Thinking visually

In a number of papers I've put forward the idea that digitally-mediated communication has led to the use of innovative, self-sponsored writing on an unprecedented scale. This is writing at the point of change, with new forms, structures, spellings and functions coming into being. Writing as self-expression, writing as identity performance and writing as negotiation or participation. I've argued that writing on screen is an important and ubiquitous characteristic of contemporary cultural worlds and defended this 'narrow' description of digital literacy. This has led some to assume that I am arguing for preserving the 'dominance of the written form'. This is untrue; I'm just more interested in writing, although of course I note that it often appears on screen in combination with the visual. Still I'm as sceptical about popular ways of visualising data as I am about unsubstantiated claims about visual thinking or visual literacy. It's clear that images do some things better than words. So I found this piece on visualising data very interesting. Scrolling down the comments I found one that I was about to make. So here it is: 'Just to play Devil's advocate: if visualization is so great, couldn't you have conveyed all the ideas in this article using just visualizations? Why did you use words? Specifically data visualization is good for very large quantities of data that cannot be easily interpreted or even presented in a short word format.' (Mark Krepicz). So, for the time being, I'll stick to words to develop my ideas, not because they're better or anything, but just because they work.

Zapped

Tina Peterson’s piece The Zapper and the Zapped , which is a study of the role of the microwave oven in everyday life really is a thought-provoking contribution to the Vannini book. It’s a perfect example of making the familiar strange. I suppose I consider myself to be fairly reflective, particularly when it comes to technology, but I must say I’ve never given the microwave much thought. Maybe that’s because I’m an avoider: Peterson has three categories, mad scientist, reluctant habitual and avoider. But actually I’m not an avoider for any of the reasons she gives, such as health scare/moral panic or food snobbery, but because I never really got the hang of it. Apart from the intellectual analysis that Peterson applies, I learnt that heating up drinks and doing popcorn are the real culinary niches that consumers have identified. No mention then of porridge, scrambled eggs or rice all of which work well. But I thought Peterson’s typology could be generalisable beyond the kitchen. Take computers, for example. You could be a playful enthusiast (mad scientist/techie); a reluctant habitual, after all there are a lot of them around; or an avoider (in which case you won’t be reading this). I think if I was granted another academic career, I’d be into material culture. After all they get all the best topics! As it is I have my own little world. For instance, there’s this on participation and new literacies, and I think it just counts as Merchant (2009). Now, where’s that zapper?

Writing, copying, assembling

'Writing is an act of poaching: stealing phrases, words, scenes, and experiences from the world around oneself, rearranging them, and in so doing, claiming selected bits for oneself as an author. The performance of writing makes concept into material - in the materiality of process, if no longer in the materiality of print. The act of reading is writing's second material moment. Partial, arbitrary, strategic, writing is translation: it is a struggle for meaning, not necessarily the "correct" meaning, but rather the will to be meaningful and communicate with recognized authority.' This is how Kien introduces his chapter on ANT Phillip Vannini's collection called 'Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life', and it certainly is a wonderful description. It extends and repositions the idea of writing as copying or remixing; a subject that I've posted about before. The Vannini book is pretty good reading. I've been a fan of Vannini's since coming across his work on the social semiotic of the tanned body, and this diverse collection (recommended by Tetra) is certainly no disappointment. I particuarly enjoyed Noy's account of the domestication of the family car, and Richardson and Third on mobile media. If you're interested, you'll find a more exacting critique of the book here.

Visualisation

If you like the idea of wearing ridiculous glasses and seeing things in 3D you need some pretty expensive hardware - good graphics cards, offset projectors and so on. Wallwisher, on the other hand is free, flexible and fun (that's the three f's). But of course you can do things in a visualisation suite that you could never do in Wallwisher. But application aside, the world of 3D film can help to bring ideas about 'immersion' and 'virtuality' into focus (unintentional pun). It's interesting that 3D technology seems to emphasise the illusion of image. It's quite clearly an image but the difference is its dimensionality. I don't experience the same sense of place that I do in Second Life. Things are coming at me; but I'm not in it. The shared ground is that it's virtual in the sense that it's almost life-like. Real and not-real, both at the same time.

