And where are you?

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

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

Dogs, blogs and numbers too

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

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

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

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

In a shop front

Not gay

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

New things

New things

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

Wordplay/bookplay

Shine on, Sharrow

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

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

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

Text in the city

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

Crochet for men

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

Labyrinths

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

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

Blog depression!

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

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

Anyone, anytime, anywhere

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

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

BA (Manga Studies)

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

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

Souvenir soap

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

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

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

The kids are all right!

Night out
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

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

Harsmedia podcast

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

Double six!

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

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

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

Wires and cables

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

Back in town

msn
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

Yes, I'm back in town and coming into digital culture like an outsider! Blogs are now regular news features: here's a couple that hit the Sunday papers. Thinking about the wonderful world of new communication I've been i-messaging my daughters (hopefully, you can't quite see the picture clearly) and am struck by how different that writing environment is to this. Similar tools, different rules. And, as Ruth had problems with her wireless connection, I found myself txting and messaging at the same time. Time for a lie down.

Sleeping Blog

This blog will be asleep now until August. Now, I may become an honorary member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, but I certainly won't be listening to Topknot (Cornershop featuring Bubbly Kaur with M.I.A.) or going to The End (listen here) ..... although really I'm far too old! Unfortunately I'll miss my favourite local event that showcases digital artistry Lovebytes which this year has the new Greenaway project and the again I won't be in Bath for this.

I'll be in southern Spain...BUT...I'll be back! So, in the meantime, feel free to browse through my links, look through the archives, leave messages, click through to my Flickr stuff ... and all the rest. So, it's bye for now. My blog is sleeping!

4 or 5 top technologies

1. The sack trolley. Just load on something heavy, shift the weight and the wheels do the rest. Having just helped my mother move house, I can recommend it!

2. The word processor. (Yes, I know). Press the keys and hey presto, your words are up there and you can send them to anybody else - anywhere.

3. The bicycle. So elegant, so simple, so universal and it gets you around with minimal environmental impact.

4. The kettle. Fill it with water, flick a switch and within minutes you have enough boiling water to make tea. Pure magic.

5. Hair straighteners. Well actually I don't need them, but I hear from very reliable sources that you just can'€™t do without them.

I'd be interested in your 4 or 5 top technologies.

As Jim Gee says "Technologies are tools that allow us to do specific things....technologies have no effects, good or bad apart from the situations and settings in which they are used." Think about it.

Not Galang

This is Cafe Rouge Sheffield at a meeting with colleagues where we finalise our work for this site (not as I first thought for this site). That work is almost complete and I'm happy to say the first draft of my handbook chapter is now complete too. YIPPEEE!! I'm wondering about reactions to English 21, now a month old.... or is it buried beneath pre-election panics and union rhetoric?

Galang

This is Maya Arulpragasam known as M.I.A, a refugee from the conflict in Sri Lanka. She sounds good here and those images pack quite a punch. Fooling around on the Airtightinteractive tag-browser, I searched for M.I.A and it brought up loads of baby pics! Clearly it doesn't do punctuation. Anyway, I put in some of my favourite tags and guess what there were my very own pics. OK, must get back to Googleblog now (beats googlewhacking as a way of filling in time!).

Time's arrow

Now were on British Summer Time waking up in the morning is a little bit more of a challenge. That's where Clocky comes in handy. After the snooze button is pressed, the clock, which is equipped with padding and a set of wheels, rolls off the table to another part of the room. Each day, the clock finds a new place to hide...and, of course you have to look for it!

And then there's The Next Generation Blue Snooze which updates itself daily by listening to the radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado (or Rugby if you're in England). That'€™s precision, and the design is so.... tasteful. But I think I prefer the Robotic Flip Clock. It has style - rubber feet that stick to your desk, the legs swing and the numbers flip to give the impression that it's moving towards you! Finally from Half-bakery there's the wonderful idea of the alarm clock that automatically phones in work to say you're sick!

