Safely arrived in Miami, thinking of Pirandello: 'My drama lies entirely in this one thing, in my being coscious that each one of us believes himself to be a single person, but it's not true. Each one of us has many different possibilties of being. We are different people with the different people we meet and all the time we're under the illsion of being one and the same person with everybody and it's not true.' Food for thought.
Yes, that's how it's supposed to look. What I call a very distressed kitchen style, something that the Sheffield School of Design would be proud of. Anyway, it could look like this by the time I return from Miami, but some how I don't think so!
Went to see an installation of 39 metronomes by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed today. These metronomes are strategically and unobtrusively placed around the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. The blurb says: “the viewer becomes aware of the architectural spaces and the collections in new and challenging ways.” I reckon they were Yamaha QT1s, but they were all placed too high up for me to see. I liked the clocky tocking sound in that rather fusty old building. The out of phase rhythmic sound made me think of John Cage, making in interesting backdrop for familiar works of visual art. Well done, Martin Creed, not quite as good as work no.79, but still ahead of the rest. (Work no.79 is ‘Some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall’, and it's here...well I suppose it isn't really, this is just a photograph of it but you get the idea, don't you?)
I was interrupted whilst eating last night with a follow-up phone call from the University of Nottingham politely asking me to consider donating money. I hope my response was equally polite, but deep down there was a simmering experience of phone rage – my private space intruded upon, and the repeated requests to donate money really irritate me.
I thought I invented the term phone rage there and then but oh no, it appears it’s been around some time. Of course, there are many triggers for phone range. Some people just hate computerized phone systems – so, for example, here’s an American website list that helps you bypass the computerised system and talk to a human!
But from the other side of the fence, sometimes you wind up in a position when you’re on the front line, getting the flak – someone else’s phone range. Worry not, help is at hand:
"Phone rage is on the increase! So how can we control it? Understanding the causes of phone rage in your customers and using techniques to manage them is an essential requirement of any organisation."
Yes, this Capita training course gives you the skills you need to cope with other people’s phone range!
I heard a piece on the radio the other day where someone reported on their partner’s favourite approach to unsolicited tele-sales – not phone rage, but the gently-voiced question, ‘What are you wearing?’. Apparently it’s very effective! And, to conclude this is a totally different kind of phone rage altogether.
OK, a bit more of the not-kitchen then. This destruction/construction event is caught on camera - and that’s today’s verb. Visually we ‘capture’ events in order, subsequently, to be captivated by them. Sometimes in celebrity discourse our central characters are ‘caught’ in unflattering or compromising circumstances, and of course this is what celebrity journalism specializes in. In this sense the photographer makes a coup…a scoop, a catch.
The verbal metaphors of ‘catching’ and ‘capturing’ add to our ideas about the photographer as detective, a recorder of undisputed reality and extend to the ways we see cameras as tools of surveillance. So much for the visual - words on the other hand describe different kinds of reality, from the detective’s notebook, to the journalists report, and the blogger’s thoughts. Ah, and it was so good to get comments yesterday from Princess Sally down under. Better than any celebrity and she takes good pictures too (particularly flip-flops on the beach)!
The kitchen wall: it could be a canvas, but it isn’t. It’s just a photograph I took…I’m interested in the way we use the verb ‘to take’ when we talk about photographs. We take a photograph – take or appropriate an image. It suggests that the image (the sign/the meaning?) is there for the taking.
I’m sure Barthes says something about this in Image, Music, Text or Camera Lucida. In contrast we compose writing, we make meaning, we weave in hyperlinks and we make sure we do not take (or at least we hide our takings).
Some people take photographs seriously. There’s as much composition as appropriation on this photoblog. And this skyscraper image is amazing. Surely, this is more about making meanings than taking them. Nevertheless, straight comparisons with another mode (eg writing) just won’t work. What would the equivalent to the irony of The Dullest Blog in the World be, I wonder?
