Guess who?

Hannah
.

Guess who I saw outside the Gucci the shop? That was the highlight of my day, today - that and meeting Big Sister! But really, how can the TDA manage to organise such boring meetings, so utterly devoid of intellectual or any other kind of stimulation? The only saving grace was the slightly kitsch Victoriana of the London hotel venue. Then I managed to track down the last remaining copy of Schroeder's 'The Social Life of Avatars' in Foyles - but why are Springer-Verlag's charging £42.50 for a slim 200 page paperback? Who are they fooling...guess who?

Messages on walls

protest1

It would be useful to start thinking of wall-markings in new ways. I'm getting a little tired of tagging my photos 'graffiti' - the term seems to have outlived its usefulness. For a start wall-marking isn't simply restricted to writing, other modes are involved...and then again, the distinction between legitimate corporate marking and other kinds of meaning-making is not particularly clear-cut or subtle.

Here, the anti-KFC marking is a sign of resistance - open to interpretation, of course, because it's not immediately apparent just how KFC oppresses the working class.... However, it can only be properly read in relationship to the sign next to it, which we recognise immediately as being 'official' in some way. And then, the context is important, too. The immediate context, I guess, relates to the material surface: the temporary plyboard boundary and all that it suggests as well as the writing tools and processes implicated by the particular appearance of the texts. The wider context is the plot development and then the whole commercial structure that is KFC, the discourses of multi-national commerce and anti-globalism etc. etc. So, I don't think it's particularly helpful to reduce all this and label it 'graffiti'. New term, needed (marks of resistance?).

Happy/sad

stones

YAY! Congratulations to Jackie and Julie – it’s their civil partnership today. OK, so it’s a bit of a clumsy title (civil partnership) and it’s so long overdue, but at least there’s some official recognition that people don’t necessarily want to spend their lives in heterosexual relationships.

Today, I was sad to hear that my favourite Malian singer Ali Farka Toure died last week – music’s been much on my mind lately. I was also reading about Robert Johnson. I missed a trick when I was in San Antonio last year, because this was one of only two places that he recorded his blues. I think he only recorded about 20 tracks in total. But his story is a classic one of “dealing with the devil.” He used to hang around established blues singers (like Son House) and make one hell of a noise – they used to tell him to get lost! Then, the legend goes, he went down to the crossroads in Clarksdale and made a pact with the devil. On his return he was the meanest player around, later known as the King of the Delta Blues. A Faustian tale if ever I heard one! Somehow I connect the sound of Robert Johnson with Ali Farka Toure…maybe musicologists do too, I know Ry Cooder spotted the link on Talking Timbuktu.

Flying

mask1

Bafta’s decision to create a video games award for October has got to be a welcome development. Kenworthy’s statement that “video games are a growing art form, a key art form” is good news indeed. Maybe more educators – particularly those involved in the new creativity movement in the UK – will sit up and take notice. But, of course, we need some good models of how to recognise and use this new art form in school settings.

Flying through the air over a colourful landscape with a group of teachers in Barnsley, earlier this week, raised similar questions for me. Here we all are…exploring a virtual world, changing our sex, the outfits of our avatars, getting used to the control keys, but not yet really getting to grips with how we could make use of all this in the classroom. As usual we’re behind… BUT I think I’m gradually becoming more tolerant of that. There’s important and innovative work to be done. It’s a whole new ball game – Katamari-like, in fact.

New school/old school

newschoololdschool

This is the classroom where Jackie used to teach Hannah (Ruth went there too). Funny it seemed such a new school then, but now it's the one they're knocking down. It was a great place then, I hope the "new build" will continue the tradition.

You’ve got to be brave to blog, and I reckon blogging in another language is doubly brave! So when Hsinwei (Vera) started up Psychedelic Land, without any prompting I just felt like celebrating. She writes: “I decided to do something new. That is having an English blog! All articles will be written in English...it's a challenge for me...” (note we have another version of the blog manifesto here!). Well Hsinwei is TOP BLOG – it was going to be La Flaneuse - but I’ll wait till she’s through with her migraine. So the first “output” of the Blogtrax has reached final draft stage. We’ve agreed to keep up the metablog with anonymous postings. Watch these spaces for more.

Songs of resistance

Jez's maze

There seems to be a lot around at the moment about folk music (for example, here). I asked a friend who's knowledgable in such matters if he thought there was a folk revival- he said there's been one going on since the 1950s! I just didn't know what to make of that.

But at the weekend, I read about how Ewan McColl was under surveillance as a communist (and banned by the BBC, too), and that made me think that the best times for folk music are when it becomes a vehicle for resistance. Bring on Dick Gaughan at the Miners' Strike for example.

