Back in the world

There's been a bit of technical glitch which is now fixed, and so I'm back in Barnsborough once again! And that's quite strange - the same old 'place', familiar, even the bits I'd forgotten about. So I snapped myself outside the police station as a memento. I remember what it's like inside, but I didn't return. I know the cells. So is it a place? Well, that's the experience I report. Boellstorff would say that. He would argue that it's an act of homo faber: a created world 'for human sociality' (p. 237) in other words a distinct place. But what sort of relationship does it have to the 'actual' world? Is it an extension, a parallel world, an imaginal space, a mulimodal palimpsest, and does it matter? That's the debate I'm currently exploring in the book chapter. I think it's at this point that I may need help from my co-author!

Naming cyberspace

Marking Penguin's reissue of six of William Gibson's novels, yesterday's Guardian ran a good article on the godfather of cyberpunk. Most of it is drawn from the Paris Review (here), but what is so interesting is Gibson's account of how he coined the term 'cyberspace'. There's no reason to doubt him, is there? I was reminded of the way that Jaron Lanier claimed the term 'virtual reality'. Because these histories are recent, the people are still around to tell the story. Like 'virtual reality', the term 'cyberspace' has entered the vocabulary in a way that makes us think we know what we're talking about when often we don't. It's ten years now since I wrote a paper titled 'Teenagers in Cyberspace' (here), but I'll own up and say that at that time I hadn't read 'Neuromancer'. It was pure imitation, I'd heard the term cyberspace, liked it and used it. And so it goes on. The cyberspace/virtual reality meme really was nailed by Gibson as the Guardian article explains: 'Case, the hero of Neuromancer (1984), applies the dermatrodes of his cyberspace deck to his forehead, powers it up and jacks in to the matrix, his "inner eye" sees a "transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity", on which, or in which, is "a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system".' The idea was a stunning mash-up of drug sub-culture and what new technology was beginning to promise, and it generated a fascinating interplay between this imagined future and what computer labs were trying to develop.

Digital-analog circuits

'The analog is always a fold ahead' (Massumi, 2002:143). He really does have a way with words. And sometimes he gets quite cross. You can almost hear him fuming and saying 'twaddle' under his breath when he writes this: 'A commonplace rhetoric has it that the world has entered a "digital age" whose dramatic "dawning" has made the analog obsolete. This is nonsense. The challenge is to think [...] the co-operation of the digital and the analog, in self-varying continuity.' (2002:143). He may sound cross, but it's still a convincing argument. He develops this by illustrating how the digital always connects to the virtual through the analog. In other words to paraphrase his 3 examples word-processing involves analog operations: the digital is just what happens behind the scenes/screens, in between encoding and decoding; music, unless entirely synthesized, may be 'digital', but the digital is sandwiched between its disappearance into code and its reaappearance as C minor, or whatever; hypertext is open in its analog recepetion. And so as the man says 'the digital always circuits into the analog.' (138). So think on!

You don't say

What you don't say or write about can be as interesting as what you do. I mean this in a particular kind of way, though - not in the sense of self-censorship, or anything like that, but with reference to the ideas that seem to slide away in the act of expression. In writing about virtual reality and virtual worlds, I've been noticing this. A small tribe of ideas scurry away into the darkness each time I approach them. Partly this is because they don't really belong in the daylight of what I'm writing about. But I thought I'd sketch an approach here. Describe the hidden people, why not? The tribe belong to the fellowship of strong social constructionism. To begin with, I started thinking a year or so ago, that the socially constructed space of a virtual world (I think Gibson talked about a 'consensual hallucination') was a pretty good guide to how things actually work when we strip away the taken-for-grantedness of what we call reality. So reality forms from data as we experience or co-construct it. We inhabit a consensus reality which is established through some pretty sophisticated programming. The little that I know about consciousness studies seems to point in this direction. Work in that field suggests that the selectivity imposed upon us by the limited bandwidth of our perceptual faculties makes the world appear in a particular way to us. That takes you to a sort of psychological constructionist point of view. I don't know if that's an official term, but it has the right sort of feel to me. Philosophically, of course, that leads one to ask if there's anything really out there at all. The example of the virtual world can be helpful in addressing this. There is something there (of course), but we create it at the same time that it creates us. What's more its created out of stuff that we wouldn't recognise as a virtual world in the first place. So it gets metaphysical. I imagine the discussion on the holodeck 'There's something out there, but it's not what you think it is.' Thinking about the virtual can, in this respect, be quite powerful. I think. OK, maybe its best not to write it after all, but I'm glad I tried!