Recuperating… entertaining myself with 3run stuff (although that really does look too energetic by far!). I enjoyed DrJoolz close-up photo thing, as well, and I think I won. Yay! I seem to remember that sort of ‘brainteaser’ from way before CBBC. Also read this stuff on LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), which is software that can be used to do marking for you. Appealing, but not appealing both at the same time. So here’s the link to Wired News on how LSA can be used for automatic marking of essays.
I also read again about how you can risk your job blogging – well maybe, but mostly I think, if only it was so daring! And then on the possible health risks for young children using mobile phones, the Guardian reports on this new study which promises to provide us with some useful information.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been really cheered up by reading sympathizing and encouraging comments on my ‘being ill posts’. It’s a strange experience being ill online, but somehow or other I’m glad I posted about it (sneezes on screen). Thank you!
I’m not good at being ill, but today I’m grounded (feverish/sore throat – hope it’s not bird flu). Even photographing the skateboarding Honey Monster didn’t really cheer me up. I’ve had to cancel attendance at the UKLA meeting tomorrow, which means missing out on meeting up with my wonderful daughters, and I probably won’t get to Graduation on Monday.
On the other side of the road, Jackie keeps up her output as a very prolific person here. It’s great evidence of the impact of the digital on the lives of very young children, and the call to develop appropriate curricula and pedagogy is powerfully argued. This is the foundation for what Colin’s called School 2.0. Well done, Jackie!
All day I’ve been wondering whether blogged research-thoughts, as a form of self textualisation, constitute a more valid subject position than the usual product of modernist narrators. In these sorts of posts (or on Blogtrax) we perform indeterminate, fragmented and multiple narratives of the self. These first-person narratives are a kind of life-writing (although to be truly post-modern we would need to interrogate and problematise the projected identities that are produced).
The difficulty in developing an authentic account of blogging seems to turn on the challenge to claim an authority which is acknowledged as a social construct and avoids a return to the pretense of impersonal objectivity. The problem is also one of applying a relatively stable analysis to fluid multivocalised and tightly interwoven texts…the camera looks out of the bathroom window. I think there must be a connection, or is it apophenia?
I just caught up with some comments on yesterday's post, and with an uncharacteristic recognition of audience thought I'd blog a seal point. I came to this decision after being inspired by Wendy's manifesto on how to be a Badass Knitter. And now...a badass blogger!
Wednesday is the last of the wonderful Becky Bowley’s durational performances at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham. She knits with yarn that dissolves before your eyes as she works. Her knitting has no visible result - its only measure is passing time! And thinking of knitting I wonder how things are getting on with Lucy, the sealpoint Ragdoll kitty and knitting supervisor, and those stunning knitted kitty baskets and the world of Wendy Knits?
This feature introduces us to mociology and Joe Trippi’s book ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. Trippi argues that bloggers and mociologists (users of mobile phones) have the power of a ‘two-way printing press’. This he suggests will impact on the political process ‘It'll do for 21st-century politics what print did for the 18th.’ – or maybe we’ll just use our camphones to record our birthday parties. Who knows?
Morning sunlight was particularly good this Saturday. I had a few hours in the window with Christine Hines’ Virtual Ethnography. She talks about newsgroups and webpages (let’s add blogs) as “instances of self-presentation which it is hoped will be accepted as appropriate and plausible performances.” (p.122) - it’s interesting that use of the word ‘hoped’.
Later she argues that the webpage is “made meaningful primarily through the imagining of an audience and the seeking of recognition from that audience.” (p.136). There’s also a useful page on virtual ethnography here.
Instant messaging presents some interesting possibilities for communication. I have a clear memory of Michele Knobel at the IFTE conference in Melbourne doing a live i-m question and answer link-up with Colin, all bleary-eyed in a Glasgow office. We’ve been using MSN as a family network for a while now and I wanted to explore some of the frustrations with i-m which lead me to conclude that it’s rather a stubborn medium.