Yesterday, on Night Waves, there was an interview with folk-protest-veteran Joan Baez, who's currently touring the UK. She was asked who she thought had taken on the mantle of Woody Guthrie in contemporary America. Without a pause for thought she said Michael Moore - different build, same stance, different medium.

Eh?

mask2

...and I thought I was the only one to tag my photos of graffiti as palimpsest, but I discover from DrJoolz's blog that there's a pool! Also, from the live manifestation of that esteemed blogger I catch up, if rather belatedly, with Dana's great blog, here (flaneuse is so good as a title, I'm instantly jealous!). And these occurances go someway towards illustrating for me the inter-relationship between identity performance and social networks - that is to say, we gain a sense of selfhood from locating ourselves in the ongoing narratives of others. Those ongoing narratives are no longer necessarily familial or localised, but more diverse and dispersed (that is to say, Dana's blog; the palimpsest pool and so on)...

....eh?

It snowed

snow3

Three inches of snow in Wales and then over the weekend it snowed here, too. A Narnia moment in Nether Edge, so I took this on 'night vision', and was interested to note how special it looked! Is this photography as confecting reality, or dignifying the moment? Possibly, but I wouldn't quite adopt the strong position of Baudrillard who says: "Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observations that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world has a stunning clarity." (Baudrillard, 1993:155) There's that strong grain of existential angst in the idea that the world is a great disappointment, which is why I prefer to dignify the moment.

[I'm back!]

Still wondering

red2

I did a particularly close reading of Jim Gee’s ‘Situated Language and Literacy’ for NATE’s English in Education journal. As an overview Gee’s great, but I did come up with one niggling criticism. Gee argues that technologies are always neutral and value free - he firmly believes that the design principles of video games are sophisticated, and need to be, because of the market forces of new capitalism. Are we then to infer that new capitalism is a benign force? According to Gee, it spawns a technology and environments that are good for learning; it demands a new kind of social agent, a shape-shifter with a portfolio of experiences, skills and achievements; and ignores the social categories of race, class and gender – sounds like a happy future. But does this in fact stand up to scrutiny? I’m still wondering.

I’ll be taking time out from the blogosphere for the next 10 days, hanging out here. But I’ll be back. And finally, I’ve decided to go to San Francisco with the Travel Notes people, planning to be there from April 6th while April 12th (mmm now how’s that for glocalingalism?)

Romance ain't dead

Romance ain't dead

This is a cracker! On a wall just off London Road, this is part of a series which feature masked figures. I now wish I’d shown this last week, when people like Simply Clare and Dr Joolz were posting about Valentine’s Day. Anyway it’s now Saturday and I’ve finished Saturday. It did hook me in, and I do appreciate the way McEwan writes the small stuff - but I tend to find his narratives a bit contrived. His exploration of brain/mind/identity is excellent. I’m less impressed with his fence-sitting over Iraq and what I detect as a slightly irritating tendency to exonerate Blair from all blame.

Dig the city

citydig

There’s an interesting segment on the south side of the city just beyond the cultural industries quarter, and it’s layered in history. Here there’s old warehouses converted for city living, art studios, a martial arts centre, sandwich shops, old pubs and so on – all alongside small businesses, the surviving leftovers of the Sheffield steel industry. You’ll also find two of the city’s biggest clubs here: Republic (home of Gatecrasher) and the infamous Niche all-nighter. Squeezed in between this and the American-style Decathalon cut-price sportswear outlet is a small pocket of land - the site of the Sylvester Wheel.

Arcus dig the city, often focusing on industrial archaeology. In the photograph you can see old querns (millstones) and those good folks from Arcus labouring away. They’re uncovering a workshop and grinding troughs which date back to 1650 (if not before). Powered by the Porter Brook, it was still going in the early nineteenth century and was used in the production of table knives and the like. Round about 1850 they went over to steam power. There’s a planning application on the land now, so something new will eventually be layered in.

Sonic teenager repellant

barn door

On the way back from Chesterfield today I heard a radio feature on Howard Stapleton who, after feeling intimidated by a large group of teenagers hanging around his local shop one evening, decided to do something about it. Well that’s his story anyway – a good way of promoting the Mosquito which emits irritating sounds only teenagers can hear –which is remarkable in itself since it’s traditionally been teenagers that emit irritating sounds…I felt rather disgusted by the idea. I thought of bird-scarers and pest control and, then that gave way to reminiscing about hanging around outside shops as a teenagers – something Howard Stapleton obviously never did. But surely if all this hanging around is genuinely anti-social shouldn’t we treat the cause and not the result? Shouldn’t they be in their bedrooms playing shoot-em-up games or surfing the internet? Or maybe the games just aren’t good enough (sorry JG) – maybe they need hanging-around-the-shops simulations or design a virtual Howard Stapleton scarer. Another point of view can be found here.

