Documentary

Showroom

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.

Phat Thursday

kicker

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).

Capture, archive, remix

Neal1

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!

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.