Earlier this week, Hannah was at her sister’s house in Ilford (East London). Now although Sammy uses MSN to talk to his family in Morocco, that evening he had a friend round – the webcam showed them talking as a sort of backdrop. Hannah was keen for us to see her new hairstyle, but I tripped over the mike cable, so apart from gesturing inanely via the webcam, I was reduced once again to writing, Hannah to shaking her curls. Nothing much was said.
At the same time, Ruth was at an internet café in Ealing (West London). The backdrop showed the proprietor sitting god-like on a throne of a chair, surveying his heard of cash cows. Ruth had Oli in Tenerife in one window, us in another and Hannah in a third. We’re all linked up, but a multi-channel cam-chat is impossible to do. We had connection, but not much communication.
Back to Alex’s post about blogging. What sort of comparisons can be made? I-m, unlike blogging, is essentially a one-to-one medium, not particularly good at establishing or maintaining a network. For:
1. dispersed communities – obviously good at the dispersed bit, but as the examples above show, it's insufficient, on its own to, to create that network.
2. conversational desire – it seems to work quite well if you’re just writing. My experience is that the web-cam changes things…and not for the better. I wonder if this is my lack of experience, but frankly, I’d rather phone or type.
3. participation – OK, yeah, this is easy enough, but of course we are talking about synchronous online communication with all the strengths and weaknesses that has.
4. Thinking-in-progress – mm, not really. This is much more about phatic communication in my experience. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
So, at the moment, I find i-m a stubborn medium – hence the photograph of Madame Blavatsky, above.
(Incidentally, the wonderful Peggy Reynolds did an excellent radio feature on Blavatsky last December)
I don’t usually do politics on my blog, but I wanted to post on the Blair debacle. It seems patently clear to me that Blair’s foreign policy has laid us wide open to the threat of terrorism. If that’s what the Labour revolt is really about, then so much the better!
But, I also wanted to underline that unrest in Paris is derived from the failure of the French to acknowledge institutional racism. Michel deCerteau reflecting on social upheaval in Paris, 1968 came to see how difference and diversity were essential to a society’s vitality and power of invention. We seem to be slipping into a politics of polarization on both sides of the Channel. We do it differently, but maybe the end result is the same.
I wanted to post on politics, but found the inside of my fridge more interesting. Is this the end point of consumerism, or is it simply time to go shopping? The fridge’s door opens on another collection of random things – a what’s in my fridge meme. Interestingly, Nancy’s webzine also features collections – is that synchronicity ?
Another collection – this time it’s writing tools, sparked by hearing about historian Bethany Hughes talking about the impact of paper on European civilization.
As we know paper was invented by the Chinese - the idea probably traveled down trade routes, collectively referred to as the Silk Road, into the Mediterranean area. Hughes claims that Muslims learnt how to produce paper, and that it was the Moors who introduced paper into Europe from their paper factories in Andalusia.
In a fascinating documentary on Channel4 Hughes traced the history of the Moors and their Islamic society that ruled in Spain for 700 years. She explored the Moorish influence in mathematics, astronomy and medicine, romantic love, paper, deodorant… Just what we need to counter the current wave of Islam-a-phobia.
All right, so we have new surfaces for writing, new technologies, and, of course blogging. Here’s Alex Halavais writing about blogging. He isolates 4 things that blogs do. According to Alex, blogs:
1. promote communication in dispersed social networks
2. encourage reciprocal communication (feedback through comments, links, and other channels) fulfilling a ‘conversational desire’.
3. accumulate content in small segments, and have a low participation threshold
4. give a relatively open and unfiltered view of thinking-in-progress.
I’ll go with that. Anyone for a 5th?
My Flickr eyes were open. I walked into the Room-That-Time-Forgot, and I knew what I would see and photograph. Hannah’s stuff, abandoned like crockery on the dinner table on the Marie Celeste. I’m infected by a meme on collections of stuff.