Losing culture

Johann Hari's piece in The Independent on Tuesday invites us to consider whether the 'internet has transformed the way we think about ourselves' which is an interesting question, but one that in the end treats technology as a thing that is doing something to us. But the points made about the changes in patterns of friendship and romance that have arisen with digital culture are well made. From lightweight friendship maintenance to searching for a partner online: it's clear there is a shift. I also liked the observation that rapid social networking helps the good, the bad and the silly to co-exist in an unregulated way. As for research on attention span and trains of thought, well....what was I just saying? I forget. Perhaps it helps to bring some of these issues into view in a reflective way, but personally I'm rather tired of hearing about the tyranny of ecommunication. Can't we move on? In a way the whole argument is concisely framed by the strap line 'are we losing our culture', implying that we had something worthwhile (in the last millenium) that is now in some sense under attack. Culture: is it seaping away through my keyboard or am I re-making it each time a type?

The soporific effect of phonics

Don’t ask me why, but I’m having to read lots of research papers on phonics at the moment. The only way I’ve found to cope with this is by taking a couple of them to bed with me each night. And there’s a very interesting phenomenon. It all starts off quite well; in fact I must say some of them are written quite well. You can sometimes believe that there’s a really interesting subtle problem that they’re shedding new light upon. Then the researchers begin to tell you what they did, and I notice how incredibly heavy my eyelids have become. But I push on, willing myself to concentrate. I wake up after about 10 minutes still clutching the paper; still no further on. It works everytime! Maybe I’ve discovered a cure for insomnia... but no sadly that can’t be true unless I first have a control group and a very specific treatment. Anyway I’ve tried reading them in the afternoon instead. Unfortunately I get the same effect. But today was a bit of a breakthrough. I read one in the morning. And I found myself wondering just how the learning of a symbol system invented by humans can remain such a mystery to those who invented it in the first place. And then I drifted off. Again.

Coming of age

I'm really enjoying the Boellstorff book 'Coming of Age in Second Life'. I thought that this was right on the button: 'Second Life culture is profoundly human. It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our "real" lives have been "virtual" all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human "nature" to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being. Culture is our "killer app": we are virtually human.' (Boellstorff, 2008). And that's only p.5...can't wait for the rest!

Facebook power

I learnt today that PGCE students compare school placement experiences through Facebook. Well I expect they’ve been doing it for some time, but the difference is that now the staff have cottoned on! So there’s a sort of student backchannel that exposes the wide variety of provision and experience. Ofsted would love access to this to drill through the glossy veneer of ‘partnership’ which ITE institutions are forced to present! Hearing this made me think how powerful social media can be. In earlier times ITE could operate a sort of divide and rule approach. Just as long as students were isolated in their various placement schools, they could be encouraged to get on with it and to see the local reality as the only reality. Of course they shared stories with friends, met up in pubs and commiserated with each other by phone, but the Facebook network is far more powerful. They are more widely and more publically connected and their conversations build. I expect we’ll be starting to advise students not to use Facebook soon, if indeed we aren’t already doing so. I mean if you ‘have to have a photo taken of you clutching your handbag, mascara running, asleep in the corridor when you were too drunk to make it back to your room’ (Miller, 2010:114) then what’s the point in having a reference?

Linked

These last three posts under the title of 'Making it' are just ways of trying to figure out some connections between how stuff is produced, its history and the various roles of people and technologies. If the bookcase began with a plan, or a script, in the form of a text, it took human labour and the control of particular kinds of tools to produce. It grew out of a specific event or performance, in a particular time and now continues to perform a function. And presumably the rock band also started with plans or scripts - a number of different texts, musical, visual, gestural - and even, sartorial. Control of the musical tools is required for production as well as video tools to capture the performance. It presumably grew out of a rehearsed, a practised performance and continues to perform the function of entertainment. And so, too, the dance video, inspired by earlier texts or cultural forms, it is a performance at the practice stage. People and practices are central to all three performances, but they each involve intricate connections between texts and tools and all have there own history and temporal tragectories. The stuff we are left with seems to carry all the traces of prior activity, is conditioned by it and it turn conditions future activity.

