Old or new?

birthday car

So here I am reading the inscription on one of my birthday cards. Yes, born 12:10:53, that’s fifty two years ago today! Maybe not quite an old man: but certainly not a new man. The only cake was electronic (this one from oddjapan), but I don’t care. This, then, will be a lightweight posting. An appreciation of William Orbit’s work with Madonna, and a visit to Orbit’s website, where you can interact with the visuals or check his video library (I recommend ‘Time to Get Wize’)…and a reminder to visit top blog regularly!

Eye D

iris id

When I first wrote about names, identities and signatures in online communication (here), I knew that there was very little work in the area. Turkle’s seminal work Life on the Screen (1995) was already a bit dated and David Crystal’s Language and the Internet (2001) had not yet been published. However, I wasn’t fully aware of the enormity of the topic at the time.

Not only are we seeing wide spread use of personalised screen signatures (in email, i-m and message board environments) but our access to geographical and informational spaces is increasingly policed by individual codes, passwords and pin numbers. In the UK, the introduction of ‘chip-and-pin’ payment methods effectively banishes traditional signatures from most financial transactions. Our mark becomes a sequence of digits.

New methods of identification are accompanied by new possibilities for identity theft. Now it seems that with iris recognition (patented in 1994) and the more recent vein identification, technology may deliver more reliable systems of tagging individuals. Will signatures eventually become obsolete, I wonder?

Margaret’s world

Low life?

Still not a clue what to find behind the shutters of Low Life: the only way is to go and have a look. There’s so much I don’t know, but then I do know exactly what’s been on the radio and, what’s more I can hear it now, too.

Episode 1: Fed up with her limited life after a long marriage to the bowls-playing retired sweet salesman William, Margaret Collins decides to start her own on-line diary, or blog. At first William thinks this is just another of Margaret's fads. By the end of Episode 1, Margaret has 1 reader.

Woman’s Hour has been a national institution for as long as I can remember. Nevertheless, as a radio magazine it often manages to include leading edge features. Not that The World of Margaret falls into that category. This week’s Woman’s Hour drama strand just illustrates the increasing domestication of blogging culture.

By Episode 5, we learn that: William’s blog proves a perfect complement to Margaret’s – at first. But early one morning, William discovers an unwelcome message from his wife. And so this shows how the blog has been recruited as a literary device, as the journal has done since Defoe’s time and probably even before then. Nothing new there…but shouldn’t I be working at 10.45 am, not listening to Woman’s Hour? Not now I can listen anytime anywhere!

Young, gifted and digital

Hannah

My digital daughters tell me that a third of young people online have their own blog or website. They showed me this in the Guardian on Friday. Blogging is described as one example of the way in which “the digital revolution is sweeping all before it”. Wary of a digital divide, the leader concludes that there is “an imperative need to put the maximum resources we can into education and providing the next generation with the skills they will need to keep a place in the van of the digital revolution. Judging by what our youngsters are up to they won't need much encouraging.”

More detail of the Guardian/ICM survey is here. This shows how the young live in a world in which communication is enhanced and shaped by social software. But yet our professional motivation to recognize and incorporate these skills seems sadly lacking. I refer back to Dan Buckley’s blog debate on the educational value of blogging launched in popular teachers’ weekly the TES (which describes itself as the world’s leading education newspaper, with average weekly sales of 121,000). What debate? Just the 3 of us, and I think we agree.

So long Stephanie

stephanie

She slipped away from us in the night, our family pet, another reminder of the shrinking domestic situation. I think Stephanie the goldfish died of old age. Then by chance I found out that Stuart the guppy at the SHH studio died the same night (this time of dropsy). Synchronicity. Walking across campus I was reflecting on the pros and cons of flushing as a method of disposal when I noticed a rain-stained poster taped to a tree directing visitors to the ESRC Seminar Digiplay.

That was quite a jolt - I experienced a momentary jolt. Was this an event I should have been at? I quickly recovered when I remembered reading about this. No-one I’d ever heard of, but organized or co-ordinated by the Manchester University CRIC group. The seminars are part of Digiplay (with the impressive front door webpage) which naturally has its own blog. All this may just be of interest to colleagues in Lets get digital:play. Or maybe it's not the right connection.

Lighten up

Lighten up

This is just what’s needed on a grey day – illumination from cre8. But then again, this company offers something altogether different. The savethegorillas lighting is what you might call a slightly ethical design concept. 5% of the profit on each lamp goes to a gorilla protection fund (but what exactly is the profit on each lamp?). Both these and audio animals come from top blog, no garlic please.

