

Eyebrow meme

Parody, meme or both? I’m not quite sure which, but this is RinaKristia’s eyebrow dancing. The sisters’ version is arguably better than the original Cadbury’s chocolate version (here). Consumers of popular culture become producers of popular culture; but then making your own chocolate is a lot harder to pull off. So maybe that’s the deeper message that lies behind Colin and Michele’s coffee producing videos. Think about it!

Dr Sheng

Jing Sheng's fascinating study of the literacy practices of Chinese migrants in the North of England adds to our understanding of how identity and literacy intersect in glocalised contexts. These telling stories show, for me, how identity is performed as well as called into being. Her research participants show and tell us how they use an array of cultural artefacts in multiple social networks to provide an account of themselves. To say much more would be to steal Jing's thunder, as I'm sure she is already making plans to publish. Jing is now working at Capital Normal University in Beijing. I hope her employers recognise her strengths. Can this, I wonder be read in China?

E-luminated

Inclement weather held me captive in my own home last week and scheduled teaching was rerouted as we hurriedly decamped into cyberspace. And that was my first experience of Elluminate which kept me engaged for a good three hours. Apart from showing a screen that looks a bit like a primitive softsynth, I was impressed by the way that it integrates a number of modes of communication. Having said that I think I prefer the illusion of embodiment that virtual worlds can provide. You also get loads of that Eurovision Song Contest stuff: I can hear you, can you hear me? No we can see you but we can't hear you, how about everyone else? No, I've just lost you. And so the medium ends up blanking out the message. But, if and when that's all sorted, and you're in a shared communicative space, it must be possible, at least possible, to learn ,assuming the design is reasonably all right. What excites me is that the participants are distributed and the immediate presence of the institution is erased. The learning is not location specific and the communication is person to person and sometimes many to many. Sounds OK. Let's see how it goes.

Developing your apps

With the wildfire spread of Facebook, the idea of getting or running new apps has entered into everyday discourse. Developers have for a while realized that allowing people to create their own material can enrich the core product. Harnessing the creativity that has driven the open source movement has been important to the evolution of services like Flickr and Blogger. Although I've never met anybody who has devised a successful app, there must be plenty of them judging by the rapid innovation and dissemination of their hard work. So Apple made a smart move by allowing this kind of devlopment with the iphone. The very cheap ocarina app by smule is a classic example. It turns your phone into a musical instrument. If that was all, you might say 'so what'; but by harnessing the phone's GPRS, you can listen to other ocarina playing on a global scale. I think that's both frivolous and deeply significant. Whatever will they come up with next?

Digital Provenance

In Spook Country, William Gibson talks about the connections being more important than the content. I don’t really pretend to understand what he’s getting at although I am struck by the resonance with social rather than informational technology. But it did occur to me that digital artefacts do make some interesting crossings. Take the picture of Ruth I posted before. It’s a self-shot taken on her Blackberry and sent to me through messenger. I bluetoothed it from my phone on to my laptop, and uploaded it to Flickr. Next day I posted it in my blog and there it is, each time re-contextualised and there, ready to be changed again. Replay and remix are not, as we know, particularly new but they are certainly more commonplace in new technology.

Hospital

Ruth patient

I quite often get people saying that they appreciate the way in which I post daily. Thanks, if you are amongst that number! The only trouble with that is that I feel that I might need to apologise when I don’t. Actually I often miss and I never apologise. But this week seems different. On Tuesday my mother was taken ill and subsequently hospitalised and on Wednesday evening my daughter was knocked over in a hit and run in East London. Mother’s still not well, but Ruth (see picture) is on the mend. Not surprisingly then, there’s little else to report. OK, so I did see in Reading Today that they have some material on Web 2.0. I looked at the site, but I could only see this about wikis on protest songs .The times they are a changing: slowly.

Zeitgeist

From time to time I really enjoy reading William Gibson. He always seems to capture the zeitgeist. In Spook Country, Bobby Chombo says ‘That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery’, and then ‘there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction.’ So true, so true. And then back in the real world you can read danah boyd’s doctoral study here not that I have been, but it’s nice to know I can - and that her ethnographic study of teenagers’ social networking also captures the zeitgeist.