Returning to the virtual

I've been (re)turning to the virtual, once again. Yesterday I was interviewed in SL by a docotoral student. That was interesting because I hadn't been there for a while. Also, although I've conducted interviews in virtual worlds before (and have written and talked about this quite a bit) this was actuallythe first time I'd been the interviewee. That's interesting, because in this particular situation all I had was chat - in other words there was no sound and, as it played out, our avatars were stationary. So, apart from the experience of being in that particular part of cyberspace, the communicative interplay was just the writing. And although in some ways I was my avatar, my answers (and of course the questions that provoked them) were those of Guy Merchant. At the same time I continue to explore the virtual in my writing. I'm exploring how online environments have distinguishing characteristics that set them apart from other contexts, but suggesting that they should not be dismissed as not being real. In developing an alternative perspective, I take the view that virtuality bridges the material world and the world of information and data, or as Sakr (2008:8) argues ‘Virtuality is a negotiation between materiality and information.’ This negotiation regularly takes place through interactions between people and technology - perhaps that interview illustrates some of this.

More virtual

I've been looking back at writing on virtual reality and virtual worlds to help me in shaping my editorial contribution to the forthcoming publication 'Virtual Literacies'. First of all I tracked down a copy of an interview with Jaron Lanier (Journal of Communication 42:4), a rather wide-ranging piece from 1992, which will be useful background. It seems widely held that Jaron coined the phrase 'virtual reality', and this seems about right. Morningstar and Farmer's (1991) piece on Lucasfilm's Habitat uses cyberspace and virtual world throughout. The latter is a chapter from 'Cyberspace: First Steps', a collection edited by Benedikt - and this is a fascinating piece. I reckon that it would interest a broad readership because of the fascinating insights it gives into virtual citizenship, governance and of course design. These guys designed a commercially viable system which could support a population of thousands. I think that's a first, but need to check my facts. All of Second Life is prefigured here: 'users can communicate, play games, go onadventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start business, foundreligions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.' But if that's not your bag, it's still worth a read because they tell the story of creating and then populating a world so well. In the beginning it was an idea and then people started logging on, and that changed everything!

Virtual realities

Yes, why not go for the plural - we are so accustomed to thinking of VR as a singular thing which it most clearly is not. Heim, who I referred to here, has a list of seven kinds of virtual reality, or seven realities if you would rather. Some of them seem to overlap, but I'll try to be faithful to the source (Heim, 1993: 109 ff). Here we go: 1. Simulation. I think he means high definition graphic environments; audio/graphic realism; precision rendering; and all the other ingredients for producing lifelike dataworlds. 2. Interaction. Here he seems to want to include everything from desktop environments with their folders, files and wastebins to virtual classrooms. (Does he mean places you can navigate within as if they were actual spaces?) 3. Artificiality. Here he really goes off on one, exploring the philosophical position that reality, as-we-know-it, is a human construct and that as a result more or less everything could be seen as being virtual. This threatens the entire VR edifice, so Heim abandons it as being too broad to be of use. 4. Immersion. This is mostly about a total sensory experience - the sort of thing associated with HMDs. At this point, Heim isn't concerned with the psychological dimension of 'being there'. The sort of immersion that Schroeder has written about. 5. Telepresence. Here he's talking about robotic presence. Controlling materials at a distance. 6. Full-body immersion. No, this isn't about body suits or flotation tanks, it's about 'becoming' a represented body/thing in a virtual environment. For this I read Second Life avatar. 7. Networked communities. Here, users 'stipulate and shape objects and activities' and 'share imaginary things and events' (116). Dubbed 'post-symbolic communication' this may move beyond words and real world references. All told a rather complicated list, but there are some ideas that are definitely worth developing here. Watch this space!

