What's on your mind?

I think SNSs are under-theorised. So as I turn my attention to some of the data collected last year on teens' social networking, here's some first thoughts on the big F.....I'm suggesting that Facebook provides contexts for the social construction of relational meaning. An individual personalised profile page resources and constrains this social construction in the way in which it presents multiple invitations and a limited set of opportunities. If we take the view that identity is always dialogic and performed in relation to the other, then there is a sense in which you are called into being by your profile page. Here the process of interpellation, used by Butler (1997:5)and drawn from Althusser (1971) is helpful. Interpellation is mobilised by Butler to illustrate how people accept and internalise social relations and norms. On Facebook the busy screen that updates you on activity in your social network already positions you, but the site's prompting question 'What's on your mind?' hails you into being as a particular kind of subject, to use Butler's expression. In this process of interpellation you enter into a universe of textualized selves in which your own self-narrative is developed, modified and repeatedly performed in relation to others. Social relations and friendships are rehearsed and more or less publically enacted in a heavily mediated environment. But of course this environment intersects in complex ways with life outside Facebook - life in what we sometimes call the 'everyday world', in which freindships are also enacted, but also in life in other mediated environments and life as experienced in relation to other popular narratives.

One thousand posts

I missed the exact day of my blog's sixth anniversary but this is officially the THOUSANDTH POST! So that's an occasion for some reflection on the what and why of blogging. Thinking back to the start, I was intrigued by publishing on the web. I'd done a few courses on web design, but it all seemed far too complicated, so when I came across the blog concept in late 2003 I was keen to give it a go. Pretty soon after I'd published my first posts Colin and Michele found my blog and I was dragged rather unceremoniously into what people were beginning to call the blogosphere. That spurred me on a bit, and realising that my blog might actually be read by others made me try a little harder to do something sensible for a change. So most of the time in the early days I'd use the blog to collect links to all sorts of quirky websites that I discovered in my surfing life. Colin and Michele wrote about it once and described it as wunderkammer. At the time I didn't know what that was but it sounded all right; now I do and it sounds even better. That was a fun time. Later on colleagues like Dr Joolz caught the blogging bug and soon there were several groups of academics connected to new/digital literacies who were posting stuff. That was an era of much commenting and encouragement! Some carried on, some fell by the wayside amd some became intermittent bloggers. As time went on my blog became more focused around the issues now on the header - education, new media and literacy - but I always allowed for the possibility of adding anything random that appealed. Over time its become an important way of processing what I do in my academic life, in my writing and in my research. I'm recording what's on top for me each day. Sometimes these shards of writing get absorbed into stuff that gets published; on other occasions I'll include off-cuts and often there will just be random thoughts or half-digested bits from what I'm reading. It's a way of working that suits me. At the same time I try and keep what I'm reading, listening to and watching up on the sidebar and from time to time I update the links (but that's now overdue). I don't think I really believe in blogging as a genre. I get the point, but there's so much variation in blogs it's hard to pin down. I'm not that keen on the concept of the blogosphere now either. I work across more static websites, Twitter, Flickr and a number of VLE blogs and wikis. That's the sort of circulation around my posts. I suppose I must have an 'ideal' or 'imagined' reader, but most of the time I'm motivated by doing it for me. I'm always surprised, maybe flattered when someone says 'I read your blog', but quite early on I removed the site counter because it annoyed me. Mostly my blog is work/interest related. I know family members and non-work friends sometimes read it, but I get the sense that they're not particularly drawn to it. Performance? Why, of course, there's a performance of the academic self. I'm happy with that. And, yes, there's so much to write about this topic - and lots that I haven't written about..... but one of my conventions is to keep it fairly brief, and I feel like I've already exceeded my average length. Maybe some linguistically orientated student of blogging could do a mean length of utterance!

Self accounting

A couple of quotes from Butler that have set me thinking: 'I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.' (2005:15) and 'An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing....the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our 'singular' stories are told.' (2005:21). So our individual identity is the product of social interaction, is confirmed through recognition and framed through similarity and difference. I guess that's what I mean when I say identity is relational. Work in progress....

This week last week

Last week was one of those characterised by a flurry of activity. The DIY media book was published, my piece on online social networking came in final proof form, and Scholastic published the re-vamped curriculum materials on Sci-Fi writing 7-9 (see pic). That was a demanding little project, but it kept me distracted during a difficult personal time. I also had an interesting chat last Thursday with Lyndsay from Future Lab about what participation, and in particular digital participation, might mean or might look like. There’s certainly more thinking to be done in that area. As well as all that, I expanded my technical vocabulary which now includes the wonderful term exertion interface which pretty much sums up Wii activity.

