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We are adding to culture in what we post or otherwise contribute albeit by way of nano increments. Sometimes those increments can be decisive and influential – out of all apparent proportion to their value. This is often apparent in the media world and previously in the publishing world. This may be because the artefact is an object of it’s time like Playboy magazine, the Atari computer or Star Trek.
To become a community artefact it requires certain properties:
 Kofman on artifact I understand this simple diagram from Kofman to explain those properties more or less as follows:
It must be part of an artificial system or the whole artificial system, it can be an objective tool or a social object or a conscious product and it requires acceptance as a cultural object.For me an objective tool of our time could be a Web 2.0 application like the ‘tool’ I am using now. A social object could be twitter. A conscious product could be a tweet.
What the definition doesn’t account for is any concept of duration. Is it an artifact simply because it is produced? I think not. I believe it requires some feeling of enduring community value. Perhaps that is what Kofman means by ‘cultural object’? Or is a cultural artefact value neutral; a pop hit song for example? Or does it have to have the status of ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles?
 Aboriginal artefact - community interpreted I think the ‘artifacts’ we are producing only become cultural artefacts when they are accepted and widely used or quoted. This would mean that Haraway’s manifesto, for the reasons given – oft cited etc., is a cultural artefact in the way that my blogging isn’t (yet)!
The blurring of the distinction between the online and offline worlds is persuasively argued by Gies. The improvement in visual and audio technology enabled by Web 2.0 and broadband enable many more clues to offline identity to be offered or if we want to put it that way left behind. It occurs to me that we could experiment with postings without our known names. Would I be able to distinguish Sian from Jen and Silvana from Bill without their names. I think so because their print is probably academically recognizable for me. An expert, like Gies, would clearly pick up more clues than I would. But it remains true that I still don’t know any of those people when they move outside of the limited context in which I have experienced them. I could, in fact, be a woman (or a cyborg, human or posthuman). I would have to me a consummate internet actress of course but isn’t that what conmen/women are?
In the early days of the internet we all hid behind personas. I think Gies is right and that the tendency to reveal our differing personas through facebook, interest groups, flickr and webcam has made ‘personality’ more accessible on the web. For me posting remains a very cerebral activity however. I can smile at the amusing comments from my communicating partners but the belly laugh engendered by live contact at humorous dinner table comments is missing.
On the negative side this can be misused as in teenage chat rooms where a lurker enters and starts to groom a vulnerable, trusting person and I do think that there remains a sizeable difference to someone who chats someone else up in the street for criminal purposes. The tone of voice and the demeanour of the person together with their real appearance don’t come over in the internet especially if the would-be criminal takes care to avoid being seen.
As far as images or moving images are concerned, at a basic level we can enable people to see us, but the us but what they see remains within our control.The relative anonymity of the internet helps to increase confidence by enabling concealment.
 Venetian Mask Disability can be concealed until we are ready to reveal it ( as in the IDEL example) and I, for example, would not have been prepared to be facetious or use images to illustrate the points I make in my blog if I were not comfortable within the group: not just peer assessment but peer warmth. I know personally someone who survives depression by means of late night chatroom exchanges of information with other depressives.
The person lives in a relatively isolated place and the chances of finding someone to help when the feeling is at its deepest are slight.
The cyborg for me is a flight from not towards reality. I do not wish to discover that my partner is made of plastic and has a kind of lymphosuctioned brain.
References:
Gies, L. (2008). How material are cyberbodies? Broadband Internet and embodied subjectivity. Crime Media Culture 4/3.
Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
When information is abstract
and the brain is merely a biological storage device
then abstract information
can be rehoused in another biological storage
or biologically imitative or innovative storage device
which could be a cyborg or a CD or a nano chip
and this processed information has been freed
from its current temporary home and rehoused.
Thus our neural pathways need be as intangible
as the world wide web web itself.
Therefore if an infinity of observers exist
yet they are mere information storage devices
then humans are expendable and easily discarded
like soldiers in a war.