Flybook

Flybook

Described as “Mobility redefined!”, the Flybook has two really important features. First it comes in a range of different colours and second, it measures 235 x 155 x 31mm. That’s small. It works like a tablet PC and weighs 1.2 kg. There’s no CD/DVD drive (could be a disadvantage) but as they say “it’s crammed with the latest multimedia and telecommunications technology” – in other words it’s wireless and has Windows XP. I suppose then, it’s a case of anytime, anywhere as long as it looks good.

It's a

yellow pages

It’s a piece of plastic packaging, a disposable advertisement for a variety of service industries. It’s a random collection of words on plastic. It’s a sort of imitation of a tag cloud. It’s an advertisement for its contents (a guide to leisure contacts?) Tactile exploration adds little. It’s shiny plastic, easy to tear off because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

In contrast this has teased me so much that I just had to go back for a tactile exploration. And that revealed that letters 2, 3 and 7 are snapped off capital Ls. Something that you can’t discern from the photograph – or maybe you can now, on larger view. Anyway it rewards tactile exploration.

More than this

THC

THC graffiti is all over the Sharrow area, going through different forms and colours. This one's older and more colourful and at least 6 foot high. It is resplendent on the concrete wall of a culverted stream. The location is so good, being one of those liminal spaces which cities produce. They provide surface and cover - like the sides of bridges, alongside the railway tracks, alleyways - spaces you pass through on your journey to other places.

Reading Baudrillard (Art and Artefact): "Graffiti - another form of ready-made - says nothing other than: 'I exist, here I am, my name is so and so.' The pure and minimal form of identity. I exist, I met myself." (1997:21). OK then, take it away THC (maybe this is another way in which I respond to graffiti), seeing it more than property marking, signing the self into existence.

[Wow, I did this with a new tool I found, which uses Flickr!]

Digital selfhood is an interesting way of describing the sort of identity performance we do as bloggers online. Reading this article made me rethink some of the ideas on Blogtrax about impression management (I seem to recall we described it as ‘show and hide’, but it could just as easily have been called identity editing). An argument that surfaces in the article suggests that we may be influenced by celebrity narratives in the media – producing a quotidian version of these, a commodification of the self.

The article also refers to the MirrorProject. I don’t think I’ve come across it before, but it’s a fascinating archive of thousands of self-portraits – photographs taken in reflective surfaces. Just performing, presenting me in that vast and anonymous landscape of new media seems important in all sorts of ways. Hence the above outburst (published earlier today) as I discovered a new tool that enabled me to write my name out of other people’s Flickr photos. It felt great, and looks pretty cool, too!

And as if this turn to the self was not enough I subsequently learnt that I can add this programme to my Firefox browser. AttentionTrust allows me to monitor my own attention economy – to understand, in a self-reflexive way, what I actually invest my attention in - as opposed to what I think captures my interest. My oh my, it's a strange new world.

Identity

gatepost1

My identity as a photographer is fragile. You see I thought this was probably the best photograph I’ve ever taken, but although the post attracted some comment, nobody mentioned the image. Reality check (as they say). But to make it worse, it’s had no views and no comments on my photostream either! Now I wonder if that’s because I forgot to tag it? THC, on the other hand got 8 views really quickly – but then that’s grafitti, which always draws the crowds. Anyway, just to massage a little interactivity, here’s the gatepost mystery…what does it say?

Changing

steel city

Words change walls, change familiar things like trains and buses; but here graffiti seems to have transformed the whole shape and meaning of Steel City Gymnastics (next to the municipal baths). The building itself, even the original sign seems to have become a secondary thing, a surface, a canvas for a bigger message.

Changing practices are showcased here. This is Active Worlds for educational settings. We’re going to be watching nine and ten year olds in dispersed locations in Barnsley navigating and learning in a virtual world. It’s so exciting! But first, of course, we have to get the planning group and then the participating teachers into virtuality. That’s a lot to document - somebody, give me a grant and a research team…please!

This

eyelike

I liked this in ‘Saturday’ because it seems to capture with clarity those occasions when writing suddenly gets tough: ‘What dragged him back was an unfamiliar lack of fluency. He prides himself on speed and a sleek, wry style. It never needs much forethought –typing and composing are one. Now he was stumbling. And though the professional jargon didn’t desert him – it’s second nature – his prose accumulated awkwardly. Individual words brought to mind unwieldy objects – bicycles, deckchairs, coathangers – strewn across his path. He composed a sentence in his head, then lost it on the page, or typed himself into a grammatical cul-de-sac and had to sweat his way out.’ I reckon that’s McEwan at his best, capturing the small detail of lived experience.