Making it #3 - smartmob meme

It quite intrigues me that the whole concept of the smartmob, popularised by Howard Rheingold, has been adopted by traditional media to advertise itself. So last year we had the Tmobile phone company flashmob at Liverpool Street station and then this year the filming of a flashmob dance in Covent Garden. The video above shows an amateur take of the Covent Garden shoot (to promote Sky TV). Ruth auditioned and got paid for this. You can see her on the top right! So does old media eat new media or is it just a different way of making it?

Making it #2

My friend's son sings for this rock band. I like the energy in the preformance even though it's not my kind of music; and it makes me laugh! In some ways it's a sort of remix, a reversioning of guitar-based rock which has now been around long enough to cross generations. The performance has got all the elements, audial, visual and gestural. It's a different kind of peformance, a different sense of 'making it' to that shown in the previous post. The underlying question I have in mind is a semiotic one. Does it point to or represent anything else, or is it just what it is?

Making it #1

This is a bookcase my brother made when we were teenagers at home. He followed a plan from a DIY magazine he subscribed to, using the instructions (more or less) with a few improvisations on the way. He was always at his happiest making and doing. The bookcase ends up being an object that has outlasted him. I think its got an authentic sixties feel to it, and now it works well to store my back numbers of JECL: now ten years old. Still thinking about objects and material culture, I wanted to document this because it was a performance of something or other: and now its performing something else. It's useful. The object doesn't carry the story, or represent anything, it's just caught up in everyday events; a bit like Stan Ogden's glasses.

On Twitter

I suppose as time goes on and the novelty wears off we can start to differentiate between different sorts of social networking , what they do best and how that suits our purpose at any given time. As will be fairly clear the blogging format works well for me, because it allows me to capture what interests before it evaporates, but in a reflective (but fairly rapid) form. But because I’ve never really got successful at photography, Flickr attracted me initially as a place to keep images and then as a place to study how we might network around images. Now I have mobile Flickr, new possibilities present themselves, but I’ve been rather slow on the uptake. Microblogging suggests something that’s different again. I like the always on idea, I like the economy of words that is imposed and sometimes I appreciate the chaos and randomness of intersecting conversations. Twitter works best for me when I’m bored. And that’s not very often. I like it, too when there’s a bunch of people I’m familiar with who are trading ideas around a theme. And finally I like Twitter as a backchannel at conferences and so on. But I’ve also noticed that how Twitter is presented makes a difference to me. The standard Twitter interface is a bit boring, somehow a little too flat for my liking. So I swapped to Tweetdeck, but I nearly chucked that in the summer because it’s too busy, too demanding, too intrusive. So my favourite quickly became Twitterberry, simply because it’s mobile and that seems to me to capture the lightweight feel of tweeting. But then Twitterberry got so very slow and so limited in functionality. I went back to a more self-disciplined use of Tweetdeck. Then Ruth introduced be to the Uber Twitter beta for Blackberry. That’s what I call an app! I really like the location function. If I want to, I can show you more or less exactly where I am. That’s fun; but it’s also pretty useful. Who needs a map with a good mobile? Who needs to know where you are with GPRS?

Houses and stuff

Daniel Miller’s Stuff is the best thing I’ve read for a long while. For a start he writes well; but also the book is an intriguing glance over the shoulder at his own journeys in social anthropology and the investigation of material culture. A favourite extract is where he launches into a passionate rebuttal of the semiotic perspective on clothing: ‘what and where is this self that the clothes represent?’ he asks. ‘In both philosophy and everyday life we imagine that there is a real or true self which lies deep within us....It is as though if we peeled off enough layers we would finally get to the real self within.’ And then ‘if you keep peeling off our layers you find: absolutely nothing left. There is no true inner self. We are not Emperors represented by clothes, because if we remove the clothes there isn’t an inner core. The clothes were not superficial, they actually made us what we think we are.’ (p.13). It’s the sort of performative account of ourselves that I was alluding to here. After all that I’m now in Houses: Accommodating Theory (Chapter 3), I wonder if that will be as entertaining.

