Nicola's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

This week was mostly a matter of being ill at home with fluey symptoms.

Having run a fever all weekend with coughs and sniffles I was off work for the whole week and on Monday 16th and Wednesday 18th I was too busy being tucked up in bed sleeping off symptoms, taking paracetamol and feeling like my head might explode to do anything online at all. My lifestream from all corners of the web was blank and friends were much more concerned about my silence than about my tiny Tuesday tweet to say I was unwell. They know to be Nicola is to be online, sharing, posting, updating. To be silent or near silent for any number of days is weird or concerning behaviour but particularly when everyone knew I was in town and not tied up with a family event or otherwise away from access to the internet. A few friends got quite spooked and started checking in on Facebook. One was getting concerned, absolutely days ahead of time, that I might not be well enough to roast the massive Thanksgiving Turkey next week. Such is the peculiar impact of my presence/absence online.

By Thursday I had perked up enough to enter the light daytime television period of any illness and that meant I could also handle a little light email and start bookmarking a few interesting things. I let people know via Twitter that I was on the mend and answered various kind Tweets from concerned followers – most weren’t those that see me around town a lot but those who do retweet me and take an interest in following up comments. I was supposed to attend an Edinburgh Coffee Morning (a weekly networking event for new tech/social media) this week and two of the people I should have met there also checked in to see if I would be along and how I was feeling. Flicking through my email I spotted a few things I should grab and note and, particularly as I was still feeling quite ropey, could come back to later when feeling brighter. These included:

• An announcement from the Ordnance Survey about mapping data which will be made free online – as well as offering some interesting potential for emerging location based web services this is also of general professional interest as my own organisation provides Digimap (http://www.edina.ac.uk/digimap/), a service which provides online maps and spatial data of Great Britain for UK HE and FE (including various ordnance survey data sets).
• A link out to a webcast of the Silicon Valley Comes to the UK – NESTA event on Social Media with participants including Stephen Fry and Biz Stone.
• An article on the unmasking of notorious escort and blogger “Belle de Jour” and what the publicity about her real identity reveals about the problems of anonymous blogging.
• A link to remind me that Twitter have started supporting Tweets via MMS (only in the UK, only from Orange handsets so far) which I’m eager to try as I often take pictures of newspaper hoardings on my walk home from work when daft/alarming/emotive/non-news type headlines catch my eye. I also grab shots from my phone of little moments at home (often nice plates of food or daftness) and bizarre window displays in shops. None are thrilling, all are ephemeral and all are easier to MMS (multimedia message) than to email or upload on the spot (see examples below) so it should be fun gilding my Tweets in the next few weeks – it will add a whole new element to the lifestream as I could get super literal about digitally tracking my day if I wanted to.

By Friday I was, aside from 30 second nose blows, feeling much more like myself and a lot more able to absorb the world (if not really take that much part in it again yet). In the daytime I saw a few emails and news stories like a new Facebook Privacy Policy (always interesting given how often they relate in public backlash – although Facebook provide a free service their users know all too well the value of them walking which leads to interesting clashes), an article on Second Life and the rather radical (and good) news that YouTube are adding automatic captioning for all videos (eventually) which will mean increased accessibility but also increased search engine friendliness. One of the ongoing challenges to humans becoming posthuman or part cyborg or simply delegating more work to automated systems is the fact that human understanding is very complex compared to those of machines. Machines can interpret sound, images, video but most are best with numbers, text and similar programmatic inputs. There are specialist systems and algorithms for different sorts of data but few computers are expert with all types on input whereas most humans are capable of understanding (in some way) sound, image, text etc. more intelligently. The more machines are able to understand unmediated images, video, etc. the more they will be able to serve and interact with their human users. Until then image-based pdfs will ellude screen-reading software, metadata for sound recordings will rely on words or provided information not the meaning of what is spoken or conveyed.