[I think I'll probably get a gorilla anyway]

Retrospective

Passions

Reading this, filled me with despair, even though it’s quite precise in pointing to inequities in our educational provision. I thought how 20 years ago I would have fought for such official recognition of inequality. So why the despair? Well of course it’s born out of an understanding that we have a school system that looks for conformity as a solution – conformity of curriculum goals and conformity of measurable outcomes. But also the despair comes from the frustration that we have allowed this narrowing and tightening control of the education of children and young people in the first place. That, and the fact that we still have the same old inequalities.

At lunchtime, queuing up for my spicy couscous at Tesco Metro, I caught sight of the front page of The Independent – not a newspaper I’d normally take home – and there was a story that changed my mood. The cover shows the regeneration of the Broadwater Farm Estate since the 1985 riots. Moreover, the article is a sort of celebration of ethnic diversity. Something we definitely need in this current climate. So, I left Tesco Metro with reasons to be cheerful.

[There are some gorgeous passion flowers in the garden, too!]

Down under

I really liked Anya’s photo of Jackie down under, so I thought I’d blog it too - especially since it works well to shrink our world. What I’ve got’s a bit grainy, but shows real presidential style - good light from outside and it looks nice and warm. There’s something quite classic about that bookish pose. You might say “Jackie reading”, but of course, it’s really “Jackie with book” as she looks out of the picture in the direction of the viewer. Something about the book itself suggests she has just been flicking through – but then the distance from the eyes is just about right for reading. Funny really, because I’m a close neighbour, but the nearest I get to Jackie reading is the shutters behind which she reads.

Over on the other side I learn from Sarah’s blog about Eggplant at Teachers College (Columbia University). They are the educational gaming group: play, learning, avatars, narrative and technology – genius acronym- here’s their blog. I also keep an eye on cultureraven, but there’s been nothing new for a while - disappointing, that.

Lock up your pets

Leave the cats alone

This post begins as a sort of postscript to the shutter theme – but it’s also a weaving together of a number of threads. I’d forgotten about Feline Tattoos and yes they have an excellent grafitti-style shopfront, so that’s where we start. But do they tattoo CATS?

Well, I had this pet thread running and it leaked over onto Simply Clare and a close encounter with Diva Kitty, and now Simply Clare’s staking out her territory with truly shocking posts, when I just wanted to get back to body adornment and skin art.

Occasionally, I go here - Tattoo culture: highbrow for the underground
– why? I’m intrigued by that otherness. Let me explain. Self identity seems to me to be constructed and transformed in social worlds. Textual production and consumption are particular social worlds – if you like, they're sites for the work of the self. Texts allow us to become self. In skin art, it’s the other way around. Self becomes text in such an obvious and constructed way. Mmmm OK, that’s the best I can do – it’s been a long day

Blog on blog

Rainbow information

I like the blogosphere just because there’s always plenty going on. So I thought I’d devote some space to the rainbow coalition of out-there bloggers. First, a welcome back to Colin and Michele (it’s been a long time!). And from their blog, a link to Joanne Larson (here).

And then to our very own Let’s get digital: play, which looks like it’s on the move. Over here on Apophenia, Danah Boyd goes off on one. Meanwhile gamegame has the wonderfully recursive downloadable game about game design! Time to roll over on Top Blog and introduce no-garlic-please.

Photo messaging?

cam phone
It’s a nice cam phone, but perhaps a bit on the bulky side. It could, of course, be integrated into the breathalyser phone service mentioned on top blog, textually.org. Here we’re told that in Finland they've just launched a service, called Promile SMS, as part of a nationwide campaign to prevent drink driving. It works like this: the user texts personal information and drinking habits, the service replies with a message with a blood alcohol level estimate and time needed for the alcohol to be broken down by the body. I suppose it all hangs on how much you remember, or if you know where your phone is....and then there's mobile phone charms (are they taking the piss?) – a whole new area of interest.

On a different tack, I am very pleased to be in good company here with some material designed for colleagues new to teacher education (there’s a book to follow). Glad to see that this material is now live. OK, so it doesn't really exploit the full potential of web-based material, but I expect it came in on budget.

I am the new me

barbie pierced
George said to me, "I am the new me." Well, just how do you respond to that? You see George is an AI "character" who has learned conversational skills from interactions with visitors to the Jabberwacky website, and through chats with his ‘maker’ Rollo Carpenter. You can communicate with George via speech or writing – I suppose he is still honing his skills. Rollo Carpenter, on the other hand, is the winner of the Loebner prize, a competition for producing human-like applications like chatbots.