Narratives of the self

Sartre wrote ‘a man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it’ (1964). Setting aside the rather unfortunate gendering, this is a particularly rich starting point for anyone thinking about identity and self narrative and indeed it forms the central motif of Bruner’s ‘Life as Narrative’. I’ve read the Bruner piece a couple of times and I have to say I’m a big fan. There is however a strong thread of determinism in the Bruner argument. He suggests that the narratives we inhabit are culturally constructed, rather than played out in a cultural context. I would argue for a more performative account...and I guess that’s the direction that Bruner veers towards in the end of the paper when he says ‘any story one may tell about anything is better understood by considering other possible ways in which it can be told.’

Writers and social networking

I've just read a fascinating piece on how professional writers might engage with audiences (or prosumers) using social media. Alison Boyle's project is described on Write4Children here, and raises thought-provoking issues about social networking in general. There are some familiar themes, such as the observation that most online networks are extensions of offline ones, as well as interesting observations about language conventions and building an audience. She also points to the limitations of the common tendency for brief commenting; comments that may be positive, but don't actually help you to refine your ideas. I was also struck by the short consideration of ratings, as used on Quizilla and the implications of applying crude mathematical algorithms to content on SNSs.

Identity themes

Elizabeth Moje and Allan Luke have an interesting review that explores the relationships between literacy and identity in the current issue of RRQ. This follows the Special Issue of Literacy, on the same theme, that I put together with Victoria Carrington earlier this year. The Moje and Luke review explores some interesting areas and overlaps but in the end it failed to really impress. I found the most useful bits were the questions posed, and the issues raised, rather than the themes that were identified. However, the review sits well alongside the excellent Grenfell essay on Bourdieu, Language and Literacy in the same issue.

Return of the flaneur

Yes, it's true, I was in Paris at the weekend. Paris is now so much closer, thanks to the Eurostar. So it's perfectly possible to be a weekend flaneur. The only problem is that it can take twice as long to get to London as it can to get to Paris. So the picture shows the flaneur at rest or, to be exact on the Metro. That's one way to spend le weekend. The next three all involve teaching. Still, musn't grumble!

Beware the wordle tree!

I'm getting rather cynical about Wordle - what does it actually do? A glorified word count, that’s all. It doesn't really produce a tag cloud based on a folksonomy, or an aggregate of our interpretations. It scans the document and produces something that looks like a tag cloud, treating words as data rather than words as ideas. However, I did like this post on visualizing tools as an accompaniment to reading (thank you, Ian). I also came across this piece on tagging, which is really informative. Cathy Marshall investigates the up and downside of tagging in Flickr, a subject that I’ve written about (but not in such an analytical way). Her argument implies that we could be better taggers (maybe?). It would be interesting to get students to tag learning objects, such as the paper Ian refers to, after a close reading, maybe using a better tool to build a folksonomy within a more focused affinity space. Maybe that could be achieved by ‘negotiated tagging’ in a learning space like pbworks?

The road ahead

I was very pleased to be asked to contribute to the University of Exeter Graduate School of Education seminar series, yesterday. This gave me an opportunity to develop my thinking about virtual world literacies in classrooms, good because I’m currently putting the final touches to a journal article on this topic. I’m also making final changes to the Web 2.0 and participation paper, which should see the light of day, soon. That leaves a book chapter on social networking and primary schools and that’ll be me done for this year. Early next year I have a chapter-length entry for The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. After that it will be time to knuckle down and do a more thorough analysis of the teen social networking data. Then I suppose we must turn our attention to publishing the outcomes of the ESRC Seminar Series!