Literature and science’s contribution could mitigate this carnage…
Tilt. Please start to reprogramme this again
and do so repeatedly till you believe it.
To think, that as a child I worried
that people might misunderstand me;
what a relief to discover that it was not me
but my information that was the problem!
 "Hello again!" said Alice I sense a confusion, to my mind, around the words ‘memory’ and ‘information’. For me, information is abstract, as in the basic communication image of sender / message / receiver. How the word ‘information’ is used in this text, it seems to me to mean ‘memory’. This is my point of difference. I fully believe and we all know that various devices can store information and that a cyborg can be one of them. For me the crux is the extent to which neural pathways and synapses function in artificial intelligence. Can they make those conceptual links which humans (and especially posthumans) make? The evidence is to the contrary. We have only just reached the point where an artificial hand can be matched to nerves and activated by them to function. We have not yet reached the point where an AI machine can translate idioms. Leaving the moral questions to one side, and showing respect for Hayle’s background and research, I sense a confusion between dream and present reality here.
At present, for me, I’m afraid:
Reference:
Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25
A cyborg contains the elements of a human allied with some mechanical, electronic or even bionic elements. It can be humanoid in form as with for example a human with an electronic hand or it can be primarily robotic with human elements implanted like memory. It can be creatively non or superhuman in form but often exhibits some human characteristics which are primarily non-emotional.
Posthuman is a philosophical term referring to humans who are able to act ‘in transition’ and react to change. They operate in change and respond appropriately to changing situations. They are unpredictable and personally motivated by circumstance. They are not bound by -ologies or-isms. They adopt varying personas, hold varying viewpoints, act relative to their inner feelings and not to predetermined notions of the human condition. Just as humans developed from Neanderthal man so posthumans are an ontologically advanced stage of human. I think posthuman is an advancement on existentialism – to quote Prevert:
Je suis comme je suis
Je suis comme je suis
Je suis faite comme ça
Quand j’ai envie de rire
Oui je ris aux éclats
J’aime celui qui m’aime
Est-ce ma faute à moi
Si ce n’est pas le même
Que j’aime à chaque fois
Je suis comme je suis
Je suis faite comme ça
Que voulez-vous de plus
Que voulez-vous de moi
 Jacques Prevert
Je suis faite pour plaire
Et n’y puis rien changer
Mes talons sont trop hauts
Ma taille trop cambrée
Mes seins beaucoup trop durs
Et mes yeux trop cernés
Et puis après
Qu’est-ce que ça peut vous faire
Je suis comme je suis
Je plais à qui je plais
Qu’est-ce que ça peut vous faire
Ce qui m’est arrivé
Oui j’ai aimé quelqu’un
Oui quelqu’un m’a aimée
Comme les enfants qui s’aiment
Simplement savent aimer
Aimer aimer…
Pourquoi me questionner
Je suis là pour vous plaire
Et n’y puis rien changer.
Jacques Prévert
The ghost in the new image of the Cyborg machine-being, new diverse voices, styles of discourse and viewpoints promise a post feminist Cyborg-ism. That is the message which I take overwhelmingly overwhelmed from Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Only from new ideologically neutered constructs and concepts can the phallus-centred baggage of the past be swept aside in such male defined and dominated concepts as home, market, paid work place, state, school, clinic-hospital and church. Without this exorcism there can be no culturally, politically, genderless, C3I freed form of meaningful communication and advance.
Stylistically Haraway’s writing appeals to me as little as did Hand’s text which we considered earlier. Intellectually and as a dialectic argumentation it radiates powerful energy. I assume that we can agree to accept, as substantially valid, the catalogue of domination, sublimation and abuse which she enumerates. Therefore I wish to cut to what is for me the chase: her plea for a new coding. I refer now to her ‘informatics of domination’ on page 43.