Different

booshtour

Introducing Julian Barratt– please click here (just in case you haven’t been introduced before). He plays alongside Noel Fielding, who is Vince Noire in THE MIGHTY BOOSH. This is British comedy par excellence. We’re now into Series 2. The best bit has to be where Vince fends off an attack by the Wild Mountain Man, defending himself manfully with his Nicky Clark hair straighteners - oh, and then there’s the outrageous moon clip, which you can watch here.

Always somebody

breakfast

Sue Thomas (Hello World, p. 29) writes ‘in Real Life we adopt different personalities all the time – one for our parents and /or children, another for our lovers, yet more for our bosses and our teachers and our friends.’ Is life online really any different? Often there are no physical or social cues, and self-disclosure can be ‘managed’. But still there is self-presentation – even if that is mediated through a screen identity, role or avatar. You’re still there typing away, clicking or whatever. You could be anybody, but you’re always somebody.

_________________________________________________________

I learnt a new word today. The word is gnarly (as in she’s gnarly: meaning she’s unpredicatable). It was described as surftalk, and I suppose it must class as an adjectival metaphor.

Always somewhere

London Road

I couldn't help thinking there was someone behind me all the way back from the City Campus. In the subway under the ring-road the echo of my footsteps sounded like someone stalking me. I followed the signpost to London Road leaving invisible footprints on the concrete slabs. Under surveillance the whole time. Tracked by the prying eyes of numberless CTV cameras - my mobile phone shouting out my geo-location to anyone who's interested. Anyone. Well, who exactly? Who cares? But reading this left its print on me, making me think that things run something like this: you could be anywhere, but you're always somewhere; anyone could find you, if they knew where to look - if they could be bothered in the first place.

The transparent academy

antique shop

Germaine Greer wrote a provocative piece in today’s Guardian about the real student experience of university (against the background of the Oxford move to institute student contracts). Her basic line is that students go away to university and learn to be independent and incidentally, along the way, they learn from each other. Of course, an increasing number of students are now local – they don’t actually leave home at all, let alone become independent – but, this aside, let’s hope they learn from each other because we’re so busy filling in forms and monitoring our quality that students hardly get a look in. So I laughed out loud reading about drKate’s Transparency Review – I note there isn’t a category for filling in your review (or doing mindless monitoring tasks). In fact, I made a vow to myself a couple of years back that I would always lie when filling mine in, based on a principled rejection of the phoney notions of transparency that are at the heart of this!

…and so back to the meme thing (far more interesting, I think than transparency). Well here goes: 4 things.

1. 4 things isn’t really a meme at all.

2. 4 things is a meme, but where’s it going?

3. 4 things has too much in common with the Transparency Review.

4. Guy is far too boring to engage with 4 things (and will probably loose good friends by speaking his mind).

Plugs, sockets, cables and flexes

electrical

You can still see the old world. It lives on in shops like these. Blistered paintwork, old signage, no web address - the steamed-up windows, lace curtains upstairs - everything. Still it reminds me how, even in our fast networked world, we are still dependent on so many physical connections. Electricity. Wires. I just got my foot caught in the USB lead connected to my camera; in December I trashed the webcam when I got up too quickly; a spaghetti junction of cables at the back of my desk. I eagerly anticipate the wireless world, whilst looking with nostalgia at the shopfront of John Carr and Co.

Half melon/all gone

half melon

Raw food…and it tasted so good! I finished reading Hello World tonight (in the bath, since location is so important). I really enjoyed the hybridity of personal account, story and fact. It was also uncanny that I’d made some of the same virtual and actual journeys. Was the book just another liberationist cyborg manifesto I wondered? Maybe. Maybe and why not? The book extends into a blog here, so that’s good. Anyway, many thanks to litrate for bringing it to my attention in the blogosphere. And by the way, here’s litrate’s wonderful photoset on text as litter… or is it litter as text? It’s rubbish anyway (:grin:) !

Crackers again

fireworks

It’s Chinese New Year today, and there’s a flurry of activity down on London Road – and the Lion Dance in town tomorrow. After wrestling with power kites yesterday afternoon and painting the kitchen ceiling today, I started thinking again about new processes of knowledge-building following on this post and comments. Anyway I’m revising my position on memes, acknowledging that they may not mutate, instead describing them as viral. Tagging remains as a cumulative-recursive process…and then, why not add in Gunther’s idea that hyperlinking is rhysomic. So, that seems to give us three ways in which networks enable knowledge-building.

Networking also played a significant role in launching the Arctic Monkeys - Sheffield music makes it again with the fastest-selling debut album in UK history! Interestingly, and I quote from the BBC news site, ‘the Arctic Monkeys built up their fan base on the internet, after demo CDs they handed out at gigs in 2003 were put on the web for other people to hear.’ That's marketing as knowledge-building...