Last week I posted this: 'We collect things for shelves, wall displays, mantelpieces etc. We collect ideas: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project)' ; I read the Dr Kate comments on collections and didn’t comment; I read Colin and Michele wondering about random Flickr groups. I posted pumpkins on a skip and was invited to submit my picture to the Skips and Dumpsters group. I didn’t. I decided to be more cautious about my use of tags.
I think I see a move to construct understandings in different ways. A sort of emergent pattern-recognition, like the way themes emerge in a blog, and tags cluster together as affinities develop. But are my pumpkins part of ‘skips and dumpsters’? LeoL30 politely suggests the picture fits the image pool. I remained unconvinced. After all who’s collecting who and why?
I see Kaye Trammell’s been busy writing a paper called ‘Impression Management and Self-presentation Online: An Analysis of Popular Blogs’ for the National Communication Association conference in Boston. That’s right in line with what I’m working on now (although I think I’d rather leave the ‘popular’ out of it).
On from here, i-Anya posts a link to Cynthia Lewis and Bettina Fabos who look at the social identities that shape and are shaped by the practice of IM. I’ll be reading that one tonight.
And I’ve only just caught up with Colin and Michele trying to articulate what they do so well in terms of ‘trying to push academic theory into areas we think need to be explored.’
Just when we thought we were moving forwards we seem to be moving backwards with this chunky James Bond watch that acts as a remote car-starter!
That’s Hoody Moral Panic: Google it and this Flickr group comes up straight away. You can also read here about the injustice of moral panic around hoodies. Well there’s:
1. Robin
2. Neighbour
3. Red Riding
And then there’s Justin (bottom left in the pic). He just uses the hood to keep his 3D glasses on, nothing wrong with that. Just to think, when I was growing up, the big embarrassment was to own a coat with a hood in the first place (unless, of course, it was a duffel coat or a parka)
I couldn’t resist showing these discarded pumpkins on a skip outside my house. They really are smashing pumpkins – detritus from a few nights back. This by association is The Smashing Pumpkins site with a great manga-inflected video.
And ‘Holy Lemons!’ – that’s the title of a paper by my colleagues Cathy Burnett and Jeff Wilkinson who looked at children’s use of web-based text in out of school contexts. They introduce us to the concept of information bricolage. A term that might well describe this post, this blog, this, that and the other….pumpkins and lemons (an unlikely combination).
This is Sammy’s hair style at the start of Ramadan. Eid Mubarek to Sammy and his family! Today is the end of the fast, as Muslims all over the world celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr. I note in passing that although GoogleUK dresses up its logo for Christmas and for Halloween and receives plaudits for this, it remains unchanged today (am I surprised?).
To consume:
1. to eat up
2. to completely destroy
3. to engage or dominate (often passive)
4. to use up
As a consumer, I blog my new trainers. I like them. I consume them/they consume me…part of a train of thought that I embarked upon when I wanted a bookshelf on the sidebar of my blog. My intention was to be able to share what I’m reading (listening to) with my friends and readers. The provider, gives the default header of “3 things I’m consuming”, and I must admit to feeling a little uneasy with this. I subsequently re-worded the header “interest” and then “interests” – but it’s still not quite right.
Of course 43 things’ default header is quite accurate – these are indeed things I’m consuming. You buy them from a shop or order them from Amazon. I consume therefore I am. At the same time I have deeply ambivalent feelings about being positioned as a consumer in a consumer society in which everything gets trashed (definition 2) or spent (definition 4).
But still, I like my trainers…maybe I should eat them before they eat me...
OK, whatever, it's not perfectly framed but look my pics are getting better!
I found an interesting article on social software and learning here by Ulises Ali Mejias. This is his blog, Ideant. His main idea is about blending online and offline activity and how social software impacts on pedagogy by “inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.”