DIY danger

I've written about photosharing on a couple of occasions now, but I've never really addressed the issue of ethics. I suppose that's mostly because of an interest in the sharing process itself and how it fits with the more general Web 2.0 ethos, but also because it raises some thorny issues about ownership and even e-safety which aren't exactly top of my list, even though they are worthy areas of concern. But I adhere to my own ethical principles with respect to images of human subjects. I'll ask permission to use/share photographs of individuals and I've only once had an issue with that. On that occasion it was photographing a graffiti jam in Sheffield. I was taking pictures of the materials and the emerging wall art. I put these images up on Flickr, but in one of them I had inadvertantly captured the face of one of the artists. She mailed me through Flickr and politely asked me to remove the photograph because of the rather touchy legal issues. I obliged immediately and sent an apology. So, anyway, my unwritten ethical code doesn't cover inanimate objects, like the Victorian ford sign above. I've never asked a sign for permission! It never crossed my mind. But with this pic I encountered an onslaught of verbal abuse - not I hasten to add from the sign itself (roll over Saussure) but from the owner of the property whose outside wall the sign is on. 'What are you doing? What right have you got? What are you going to do with...? Let me see!' etc etc. I explained that I wasn't a spy, I meant no harm - and this is the embarrassing bit - I had to explain that I like taking photographs of signs! As often happens in such situations the social interaction surrounding the event slowly changed its tone as I learnt that the farm was continually harrassed by the local authority for allowing water and slurry on to the road and that that my photographing had been construed as an act of surveillence! And, as the day wore one, I learnt all about the farm, the ford, local history and so on. But in the end - damn it - I forgot to ask permission. Do visual researchers do sackcloth and ashes, or has the moment passed?

DIY media

Well I suppose this is DIY media - me introducing this paper on participation for students - and for that matter everyone else. It's another instance of the consumer becoming the producer on the read-write web. And in an attempt to blur boundaries just a bit more, here's Ruth's DIY media of last October/November in Paris!

Literacy in print

Here's Colin and Michele's 'DIY Media' from Peter Lang - out now! I have a chapter called 'Visual Networks' in it which explores Flickr (again!). The book looks like a great addition to the series, and to emerging work on new literacies - and I can't wait, as usual, until I get my own copy. Also just out is Debra Myhill and Ros Fisher's Special Issue of JRR 'Writing development: cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic perspectives.' It's good to have a feature on writing, but thumbing through I note a distinct absence of the digital - which is a shame, because that's where a lot of writing seems to be happening. A while back the latest RRQ dropped through my letter box. I was really impressed with 'A Review of Discourse Analysis in Literacy Research: Equitable Access', which has so many authors I'm not going to list them (sorry folks!). But it's an excellent review and I'm going to repeat myself, here, but these essay reviews are an extremely strong feature of RRQ. Long may they thrive!

Scrappage

Old cars taken away from my brother’s house are material objects now emptied of their previous significance/use value and are about to become scrap. I wonder if anyone working in the field of material culture is looking at this trajectory of objects and the changing meanings that are involved as stuff becomes trash? Something about the topic reminded me of how the great Russian intellectual Bakhtin used his notes for 'The Novel of Education' as cigarette papers. The tragedy of the story is that this substantial work was lost when the publishing house was bombed. Unknowingly Bakhtin, who was heavy smoker, used his remaining notes in this way. Because of the wartime paper shortage he literally smoked his own greatest work! He began at the back, so that all that remains is the opening section on Goethe.

From down under?

It was great to listen to Barbara Comber at the University of Sheffield yesterday. Although developments in Australia with the NAPLAN testing regime and public scrutiny via myschool are not exactly what you'd calll good news, the careful and critical study of these sorts of innovations from their inception could be very productive in understanding how policy gets enacted and interpretted (and subverted and resisted). It might also open a useful space for comparison and critique. All through her talk walked the ghost of Foucault. But also the impact of a testing regime on conceptions of literacy was hauntingly familiar. Will it end up with this?