Mobile divisions

Now that the Guardian is available on Kindle it seems as if some sort of order has been restored. I don't have to read the Independent any more, and I can save time on pointless debates with friends. We will have the same opinions, unless, of course, the Guardian suggests that there is some sort of discussion to be had. But seriously, a Kindle newspaper is a curious thing. It has all the advantages of portability. Thanks to 3G I avoided all the faff of finding an English language paper when I was on holiday in Spain. It was just delivered digitally, on time, at no extra expense. But there's the catch, you pay for the convenience - something you don't do with the Guardian online. What's more what you read on the Kindle is a slightly reduced print version. Reduced in the sense that it's rather like reading a 1950s edition with its low image, black and white visual content. All the online advantages - the add-ons, video footage, hyperlinks, comments and so on are absent. In some senses Kindle reading can have a rather retro feel to it. Of course you can still go to the Guardian online on the Kindle, but because of screen size and navigation that's a clumsy and frustrating experience. But so what? Well doesn't this all suggest that the mobile internet, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, is, despite its considerable promise and potential, a huge disappointment. Mobility costs, it's carefully packaged by the new media industry and end-users are endlessy locked in and locked out of different services. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the free internet. OK it's never really been free, but in comparative terms it is essentially unbounded. It may be too early to say, but with all the convenience and capital that mobile devices give us, might they also divide us in much stronger ways than digital technologies have done to date?

Virtual reading

Michael Heim's 'The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality' makes for a curious read in that it was published in what seems like another era - 1993! He mixes a sort of cautiousness about technology with occasional bursts of enthusiasm. For all this I liked the description of what he calls cyberspace, which seems to me more like virtuality: 'We inhabit cberspace when we feel ourselves moving through the interface into a relatively independent world with its own dimensions and rules. The more we habituate ourselves to the interface, the more we live in cyberspace.' (1993:79). But what if that interface is print text? Heim has a view on this, too. '...the magic of the story comes from our ability to cross over from the words of the narration to an inner vision of the sequence of virtual events (which occurs to us when we walk through the wall of words on the page). (1993:133). So somehow our belief, or immersion, in a represented world defines this kind of virtuality. Carroll's looking glass, C.S. Lewis's wardrobe and Philip Pullman's subtle knife all act as metaphors for this in the sense that they are gateways to an imaginal world - a sort of parallell universe of the prosumer's fantasy sketched out for us by the author/designer. In this sense all that changes with technology is our ability to mediate or represent that parallell universe.

Government may try to disrupt social media

The idea that the government or the police should have the power to disrupt social media in the event of further civil unrest seems to me to be more like the action of a totalitarian state than a liberal democracy. I'd be particularly worried that a power such as this might be evoked to control legitimate protest or even the everyday communication of innocent citizens in times of unrest. Ironically, the advice to us at the university ran like this: 'For up to date information about the situation in Sheffield please monitor the South Yorkshire Police social media channels, which are regularly updated. Follow them on Twitter @syptweet or on Facebook For national Government guidance about the situation please visit http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_198958'.

What did you get in London?