I also wanted to quote directly from Kat on a paper given at the Internet Generations conference, Chicago (Association of Internet Researchers). It echoes some stuff recently posted on Blogtrax:
“I talked about my experience of using a blog to gather, analyse and present data, about story telling (mine and other peoples via the 73 story blog), about managing multi-facted roles (how to cope with simultaneously being technical, a designer, blogger and researcher) and dealing with the transparency of an online process (how the act of blogging reveals the messy, awkward and ill-fitting fragments of research that are often cleaned and smoothed out in more formal research accounts).”
Enough? No? Oh well there’s some great stuff on Streetstunts, free running, street tricks and so on to lighten your day.
I like the look of the new mosque on Wolseley Road, particularly now it has the dome in place. It gives the area a completely different look and will certainly provide a hub for the local Muslim community. The emphasis on locality reminded me of deCerteau writing about networks of communication:
"….ethnic ties do not replace economic relations, but they allow them to be developed. In the same way they do not suppress the importance of locality, but reinforce it, with ethnic groups seeking to find a common space by living together in the same neighbourhood or along the same axis of trade or public transportation, whether in the city or the suburbs, depending on the possibilities on offer." (deCerteau, 1997:112)
But locality is only one dimension; he also reminds us how new media can make it possible to break up the "stodginess of local networks and to establish relations with new partners for given projects of common interest". I’m sure this is happening, too.
Meeting a motley group of friends and academics to launch UKLA’s Digital Literacy SIG caused me to reflect on my own networks and how these are part local and part dispersed; part face-to-face, but also heavily mediated by new technology. It seems here that another group may lead to another blog. Maybe it’s time to kill this one off – my only reluctance is that the colour pics look so good on a black template!
Whilst everyone else gears up to Daylight Saving Time, Halloween, Eid, Diwali and Bonfire Night, this angel seems content with Cartoon Network. Scooby Doo!
Down the road work is going ahead on Sheffield's first purpose-built mosque (on Wolsey Road, Sharrow) The Madina Mosque is built on the site of the old Islamic Centre, which was housed in a former Co-op building.
[picture to follow]
Seeing beautiful flower images on other people's blogs (such as i-Anya) has prompted me into action. This is a late arrival - a spring flower - showing that time's out of whack with one of the warmest October days on record. A shame I'm still a bit of a novice at photography.
I'm a novice too in using RSS, but I'm slowly getting to grips with feeds. They seem to mash up time and space, too. So my IRA blog feed tells me what's going on with digital video down the road in Peterborough.
At the same time, the London train's late again. Emma's delayed by "burrowing animals". I hope it's not those pesky squirrels again! Call the RSPCA, somebody!
The mashed-up voice of Banksy in interview was the centrepiece of BBC2’s Culture Show this evening. It does seem that the enigma of ‘who is Banksy’ becomes more problematic as he becomes more mainstream. Nevertheless, I admire what he’s done for the urban artform.
Talent of a different kind is on display on this video from French TV: the Human beatbox. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, but this is an amazing performance, how does he do it?
On display today, the broken wind-up clock locked at 12 o’clock, reminding me of that bizarre routine of turning back the clocks for winter this weekend (or is it turning them forwards?). Whichever, it’s always totally confusing.
I suppose collecting is something we all have in common. Squirrels are collectors - notorious foragers and hoarders, but when I read the reports here and here of squirrels on crack, frankly I was surprised. Surprised - until I learnt that it’s another urban legend. Anyway I like the way the RSPCA spokesman said "he was unaware of the squirrels taking crack in Brixton.” The RSPCA seems reasonably well-informed
So we collect things for shelves, wall displays, mantelpieces etc. We collect ideas: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project); and we collect novelties such as this tea serving robot. Today’s collection ends with this report on the Scandinavian mobile-phone throwing competition. Anytime, anywhere, but where exactly?
When I first met Kate I remember having this long conversation about mantelpieces and what gets put on them. So that, and looking at Kate’s collections, has prompted me to show some mantelpiece stuff.
