Damien's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

So, that was week 1 then was it?

Lifestream

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea of an assessed lifestream – the notion of stuff that I posted to social bookmarking and microblogging sites being channeled into one place and giving a scattered snapshot of the inside of my head quite excited me. Hell, I thought to myself, this is what I do all day anyway. Why not get graded for it?

Now, however, I’m a week in and I do have my reservations – or perhaps just some concerns. Principally, there’s this: I can fill my feeds up with the most relevant, the most obscure, the most interesting and most ‘hip’ items that I can find, but this doesn’t actually demonstrate anything beyond the fact that I’m a fiend with a search engine. It doesn’t demonstrate learning, or any form of progress. I know that that’s what this blog space is for, but I am curious about the balance of points awarded to each technology and if they will be accurately balanced towards spaces that allow learning.

Lifestream themes

Regarding the ‘themes’ of what ended up in my lifestream this past week, I think, looking back over it now, the streams’ content (all in reaction to the ‘film festival’ videos) could fit nicely into two divisions equating to Hand’s two narratives of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’. Or, if you like, two towns: Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cyberia’ and James Harkin’s ‘Cyburbia’ – to continue with the tenuous ‘mapping’ notion which I was playing with in an earlier blog post.

Whilst dystopian narratives and hellish visions of a cyberpunk futurescape are far more compelling than narratives of utopic bliss (The Matrix vs. the upcoming Facebook: The Movie – no, seriously, stop laughing), I couldn’t help but think that this black and white division of cyberculture is far too reductive and glosses over another possible, emerging, reality:  something closer to that of Harkin’s ‘Cyburbia’ (see video at top) – a digital wasteland of trivia and blandness; a place as eerily artificial, contrived and controlled as the manufactured 1950’s boomer towns where it draws its name from.

I think this space, with it’s neatly contrived digital picket-fences, pretty walls and selective family photo albums is a place that might merit further nosing around in – masking, as I think it does, a whole universe of barely concealed neuroses, half-hidden unwanted links and a whole new world of politics to get ourselves lost in.

Twitter

What to say about the twitter tutorials (I refuse, refuse to use ‘twittorial’)? Well, I like Twitter as much as the next guy, but the blunt truth is that Twitter is close to useless for conversation. By the time you’re done entering in hashtags and URLs, you have sufficently few characters left to reduce any cogent thought to a monosyllabic, txtspk grunt which makes peerfectly articulate people suddenly come across as incapable of communication. Don’t get me wrong:  it’s great for sharing random links, following threads of content and just-in-time questions and answers, but I don’t rate it as a tool for facilitating discussion. To that end, it strikes me as perhaps slightly odd that our discussion forum threads are not graded. I worry this will see the forums ignored – a bit of a missed chance maybe, in light of Jay Cross’s assertion that conversation is the single most powerful tool for learning. Perhaps the comments section on these blogs will become that space.

Film Festival

I really enjoyed this – a fun, novel way to get the mind going and a useful set of lenses through which to read and re-read Hand and Bell. Great choices for the videos, great comments and overall highly enjoyable.  More like this please. More!

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Hand’s ‘dystopian narrative’ seems be one where new technologies provide government and big corporations an increasing level of access to your life and data. What he didn’t mention is the other new digital battlefront: the boundaries between friends and family online.

‘Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids’

‘Do you want to be my friend? Confirm or ignore?’

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

A classic example of what I think Hand identifies as the ‘dystopian narrative’:

I post this because I’ve been reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cyberia‘, from 1994 and James Harkin’s ‘Cyburbia‘, released this year. It’s impossible not to notice how similar the language of Rushkoff’s ‘Cyberia’ is to that of The Matrix movies, which came five years later.

Rushkoff pulls together a pallette of ideas, narratives and artefacts from early internet counter-culture, detailing a movement who wanted to use virtual reality, house music, video games and a shed load of psychadelics to hack ‘the matrix’ of reality, reshaping the world into something new. You can make up your own mind if they did it or not, but it’s a fascinating read: there’s more than a hint of the beginnings of what we now call social ‘media’. Rushkoff would later coin the phrase ‘screenager‘ and claim that ‘social media caused the credit crunch‘.

But whereas Rushkoff’s book is all breathless energy and enthusiasm, James Harkin’s 2009 book, ‘Cyburbia’, paints a picture of an altogether more paranoid, dislocated space. ‘Cyburbia’, as Harkin depicts it, is a world of twitching virtual windows, bitchy gossip, facebook politics and a thousand mundane distractions too trivial to mention. Its citizens, he seems to suggest, have become enslaved to Norbert Wiener’s ‘cybernetic loop’.

I have no idea who is more on the money, but it’s great to get two such contrasting lenses on the same subject.