Media storm

It’s been snowing for about four hours now, and the road outside is a slushy mess. For once the forecasters were right. They’ve been telling us since Friday that we’re in for Big Snow. We were so well warned that it changed our experience of Saturday and Sunday until it became a weekend of waiting for the snow. Still there’s something quite special about being snowbound in a place when it so rarely happens. I hope you get the picture, it’s Amy Winehouse (courtesy of Emma and Ruth).

Where's Hill at?

Children's literature isn't normally something that gets a look in on this blog. You could probably guess why. But in the process of looking around for Web2.0 material that is related in some way to formal education, I found this little gem. It's Eric Hill's contagious ebullience that really bowls me over. That, and the fact that he is decidedly unteacherly about the whole thing as he describes how he experimented with interactivity and modality in those famous Spot books. But where is Spot in the digital age, or has he gone virtual - that's what I want to know.

Flash mob futures

Rush hour Phnom Penh 1
Back in November I wrote a critique of Rheingold’s flash mobs and the whole idea of direct action mediated by new technology. I argued that it is hard to see how impromptu i-pod parties at Paddington Station or smart mob swarms in sofa shops fit into this vision. I suggested that they might constitute performance art or collective play, and certainly heralded a new kind of social participation, but weren’t so likely to transform society in any radical way. The French activist movement L’Appel et Le Pioche has just proved me wrong. You can read about spontaneous picnic parties in supermarkets here (their French blog) and the English press commentary here. Sounds great, but are things about change?

KTV as new literacy

Mr Leang
Just for distraction, on those long bumpy coach journeys in Cambodia, you get plenty of Karaoke TV. This is mostly Khmer or SE Asian pop with subtitled words. The words, in true KTV style, are highlighted more or less in synch with the vocals, so you can sing along if you want to. But nobody does; at least, not on a public bus. But it just struck me that this is a powerful new technologically-mediated literacy practice, and not just a distraction.

Kawaii!

Kawai
Hey, I'm the proud owner of 284 of these personalised Snoopy stickers! This all started when I expressed interest in a sort of Kawaii thing that was going on with the Taiwanese students I was teaching a few years back.... and then I just received this delightful seasonal message along with the stickers. Lungshing is the company that does them (along with all sorts of Sanrio stuff). Maybe someone should look at the use of stickers and stationery in literacy practices, after all there's identity performance, multimodality, popular culture and stuff, what more could you want?

New Literacies

Many thanks to Martin for pointing me to this video on YouTube which puts across familiar messages but makes more specific reference to younger children. These videos really pick up the heartbeat of new literacies. From another point of view here's Colin and Michele writing in a really interesting way about the writing of New Literacies. It's like a hall of mirrors, sometimes!

Back to work

Feather duster man
So it's back to the old routines again, and things are rolling along as usual. The Web 2.0 book is one stage nearer to publication and my piece Literacy in Virtual Worlds is now available here. Things are looking good for an exciting Special Edition co-edited by me and Vic Carrington (in this journal) and there are a couple of other exciting ventures in the pipeline. Watch this space!

Phnom Penh

After a long boat journey from Chau Doc we made it back to Phnom Penh, where it's hot and muggy. Spent the afternoon hanging out with the monkeys at Phnom Wat - that's about the quietest place out of the continual noise of the motorbikes! Tomorrow we'll be on the road again, heading down to the sea at Sihanoukville by air-conditioned coach. This is a four hour journey, although judging by how things run here it could be anything up to six hours. You always have to be on time at the start of the journey but it never quite works out to plan by the time you reach your destination. Still I'm not complaining, at least it beats the day job. May post from Sihanoukville, hope to have some original pics by then!

Sorry I forgot!

In the rush to get away just after Christmas, I forgot to announce a short break in my posting activity! So this is stolen picture of where I am at the moment, a shot over the rooftops of Chau Doc in Vietnam. It's great to be able to have a break and get a taste of what it is like on the Mekong delta, and I have to say it's rather different to Sheffield. For a start it's pretty warm; there's more motorbikes and bicycles than cars; and the standard of living is pretty low. Having said that you can still buy flat screen TVs and mobile phones! Yesterday I saw European tourists photographing Vitenamese kids on their digital cameras. The kids were fascinated to see their own images, pulling faces, making v signs and so on. This morning, outside the hotel in Chau Doc the situation was reversed as a Vietnamese teenager came up to a young German family and took pics on their mobile phones! Tomorrow we'll get the boat up to Phnom Penh and from their down to Sihanoukville. No promises about regular postings, but a normal service will be resumed mid January!