The strange thing about Friday’s email was the number of happy silly links friends and colleagues were sharing – I don’t know when Fridays officially became the day for silliness but they now always seem like the time the daftest things come to light. This week I was sent Catsforgold, a very accurate parody of the recent rash of daytime TV ads urging you to post your gold jewellery to similarly named companies who will post you cash in return. However the best silly site I was sent this week is actually a perfectly normal Amazon product page that has been subverted by viral people power because, well, quite a lot of people thought that a Steering Wheel Laptop Table sounded a tad lethal. The time and (in most cases) subtlety of the posts here wonderfully subverts and questions the validity of the product. It’s something I’ve seen Jon Ronson encouraging Twitter followers to do to dubious ghost detection kit and, just this weekend, a friend forwarded me the ebay ad for Debbie Magee’s moulded rubber hand which was replete with questions that may have been serious, may have been meant in jest but definitely lowered the tone of the sale in a method roughly proportionate to the unusually brief sellers description and cynical responses from not Paul Daniels, the listed seller, but his apparently unamused PA. What is always so good and challenging about these subtle virtual pitch invasions is that, unlike most physical situations, there is an opacity in text and publicness of discourse that makes (sellers) treating remarks as anything other than sincere potentially quite risky. I don’t know if that ultimately may lead to a more conservative society or not but I suspect it is just the new face of satire. Why make crude political sketches when you can post your comments ironically right on your target’s website? Maybe being post human in this way is also post political? I don’t agree with Harraway’s idealism but it’s hard not to see something recognizable in her proposal of the future of politics when there is significant public disinterest in national and party politics at the same time as interest in niche and specilist campaigns increases.

On Friday evening my partner and I were feeling up to organizing our Thanksgiving celebrations for next Thursday and, being good posthuman chefs, delegated much of our memory of recipes to the internet, so it was a Google search for a vegan chocolate pie, a world of troubled searching and browsing to find a recipe to make a tasty Turnip side dish after a massive Turnip (that’s a Turnip not a Neep or Swede – Google isn’t great at the distinction but recipe wise it’s crucial) showed up in our Veg Box, and finally a quick search for Artichoke Dip found me the YouTube clip I’d cooked (deliciously) from before. I’d forgotten the name of the dish, the cook, the website, the ingrediants for the recipe and still I knew it would take 2 minutes to find it. I can’t imagine how one would do this in a recipe book where, images aside, your only help are headings, indexes etc. and finding most dishes can be a little hit and miss. And written recipes are certainly less memorable than Mr Alan Smith…

This weekend I haven’t been adding much to my lifestream but I have been browsing for presents for my nephews and niece as, being all the way over in Seattle, it is often easiest to send the bulk of their presents via US internet retailers as they arrive quickly but we can see what we are buying and we can pay without any currency or postal rate issues. The internet adds and takes away from international family communications – Skype and present buying online is great but it is not the same as seeing people in person or purchasing gifts you have picked out yourself – there is a rewarding festishistic quality to present shopping that it seems impossible to replicate online. However having a showroom-like store for touching, browsing, trying on etc. who would then send on items a-la online retailers may be worth revisiting as a concept (since this is how department stores operated for many years) given the way in which shops are now stocked and how frequently you are referred or suggested to look online for a wider range of items. There are many things I can pick online but until websites go haptic, 3D and odourised there are also many items it is much more fun to grab in a shop.

Talking of culture clashes there were two news items I was depressed to find this weekend. Tweeters are being paid to Tweet occasional automated ads (something I find irrationally exploitative though it may be a Million Dollar Homepage type flash in the pan) and the London Nude Tech Calendar is ready for launch. The latter I find incredibly depressing after a fortnight of reading about feminism and moving beyond human limitations and physiques. The volunteers for the calendar are very conventional attractive people but it has been promoted by the organizers as being a sort of Who’s Who of Social Media players in the capital, that implies that in order to be part of that industry there is some sort of beauty filter rather than competence measure. And, although the calendar features teams of staff and a relatively mixed gender balance, the entire promotional presence is based around the image of a young naked woman (tagged left and right NSFW – Not Safe For Work) rather than a more representative mix of images.

However I should add that I find the nude calendar movement that has come out of the Calendar Girls phenomenon more than a little degrading. The undercutting humour of middle aged ladies with wobbly bits and discretely placed baked goods is wholly absent in calendars that photograph models from a glamour or “artistic” gaze where nudity rather than comedy or playfulness is the goal. Having been given a series of wholly non ironic – though amusingly cheesy – nude calendars no more than 9 or 10 years ago (the engineering sector is, I am sure, still producing such things for sales reps to hand out) I find it can be hard to detect the irony in these things sometimes. I think I would compare London Nude Tech to most of comedian Jimmy Carr’s material – both may have a value to a post-modern ironic audience but there is simply no way to guarantee your audience or that success will not largely come from those that simply agree with what is being ironically nodded at.