Listening to the wonderful John Berger interview last night, I was reminded of an earlier post - time is not linear. Berger suggested that our conception of time is quite parochial. The idea of linear time, he says, is mainly a product of eighteenth century thinking. Before that, time was cyclical (or things existed out of time). We tend to view time as a locomotive force propelling ourselves into uncertain futures. Berger seemed to be saying that he thought that all events are really co-present. If that is the case, then why do we need British Summer Time, Clocky or Blue Snooze.... or four months off?

In the time it takes to grow a moustache

These are my old disk boxes. Mostly they are word documents on floppy disks and they are destined for the bin. Being into communication, it's funny how I don't very often think in terms of information - but yet that, in the broadest sense, is what we communicate. So I'm struck by the fact that the space that information takes up keeps on getting smaller, and the speed at which information travels keeps on getting faster. We can, in fact, pack more in. But yet it still takes the same time to walk to the corner shop, to bin floppy disks..... or grow a moustache. So, this is a moustache site with lovely slide shows and music courtesy of Josh Rubin. It's not body art is it? Cos it can't be fashion!

Easter tag

She looks just as good in real life (in Gants Hill)! Riding the tube on the way over I studied South Bank's new ad campaign that uses a design of words/subjects in different font sizes. This is, of course, used on blogs (like this one) and on Flickr to signify tag frequency. This is rapidly becoming a new way of visualising things verbally. Flickr's hottest tag of the last 24 hrs is Banksy, clearly a legend in his lifetime. Enough - this all of my Easter tag post!

That Ealing feeling

And it's hello from Ealing. Not exactly here or here, but somewhere in West London. I love the early notebook, featured on BoingBoing - that's here, although today I'm just travelling with my Toshiba laptop. Tomorrow I'm hanging out at the British Library, migrating East on Friday.

New literacies?

Carol's inner wrist tattoo is another example of an appropriated script. (And here's another lettered tatto in Tibetan). When did people first start to mark their bodies with words? Not, perhaps a new literacy, but maybe a newly discovered literacy.

Last week the government launched its e-strategy. Much tamer than the consultation document, low profile, and difficult to locate on the DfES site. No surprises, some investment... and I see relatively little on digital literacy, at first sight. So to compensate for the completely predictable, here's a curious blog with a very interesting tagboard on the side. Now that's what I call new literacy!

Opinions on your fingernails

Ruth: Hair can really make a difference to things.

Socrates: True opinions (doxa) are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long...once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable. That is why knowledge is something more valuable than opinion.

Guy: Emma's hair photo on Flickr got 21 views in 3 minutes and that doubled in the following hour. Was that the hair, visitors' opinions, or the way I tagged it? What say you Socrates?

New look/new word

Here's Kaye Trammell - I note her blog and her newly appeared moblog (left sidebar) show quite different persona. I reckon I'd go so far as to suggest that they are genuine heteronymic works. It's interesting how we adopt different voices in different webspaces. Think voices, think Bakhtin, think heteroglossia. Well maybe that's not at all startling. But do the affordances of different textual spaces change our communicative presence. Mmmm moblog mmmm then are we becoming heteromodal communicators? Hetero, hetero, hetero, any advances on novel uses of the hetero affix as comments please!!

Saturday is bashment day

Long-awaited and finally here - Bashment Barbers! Mark doesn't need to go here for his dreads (or his treatment for male pattern baldness), but at least it's always full when I go past although definitely closed on this ocassion. There's good quality trainers on sale too (and a link to Bashment FM here). We have Italian barbers, Muslim barbers and now BASHMENT BARBERS!!! What more could you possibly want?

Pimp my shuffle: opportunity or risk?

The last month has seen publication of two large surveys of new media use. There's a lot in the Kaiser report about regulating consumption (Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18 year-olds), but it's also interesting to see the rise of i-m, email and chat. The distinction between consuming screen media (TV, DVD, video, movies) and reading (print media, such as mags, newspapers and books) is problematic. We need more on onscreen/offscreen literacy practices in my opinion. Regulation and risk is threaded through the UKOnline work. The fourth report (Internet Literacy Among Children and Young People: Findings from the UK Children Go Online project is here) defines internet literacy in terms of access, understanding and creation. This is a helpful way of looking at things. The UK work shows increasingly levels of online interaction (email, online gaming, sms, and message boards).