Whatever our opinion about the motivation of rioters, it needs to be acknowledged that mass unrest is a kind of spectacle and a political statement - even though it might not be a product of an articulated political doctrine. But as spectacle a riot is now densely mediated. It makes compulsive TV viewing, particularly when you are familiar with the location. Watching one sequence I was aware of watching 'from' the Sky News helicopter as 3 citizen 'journalists' photographed 1 rioter in a hand-to-hand scuffle with a policeman in Lewisham. Hidden from my view more images were probably collected from the nearby police helicopter and from behind their lines. After the event, if it is anything like the student unrest earlier this year, it will become a battle of images. But technology was to the fore in at least two other ways. Firstly, as has been widely reported, social networking sites and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) were used both to distract police attention and to co-ordinate activity and looting. Rheingold may have been ahead of his time with Smart Mobs, but this is mobile mahem writ large on the streets of London - so much so, that the police, roundly outflanked by youth are reportedly looking at (hacking?) BBM chatlogs. Secondly, the main targets appeared to be mobile phone shops and Curry's Digital. Gadgets have become objects of desire, significant cultural capital and a potent symbol for all. We do not need to speculate prematurely about whether this is a restless underclass seizing what has been denied to them, or a lawless mob stealing what can easily be sold (maybe both are true at the same time) in order to see the significance of the main retail targets.

Wanderings

Way back when I was doing my Masters, Bill Harpin upbraided me for taking the scenic route in my studies. He wanted me to read his book on writing; I was reading Derrida. I'm not sure it made any difference, but old habits die hard. Now somehow, a week or so ago, I ended up getting Brian Massumi's 'Parables for the Virtual'. Maybe I liked the title, or perhaps it was the cover. Anyway I got 2 copies. I thoroughly enjoyed the first copy and read it cover to cover. Just as this reading was coming to an end I realised that I'd hardly understood a word of it, and so I decided to go to the second copy and it is, indeed, exactly the same. Word for word, the same. But I'm going to it as a second reader, to try to find the point at which I got lost, and maybe to watch myself getting lost all over again. This much because I like Massumi's starting point. It goes a bit like this. He critiques cultural/social theory for its inadequate account of the 'body in movement'. He says: 'Earlier phenomenological investigations into the sensing body were largely left behind because they were difficult to reconcile with the new understandings of the structuring capacities of culture and their inseparability both from the exercise of power and the glimmers of counterpower incumbent in mediate living. It was all about the subject without subjectivisim: a subject "constructed" by external mechanisms. "The Subject".' (2) That creates a sort of stalemate because for example: 'Aren't the possibilities for the entire gamut of cultural emplacements, including the subversive ones, precoded into the ideological master structure?' (3). Instead Massumi focuses on the sensing body, seeing structuration as a back-formation - 'positionality is an emergent quality of movement' (8). As you can see, I'm doing OK so far, but that's just the introduction. When will I see myself getting lost? That's the mystery. No. The real mystery though is why Amazon sent me two copies. Maybe they knew I'd struggle with the first reading, who knows. They made me read it twice.

Baroque literacies?

The picture is supposed to evoke the idea of ponds within ponds (Leibniz) and the following are some of the ideas I'm working on, beginning with the idea that the human subject is embodied and all activity is situated (there is little choice in this, after all, at least from a phenomenological poit of view). And then, as a result there may be little gain in ‘looking up’ to more abstract theory, but a compelling richness in ‘looking down’ into the complexities and interconnections of embodiment and situated activity itself. Rather than moving in the direction of coherence and convergence this suggests a view of literacies informed by the notion of ‘baroque complexity’ (Kwa, 2002) - one that may provide a more nuanced account of how digital texts enter the communication economy of contemporary literacy practices. Drawing generously on the work of Deleuze (1993), Kwa outlines three characteristics of the baroque: 'First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a 'sensuous materiality'. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individual but flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and environment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music.’ (Kwa, 2002:26). So Kwa’s version of the baroque encourages us to ‘look down’ at the detail rather than to ‘look up’ for some broader picture (Law, 2002). In practice that may well mean seeing the ways in which the broader patterning of practices such as the global flows of information, shifting power relations and so on are inscribed or become manifest in specific situations. To be continued....

