This week I was struggling with the two core texts by Haraway and Hayles. I’ve been reading some of the blogs of other people in this course and this has helped me get my head round the ideas and think about what they mean for me.  I did find the texts very tough reading and part of me doesn’t really like the ideas they outline very much. (Part of me… I must be getting post-human).

I’m not sure I really like the metaphor of the cyborg. This is too much machine and too little human for me. Maybe I’m not immersed enough in technology, but I really value everything to do with real life far more than anything virtual. To me machines are there purely to help me do my work, stay in touch with people, learn better, etc. I’ve also never really got into science fiction. I can understand what Haraway is getting at to some extent and I agree that the philosophical idea of crossing boundaries of race and gender can be fascinating. As a “language person” however, I am constantly working with cultural ideas and heritage and I can’t imagine a scenario where this will not be important to people.

However, I am interested in the idea which both Hayles and Haraway have described of having a collective identity (whether you want to call this posthuman or cyborg). I know this is an idea which is very strongly linked to postmodernism (though I’m sure this idea has been around for a lot longer,  but maybe it is becoming more important in this era).  I think what is new in this text is that Hayles is using this concept to explain what happens in virtual environments and she is arguing that virtuality is just one facette of our identity, but still an embodied one. But even without any connection to machines it’s interesting to acknowledge how different we are in various surroundings and roles. Again, as a language teacher this is an important thought as learning a new language is linked to a new role and new outlooks in life. Language itself and the way we teach and learn it is also made up of so many different parts. It can be split up into reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, and in some ways it has to come together again, but with a different emphasis for every person and in every act of communication. There is a lot to think about here and I’d quite like to write my final essay on something to do with language and learning in the posthuman era.

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.

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

This is a very interesting text. First it gives a good definition of what “posthuman” is:

- informational pattern is privileged over material instantiation, so that biological embodiment is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life;

- consciousness is not seen as a central phenomenon, but as a minor sideshow;

- body is seen as a prosthesis which can be extended or replaced;

- there are no boundaries between bodily existence and computer simulation

The text is basically concerned with the concept of embodiment. The author is arguing that disembodiment is not necessarily a consequence of the posthuman. In fact her “dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival”. (p.5)

She argues that the concept of disembodiment is not a new one and was described in humanism as well when cognition was emphasized rather than embodiment.

She sees herself as a posthuman collectivity, a “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make a self.

Virtuality is defined as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns”

In 1948 Shannon defined information “as a probablility function with no dimensions, no materialility, and no necessary connection with meaning. It is a pattern not a prescence” (p. 18). This leads to theories of disembodiment. However, the author explains that there have always been critics of this view and that this was a theory driven by the atmosphere of the time. The author would like to recover ” a sense of the virtual that fully recognizes the importance of the embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings”. The book she is introducing describes various narratives through an interplay of science and literature. She would like to see disembodiment as just one narrative amongst others. She uses literature to illustrate “embodied” theories. Literature itself shows that we use embodiment (information is not portrayed as patterns but is embedded in a story).

What do I think of this text?

I’m really pleased that Hayles is arguing for an embodied version of the posthuman. I have never liked the concept of disembodiment. I also agree that the existence of virtuality and virtual worlds is not an argument for disembodiment of information. Virtual worlds are games where you use your imagination and the imagination will always be part of you.

What I don’t quite understand is how she is reacting to the definition of “posthuman” she gives in the beginning. She undermines part of the definition in the text by emphasizing the importance of embodiment. To her the splitting up of the persona seems to be more important as a definition. However, she doesn’t really outline her own definition of what “posthuman” is.

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

If I’m reading this text right then Haraway rejects the view that had been prominent through Marx and Freud of there being an innate desire for a wholeness that we lost along the way somewhere. Instead she embraces the breaking up, the differences, the barriers to communication, the transgressions of boundaries as this gives every individual the right to “write their own story”.

Even though she quotes the “women of colour” as a new ideology and this seems to refer to some sort of community I’m wondering whether her portrayal of the cyborg isn’t by definition an extremely isolated and lonely creature? Is this really a positive development?