Colin comes a cropper

spiral design

There’s a moving account of Colin’s predicament over here – it made me realize how the blog’s not the best medium for offering emotional support. Couldn’t think what I could post that would communicate my concern; a shortcoming in our glocalized networks, I reckon. Anyway I hope he’s comfortable, coping, and wish him a speedy recovery.

In looking up something else, checking a students’ reference I think, I stumbled on Jennifer over here. A nice serious photograph, I must say. And finally, because it’s Friday and I got nearly everything done, here’s a useful gadget I’d probably use when reading in the bath. [Confession, yes, I read in the bath!]

Paradigm shift

Eid cards

I’ve been weaving Barry Wellman’s stuff (from Digital Cities II) into my writing today, trying to grapple with how online identities are played out in social networks. What he describes as a paradigm shift from 1. close-knit traditional communities to 2. glocalized networks to 3. networked individualism is actually not - he's over-stating the case. He admits that these forms of social organization co-exist and overlap. Good, that squares up with my perception. I also like the way he doesn’t allow online and offline communities to separate out. ‘Often computer networks and social networks work conjointly, with computer networks linking people in social networks, and with people bringing their offline situations to bear when they use computer networks to communicate.’ (2002:11). Good again, but best is when he asks this question: ‘To what extent does the Internet reduce the importance of traditional social organizing criteria such as: gender, social class, ethnicity, language, life-cycle stage, and physical location. Are these residues of little boxes? There appears to be much involvement in teams and communities of shared interest and practice. Moreover, the supplanting of little boxes by networks means more cross-cutting social ties interweaving formerly disconnected social groups and categories……Yet the traditional social organizing criteria continue to command continual attention.’ (2002:20) And if that isn’t already too much he also asks, with an uncharacteristic economy of words: ‘Will networked individualism deconstruct holistic individual identities?’ (2002: 16).

Dark sun

dark sun

Not enough time. It seems to be the same with everyone I talk too. Everybody's pushed. Despite putting together an excellent symposium proposal for BERA, Dr Joolz is at full stretch. Of course I’m behind, as always. Just how do Colin and Michele find the time to put together ideas for another fantastic book? It beats me. You know I even tried to stretch time by playing this really slow game of falling sand. It really was a real flow experience. I felt great….then I had to quickly get back to my mail, which of course, in the mean time had been piling up! Perhaps the really radical change would be to completely alter the way we think about time and tasks...I mean, just imagine if I invested in this fabulous Kerala Trance Watch, I’d be so busy trying to figure out the time that I wouldn’t notice that I was late. How would that feel?

Alley way

alley way

Victorian buildings are punctuated by these wonderful arched passage ways. Although the architects and builders were keen to construct impressive facades and unbroken rows of brick or stone, they also paid careful attention to the ways in which they would link together, the ways in which various people would move through these urban spaces.

The passages are neither one thing nor another. Like indoor spaces they are covered; like outdoor spaces they are open. They are not exactly private, but then again they are never really public. Nor are they owned. They are shared. Passage ways are functional - ways of moving through buildings. In this way they are durational and liminal. They are neither here nor there.

The Victorian passage way was designed for use - for coal delivery and refuse collection - for getting round the back when access was required. Nowadays many of these passages have locked gates. In suburban areas they are used for storage. Bicycles and ladders clutter the walls, and for many people, the back door has lost its former significance. Callers always come to the front, anyway.

Shame about the missed meme

old cinema

Small mistakes: oversights. On my photostream I put this against the picture above:

‘ ..daring. I kicked the door open to the old cinema (recently used by a club called Bed) and stepped inside. All that's left is the facade and the staircase to nothing. Looking carefully you can just see the new brick edge of the Forge (the one that has the Jarvis Cocker poem on)’.

But it wasn’t an old cinema at all. It was a Mecca or Locarno ballroom - not an old cinema at all. Also, I spelt Spar shops like spa towns (without the ‘r); I got the link wrong to my piece on identity in Discourse (it should be this); the link went dead on the penguin game… Small embarrassments seem large when performed publicly.

I’d also missed the fact that that ‘innocent’ little Flash game was a major meme. Yesterday, I wrote:

'It’s simple. You’re a gorilla with a baseball bat. A penguin jumps off a cliff and you just see how far you can whack it with a baseball bat. That’s what I call therapy! Best score 318.'

Sometime later I remembered someone had described this to me a while ago – I’d heard it. Then I found the Bloody Penguin, the archives and a description of the whole meme. Well, duh! Anyway that prompted me to reflect on meming and tagging. Meming’s about a trajectory of mutation; tagging’s about a trajectory of accumulation. In a meme, an idea/object is transformed in successive versions, so it’s quite linear. Tags can cause you to see the original idea/object in a new light: so it’s more reflexive, more associative. How’s that, am I redeemed?