Oh, and the picture now that Flickrs up and running - and what a worrying 24 hour absence that was - shows JimYounkin, AKA shuffle pimp, courtesy of Republica. Lovely... (or should I say tasteful?) it's the retro cordless version of an ipod shuffle. Watch the slideshow of this astonishing hack here. Is this an opportunity or a risk? Well, let's not wear these in front of the children!

Young bloggers bloom

Many thanks to Julia Myers for bringing the Hangleton junior bloggers to my attention. The good news is that some educationists are beginning to take blogging seriously, the not so good news is that it gets rather teacher dominated. This is one example of a class blog, and another, and another. There’s a BBC report here and the TES write up here (this is the portal page). The reports are from last summer, but the blogs are still live. The young bloggers need to take control. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Property marks and street art

How many European potentates and noblemen have had their personal monograms decoratively incorporated into the architecture of their palaces, the wallpaper of their public and private rooms, the crockery of their dining rooms, or the uphosltery of their furniture? asks Roy Harris. Just respectable property marking; elite graffiti. I love it when words are released from pages and books (I first discovered this through the art of Ian Breakwell, who in the mid 1970s was constructing crazy chains of cut-out words). Atom's graffiti, above, is from Montana Color, and it's worth tuning into the Flash intro (they usually say skip this, but I often find it's the best bit). Then there's these guys who change graffiti into street art. It's out there, the word on the street is......

Magic handbag now available in US

The bag's on the move! Dr Joolz presents her's here, and Joi Ito has his here (also labeled, but curiously different). It's the what's-in-your-bag-photo-tag working its way along (also here). I'm not opening mine for anyone, but I announce now that my magic handbag (with its accompanying dagger of doom) is now available in the US (here). Good ideas travel well. Steel city bloggers will soon be putting their heads together to create a neighbourhood of blogs like this one, but based instead on the city's supertram stops.

The intelligent pen

Just when you thought you were saying your last farewells to inkstained fingers, Logitech launch their campaign to bring back the pen. Of course this is a pen with a difference, an intelligent pen that remembers stuff and does all sorts of strange things on smart paper. There's a pretty straight forward report here and this on a company that'€™s using e-pens for logging service jobs in the field (?). I think I prefer a keypad - you see I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to digital writing and new technology.

Mobile ideas

Hannah keeps track of her financial situation with an SMS bank statement each week, and now I read that they're using SMS for parking reminders in Sydney! So, SMS is coming of age. This report suggests that one in five of the 30bn text messages we'll send this year will be about business. But it's a little condescending to be told Text messages don't replace real conversations, and are not always appropriate - ah, right thanks, I'll try and remember that next time I'm doing business. As the mobile phone becomes more respectable then data theft seems to become more of a concern. If you're at all worried, what about a mobile phone pouch AKA a cloaking device (was that a Romulan cloaking device, trekkies?). I looked, and my pouch was empty!

Writing on the body

We're just about there, butterfly! And this has set me thinking more about writing on the body. First, riffing off Jill Walker, I'€™ve got Shelley Jackson's skin project, the impressive Gaelic goddess, and galleries full of lettered tattoos. So many choices to make, even after you'€™ve decided to check out the tattoo parlour! All these skin marks are (more or less) permanent, but what about those other words we carry around on our bodies? Clothing in particular has become an important site for writing, from designer tags, labels and logos to decorative script and slogan t-shirts: we are moving texts. Here's Baby Politico, with banners for babies - because activism starts early! The Arabic tattoo though, is part of a trend in the appropriation of other scripts, related in a way to the use/misuse of Chinese characters as designer chic. And on that particular theme here's a blog on the misuse of Kanji script.

Watching the sun rise

I'™m still trying to figure out the significance of a sunset clause. It sounded rather good to me at first, but now it seems that our politicians are locked in a series of constitutional all-nighters. There are legitimate fears that the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, if passed will lead to violations of human rights, erosion of civil liberties and miscarriages of justice. That's not good. But. from here it looks like we have a more serious problem with binge drinking and street violence than terrorism...and now for something completely different: a Gaudi theme.