From my conversations with him (that’s George, not Rollo), I’d say he has a good vocabulary and a rather annoying tendency to change the subject. The latter seems to stem from a limited memory for conversational turns (he all but admitted this to me) – a short attention span, or else he’s easily distracted…..a bit like me then.

All becomes clear

Mum
This is my mother at 83 soon after her second cataract operation. She hopes it will now be easier to re-read Heart of Darkness, although whether or not it will ease her sense of frustration is hard to tell. “Nothing very much seems to be happening.” she complains. Anyway I explained how I’d like to blog her, but despite being familiar with email and mobile phones, blogging remains firmly outside her experience. The times [they r a] changing, I thought.

And then I read that there are 600 billion pages on the web: that’s about 100 for every person. A kaleidoscope of flickering images, and words crawling like a swarm of dark insects across our glowing screens. The crazy flow of communication. We see it all.

Space cadets on Desolation Row

Neal3
In a magazine article in 1967, Jack Kerouac set out what he thought writing might be:

"...spontaneous or ad lib artistic writing imitates as best it can the flow of the mind as it moves in its space-time continuum, in this sense it may really be called Space Age Prose someday because when astronauts are flowing through space and time they too have no chance to stop and reconsider and go back. It maybe that they won’t be reading anything else but spontaneous writing when they do get out there, the science of the language to fit the science of movement"

Not only does this seem to capture the vitality of Beat writing, it also seems prophetic when we think of how new forms of writing take on the functions of speech and attempt to achieve a closer mapping of the contours of talk (txt; msn etc).

Being of a certain age, I felt it my duty to watch Scorsese’s portrait of Dylan last night (simultaneously broadcast on BBC2 and PBS: are we supposed to be impressed?). Basically I mistrust all acts of revision, the myth of history, particularly when someone seems to be reworking popular culture icons of another era. But that aside, the most memorable images are those of the young Dylan churning out words on a portable typewriter. Not just the technology (quaint though it now seems) but the rapid outpouring of Space Age Prose – very modern and peculiarly old-fashioned at the same time.

So there he is, taking on the mantle of the Beats, doing this rapid (ephemeral?) writing on the move...portable. On the road. Writing with no direction home.

[…and themed in here, my photo re-mix of Neal Cassady ‘Watching for the cops’ inside a beer glass.]

How do you do?

mixer2
How do we relate in our social networks? It seems that several continuums (continua?) operate simultaneously (like sliders on a mixing desk). We have strong to weak ties; close to loose relationships; local to distant links. And, can we be dispersed and still intimate? AFP reports that Japanese mobile telephone operator KDDI will start a group chat service later this year allowing five users to converse and share text messages and pictures (from this week’s top blog textually.org). So, a dispersed group can then maintain social ties with regular updates on location and situation. Interesting.

Back on street-level we have Skewville self-styled subversive street artists. Here’s their Flickr tag cluster. Also on the page there’s a link to the strange world of when dogs fly. I just don’t get it..... but then the idea of footprint stamps really appeals.

[all mixed up Monday]

Flatpack: anytime / anywhere

Which screw
I don’t own a suit and so it’s become necessary to invest in a small chest of drawers to store all those t-shirts I accumulate. But was it a mistake to go to IKEA?

Now, there’s something very late modern about IKEA. You visit the place (by car, of course) and it could be anytime, as long as it’s before 10:00 pm, and anywhere – in this case it’s Nottingham - but the only way you know where you are on the map is the sign on the way out, which reminds you IKEA – NOTTINGHAM. You pick up one of a great many identical looking cardboard boxes, pay by plastic and then it’s all down to you.

It almost seems rude. It’s called Blunkt or Bunk, or something even worse. And when you open it up, it’s just a collection of bits of wood. It’s broken. And then it’s up to you, the ‘end-user’, to fix it. But, just as they say that wood fires give two kinds of warmth, so flatpack furniture gives two kinds of pleasure. One buying it; two putting it together (if you’re lucky). Failure at the second tends to cancel out the first.

Yay! I’ve done it. I may have a bit left over, but there’s absolutely no way that I’m going to join that incredibly long queue of return goods. They ought to pay me! Then, I spoke to Emma. You know what, she bought one the same somewhere near her. She put it together in 20 minutes, and advises me to stick with blogging. Which made me think that blogging is like flatpack internet publishing. They (Blogger, Typepad or whoever) give you all the stuff, including the baffling instructions - in other words you get the bits anytime anywhere, and then you put it all together. Yay! And don’t you just love it!