I got this Navajo pot from the stunningly beautiful Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which is the ancestral home of the People of the Cut-throat Shark (Cui-ui Eaters). Our half hour there with Ben, in the little town of (would you believe it) Nixon, taught me more about indigenous people and water rights than hours of reading would have done.
Although I sometimes leave CD cases on the mantelpiece, or use it to display my birthday card on, it’s not cluttered with gas bills or lip-salve and other stuff. For me, the kitchen’s the place for that stuff.
Over on Blogtrax, there’s the next stage of working through the autoethnography that Julia and I are doing. One of the things this has brought to light is how online publishing can alter the research process – particularly the relationship between researcher, participant and user-group. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in one category or another, so you could go there and leave a comment. Alternatively you could leave a comment about commenting, here or on Dr Joolz.
Looking back at cassette tapes, once the ubiquitous format for analogue audio storage, we can see it’s just a case of the same thing looking different. This photoblog is interesting in that sort of way. Mass production moved on from the Henry Ford standard of “any colour so long as it’s black” to something just a little more diverse. And that diversity is at the heart of consumerism. So, Color-ware Inc pride themselves on being able to alter “the color of existing products. The idea behind Color-Ware started with transforming the ubiquitous beige computer into a custom-colored work of art.” Well, that’s just what I always wanted! My Nano-pic is a design from the palette (have a play here). Is that choice?
Not for me. Choice is something to do with functionality. So a good MP3 can shuffle through your whole library – I like that. The best you could do on cassette was create your own (unilinear) mix. For me a 20Gb iPod beats the Nano because there’s more on there to shuffle through – more choice - unless, of course, you want colour (the same thing looking different)!
After serving her time as blurker and blog commenter, Kate now has her own blog and so, in celebration drkates artyfacts is top blog. I really liked the agenda setting statement in her first posting:
"Commenters may be interested to know the themes in advance, so they can adjust their comments accordingly.
For now the themes are:
rucksacks
lost tickets
lost items"
I liked it because I’ve been reflecting on regulation, self-regulation and ethics in blogging. So, Kate’s provisional agenda reminded me of this, and what Torill does not write about on her blog. And then, from another point of view Danah Boyd writes about other people wanting to control what she blogs. "I want the right to control my voice" , she says, and that’s a theme that’s emerged for me through this last week.
One of our administrators tells me she was a Red Guard towards the end of the Cultural Revolution. She also has clear memories of earlier times of turmoil in China. She’s lent me a copy of The Good Women of China by Xinran. This book is based on the stories women shared with Xinran, when she presented a radio programme called Words on the Night Breeze. These stories are very moving. I was struck by the similarities of Xinran’s work to what Pratap said about giving people a voice – the media at its best, as deCerteau says, helping:
"the person to follow the thread of memory, which easily twists or knots up or gets lost in chaotic or confused repetitions…helps to relate one kind of experience or another…to clarify the chronology of events in reference to the history of the region or the nation." (1997: 130)
In that strange world of academia the exchange of ‘business cards’ – particularly at conferences, is quite a thing. I don’t think you can ever ‘catch ‘em all’ like Pokemon cards, but it’s an interesting enough ritual. So naturally, I thought it would be good to get my blog address on mine this time and I’ve described how I went about it at length here.
Now, after a long delay, a bureaucrat in my institution has emailed me the following:
“You have asked to have the web address below printed onto your business card.
I'm sorry but I don't believe it is appropriate for this to go onto a University business card. We normally just have the University website, and whilst this may be connected to your work, I think it may be easier if you wrote this on the back for those that you wished to send your personal details onto.
Hope this isn't too disappointing but we are trying to maintain a standardised approach to business cards and other items of stationery.”
Well frankly I’m not disappointed…or surprised. I expected this to happen. But I do like the kindly advice to scribble my blog address on the back! It’s a bit like the street cards by gapingvoid…or the concept of blog cards (on gapingvoid’s own blog). Mildly amusing.