Identities

Well I finally got recognition of some of my multiple identities. How postmodern is that! So the doorplate saga rolls on, but it brought to mind all that stuff about anchored and transient identities which seemed to go down quite well. I want to revisit the ideas, particularly with respect to the data I have on teens’ online social networking. The original idea was really motivated by a need to underline the fact that whilst many were arguing for the levelling effect of the internet and suggesting that you could be who you wanted to be in an online community, the weight of one’s historical and social past is actually still present, and that performances of gender, class, and so on are still very much in evidence. Of course I was not arguing for an essentialist self, but merely suggesting that strong, structuring forces continue to exert an influence. These could be seen as discourses to which we are strongly anchored. On the other hand the kaleidoscopic identifications (often media-related) and more temporary I saw as transient identities, easier to remake and by definition easier to discard. Perhaps the division was too strongly made, because it has since become clear to me that the sort of things I referred to as transient could actually be closely related to or even expressions of anchored identities, the TV shows we like, the toys children choose, the sport we feel passionate about and so on. So I’ve shifted my ground in the direction of a particular kind of relational performativity. I particularly like Butler’s idea of interpellation but I am also still working with what the ideas of transience and anchorage might add. In the interim I’ll just mess around with doorplates.

Hall of mirrors

My target for today is to write about targets. If this is successfully achieved then I can be safe in the knowledge that I have met my targets! This is the sort of hall of mirrors effect that the current fad of reducing learning to specific and achievable targets breeds. The setting and achieving of targets is foregrounded and there is little questioning of the appropriateness or the relevance of the learning itself, nor for that matter an openness to the unpredicted, incidental or otherwise unmeasurable learning that might occur. In schools children's learning (in all its vastness) is reduced to a target - a target which contributes to a sub-level - which in turn contributes to levelled progress, which somehow represents an education. I just marked a student assignment that identified a personal target of setting more targets! So a mindset is produced which is replicated with seven year olds in the school system. This has an insidious effect on literacy education when the targets themselves focus on things like knowing the difference between fiction and non-fiction, using a range of connectives in writing, and choosing more inteteresting words. Not that there is anything wrong with knowing these things of course, but the complete atomisation of lannguage, learning and literacy that can occur is a real cause for concern. I'm targetting this reductive view of learning. But I'm also interested in the provenance of 'target culture' and what the target metaphor itself invokes.

Critical media literacy

I promised a snippet from my writing on critical media literacy, so maybe this gives a sense of where I'm at .... As we move towards a reconceptualisation of literacy education there remain some important and unresolved dilemmas. The first of these concerns the various interpretations of the notion of criticality. In some ways this debate mirrors some of the complexities in critical theory and in literary criticism. We need to ask whether we want children and young people to re-discover the ideologies and biases that some adults have previously identified, whether we want them to be informed media critics, or whether we want them to be discerning consumers and producers of media. The second issue is whether or not we believe that the formal education system can be expected to bear the full responsibility of developing media literacy. Given that the major part of young people’s engagement with media is likely to take place outside of school contexts, there are good reasons to suggest that media literacy develops across a range of contexts and that parents, after-school clubs, community groups as well as producers and independent agencies have an important role to play. Thirdly, there are some contentious issues at stake in identifying what constitutes development in critical media literacy. For instance, in discussing literacy the MacArthur Report suggests that ‘Before students engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write.’ (Jenkins et al 2006b: 19). But given that young children are already immersed in media culture well before the start of their compulsory schooling there are powerful arguments to suggest that critical media literacy should be taught alongside traditional literacy. Finally, there is the question of how this kind of critical literacy can most profitably engage with some of the popular discourses about the harmful effects of media. These discourses often focus on the vulnerability of the young and the supposed dangers posed by early exposure to sex and violence; to manipulation through advertising; and to the possibility that they may become addicted to media. Although media education has contributed a degree of challenge to such views, they have re-surfaced in recent concerns about chatrooms, videogames and online social networking. An open-minded and critical approach to media regulation and safety issues will need to have a central place in critical media literacy as it responds to changing contexts. I think that's what I think.

Knowledge procured through doubt

In Galileo's last speech in Brecht's great play, he talks about the pursuit of science demanding a kind of courage: 'It deals in knowledge procured through doubt'. Well there's a distinct absence of doubt around as Krotoski strides around in her blue coat occasionally stopping to caress her Macbook. In episode two of the Digital Revolution we're treated to more of the 'triumph of freedom over control, thanks to the internet' rhetoric. Geeks show us how it's possible to get round state firewalls and we get a lot of swivelling eyeballs - for instance from an over-enthusiastic Clay Shirky (too much coffee?). But when Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about freeing-up information, surely we must have one or two incklings of doubt. Don't get me wrong I love Amazon. I even like the way it tries to read my mind and tell me what I want to read - that's clever shopping. So Bezos runs an intelligent and very reliable bookshop that scares the hell out of traditional booksellers. If freedom is about being able to buy more or less what you want when you want it, that's OK; but I thought it was a bit more than that. For once I found myself in agreement with Andrew Kean, blogging here. The clips on Twitter in Iran and networked Climate Change camps were OK, but I want more searching analysis for my licence fee. A freedom to doubt.