Rushkoff is fond of quoting Alfred Korzybski’s observation that ‘the map is not the territory‘, but I wonder if we can’t tag two towns on the Map of the Internet [2009 edition]: Cyberia and Cyburbia. The former a small, but still lawless corner of the internet, and the latter a larger space, but a bland, 1950’s American, picket-fence town.

More

Douglas Rushkoff

James Harkin

British Pathe News

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Who is going to control the internet? Can it be controlled? Do we want it to be controlled?

Hand’s analysis of the differing ‘narratives’ on cyberculture seems to reveal two central themes – two lenses through which to view cyberspace. Lenses which, at first glance anyway, would seem to sit in stark opposition to each other. First that cyberspace will be a liberating space for society, removing barriers to communication, reducing the cost of creating value to zero and moving us away from rigid top-down control of governments. The other, a narrative that seems to be in almost bipolar opposition, is that the web is providing government and big corporations opportunities to mount assaults on our privacy and space which would have been previously unthinkable.  And I can see both sides.

A piece by Charlie Brooker in last week’s Guardian would seem to illustrate this quite well. Drawing together strands from a story about how “artist” Damien Hirst has gone all legal handbags with another artist (Cartrain, a 19-year old would-be Banksy) who had the temerity to use an image of Hirst’s much-discussed diamond skull piece in a montage, and how this relates to broader issues of copyright and owenership, Brooker then turns to comment on the increasingly hysterical legislation being mooted by the British government in response to file-sharing technologies. In short, the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule is back on the table after, we can assume, a ferocious round of  lobbying by the music industry. Brooker then says:

”In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.’

And it was. I know this because I was one of those kids.

Old school

Did I know that I was breaking the law? No. I was completely unaware of issues of copyright and ownership. I was six for God’s sakes. All I knew was that there was a machine in my living room which enabled me to record songs off the radio so that I could listen to them again when I chose to. Not when or where the record company said I should, but where and when I chose.

In terms of simple affordances , the only difference between BBC’s Radio 1 Sunday Chart show combined with my Dad’s tape-deck and modern peer-to-peer file-sharing softwares, is the fact that the latter is explicitly in corporation’s faces. In public. Recording a track off of Radio 1 in 1985, a music executive had no way of knowing that such illegal activity was hapenning. Or even if he had known, he had no earthly way of doing anything about it.

It would seem that at the same time as new technologies have enabled people to share media and enabled data to be ’set free’, the same technologies have enabled corporations to gain a window into a social habit which has gone on for decades. And to try to do something about it. You might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the solution would be for them to go where the kids are and start working on online services that deliver quality, value-for-money products in a manner in keeping with the times, but no, you’d be mistaken.  Law-suits, apparently,  are the way to go.

Time for a little bit of history.

Older school

My father (80 years young this year) recently told me stories of how during the early 1950’s he and his friends would gather at each other’s houses to play vinyl records and share music. Was this ‘filesharing’? Did it constitute illegal activity? Were they breaking the law?

Similarly, my father also told me a tale (just this weekend gone) which caught my attention: during the Second World War, Ireland (my home) was officially ‘neutral’, meaning it had no strategic allegiance with either Allied or Axis powers. This led to some fairly weird behaviour from the Irish state. One of their more peculiar notions was to place a ban on the broadcast  and showing of all war footage – so those wonderful old Pathe New reels which British audiences crowded into cinemas to watch, were not shown in the Republic of Ireland.

But, my father told me conspiratorially, the word on the street was that should you know the right person in Dublin, access could be got to small, select private screenings of war footage which were held on the quiet in backstreet Dublin cinemas.  Due to the bootleg nature of the footage,  it was not the sanitised, ‘good war’ morale-boosting footage which London audiences saw. Instead it was raw, hideously violent rushes shot on European battlefields which showed the true carnage of battle.

So, did the censorship rules implemented by the Irish government (to stop ‘filesharing’ of contraband materials) actually facilitate a small number of Irish citizens actually being better informed about the realities of what combat troops were facing than the folks over in London? Perhaps.

I couldn’t help but think that, occasionally, the invasion of corporatism into technologies often results in unforseen consequences – cultural and social changes that can’t be predicted. And can’t be controlled. That the battle for control of new technologies and the frequently absurd squabble over increasingly complicated copyright issues can lead to cracks in the spaces betewen the desires of end users and the corporations trying to protect their wares. I’m thinking this could be an interesting theme to track.

Note: it’s interesting perhaps that the British Pathe News reels site which I linked to above plays a vast archive of fantastic footage, but doesn’t allow for embedding. They’re not still worried about reproduction rights are they?

References

[1] Hand, M (2008) ‘Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat’, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.