The power of many

juggle triangle1

Many, so many, different things to do.... I look back over the week (particularly Wednesday) and realize that suddenly it’s Friday evening and I’ve stopped juggling: hence the picture, and the reason for so many things that I forgot to blog this week.

Many distributed machines can cause havoc. Alex Tew’s MillionDollarHomepage.com was zapped by hacker superhighwaymen after he refused to share his profits with them. Apparently hackers illegally use the combined power of other people’s computers to swamp, slow down and eventually freeze the site. This is called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Read all about it!

Many, as in far too many, people can put heavy demands on massively multi-player online role-playing games, and this gets costly. Hence the fate of Asheron's Call, released in November of 2002, which was shut down by the developers despite much protest on December 30 last year.

Many of us are getting hooked on this little flash game. It’s simple. You’re a gorilla with a baseball bat. A penguin jumps off a cliff and you just see how far you can whack it with a baseball bat. That’s what I call therapy! Best score 318. Try it, it’s here and it’s irresistible!

Many people have been telling me about the whale in London. It’s on the BBC website, there’s even a video clip here, so it must be true. That’s almost as many people as commented on Monday’s post about internet scare stories!

And not so many people seem to have heard of The Books - but they have a really innovative sound (soon to be appearing under my interests when I can locate the CD), and on tour here.

[many words; many links]

A large cup

large cup 'n' saucer

A large amount of speculation about identity found its way into a paper I wrote last year for Discourse. Here I suggested a continuum along which identity is performed. One pole represented the fixity of what I called ‘anchored’ identity, the other the less stable ‘transient’ identities. I’m currently revisiting this, but set it out again here to see how it looks now.

Examples of anchored identities are: gender, position in family, religion, age, social class and geographical location. They relate to aspects of our lives over which we have little control and are least likely to change. On the other hand, transient identities change over time, being influenced by maturation, changing cultural conditions and peer group affiliations. These identities are defined in relation to media narratives, ideologies, popular culture, iconic objects, social activities and networks.

Follow your own path

juggle collapse

I love the team t-shirt worn by the guys on the first 3run video clip here, at the top of the list. It’s well worth downloading – watch them do their stuff in London. Follow your own path, is what it says. Yay! As for juggling (now there seems to be a link that’s about physical co-ordination here), I know I never had the patience to learn, even though I admire people who do. The nearest I get is when I manage to have all my interests going at the same time – but sooner or later they always seem to crash, just like juggling balls.

Lunch pack

lunch bag

I was really taken by Angie’s lunch bag – although colleagues in the office were cautious when I suggested that I might get one. Jonathan, as always, was diplomatic and suggested that it might depend on what sort of messages I wanted to communicate. It’s so interesting how a rather innocent (and, let’s face it,useful) little bag can become socially contentious!

MSN travel blogs seem to be the preferred medium of Brit youth abroad. Here is Princess Sally, back in Australia once again and Henry who’s been via Dubai to India. Travellers’ tales on the net…the perfect medium.

Fabric of the text

cushion

It was very good to read Dr Joolz writing at length about the narrative texture of blogs. I know on Blogtrax there are plenty of references to the distributed patchwork of themes that emerge when people refer to and hyperlink across sites. But there are also, of course, counternarratives about the social affordances of new technology. Resistance to change, coupled with a latent tendency to mistrust technology has, I think, led to the emergence of a particular kind of discourse, inflected by moral panic.

These scare stories tend to focus on the internet, usually constructed by the popular media as a ‘place’ - a place inhabited by weird and scary people, and a place in which weird and scary things take place. Whilst such stories undisputedly have their basis in fact, they work together to construct new media as a threat (even a personal threat). I’ve identified 5 views that underpin these scare stories.

• Your virtual property is never secure - it can easily be stolen or maliciously corrupted by viruses;

• Your personal details are easy to locate – so easy that internet criminals can steal and use your identity (your money);

• You are constantly under surveillance - where you go, what you do and what you say is always tracked;

• Your personal safety is at risk – young people, in particular, are at risk from sexual predators;

• You shouldn’t trust who you meet – people aren’t who (or even where) they say they are.

.....are there any more?

Eid ul Adha

Spa shop

Horobin's was the corner-shop where I grew up. Mr Horobin was a neat man with brylcreamed hair and he always wore a white grocer's coat. He had a bright red bacon-slicer with a shiny black handle and a spinning circular blade which made a zinging noise as it cut through the meat.

There was a scare about corner-shops then. Would they survive the competition from the new generation of supermarkets? Just to protect themselves, we were told, many corner-sops became Spa shops - which meant they modernised. Mr. Horobin was one of them. He stopped slicing his own bacon. Instead it came in vacuum-sealed packets.

Nevertheless I feel a certain nostalgia about Spa shops. This one's my local. I love it, not just because it's open 24 hours, but because half of it sells saris and shalwar kameez and they always play the best Bollywood or Bhangra beats (depending on which generation is behind the counter). They're just as friendly as Mr. Horobin and not nearly so greasy.

