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Lifestream
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Published Week Eleven Roundup.— December 8th via digitalculture-ed.net
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Shared The Glass Bees at bavatuesdays.— December 6th via Delicious
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Shared The Glass Bees at bavatuesdays.— December 6th via Delicious
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Shared cookie-cutter - Wiktionary.— December 5th via Delicious
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Shared cookie-cutter - Wiktionary.— December 5th via Delicious
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— December 5th via Delicious
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— December 5th via Delicious
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— December 2nd via Delicious
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— December 2nd via Delicious
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— December 2nd via My EDC Comments
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Links
Admin things
#1 by jen on September 22nd, 2009
hi Ali – anyone who can kite surf can definitely juggle, I think! Welcome, anyway – good to have you on the course.
#2 by Tony McNeill on October 4th, 2009
I think it’s a generational thing. The edupunks are all middle-aged guys like myself who still think they’re Joe Strummer! The unis they work for may use Blackboard but they’re gonna change the system from within. These men should be pited and given out support – not mocked! LOL Tony
#3 by jen on October 5th, 2009
wow, I hadn’t heard ‘edupunk’ before – that’s… probably sort of ironic, given that most of the tools we edgy-cators (I don’t know – I just made it up) are using as alternatives to our VLEs are not exactly rough and ready… I mean, Wordpress was about a million times easier to install and get to grips with than any institutional elearning tool I’ve ever seen. Still, maybe it’s the more the attitude that counts, and maybe the DIY is in the choosing and cobbling together. It does make me think about Bell’s ‘work stories’, and the reminder that cyberspace doesn’t come from nowhere. We are doing our punk stuff on top of infrastructures and commercial ventures which may not share our values. Maybe that makes it even more punk… or maybe Tony’s got it right: http://digitalculture-ed.net/alip/2009/10/04/punk-teachers/#comments
#4 by alip on October 5th, 2009
Edgy-cators…
Love it!
#5 by Damien DeBarra on October 17th, 2009
Could you embed it somewhere else at put the link here?
#6 by jen on October 18th, 2009
interesting Ali – no individual screenshot stays put long enough to make much sense, and as a whole piece I find the flickering screens quite fractured and disturbing, and difficult to look at. For those reasons I interpret this as a dystopic artefact, even though the screenshots themselves (representing your digital life?) are mostly quite innocuous or even perhaps positive. Is it a commentary on information overload?
#7 by alip on October 18th, 2009
Yes, the piece is very much about information overload. The screenshots come from places I regularly visit to get information, to do my job or just to socialise and have fun and for the most part are pretty innocuous, but the overall effect is that of a fragmented digital llife. I originally started out with a montage of desks from my office and the number of screens we all have on them, all so we can better process whatever it is we process. Those screens were the starting point for this because I spend so much time at work, but the different sizes and viewing angles made getting the screen shots onto them quite difficult.
#8 by alip on October 18th, 2009
@Damien – I tried a couple of different places (and a number of different formats), but had the same problem. But the animated gif does the job and still conveys the message I wanted the piece to.
#9 by Nicola Osborne on October 18th, 2009
Ali, I agree with Jen that this gives a great sense of information overload. I am viewing it right now with an additional (phone) screen to one side, 6 tabs of my browser open, Tweetdeck on the go etc. and very much relate to that sense of trying to navigate multiple flows of data.
I was at a talk by an academic the other day talking about the web and suggesting that a single Google search might return more information – perhaps more directly relevant interesting information – than, 50 years ago, you would have encountered in your entire academic career. It’s a startling thought and one that makes me really question what the tools of mediating digital space are and should be in order to provide the access we want with a coherent way of being part of the information flow.
#10 by silvanad on October 19th, 2009
Really good visual of information overload. It needs no supporting words. I think even if you don’t get that it is information overload, it has the effect of giving you information overload.
#11 by Tony McNeill on October 19th, 2009
I feel like David Bowie in that scene from Nicholas Roeg’s The Man who fell to Earth … Great visual that still works well as an animated gif. I dd something on Flash and ended up exported to avi and uploading to YouTube
#12 by sian on October 19th, 2009
Great one Ali. It seems to me that the dystopic interpretation comes from the regimented layout of the screens, rather than necessarily from the digital life-world being represented. Something in Nicola’s vision of ‘multiple flows’ – flicking between tabs on the screen, across laptop, desktop and mobile device – somehow puts the individual at the centre of all this information overload and implies maybe a more positive, even joyful immersion in technology. It’d be interesting to see you ‘do a Silvana’ and construct a utopian equivalent to this one! (It’s OK, I know you don’t have time : ) )
#13 by billb on October 19th, 2009
What a coincidence! I’ve just counted my open Firefox tabs and they are 23, as many as the different web pages you used for your Flash/Gif. I suppose that tabbed browsing is to blame for our feeling of information overload. Before that you wouldn’t be able to have 23 instances of your browser running without draining your system memory.
Nice, straightforward and effective artefact, that works just as well as a Gif.
#14 by lesleyf on October 21st, 2009
I’m thinking mega multi-tasking and what a complete and utter nightmare it is. Keeping track of how many windows I have open and what they are doing and what I;m doing with them …. I can really lose the plot. for me this video is tops…I just hope my interpretation matches your meaning lol.
#15 by alip on October 21st, 2009
@ Lesley – Actually you’re not far off – it’s partly down to that whole serendipitous browsing thing where you start on one task, hit a link, go somewhere else, remember a falf finished job you have to pick up on etc etc etc. Before you know it you’ve (or rather I’ve) got windows and applications open everywhere, lots of tabs, maybe a couple of half finished emails…. to actually get back to my desktop before the end of the workday is very, very rare.
#16 by jen on October 29th, 2009
hey – a puzzle! I like the contrast between the homogeneity of the monitors and the glimpses of individuality around the edges. I wonder if the overall impression would have been quite different had the monitors been on and displaying what people were looking at as well. Nice secondary visual artefact, Ali.
#17 by jen on October 30th, 2009
Good extract, Ali, especially point 2. ‘Covert’ is the wrong way to think about research into open spaces and texts, I think, but maybe that’s a place where the notion of virtual ethnography is problematic – it doesn’t give us enough flexibility to see these entities as hybrid texts/communities. I think Hine’s implying that there is a ‘real’ online community, but that it can’t be accessed through observation alone – texts have to be coupled with contexts. I wonder what she means by ‘contexts’?
#18 by jen on November 13th, 2009
I like the idea of trying to figure out if members *not* thinking something is a community means that it isn’t (the flip side of the argument in Bell that it *is* if members think it is). Like Sian, though, I wonder if we need to ask where the community resides – if a group that is dispersed across web-based and face to face places is in some way different than the sum of its individual parts – maybe the difference is the community. Nice, thought provoking questions raised here, Ali – thanks.
#19 by Sarah Payne on November 16th, 2009
Hi Ali
Interesting comment on the rat! The rat becomes an object simply by being connected to the robot. Is that what awaits us? Cyborg/posthuman = less human.
If that is the case would it be something that you would choose to become?
Sarah
#20 by jen on November 16th, 2009
I saw Stelarc talk back in April-ish, and had the same reaction, Ali – that this is really pretty disturbing (literally disturbing flesh) stuff. I don’t think Haraway shies away from that, actually – there is monstrousness and danger as well as pleasure in her cyborg bodies. As Silvana points out (http://digitalculture-ed.net/silvanad/2009/11/15/week-8-lifestream-summary/ ), Haraway’s background is in biology, and perhaps that sheds light on her take on leaky human/animal and human/machine boundaries.