Visual understanding

I was sent this YouTube link by a Twitter friend. A Ukrainian sand-artist, Kseniya Simonova. How’s that for unusual? Apart from the fact that it’s just a little bit too long, it’s pretty impressive. For me it played into that recurring debate about what the visual can and can’t do. Well for a start it’s pretty hard to work out the Ukrainian sand-artist thing without words; but then it is quite striking that as the images evolve and take shape they make a sort of narrative that holds our attention and engages us (maybe emotionally?). I suppose the meanings are quite open. The images invite us to reflect, but then they don’t direct our reflection in any way. Music and sound effects serve to thicken our interpretation of the visual. And since I’m now writing about media literacy, I started wondering about what sort of media knowledge you need to produce or consume something like this and then, to go further, what sort of reading a critical media literacy might yield. Well, I only wondered, but when I get just a little bit further on with this particular piece of writing I hope to share some of it before it reaches the full light of day.

Hypermediated selves

Upload your photo. I did. Again. And thought about how many images of me are splashed around the internet, on Flickr, my blog, my home page, allconsuming, wikispaces and so on. There's a sort of chronology, too. One of the oldest is my icon on allconsuming, taken in the Gaudi park in Barcelona on my fiftieth birthday, whereas one of the most recent was taken last year in Sheffield just below the bar in this blog. (And yes, if you're reading this through a Safari or Firefox browser you don't get my forehead; wheras if you're using Explorer you get some extra space. I blame Blogger.) I'm confronted with representations of myself on a regular basis. The headshot has become a very popular identifier. Here it is a hypermediated self located, as Bolter and Grusin would have it, in a shifting network of affiliations. Each self is differently defined, both constructing and constructed by those networked contexts in a different way. Maybe they are only tied together by a likeness. Which brings me back to the photo of my surrogate self on a skiing holiday that heads this post. Perhaps you didn't recognise me. I changed my mouth shape a bit (cosmetic surgery). I added hair (a wig). And although you can't see I went for an earpiercing (just because you could). It's one of those quirky little things you can do online. But it's interesting because it hybridises the icon-headshot and the start-from-scratch avatar - the sort of thing you develop in Second Life. I wonder if I'm any different as a hypermediated self, but I guess one of me already knows I am.

Virtual (R)evolution

Aleks Krotoski's BBC2 documentary was everything you'd expect of old media on a Saturday night - plenty of clever eye-candy. We had talking heads, the usual suspects, glamourous locations, our presenter in slowmo silhouetted against sunsets and always with a Macbook and i-phone (was this subliminal advertising?). There was gushing enthusiasm about the 'levelling' effect of the web, promising a utopia of person-centred libertarianism, and much furrowing of brows over corporate interest and authoritarian hierarchies. But the basic and optimistic premise that new technology puts the power of self-expression, communication and information in our hands is flawed. To live that particular dream we have to be born in the right place, to have the social, cultural and economic resources not only to get a Macbook and an i-phone, but also to know what we're supposed to do with them. In other words we need to be one of the lucky (?) 20% of the world population. There was a small parallell in the way the BBC flashed a hashtag onto the bottom right of the TV screen just after the opening credits - fine if you're one of the Twitterati; meaningless if you're not. To be fair though, it wasn't all sweetness and light. There is, apparently shopping (in Cardiff), and dating (in Manchester), and pornography (in Harrogate - shock/horror) and it's all virtual, whatever that means. And then there's also the emergence of A-lists and editors - filters and blocking; but no mention of the Great Firewall of China. Apparently it's all down to a conflict between freedom and control, and you get the feeling that Aleks wants us to join in this global Last Battle - on the side of freedom and in the spirit of a particular imagining of sixties counterculture. This just goes to show that even BBC2 can fall into the trap of making the complex simple and presenting us with an either/or debate rather than a set of unresolved or unresolvable issues. Anyway, I stayed the course, I'm linking to the website and I've learnt that the blogosphere is in crisis. What blogosphere? Which crisis? And I'll probably watch Part 2 next week. Will you?