Keep out, keep looking

Shutter up (London Road)
The shutter thing has been a bit of a think-piece about boundaries. Boundaries between the inside and the outside - what is public and what is private. Often we create a binary here, but in actual fact we have permeable/ fuzzy boundaries. I think blogging helps us to see how this works, as aspects of our private worlds leak into the public domain.

Franzen in his essay ‘Imperial Bedroom’ clearly thinks in terms of strong boundaries between public and private when he says: “If privacy depends upon an expectation of invisibility, the expectation of visibility is what defines a public space. My ‘sense of privacy’ functions to keep the public out of the private and to keep the private out of the public.” And later: “A general public place is a place where every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted.” Thought-provoking, but I think he over-simplifies. What, for example, is this space?

It is a place to say that stuff…but also to note (or point to) other stuff. Like the appearance of the Motorola Rocker mobile phone with built-in itunes. Good! Technology converges, and it’s better than having two sets of earphones and tangled cables (MP3 and hands-free). And like the guy who’s selling pixels here (and here’s his blog). And like this try-out - Catch Bob a new platform for mobile gaming. I get that public information into my private space…no, no, it’s not as simple as that.

Shutter up!

Reza's supermarket
Shutter up on Reza’s supermarket. That’s a great shopfront, where he has a nice layout of shisha. Inside there’s Turkish delight and all sorts of Middle Eastern stuff…and I think he’s done the shop-sign himself. Now this could be the last shopfront for a while – I’m spending more time in the car, you see.

In the car I heard all about work in virtual archeology (the Silchester project). Here, widely distributed experts (as well as members of the public) can look at the digitalized data. A quick summary is on the BBC website. Online communities, research participants and a variety of user groups have access to these kinds of data. Yet, in our area of educational research, we seem more reluctant to engage in these sorts of practices. I wonder why? Is it because it challenges established research paradigms, disrupting their linear trajectory? Online data may be published, before it is analysed – before it gets to journal publication. Is that our problem?

Or do we have a more deeply-rooted problem in engaging with new practices. I’m very interested to note that the TES feature on blogs and wikis still has only drawn 3 comments online in 1 week! Two are from yours truly and one from Helen Ryan, a blogger and aspiring PGCE candidate (give her a place, someone!).

Chic shutters

Jaxshutters
Behind these suburban shutters a reader lurks. A reader of blogs; a self-styled blurker. But who? Whilst bloggers fret because they’re feeling numb (Clare’s blog hole) or that they’re doing nothing out of the ordinary (Anya), blog depression hovers threateningly above us all. The reader reads all. Guess who? Click.

Pushing on, I fall in love with Mimobots (figurine flashdrives) and Streetsy the street art photoblog – both from Josh Rubin (this week’s top blog). Meanwhile, the comment frenzy abates. Do I do pets again, I wonder?

[Which reminds me: I forgot some wonderful stuff. Meet Lucy, the sealpoint Ragdoll kitty and knitting supervisor, knitted kitty baskets and the whole new world which is Wendy Knits]

Posh shutters

In the Pink
This is the gentrified look, in which shop-front shutters become an extension of shop décor. Everything about In the Pink is very - how should I say – pink. Anyway, for expanded content on shutters, look no further than here. As for Josh Rubin (this week’s Top Blog) - well he has this ‘needle art’, and this report on the toilet tricycle race (well worth a visit!).

And, rather disappointingly, I seem to be the only person engaging with Dan Buckley’s debate on the educational value of blogs. Is there anybody out there? Come on, I think the poor guy needs some encouragement. OK so it’s a minority sport at the moment, but the potential is huge.

Shutter speed

DSC00359
Mmmm, shutter-spray speed seems a bit slow. The next day and it’s n-e-a-r-l-y finished... and you can see what’s taking place in the photo. I sauntered past again, and then, in a momentary lapse, bought a copy of the TES. Mistake , you might think, but no. I learnt that there’s now the TES online – with expanded content so that over the counter sales don’t suffer. And on this rather crowded page you might also discover they have a media blog. Oh good.

But tucked away (amongst the zillions of job adverts) there’s an excellent article by Dan Buckley on the educational value of blogging and wikis. And, what’s more, it’s on his blog. GO THERE AND LEAVE A COMMENT! He’s got lots of interesting links on the page as well. I felt….well I almost felt… optimistic about the future for children’s digital writing in school. Shutters up on the educational use of social software!

Shutter spray

Shutter spray
Jonathan Franzen writes so well, it’s disappointing to find he’s such a reactionary. In his essay ‘The Reader in Exile’ (How to be Alone), he concludes “I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain.” He needs the acerbic Roy Harris to put him in his place. We must, the latter argues, be “free from any tendency to flatter our literate self-esteem by tacitly equating the readers and writers of this world with its civilized population.”