Tu jat di pasand

A rough translation of Bindrakhia's Punjabi song title is the farmers' choice (or the Jat's own choice) which makes you think the Bhangra lyric might be advertising butter, rather than celebrating beauty! Surjit Bindrakhia, a traditional Bhangra singer, died in 2003 but he's still deservedly popular to a folksy kind of audience.

For the folksy academic audience there's Citeulike which is very interesting, since you upload your own work and tag it with key words. It stores academic work like Flickr stores images. And so it develops its own folksonomy with interesting possibilities. Places like this have the potential to undermine academic power bases (although I doubt if they will). As Bourdieu points out, the education system carefully regulates academic capital, which is partly why there's not a lot of Bhangra beats in the classroom!

The searchers

Google marked International Women's Day with this changed logo. An improvement, I thought, on the rather culturally-specific Christmas version. Google has become my default search engine. It'™s good and quick, and turns nicely into the verb 'to google'. But, it would be better if it remembered me, and stored what I like (a bit like Amazon does) and spared me the dross. After some initial enthusiasm, I'™m not really finding Google scholar particularly useful. Surely, anyone who'€™s at all serious must be using electronic databases. Blog-searching is a bit more of a specialist sport, but there's more on it's way. This report covers the hot favourites. Blogstreet is good because it maps your affinity space pictorially, in what it describes as a neighbourhood.

No links, just thoughts...

The first serious writing about the use of word processors in the classroom began to emerge in the mid 1980s. This was followed by nearly ten years of speculation, much focusing on the possible negative influences of new technology on literacy. As computers became more commonplace, the concerns of educators and policy makers shifted to the social implications of screen-based interaction. Work on ICT and collaborative writing, and pupils' interactions when working onscreen became the vogue, perhaps as a reaction to the idea of the isolated techno-subject. At the same time there was considerable experimentation with educational software and writing packages that were child-friendly, reflecting a professional crisis of confidence, a worry that it was all becoming far too difficult. The focus has shifted yet again and we now seem to be more concerned with onscreen writing as a way of motivating learners -€“ a way of helping those with general or specific difficulties -€“ from the reluctant to the gifted and talented; from the marginalized to the isolated, or even the digitally disadvantaged. This all follows a trend towards a more integrated (or domesticated) view of new technology in education; however, there are relatively few examples of how ICT might transform literacy, and radically change how we learn to write. Perhaps this is the next wave.

Famous for 15 minutes?

If in the future, as Andy Warhol famously said ' everyone, will be famous for fifteen minutes', wouldn't this be microcelebrity? I mean my review of this book has just been published in English in Education (39:1), so would that count. No? O.K. then, it must apply to Jason Kottke because it's here. And here's his blog - now a full time affair. But wouldn't it be better to apply the term microcelebrity to someone who'€™s satus shrank to almost nothing before your very eyes? I'd nominate Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett for demeaning themselves in that execrable waste of screen time/money The Life Aquatic - the worst film I think I've ever seen. (BTW there's a really good Spanish film at the Showroom!)

Healing

Apparently the tattoo is healing - more will be posted soon - but no pic today. And so, today being Sunday, we have a post of interesting fragments. From a Montreal conference here's a photo of a slide presentation: '5 lessons of folksonomies'™; and Susan Herzog, with a blog on scholars who blog; details of a Roy Harris book, which I have on order; and the original of DJfood'€™s audio history of cut-ups and remixes 'Raiding the Twentieth Century'€™, which can be downloaded here. Somewhere, about half way through, there'€™s a great section with William Burroughs intoning words of disembodied and disjointed wisdom in which he suggests that the random collage of cut-ups helps us to make the meanings we wanted to make all along, but didn'€™t know about until we'™d made them. A bit like this blog, then!