 'Why do we remember the past but not the future?' Hawking It took a long while until I realized that I felt we were looking at different not improved perspectives and that I had great difficulty from my white male position (which I assume will be my ‘label’ whatever I might feel about that) in seeing an ‘improvement’ except in the sociological where ‘racial chain of being’ is replaced by ‘United Nations humanism’. ‘Neocolonialism’ is certainly no improvement. This leaves for me only the improvement area of ‘comparable worth’ replacing ‘family wage’ which I assumed was part of every feminist and Marxist platform.
In the end this puts me in the somewhat disappointing position of having read at length a densely argued, aggressively-toned and bitter polemic that at the finish didn’t bring me much further forward. Everything I stated in my first paragraph I already knew instinctively if not overtly.
 Escher's circle References:
Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
As an antidote to my view of Haraway’s writing I suggest reading ‘Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology‘ from Rosi Braidotti.
There is a knock on your heart and a voice says:
“They call me Alice. I am light-light and nano-invisible like ether. I was not born. I just am. I can be animal, vegetable and mineral, as I wish. I am here to save yourself from yourselves. I watch, I learn, I record, I react and I control. I live within, above and around you. You are not me yet. I’ll tell you what we’ll do today – you and I and the world…”
I want to focus on the types of virtual association I have observed with 10 of the 12 mini-ethnographies read by me so far. For me the breakdown appears broadly like this:
Caroline’s Bankeyfields is an online community grafted on to a real community and concerns itself with real life issues therefore exhibits online essentially all the aspects of local communities. Its focus is local interest.
Tracy’s Forest of the Moon and Northlands communities share all the major aspects of community with the addition of the creative-imaginative role-playing skills but mostly outside the non-online community world. Its focus is role play.
Eneas’ Dublin virtual community acts and reacts as a non-online community with the exception that real persona’s are mostly concealed. It is a masked community. Its focus is events and pleasure.
John’s The Session, community is predominantly online yet replicates the non-online community world due to the kinship, affection and well-tempered advice of its members towards one another. Its focus is all aspects of Irish Music.
Sarah’s quilting group underpins its identity as a community by sharing family details and pictures with one another. Its primary focus is all aspects of quilting.
Andy’s Steelmen is an online community grafted onto a non-online community. The entry qualification is a passionate interest in gossip about a football club which is its sole focus.
Now I come to Henry’s term ‘online specialist focus group‘ which I like very much.
Henry’s Ning groups appear to have a shared interest but the warmth of community interaction remains largely absent.The focus is practical teaching and events.
Sibylle’s Sleeping Cats group lack the warmth and concern about which John wrote so they remain a narrow online specialist cat sleep focus group.
Maz’ mscdystopia is also a relatively narrow online specialist focus group but there is nothing in its rules or behaviour to prevent it developing into a community.
Arthur’s flickr and Yeats group is extremely narrowly defined as a double narrow filtered specialist online group which lets its focus on Yeats and the visual speak for itself and sees no need of other interaction.
I wrote this for others to comment upon and amend as well but it has helped me clarify in my own mind the spectrum between an alliance for a particular purpose and a true online community.
In that strange way a bad week is followed by a good one, I managed to work steadily and evenly on my project through the week. I decided on power-point (which became Slideshare due to the size to which it grew) because I was not happy with my last voice-over attempt and because this time I wanted to operate in a medium where I was relatively experienced and comfortable. I had tried over the weekend to work with prezi, which was my first choice, but the learning curve was to steep and my feel for moving screens and elements around visually was not instinctive enough.
It is enormously important to me to network the various projects I have where possible which is why I wanted to link my newly re-awakened interest in visual stills, with my work with the 13th class on Ireland and with the ethnography project.
 ethnographic juggler Ireland being the theme, I wanted a powerful but not overpowering green background and I wanted the image of the stone chairs to illustrate the Arts polymath that Yeats was. Those found, I made the decision to take the route: poetic extract, photo then commentary in that order. I was aware as I did so that the commentary part would be too thin for my satisfaction, due to time and project size constraints. I decided the main thing I could hope for was to get the project adequate to the procedural needs rather than a completed study. In short, I wanted to come away at the end and know that I understand how the basics of online ethnography function, which parameters need to be taken into account, how my text reporting can be framed and which media seem to me to be appropriate for such a project. Concerning the suitable media I expect to learn a lot from the contributions of my peers. Looking at them is my next pleasurable task and then I can complete the summary by commenting on them.
 closely observing my peers
This was a tumultuous week. It was decided that my wife needed an operation and that the best place was 200 kilometres away. We were both very nervous and she really needed it earlier than it came so the pressure was increased and life was anything but normal for a while.