As for me, I’m going to stick with shutter images, for now. Above you can see the first stages of shutter-art, a new sub-category of shop-fronts. And on the right margin of my blog you’ll notice a new feature – blog of the week. This week it features Josh Rubin’s Cool Hunting (always good on trainers…sneakers) and other stuff, too. I thought I’d also announce the criteria. The criteria are that there are no criteria. It’s just what I liked looking at during the week. This for a start.

Shuttered Sharrow (random)

Shutters

1. From time to time the shopfronts are shuttered, my neighbourhood sleeps. Still I walk the streets – the flaneur, adrift from the business of the place, lighting upon snippets. But still I participate in the urban text that deCerteau refers to as "a chorus of idle footsteps.... Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together."

2. How might technology alter the landscape? Those who share our journey are not necessarily present. Is this what girlwonder means when she asks what a "technologically mobile vernacular landscape might look like?"

3. Mobile gaming (just like mobile conversations) can involve us in moving between this reality and an augmented reality. Here’s a report on the game Treasure; “Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual coins' that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players' PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps.”

4. Thank you Lyndsay for bringing this to my attention. Lyndsay says: "If you don't know it, take a look at Sara Fanelli's amazing 'My Map Book' that uses collage to map aspects of a child's life, including her day, her school, her dog, and her heart." Click on My Map Book for a sample.

Pets first (for a change)

cosplaycat1
And, from oddJapan once again, we have a fancy dress costume for your cat. I quote: "if you're organizing a costume party and want your cat to participate, you can dress it up as a maneki neko (lucky cat). The costume set includes a golden hood with a raising pawn [sic] and a golden bib. " There’s more on the history and gestural semiology of Japanese cat figurines here, and you can see dancing maneki neko here.

Back home, Richard Adams writes in a down-to-earth sort of way about the impact of new technology in the Guardian, now a smaller, more colourful newspaper with expanded web delivery (for example its technology blog). When he observes that: " in the short time that has passed, it has become almost impossible to remember what office work was like before the arrival of the desktop PC, email and the internet" he makes a point about the ubiquity of digital literacy that we’ve been trying to make in the education world for a number of years. Time to celebrate the work of friends and colleagues, carefully summarized in this conference report.

[Pet postscript: one could always focus on dogs blogs like this one from doggiewoggie!]

Lateral thinking

world of experience
Creativity often seems to involve bringing together ideas from different realms. The Atlas of Experience, by Dutch authors Louise van Swaaij and Jean Klar, uses cartography to ‘map’ everyday experience. The book is punctuated with colour maps showing things like the city of Play, the airport at Wavering and Lust (…a road junction). The whole thing is brought together at the end of the book with the complete map: the World of Experience!

Envy. Kenichi Fujimoto, writing in Mizuko Ito’s book Personal, Portable , Pedestrian begins one paragraph like this: "Throughout the 1990s I studied the wristwatch (especially Swatch and G-Shock), the pager, and keitai as media, and I have discussed their position in society as embodiment of alien cultures." And to think (with the exception of keitai) I was simply a consumer.

[Oh, and PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.]

Bling for the boys

body art book
I like the look of this book and will place it on my wish list. Self-adornment seems like a very tactful umbrella term for a range of body-marking and modification practices. Iconic figures in popular culture have always been style-setters and self-adornment is now common in the sporting world. As England’s cricketers capture (or distract) the nation’s imagination, winning batsman Kevin Pietersen’s hairstyle and jewellery have attracted media attention.

The Mirror reports on Pietersen’s £50,000 pink diamond ear studs quoting the manager of Burrells jewellers "Kevin is a great ambassador for the sport and is adding a bit of glamour. He's unique and likes to stand out from the crowd and we think this will help him do that. The whole nation will be willing our boys on and hopefully the jewellery will give him an added spring in his step." All the boys will want bling in their ears now.

[....no pet posting today....phew!]

Graffiti hyperlink

Sharrow URL

I like this hyperlinked graffiti I found round the corner in the adventure playground. The Rocket01 site is here, and if you go on to here, index 8 (word-up) gives you the perspective of a graffiti artist. Unrelated, but equally attractive is the work of Mikael Kindborg (Linköping University) whose research in the area of comics has led to the design of a comic strip programming tool called ComiKit. He has photos here.