Micro co-ordination

On Friday I found myself syphoning colleagues from 3 different trains into 2 different minibuses in order to make a decent start for Seminar 3. It was really easy to do this as well as to reassure Tetra back at the university that everything was in hand! Easy because of the way in which mobile phones facilitate micro-coordination. That, and the fact that we had a presntation on phones, led me think how taken-for-granted the mobile has become. It's a potent symbol of connection (often laid on the table in face-to-face interaction as if to represent wider networks) and it's also a talisman of security (when you're alone, in the dark, or about to break down, or all three). Writing about mobile connectivity, Gergen notes how phones 'emphasise and underscore the importance of connection as opposed to autonomy, looking outward rather than inward; toward network as opposed to self-sufficiency ... With the mobile phone the relational net is always at hand ... As a material object, the mobile phone functions as an icon of relationship, of techno-umbilical connection. The Enlightenment paen to individualism, "I think therefore I am" is replaced with "I'm linked therefore I am". (Gergen 2002:109)

Layered cuts

Seminar 3 of the ESRC Seminar Series raised lots of interesting issues about overlapping 'worlds', 'spaces', or 'realities' associated with technoliteracy practices. Speakers included Christine Greenhow, Paul Coulton, and Keri Facer. Although we'd billed the session as addressing the topic of mixed reality, that term soon got pluralised, augmented and generally pulled about. I was left thinking about ways in which reality is layered with varying amounts of textual mediation, with the textual including all modalities. Now I'd normally feel more comfortable talking about multiple realities in the plural, but in this instance I am unconvinced that virtual or technosocial spaces actually constitute separate realities. So, provisionally I'll stick with the singular layered and textually mediated description. Virtually (!) at the same time we engaged in the familiar identity debates - another easily pluralised concept. Here I find myself moving away from any conception of fixity (the core difficulty with the performance metaphor) drifting ever closer towards what Gergen describes as 'relational being'. To quote: 'The bounded and centred self is undone.' (Gergen, 2002:6)

I'm losing you

This amateur linguist has developed an interest in collecting the expressions we use when technology interrupts the anticipated smooth flow of events. Take phone conversations as an example. Mobile reception is notoriously patchy on trains as they weave their way through tunnels into cuttings and alongside tall buildings, so you’ll regularly overhear high-powered business conversations or the more informal everyday domestic exchange interrupted with 'I’m losing you' or 'You’re breaking up'. These are interjections which in another context might seem rude, incongruous or even incomprehensible. Another example is when colleagues are giving a presentation at a conference or seminar and their slideshow suddenly goes pear-shaped and delivers the wrong image. Some complex and abstract theorizing will be abruptly juxtaposed with 'That shouldn’t have happened' or 'Oops! I’ll just go back'. These disruptions have a humorous dimension, but the mere fact that we don’t usually laugh or take umbrage when they occur reveals something important. That is, they are so common place that they have become quite unremarkable. No-one I know has misinterpreted 'I’m losing you' (it's not a life or death matter or a signal that a relationship is about to terminate) or I’m sorry I’ll have to go back' (back where - step backwards, go home, go back to basics?). There is in fact a shared understanding that these things happen. Things go wrong. And these represent the moments when the transparency of technology shifts and, perhaps only for a moment, the medium itself comes into focus. Talk shifts from the mediated topic to the topic of mediation. I’ll be cutting out in a minute...I just missed the nail and hammered my thumb... Am I losing you?

A virtual perspective

Connotations of 'nearly', 'as if', or 'almost' readily associate with term virtual. Although the word has some more specific dictionary definitions as well as some more recent technical ones I think these everyday uses are a good starting point for theorising the virtual. Reflecting on the Avatar experience, I’ve been thinking how the whole way in which flat representations take on the semblance of 3D is an important aspect of the virtual. So the mathematical calculation of perspective, the idea of the vanishing point - in fact the whole history of representational art from the Renaissance onwards is conjured up. Culturally we have adapted to representing and reading space in a particular way. It seems perfectly natural to perceive depth of field - but is it really culturally acquired? We readily assume the first person point of view of the artist, the photographer or the camera. And at that point is what we see virtual? Does the medium become transparent? Bolter and Grusin (2000:25) when talking about this suggest that: 'If executed properly, the surface of the painting dissolved and presented to the viewer the scene beyond.' The project could be seen as one of becoming immersed in an alternate reality by forgetting that it is mediated in the first place. That's my experience of good theatre - I begin to forget the audience around me, that actors are just doing their job and so on - I'm temporarily 'in' the world that is unfolding.