Learning to....

Gearing down for the summer offers more time for my exploration of music software. For the non-specialist, Logic Studio is a densely-wooded forest of terminology, toggles and plug-ins. You could easily get lost. It brings me face-to-face with digital learning. Step-by-step guides, help functions and tutorials are evidently a non-starter. First of all I want quick gains. You could call it impatience, but I need a certain feel for the possibilities before the questions and then the real learning start up. So my first step is to hitch up midi controllers and to begin to playfully explore what's available. And my way of doing this is to draw on repertoires I already have - just to get started, to gain interest and to experience some early success. And then I'm in! I want more, because I'm at that point that Jim Gee calls the 'pleasurably frustrating'. My curiosity kicks in: 'surely you must be able to...'; 'I wonder how...'; 'will it let me...'; 'what happens if...' And the perfect solution is the just-in-time advice that at-elbow support can give you. Ruth, whose already done a course, is great for this as she show me how to quantize, modify the velocity and fade out. But if I aspire to my own brand of contollerism (see the vid and here) I know I have a long way to go.

Of maps and brains

Sometimes when you're on a journey you glance at the map to see exactly where you are, and at that point become suddenly aware of how far you've travelled. Sometimes, too, you can see the exact point at which a particular choice - a fork in the road, for example - took you in a particular direction and into a distinctive kind of landscape. I had the impulse to check the map at this year's UKLA conference in Chester, when I was listening to Usha Goswami. Her explanations of neuropsychology and what it tells us about early reading were lucidly presented, but they seem to be located in another territory. It is a territory in which 'the brain' is a central feature and in which stories of how the brain works and how it develops are told. Checking my metaphorical map, I find I'm accustomed to a completely different set of landmarks, in a very different country. It's a far more densely populated place - one in which meanings are negotiated and exchanged, in which stuff is used in all sorts of ways, and one in which irregular and complex shapes form and re-form as practices evolve. I can't find the fork in the path, though. But I suppose my interest in language variation, in the stories we write and tell and in the impact of the digital on these things all presuppose a sociocultural orientation. I am in different territory and I'm glad I am, but I'm also pleased to know that some people are interested in brains. The map would be inadequate without their work.

Kids, kit, classrooms

It looks as though we've got nearly all of our students enroled on the learning futures wiki (pilot version), so I'm now really looking forward to looking at the work of these digital leaders over next couple of weeks. In the meantime I've been sitting on a list of views that emerged during our last planning meeting. They tend to cluster - in the ways I have them on the wall - around ideas about students and ideas about schools. Students are generally percieved of as having technological expertise, whereas schools are seen as an inhibiting force. Technology and innovation are described as 'kit', and basically you're lucky if you've got it! All our views are of course far more subtle than that, but the broad contours are still there. At this point in time I'm intrigued to see if the digital leaders themselves have a different view of these issues.

Shop fronts and shutters

The shops used to be closed a lot. Sundays completely, often Saturday after lunch, and mid-week. I think Thursday was 'early closing day' when I was young. So if you were incarcerated in an educational establishment (and most of the time I was), looking at what you could buy was time-limited. From quite an early age I compensated for this by window-shopping, pressing my nose up against the fronts of closed shops, peering in against the glare to see what you could get. I started with children's toys, but as my ambitions grew I began to focus on musical instruments and LP covers (big boys' toys), spanners and wrenches (serious boys' toys) and eventually clothes and electrical goods. I carried that on well into adult life and as a matter of fact I still enjoying looking at things I could buy, might buy, or might one day buy. It's everyday life in the consumer market-place. Sometime in the 1980s shop-owners - particularly those in urban areas - began to worry about civil disturbance, disturbed, no doubt, by images of rioters putting bricks through shop-windows and helping themselves to stuff they ought to pay for. They began to install shutters to protect their interest and city streets, at least on Sundays, became greyer places. When I first got into Flickr, partly as a homage to my days as a window-shopper, I started photographing shutters, putting them in a set. I was interested in the way that shutters were becoming a surface for art-work and graffiti. The security barrier of the shutter effectively kept most people out, but while the goods were protected another form of expression was errupting. Now many shops commission artists to decorate their shutters. So you'll see The Rude Shipyard, itself a wonderful boho artsy venue has followed the trend. Must upload to Flickr!