I picked up this paper on Jill Walker’s blog. David Huffaker and Sandra Calvert write about gender, identity and language use in teenage blogs. They suggest that interaction online provides a new context for identity exploration. Nothing contentious about that…but I like the way they suggest that: " Weblogs represent a CMC environment where both identity and language play important roles. Not only are teenagers using weblogs to present an online identity, but also to express their ideas, experiences, and feelings using an adapted language. In some cases, these blogs interlink to form online communities, similar to the peer relationships observed in the offline world. "

[and this getting very weird...another pet thing!]

Lost, found and sorted

Flyposters

This is the second posting of a boarded-up shopfront with flypost graffiti – seems like it’s becoming a theme. Basically, the shopfront is covered in adverts for events that have already happened. Abandoned print. It’s like the abandoned shopping lists that are collected and displayed on redhotscott, who says: This site has been inspired by the kind people who abandon their shopping list at the end of a trip to the supermarket. I collect their shopping lists …Each shopping list I find is added to my collection along with comments about each list. He (? why did I choose that pronoun?) has scanned and annotated 201 shopping lists so far.


I was struck by how this activity of finding and annotating everyday materials has become so popular. In common with the Harsmedia Soundblog, redhotscott is working with found objects. The only difference is that Harsmedia transform their found sounds into art. Similarly, Mark Dion, in his River Thames project worked with found objects - beer bottle tops, rusty keys, discarded combs, animal teeth, shells and plastic lighters - rescued from the banks of the Thames, and painstakingly reclassified in display cases and drawers awaiting inspection in Tate Modern. Collecting, classifying, tagging…. and some people do trainspotting for fun.

[look no pets!]

Cool hunter

Ruth in shades

Ruth is a natural born cool hunter, seeking out, even at an early age, the latest popular culture niche. Before Hello Kitty hit the UK we had to scour the malls of Singapore for products. How pleased she would have been to come across the Hello Kitty Visa Card (in gold or other colours)! After seeing these on Odd things from Japan my Lloyds credit card began to look decidedly drab.

[Warning: there is no intentional reference to pets in this posting]

A deserving case (segue)

Sammy, London 05

This is Sammy with the spiky ball we bought him at the Touch Me exhibition at the V & A. You’re supposed to bounce it and squeeze it, but he deserves an award for the crazy idea of putting it in his mouth!

And with a carefully constructed segue into awards it’s now on record that I’m pleased Ms Dynamite won the Mercury Music Prize even though I would have preferred MIA (also a nominee). Keen readers may recall I first posted about MIA here. Her time will come.

[phew! thank goodness I got off the pet theme, I was beginning to worry...]

Pets and phones (again!)

petphone

It all started as a joke - but now it seems that everywhere I look I find things about pets and mobile phones. The picture is from PetsMobility who have a new mobile phone for animals called the PetsCell. You attach it to one of their paws and it automatically answers when you call them up (because obviously the idea of a dogs being able to answer phones themselves is crazy). They do offer an optional GPS just in case you want to keep track of your pet. Read all about it here.

Over on textually.org there’s a link to the Odd things from Japan blog (mmmm bookmark!) where they have this wonderful Pet Phone remote food dispenser! You can feed and talk to your pet while you’re on the move, maintaining that feeling of proximity whilst doing something else. Proof that mobile technology changes relationships….. with pets.

What's your a/s/l?

What's your asl

I'm in here with a chapter of that title, a spin-off from the teenagers in cyberspace work. So I stake my claim to that as a chapter title. That led me to a quick exploration, discovering a veritable cornucopia of txting dictionaries such as this (emailish?). And also, by accident this curious dating game inscribed with also sorts of (heterosexual) cultural assumptions. I played male and got Fashionable Missy and then played female ending up with Funky Ed, who just had a sex change - jeux sans frontieres!

Social networking (in fur)

eyewear

These are wearables for dogs, to help you keep tabs on your dog, developers describe it as "mood rings meets instant messaging, but for your dog." The technology will also give dog owners a chance to "petwork" or network through their pets (in other words it's ideal for Edward).

Wearbles for pet owners (or cyborgs) are on show at the MIThril site. And the picture above shows the Olympus Eye-Trek - a high resolution color head-mounted display, on show here. It can easily be worn over regular prescription eyeglasses and can be used in be used in ordinary life. What a relief!

More cool stuff with mobiles

Here is the semapedia gallery in Flickr….. so what’s that all about? Well, the gallery demonstrates the use of physical annotation technology to tag things in meatspace that will provide quick information to mobile users. So you tag an object that connects directly to Wikipedia information. Here's how it works: the Semacode system generates a black-and-white printout that you tape directly onto the object and then the printout functions rather like a barcode. A passer-by ‘scans’ the Semacode with a smartphone which connects directly to the wiki. Information-on-the-go mmmmm... future perfect.

And where are you?