As you can see, they've re-connected the Eid Mubarak lights in celebration of Eid-ul-Adha. I tried to catch this evening's full moon above the shop, but that defeated me. I went in and bought some crisps instead.

Storm in a tea cup

tea cup

Tea-drinking is relaxing, contemplative and oh so British. Really I suppose it is the remains of the days of empire. So, naturally I was concerned to read of trouble in the tea gardens with workers charged of dacoity. This signals a worrying trend in North Bengal’s tea sector.

Back at the ranch I settle for Jasmine Tea (playing it safe, I suppose). Nice and refreshing after reviewing a book proposal that looks at multimodal approaches to teaching writing. An opportunity to mull over the differences between teaching writing through new media (which seems to me to suggest an autonomous skill called writing) and the idea of teaching writing in (or for ) new media, which inevitably involves learning new practices. [Note to self: damn italics, they look ugly- must use something new]

Glocally speaking, I chuckle at Ben Hammersley ranting about Creative Lab’s revisionist etymology of the term ‘podcasting’ (they say: short for Personal On Demand broadcast; he says: this) That’s reported, here. Question is what did Apple intend ‘pod’ to stand for when marketing the original MP3 player? [Note to self: must drink more coffee, smoke cigars etc. etc.]

Off the shelf/off the wall

off the wall

This is a piece by Jarvis Cocker for the Sheffield "Off the Shelf" poetry festival. And it’s now found its way onto the wall of the corporately owned Forge site on London Road (slick city-living for students and young people). So buying or renting a property here comes with its own brand of urban writing: official graffiti (what about that Tony?)

Jarvis, one time front man of Pulp was born in Sheffield and is perhaps best remembered for his stage invasion when Michael Jackson played at the Brit Awards in 1996. Never one to mince words, Jarvis said at the time:

“My actions were are form of protest at the way Michael Jackson sees himself as some kind of Christ-like figure with the power of healing. The music industry allows him to indulge his fantasies because of his wealth and power.”

And, here on the walls of the Forge he speaks out again. Graffiti or art? Or is it simply words as decoration, an extension of corporate graffiti as a kind of advertising. I think I coined the term urban literacy in an earlier post; words on the street. But the crucial distinction between graffiti and other forms of urban literacy is often based on its legitimacy – or more accurately who did it, because we must control written expression, mustn’t we?

On the wall

blairgraffiti

The trouble is that we've got middle-aged men in stripy ties erasing messages in public spaces rather than doing the decent thing and staying at home or getting on with a job (which in this case is quite an important one). Why should stripies be allowed to get away with it - where's their sense of respect?

The mark

mark

I seem to be going through a literary phase. So, the photograph I took reminds me of one of the great writing experiments of the early 20th Century – Virginia Woolf ‘The mark on the wall’. That was published in 1917. And, more or less at the same time, Pirandello wrote ‘Shoot!’ (1915), a novel which explores the early days of moving image (he was writing about ‘affordances’, but I don’t think that word was in his lexicon). Anyway, ‘Shoot!’ has just been republished.

The other literary thing is a celebration of the remarkable Helen Simpson who is an impressive short story writer. I read her story ‘Constitutional’ which is in her new collection of the same name. It makes really effective use of the affordances of the short story form.

Tomorrow I may be forced to comment on Tony Blair’s ‘Respect’ agenda, and particularly media reports of the problems of teenagers in hoodies and the horrors of graffiti, which is probably why today it seems better to bury one’s head in a book.

After tea

China tea

I spent the afternoon observing 7-9 year olds chatting on simple discussion boards designed for us by Vertebrate Graphics. Since most of the children were completely new to this, it was fascinating to watch as they exchanged information about Bratz dolls, X-box games and favourite footballers. This was followed by an interesting discussion with the headteacher on how the school might want to moderate or regulate the children’s communication.

Then, back at home, after tea, I noticed that Sheffield has become a target for the derogatory and definitely class-based screen garbage pumped out by contributors to Chavtowns. These bird-brains seem to have too much time on their hands. But then again, I suppose that this is what you get with an unregulated medium.

I’ve also been looking at the developmental work being done on ‘Magic Books’ by these people. Here’s a quick description:

“This work explores the transition between Physical Reality, Augmented Reality (AR), and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) in a collaborative setting. A MagicBook looks like a normal storybook with colorful pages and simple text. When readers look at the same pages holding a lightweight head mounted display (HMD), the pictures pop off the page and come to life as three-dimensional animated virtual scenes. By touching a switch on the HMD, readers can fly into the virtual scene and freely explore the immersive environment.”

Sounds really exciting - quite thought provoking too. But is it trying to get new technology to reproduce book reading?