If it's not baroque....

I'm still on the romantic/baroque theme today and savouring Chunglin Kwa who makes the case for the baroque so eloquently: 'It may seem unnecessary to use an overloaded word like baroque, especially because it is not immediately apparent that there is a historical continuity with the grand style of the seventeenth century. In the case of romanticism it is much easier to argue for an uninterrupted lineage. Yet several important characteristics of the historical baroque make the term baroque attractive to use for later periods, including the present. First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a 'sensuous materiality'. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individual but flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and environment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music. Similarly, action in early baroque theater is not based on the logical development of a plot but rather on a sequence of monologues, debates, and allegories.' (Chunglin Kwa, 2002:26). And it satisfies the inner-geek to copy this out of my Evernote notebook entitled 'Folds'!

The modern disease?

In 'The Wild Places' Robert Macfarlane dichotomises the human social world and the natural world, and I think that's the weakness, or at least the romanticism, of his project. At best, in his writing, he captures the baroque in ways that equal Deleuze, and details the specific in a style reminiscent of Bachelard. But I think that the thesis that man is alienated from the natural world in a sort of latter day fall is a romantic fallacy. So the author slips all too easily from observations of our current condition into a sort of moral panic as the following extract illustrates: 'In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different forms of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - its spaces, textures, sounds smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our innere world of imagination. The feel of hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our being and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.' (Macfarlane, 2007:203). Bring back Rousseau! It's an argument that's not exactly wrong, but incomplete. But in the end, you have to admire Macfarlane's rugged frontier spirit - when things get really wild his unstoppbale reponse is to strip off and go for an icy-cold swim - naked probably, although that's the kind of detail we're spared!

Texting change in language

Anthea Rowan had a good piece in yesterday's Telegraph. As to be expected it drew the usual range of comments. The full text from which she quotes (which I wrote for UKLA) runs like this: Language and literacy change over time. Social, economic and technological conditions influence these changes in significant ways. The development of mass media and, more recently, digital communication has accelerated the spread of language change and innovation. We now routinely communicate in different ways - such as emailing, instant-messaging, and making Skype calls. We use different technologies - laptop keyboards, mobile phones and webcams - to do this. These different channels of communication have led to the emergence of new communicative styles including text abbreviations, acronyms on bulletin boards, and microblogging conventions such as the use of @ and # in Tittwer. Writing, often a relatively stable or conservative mode of language, is currently enjoying a moment of creativity. This is a rich area for the study of literacy and one that has an unavoidable impact on children and young people. In fact young people are very often at the forefront of these innovations. It is too simple to suggest that 'new ways' are replacing 'old ways' or to suggest that the 'new litearcies' are somehow better than traditional practices. They co-exist and are likely to do so, at least for the foreseeable future. Most new literacy practices depend on the familiar -being able to read a familiar image and to encode and decode alphabetic writing. In fact they extend the possibilities for meaning-making and interconnection. Literacy is a much larger topic than it was twenty years ago, in an era when digital communication was still in its infancy. To fully participate in contemporary society, children, young people and adults alike need literacy more than ever before. They need to be able to write letters and send emails; they need to be able to fill in forms online and leave notes for friends and family members. There is no evidence that literacy is in decline. In fact there has been a massive increase in vernacular writing with the advent of the internet. At the same time, though, the ways in which we write and the ways in which we read are changing. In our capacity as an association for the promotion of literacy and with our interest in education, we are committed to supporting the reading and writing for all - reading and writing in whatever form is advantageous.