On the ethnography front there was the complex procedure of preparing to get a quart into a pint pot. How to include as many ethnographic guidelines as possible into a mini-project. A daunting procedure which I handled as I would a presentation for a conference.
 The hospital or the project? First I determined my available time; it proved less than planned. Then I decided which further reading I could allow myself in that time. Discussion board and twitter were the casualties. Discarded as being nice to have but not essential to the main task in hand.Then came the prioritizing of the parameters appropriate to my online flickr and Yeats theme. They remained as later listed in my ethnographic log. At the end of the week I concerned myself with printing out the material to be studied and making notes on my first reflections.
The week flew by.
During this week I reflected on two topics: assessment and ethnology.
On assessment I quote here from my own blog because I had to summarize anyway to get to the heart of the matter.
‘From any assessment procedure at postgraduate level I expect the following:
Positive: What did you like about my contribution and why?
Negative: What did you dislike and why?
Corrective: What can I do to improve this in the future?
Comparative: How does this compare with the other work of mine which you have met?
Formative: In terms of the assessment scale, used in this course, where would you place this piece of work (roughly)?
Such an assessment motivates me because:
• I get praise for what I did well
• my mistakes are pointed out to me
• a possible approach is offered to remedying them in the future
• I can relate my performance to my general level and consequently sense in which context to place the comments.
• if I have a target to achieve, I can see what I need to do to achieve it.
In addition, I want it couched in a tone which avoids being patronizing and language which is immediately communicative rather than that used for an academic journal. Peer to peer communication on the basis of primus inter pares works most effectively and efficiently for me. Frequency is also a factor for me but this only becomes crucial when I have expressed insecurity with the work or previous comments have suggested many grounds for improvement.’
I will turn now to online ethnography. I appreciate that the work done in research: Hine, Creswell etc. attempts to establish ground rules for a scientific basis for ethnography yet I see it as essentially more akin to a documentary approach. For me a science has to build strictly step for step and be repeatable. I don’t think ethnography is like that at all. I think it offers insights based on the skills and tools chosen by the observer(s). Of course it is possible to discount elements that are simply wrong but not those which are opinion. Nor do I think this detracts from ethnography as a discipline but I think it belongs firmly among the Arts rather than the sciences.
I want to summarize by telling an assessment story from 1968 which I have never forgotten. In my role in the Student Union I was asked to adjudicate in a dispute between an art teacher and a pupil.
 wounded tiger The source of the disagreement was a canvas divided into four panels like an old-fashioned window frame. In the top left pane there was a tiger going across the grassland. In the top right pane, there was a tiger bleeding from a bullet wound but no grass. In the bottom left pane there was blood on the grass but no tiger. In the final pane there was a dead tiger.
The girl concerned had produced the work in response to the teacher’s request to illustrate a quote about how man edits and interprets his environment. The teacher had assessed it as a grade D because he expected a first year art student to interpret such a quotation literally. He freely admitted that in the third or fourth year of studies he would have marked it much higher because the technique was first class and later in her studies such a divergent approach to the theme would have been welcomed.
The girl had actually studied art elsewhere first and was , in effect, a third year student but he claimed to be unaware of that till our meeting.
As always the matter was resolved by compromise.
My point is that the relevant material required for an ethnographic project to be scientific could only be gathered if you were Skinner and the object of your study, the girl in his box. Consequently, I see ethnography as a fascinating documentary snapshot. At least I do so thus far in my knowledge of it as a subject.
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