And finally, musician John Fahey was little known in his lifetime. His work now seems to be attracting more attention. A tribute album has now been released, and there’s free downloads here. If you only want to try one thing, listen to Howard Gelb’s wonderful rendition of Fahey’s ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’.

More weight?

weights

Each time I pick up a newspaper I seem to end up reading about the merits (or otherwise) of corduroy. Such a boring topic for the New Year doesn’t auger well. Apparently Stephen Fry’s big on corduroy … and there’s been a corduroy dispute here. Corduroy got a mention here, too. (And, if you’re thinking of linking corduroy and literacy you can go here!)

You can imagine, then, that I was refreshed by reading about a study of the built environment which really seemed to cross over into a social geography of the home. Although the report makes it sound like a made-for-TV study (using a smiling, white middle class family of the neo-conventional type), the idea about how we use, customize and dominate our living spaces is interesting. It reminds me of Wellman’s studies of media in the home, and also some of the work Keri Facer’s did in the Screenplay project.

I’d just like some more weighty acknowledgement of how identities and lifestyles construct the diverse patterning of the spaces we inhabit (and if not, maybe a more in depth look at curduroy?).

Docile bodies

plugged

I am in Popular Literacies, Childhood and Schooling with a chapter on digital writing. I was flattered to be quoted by Jackie earlier in the volume – she refers to my Foucauldian reading of the National Literacy Strategy. Although I say it myself, it was one of my better ideas: I wish I’d pursued it further…

For instance, in considering the materiality of writing, I have often thought and sometimes written about the discipline of the body that accompanies (or might accompany) writing instruction. Those particular physical routines associated with book and pen that are emphasized in current literacy teaching as well as the more arcane bodily disciplines of schooled literacy practices would be a good focus for analysis.

Foucault, as usual, paves the way when he writes: “A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture. Good handwriting, for example, presupposes a gymnastics – a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger.” Discipline and Punish: 152. Well, of course it’s not quite like that in the Strategy, but one does require children to sit, stand, move, grasp, turn and articulate in certain ways.

Precious, unrelated stuff

precious

I was interested to find this BT resource that helps primary and secondary school teachers to get into podcasting. These look like great ideas and all you need is an i-Pod or other MP3 and a good connection. I’d like to know who’s interested in trying this out, it sounds great!

Unrelated, I know, but also interesting is this paper: "Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity: ‘you can't land an ollie properly in heels’" by Deirdre M. Kelly, Shauna Pomerantz and Dawn Currie. Thanks to Rebekah for alerting me to this! ....and today I re-read The Rules of Distraction. There’s something really basic, but fundamentally challenging here and I’m grateful to Dana for bringing it to our attention back in Miami.

A quick plug

Plug

A plug for this, which in turn is a plug for this and ...this, too!

Distressed

you have been worn'd

It’s great the way they’re so blatant about it: "designed to tear with wear" – must be a new kind of fabric! Although it makes you laugh, there is an interesting trend in clothes, home decoration and furnishing for the lived-in, antiqued or distressed look. Distressed furniture’s been around a while. A friend of mine used to use ‘chains-and-stains’ to make new pine furniture look as though it had been around for years.

The old, beaten-up look was certainly OK for jeans when I started wearing them. OK, so you didn’t buy them bleached or torn, but you worked pretty hard to get them to look that way. Cool hunters soon learnt that we liked the look and sold it back to us. So the faux-antique, lived-in look’s been around for a while. Sadly it doesn’t stretch to the body as we are relentlessly urged to ‘Keep young and beautiful’.

Happy New Year!

Sharrow graffiti 1

On a graffiti theme again, here’s another one from Sharrow. The Mailer quotation below I borrowed from Alex Wright’s blog, mostly because my blogging inspiration at the moment is quite low.

"... chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on the other by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters, even brain-cooked by politicians whose ego is a virtue - I am here to help my nation - brained by the big beautiful numbers on the yard markers on football fields, by the whip of the capital letters in the names of products, and gut-picked by the sound of rock and roll screaming up into the voodoo of the firmament with the shriek of the performer’s insides coiling like neon letters in the blue satanic light, yes, all the excrescence of the highways and the fluorescent wonderlands of every Las Vegas sign frying through the Iowa and New Jersey night, all the stomach-tightening nitty-gritty of trying to learn how to spell was in the writing, every assult on the psyche as the trains came slamming in. "

Norman Mailer: "Faith of Graffiti"

I’m interested again in Pirandello, who’s work revolves around the problem of identity. The self exists to him only in relation to others. You can imagine that I was fascinated to see that I can get Cosí é (se vi pare) [Right You Are (If You Think You Are)] for 1p on Amazon. That’s either ridiculously cheap or else it’s not worth having.