Faced

Here, I posted a photograph of myself, so you'd recognise me in meatspace. It's already been viewed on Flickr (but not as much as the tattoo pic!). Click through and you can read my note. But what tags should I use? Flickr and del.icio.us nearly always get mentioned in discussions of tags and tagsonomy (folksonomy). Recently, the Guardian caught up, but it is interesting that their own blog is tagged by the media people who contribute rather than the users themselves. So is the folksonomic zeitgeist (on screen mid right) a folksonomy or is it really a taxonomy, a classification superimposed by the powerful?

Farashah, the sign-bearing body

This is the latest view, and farashah is Arabic for butterfly. Compare with kelebek, bilinwal, pillangao, papillon, and farfalla, all of which sound rather different from butterfly, which, etymologically speaking comes from the Old English buttorfleoge (butter + fly). Why? Possibly because of the ancient belief that insects steal butter or else simply because some common varieties are butter-coloured. Well I never!

And back to the sign-bearing body. Here'™s Bourdieu on the subject:

Strictly biological differences are underlined and symbolically accentuated by differences in bearing, differences in gesture, posture and behaviour which express a whole relationship to the social world. To these are added all the deliberate modifications of appearance, especially by the use of set marks - cosmetic (hairstyle, make-up, beard, moustache, whiskers etc) or vestimentary -which because they depend on the economic and cultural means that can be invested in them, function as social markers deriving their meaning and value from their position in the system of distinctive signs which they constitute and which is itself homologous with the system of social positions.
Distinction p.192

So that may help us in the reading of skin art in general or our take on the particular instance of the farashah mark.

Journeys

The idea of journeys to unknown destinations is a fascination. Taking yesterday's body post as a starting point, pathways diverge. So, Jackie connects the body as text to Jeanette Winterston's Written on the Body. And then Tassneem, who leaves a comment on the Flickr tattoo picture, leads me to the wonderful footprint image. A footprint that fades in the tideline, how wonderful! And then, on an independent journey, when I visit Onepotmeal for my daily narrative fix I find this:

I saw my own footprints cast in white dust on the floor like the lunar steps of astronauts, walking from the door to my seat...

Read on, this is the link. And, then I have my eye on another destination, the meaning of ayakizlerim (the original title of Tassneem's photograph). What is that, I wonder, and how does it relate to footprints?

The body as text/ text on the body

This is the back of Ruth's neck, on which she has just had the Arabic word farashah tattooed in white. Studying the inscribed body has traditionally been the preserve of anthropologists - their focus has been on how body art acts as a marker of identity in terms of gender, age, and status. But tattoos and other forms of body art have become important in contemporary culture. We are interested in the visible surface of the body as the boundary between the individual and society. The body becomes a text, a surface on which we write. The text is with us at all times. Writing on the body was provokingly explored in Greenaway's excellent film The Pillow Book. And here, out of interest is a link to his latest project - one of those sites you need to explore!

Long Blog
Today, I finished my chapter on digital writing for Jackie and Elaine’s new book. The central claims are not new - texts are changing. In it I put that the following trends are clear:

• A move from the fixed to the fluid: the text is no longer contained between the covers or by the limits of the page;
• Texts are revised, updated, added to and appended (and often archived);
• Genres borrow freely, hybridize and mutate;
• Texts become collaborative and multivocal with replies, links, posted comments and borrowing;
• Reading and writing paths are non-linear/ epistemology is rhyzomic;
• Hyperlinks allow readers and writers to construct layered meanings with new forms of intertextuality
• Multimedia allows for a rich interplay of modes - texts become multimodal

These texts are inter-related to changing contexts in which:

• A sense of space is shared as the local becomes global;
• The time is now as we inhabit a world of co-presence and synchronicity;
• Boundaries between work and leisure begin to blur;
• Distinctions between the public and the private are less clear;
• The concepts of rhetoric, scholarship and research are re-defined;
• The serious and the frivolous intermingle.

And, of course, there’s more…but I’ve moved on now to thinking more about digital writing and scholarship. I like what I’ve read about the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. There’s Simon Shum’s work on hyperdiscourse and also, I note with interest, some work on blogging and distributed knowledge. Meanwhile I love this mapping stuff you can do with Flickr – thanks to Trois Tetes for the link.