Shanghai MTI LBS Services Corporation has developed this bear-shaped mobile phone for kids. It carries short messages and includes GPS so parents can locate children by texting the phone company. It has been met with a mixed response from local parents and scepticism from educators, who don't believe children should be distracted by mobile phones in school!

There’s some interesting innovation here on using mobile devices to help social groups to coordinate their events fluidly. Mass Distraction, on the other hand, are on a mission to "provoke thought and discussion about the idea of presence: physical presence no longer guarantees a person’s availability and attentiveness". [Bauman would love them]. So they’ve designed the mobile hoody. In order to answer the phone you close the hood completely and the phone call continues until you open the hood. Mass Distraction has a series of three jackets (the Coin Jacket, the Hood Jacket and the Game Jacket). The video clips are great. Don't you just love the voice-overs?

Dogs, blogs and numbers too

It was late at night, but getting up there was surprisingly easy... after all, it needed brightening up!

A great couple of days with the ESRC seminar series core group … and now I’ve started thinking of grafitti as dangerous play ! Several different threads in the discussion prompted me to return to old links. So, on the contentious subject of grafitti picturesonwalls is always worth a visit. I talked with Rebekah about hyperlinked grafitti, and that’s here.

Printculture has this on becoming ‘taken over’…immersion, flow or obsession? We also had several conversations about the playful use of mobile technology. Back at home I remembered the Urban Tapestries work here and here (story cubes, also from Proboscis are interesting, too). And, if you’re interested in that and or different kinds of blogs, there’s the number 73 bus.

Finally, for Julia, there’s a quote from Jim Gee: ‘what people have an affinity with (or for) is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavour or interest around which the space is organised’.

In a shop front

Not gay

Oh, shop fronts again. This little gem was in a shop window in Covent Garden, London. Sometimes shop windows are like an entrance to another world. For example, there’s this…which is from William Gibson’s blog. His photo, he says, 'is the window of Mr. E. Buk's extraordinary Spring Street emporium of dream-gomi. The shop Cayce looks into doesn't exist…' I'm hooked already. Flickr has a growing shop-front cluster and that’s where I found this. Light, but somewhat dark as well. Playing at work, I came across this book by Leslie Haddon: Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction and Research Guide. Made a note to find out more.

New things

New things

Well not exactly new, often the first time you see things is as good as new though. And then there's the electric bike, it takes the hard work out of cycling, but does it also take the cycling out of cycling? More interestingly new are new bloggers, a big welcome to Simply Clare and Mary Plain, both blogs look really good (and when is somebody going to do a study on the names that bloggers use - it'll probably be Dr Joolz!)

Wordplay/bookplay

Shine on, Sharrow

Some more local stuff, but is it graffiti, or wall-art (it’s tagged as both in Flickr)? Maybe I’ll just settle for urban literacy, but it’s amazing how much wordplay and bookplay is around. Bloggers will be aware of how Avant Game’s Ministry of Reshelving mobilised playful social action in bookshops. Logolalia have a less radical form of bookplay. Here’s their instructions:

Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I suppose in essence this is a recycling of William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Maybe he was doing serious play; play as art. In a related way, Ian Breakwell has been doing art with words for a long time (since the mid 70s). And Tom Phillips’ Humument is a sort of visual and verbal mash-up of an 1892 manuscript by W.H.Maldock A Human Document. So more and more the word is being set free from the ‘enclosures of bookspace’. Like this posting, the word onscreen, digital literacy, message play, blogging.

Text in the city

I love shop fronts more than I love window shopping. The shopping areas around where I live are the very opposite of the mall environment, and each shop front is unique, saying something about its proprietor(s). On London Road, shops change hands faster than money. This picture shows a boarded up shop front, which in itself has become a sort of palimpsest. The fly-posters as printed texts seem to be "forming paving stones and paths, networks of rationality through the incoherence of the universe" (de Certeau, 1984).

Crochet for men

Former BBC director general Lord Birt criticised the state of the British media in the MacTaggart lecture last Friday. "Let us not tabloidise our intellectual life. Let’s skew the balance back towards scholarship." But this assumes it was there in the first place. Meanwhile the BBC itself took the initiative with a podcast trial. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time is up there, featuring his exploration of Marx. Not bad, but not so varied as this though, including as it does, Crochet for Men. Why not?

Labyrinths

My new office is an interesting space, being a conversion of two old residential properties (Victorian I suppose). Apart from smelling like the inside of a hoover bag, it's a bit of a maze with interconnecting doors and two staircases which take you to different parts of the building. There's that dreamlike feeling when you discover uninhabited rooms that lead you to places that didn't seem to be there last time you looked. And then you'll find yourself somewhere familiar. A labyrinth.