Well, blending’s OK on the night shift, working from home, but any suggestion that one might use the University’s good name for nefarious purposes, like publicizing your blog, meets with resistance.
I was just reading Torill Mortensen on the "what is blogged/ what is not blogged theme" (one that has also run over on Blogtrax). And then I decided to check Tales from the Bearpit and discovered the 32/5 meme (23rd post, 5th sentence). Mary Plain shows that over on California Eating. But strangely enough the same posting on California Eating does a Torillesque posting on what is blogged. I quote:
1) Info that's useful/interesting to anyone (restaurant and travel tips, and, if I was stupid, work gossip/bitching)
2) Stuff that's interesting to family and friends (daily events, observations, musings, and Clio news)
3) Stuff that may only be interesting to me (long musings about How I Feel and, uh, Clio news)
Anyway my 23/5 reads “Then again, maybe that clunky keyboard is just a throw-back to the times of typing”. Mmm the clunky magic keyboard that takes me on a strange journey from red toenails to red coats (isn’t it interesting what people choose to leave comments on?).
Here’s a picture of Sally with friends just before her trip to Australia. I ‘borrowed’ it from her blog, because I haven’t seen Hannah (far left) for some time. It’s just great that a blog can give voice, and keep us updated when friends are on the move. I particularly like reading The Wonderful World of Princess Sally…. it really tells you about Sally. So, anyway, far left Hannah, just above is Bella, then PS and on the right Hannah’s flatmate Izzie.
[ …and then here, a piece on celebrating learning through play]
Each year Sheffield’s Showroom cinema hosts the International Documentary Festival, which is a key event for the industry. There’s a photoblog and podcasts to accompany the event. So, anyway, as a result, it was our good fortune to spend Saturday night with Pratap Rughani, talking about his work and his inspiration to give voice to those in oppressive situations worldwide. Directing hard-edged documentaries seems a natural extension of his work as editor of the New Internationalist.
Pratap’s award-winning Playing Model Soldiers was an insightful account of young black men in the army. There’s more documentary work than I can comment on here, but I was particularly interested in the conflicting interests of globalization and state control in the series on satellite television in South Asia. Some of this is captured in this article.
It was great to learn about how Sheffield snowboarders use digital video, mobiles and their own website to capture and circulate what’s cool in the world of boarding. New technology is seamlessly blended with lifestyle identities.
Snow’s a pretty rare occasion in Sheffield these days – hence the significance of Phat Thursday, last March. Watch the video full-screen it’s great - particularly the bit where the guy rides the rails outside an old Victorian school building (a tram goes underground in the background).
I’ve been turning over in mind what Danah Boyd says about remixing on Apophenia. She suggests “we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption.” Well, first off the idea of active consumption is bound to appeal – it gives us a sense of agency within a market economy. But if all it comes down to is wearing clothes from different shops, our agency is simply like that of a 70s disco DJ with a collage of ready-mades (a sentient jukebox) and that seems to be a bit of a limited construct.
To my mind remixing is better understood as a plundering of the archive, making new meanings, and is at best an act of appropriation or recontextualization. It is production in the way that identity performance must always be, but it’s also more than that. In remixing, reader-becomes-writer; consumer-becomes-producer (and this is made easier in the capture, archive, remix world of digital media). In a sense all authorship is remixing, from Shakespeare to Shabba Ranks; from Tolkein to Tupac. Anne Hass Dyson illustrates this well, here and here when she shows how children create when they remix media.
Danah Boyd highlights that part of “the identity process is to consume culture, mix it and personalize it, and share that with our friends”. I agree, but think that this is a different order of remixing. Here we’re authoring the self, to borrow (remix?) Holland’s phraseology. Danah concludes with some ideas about distribution – well I haven’t got that far yet. I’m still stuck on deCerteau and circulation!
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!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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]
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!]
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.
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
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.
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.