In search of lost lines

Putting down a copy of Hollinghurst's Booker Prizewinner 'The Line of Beauty' to tune into Radio 4's excellent adaptation of Proust's gargantuan 'In Search of Lost Time' makes me think of the similarities and differences. For a start both are written from the point of view of aspiring writers. Proust's narrator has an obsession with the aristocrats and high society of the Faubourg St-Germain; Hollinghurst's hobnobs with a mixture of Tories, English nobility and haute bourgeoisie. Separated by just under a century both are gay writers; but neither claims to have written a gay novel. Proust because he was most certainly not out; Hollinghurst because he his. Times have changed. But time is the grand design of Proust's work and this rather diminishes Hollinghurst whose lines are those of James, male bodies, cocaine, and generally far shorter than the beautiful but convoluted ones drawn by Proust. Still I enjoyed The Line of Beauty, but not as much as Marcel.

I saw this...

..and thought ah yes, meaning as use as Wittgenstein put it in Philosophical Investigations. So there€'s football teams like one of Sheffield's own (the Owls) and Brentford's (believe it or not the Bees) conjoined with a verbal metaphor. Here's the story (yawn). So, context is everything (cue blogpost). Will this be good enough to make sure they log my blog? I hope so!

Snowed in

Couldn'€™t get to work with 20 inches of snow outside my front door! Well that ends the weather theme (apart from remembering to tie in this post). So here'€™s something visual, in the form of Elliot Golden's graphic work (here) Click portfolio A or B to the left and wait for the gallery to load. And here's something musical in the form of DJ BC'€™s mash-ups of the Beatles and the Beastie Boys (The Beastles). More mash-ups available here. Here's something more on the verbal side, a short tattoo narrative from Australia. And, finally something a little more academic in the form of a research blog on skinning. Good, because blogs are a great way to open up research, but a little more on skinning would help!

Visit Venice
This blog and its links often touch on the separation of time and space from place. This is, I think, one of the most powerful insights from Giddens. So, yesterday’s blog joined snow in Westport (13 November 2004) with snow in Sheffield (forgetting, by the way snow in New York). And in this space, which dear reader is the screen, you can temporarily migrate to Northern Italy to a ‘flash-space’ which is really worth spending some time inhabiting. It’s called Their Circular Life and it’s great!

Snow in old England

Following my penchant for marks, tracks and footprints, today's snowfall held the promise of a blank canvas. Hoping for the Westport picture I blogged here, I went out with great expectations. I failed miserably (probably the wrong kind of snow). Anyway, second best - but somehow not quite so romantic - here are my tyre tracks in the fresh snowfall.

Never blog your fingers...

They look awful! But I said I woul€™d never blog my finger, and then it suddenly came to me, why not? You can see how the injury (middle finger trapped in supermarket trolley) is beginning to heal now. But somehow that means more than the following factoid: '400 teachers in Queensland don'™t know what a syllable is (never mind the fact that they could be mathematicians). Enough to launch an enquiry. Anyway that'™s from this...but then this suggests that the inquiry is about cash. Interesting how ideology and money are sometimes interchangeable. Anyway I feel for Australian teacher educators if they are to face the same levels of suspicion, the policing of knowledge boundaries and the layers of accountability that inhibit their colleagues in the UK. And then on a more cheerful and totally unrelated note, I'm pleased to be here, too!

Chav Champion

Lady Sovereign is hacked off about being called a chav. And, now it's official, the whole chav thing just recycles class prejudice as I suggested here. The Chavscum website is particularly distasteful with its references to the '˜peasant underclass' (here if you must). So, Julie Burchill is a controversial figure at the best of times but her celebration of Chavdom (last night on TV) is one of the more intelligent bits of Sky One programming. OK, she got angry, but I think her argument, summarized here, is right. And she gave Lady Sovereign a different voice. 'I mean I'€™ve seen things,' said the DJ, '˜and they probably live in Chelsea, and all they see is buses going past and that lot.' They, of course, are those re-inventors of class prejudice (the real chavvies) ... Rule Britannia?