I was reminded of Borges' fictional places (The Library of Babel has always been a favourite). Looking up stuff on the grand old man I discovered this. The Crimson Hexagon is a sort of annotated bibliography of Borges' fictional booktitles. Strange stuff, labyrinthine in its own way.

Blog depression!

I noted this (from thenonist) on blog depression earlier in the week. I borrowed the image from Jill Walker, who I haven't visited for a while. There's a link there to her latest publication which looks at what students learn when they're blogging - interesting stuff.

Now, is this posting long enough...or interesting enough...or should I have found something more interesting...or original...or....???

Anyone, anytime, anywhere

Blogs are humming with comments on Google's venture into social software. In their bid for world domination Google now want to colonise the instant messaging market with Google Talk. It's being compared to Skype (which is here) as a way of increasing connectivity.

Comparing the sites, it's interesting to see the idea of total mobile communication taking shape. Any-one (really?), any-where (increasingly so), any-time (in a way I hope not). The Google promotion emphasises choice of medium, quality - particularly with respect to audio - and convenience. Will this corner of the Google empire flourish? Only time will tell.

BA (Manga Studies)

Learning that at least three Japanese universities are now offering courses in manga studies, I just had to blog 10 year old Oscar's Manga syle sketches. In Japan, it seems that academic interest in manga grows, whilst the home manga and comic market is in decline. That seems to be a familiar picture in popular culture and the study of popular culture.

There are some interesting manga blogs around. I've been looking at the wonderfully titled Cognitive Dissonance which offers comic-book reviews including manga stuff and Precocious Curmudgeon which has a similar pitch.

Souvenir soap

There must be a market out there for souvenir surplus and souvenir mistake goods. This unfortunate Olympic leftover makes a good holiday gift - semiologically interesting olive soap (and functional too!).

Meanwhile my re-introduction to digital culture continues apace. I find out where I could be going wrong (?) reading Stephen Downes - a sort of blogging-by-numbers. The visual display provided by a tagboard or tagcloud is quite tempting. I might try one. Here are the tools. And this one monitors posting frequency. But, is frequent posting necessarily a good indicator of content?

And on the emotional psycholgy of blogging, we now have a new phenomenon. Blog depression! Obviously another example of how evil technology is taking us over. Read all about it here.

The kids are all right!

Night out
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

With several bithdays to celebrate we're out on the town having eaten tapas here. From left to right this is Ruth, Hannah, Asia, Emma, Sammy and Oli. The food's good and the company's...excellent! And, this afternoon we checked out the Touch Me exhibition at the V&A. The stuff that worked was really cool, but don't you get fed up with exhibits that are broken from overuse. Body-messaging and audio-texting were particularly interesting.

Harsmedia podcast

Well I'd never come across a soundblog before, so here's the Harsmedia Soundblog. Click the streams on the left bar for audio samples. Harsmedia are a co-operative of digital artists who are working with found cassette tape. This is the Found Tape Exhibition. Part of what they do is mash up the castaway sounds they find. These files are podcasted. And here's Nick Brendon (from US sitcom Kitchen Confidential) with a rather less ambitious audioblog project.

Double six!

The ESRC Seminar Series on Play and Digital Culture is to go ahead, so play's the thing - that's good news. Although homework reading for something like play seems like a contradiction in terms, I'm quite eager to get stuck in. Jesper Juul (aka The Ludologist) is interesting on the world of games, but there's a sense in which play is larger than the game itself.

Play gets interesting when it's subversive and breaks out of conventional ways of doing and seeing things. That was what Richard Neville realised when he wrote Playpower. For Neville play was subversive, play was political, and play was all to do with disrupting the status quo.

Interestingly, one of the most playful and innovative uses of writing predates silicon literacy. The work of Mallarme - particularly Un Coup de Des - did something with the printed word that hadn't been done before. Something that demonstrates what written signs can do. A reproduction of Un Coup de Des is here, or if you're more interested in Balinese Cockfighting it's all here and here!

Wires and cables

A temporary disruption as I relocate. All my gear's in boxes and it's all reduced to wires and cables. If we went lightweight and wireless there'd be nothing for technicians to do! I think that the persistance of wired connection is part of the secret ecology of new technology. So where are we in the food chain of digital communication? Browsing, grazing and occasionally spewing stuff out. But nevertheless I must say I'm very proud of the new look Blogtrax over here. Let's hear it for Dr Joolz for keeping ahead of the game and keeping us entertained with her keen sense of the visual!