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.

Another pretty exhausting week gone by. At the beginning of the week I was working very hard on the ethnography. Again, my major problems were on the technological stage, I was really dreading this and had all sorts of hickups with converting pictures to slides and compression and all the rest. The thing is that everyone assumes I’m great at technology as I’m doing this course, but in actual fact I still find a lot of things very daunting. So, it’s great feeling now that I managed to get this up and running. I don’t think the lifestream properly portrays the amount of work that was put in this. While the lifestream is a nice tool to get everything together I’m starting to get a bit suspicious about how useful it will be for assessment. It’s very easy to “feed” it with tweets and things from tumblr, but you would have to read it quite carefully to actually find out how meaningful the entries are. A lot of work for the tutors…

Since finishing the ethnography I’m really enjoying reading the work of the others. It’s not only the contents which I find fascinating, but also how people have done this technically – a lot of things to learn from. I really like the peer reviews which is where the people on the course come together more closely and you more of a feeling of a “community” -  (in a nice sense).

Right, here goes: I went for the Sleeping Cats at FlickR.

Again, the quality isn’t great, as I had to compress the video.

Looking forward to your comments.

This week the lifestream is mainly showing up the different applications and tools that I have been looking at in connection with the virtual ethnography. I have been thinking about this project a lot as well as trying to find ways of presenting it. The danger is to focus on the technology rather than on the contents, particularly if you are a bit intimidated by the technology. I’ve been reading Bell’s article on community and cyberculture which presents a very interesting discussion about the term community, both real-life and virtual, and also presents some positive and negative views on online communities. I think this will impact on my virtual ethnography by increasing my reflexive point of view. I will be asking myself whether I think negatively or positively about online communities and I am sure that my ethnography will be quite subjective because of this.

It was interesting to read through Rheingold’s very positive account of an online community. The fact that he is an active member of this community will certainly influence his point of view.

The comments on the discussion board don’t appear in the lifestream so there is less evidence of particpation. It was nice to use the discussion board for a change, but I’m also looking forward to the virtual artefacts appearing from next week and the discussion that will take place on the blogs.

Rheingold, H (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. [web site]

This chapter describes various points of view regarding online communities.

It begins by looking at the general concept of communities in order to understand online communities.  In an attempt to define “community” Bell and Valentine (1997) are quoted: “It’s [...] about belonging and exclusion, about ‘us’ and ‘them’.” Other definitions go back to Tönnies’ work from 1887 where he defines ‘Gemeinschaft’ as a traditional, close-knitted community and ‘Gesellschaft’ as the impoverished urban society. The idea of ‘Gemeinschaft’ is “tinged with nostalgia” and can be compared to the concept of ‘village life’.

There are also imagined communities (like nations) which “exist because their members believe in them and maintain them through shared cultural practices” (p.95)

Threats to communities are detraditionalization, which is linked to disembedding (no longer rooted in place) and globalization. These in turn inspire heightened reflexivity giving us more choices about our identities, our politics. A negative aspect might be ’schizophrenia’ or loss of depth. On the other hand this might give us a stronger desire for community.

These concepts of imagined community, globalization, disembedding, reflexivity and detraditionalization might all open up the Internet as an ideal site for communities.

Are virtual communities a good thing? Rheingold seems to think so. He describes them as the natural response to the disintegration of traditional communities. He describes shared social codes, reciprocity, longevity, critical mass and sufficient human feeling as the elements of virtual communities

But what makes a community? There need to be some social codes, as described in examples in the text. This can be made more difficult through multiple identities. The rules themselves form a sense of identity.

Are online communities a bad thing? Critics of online communities describe participation in virtual communities as ‘bunkering in’.  The notion of community itself could be seen as very exclusive and uncomfortable places if you don’t fit in.

Other ways of thinking about community: The concept of ‘Bund’ might be an alternative: “an elective grouping, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong sense of belonging’.

Problems of inclusion and exclusion. There are in fact a lot of requirements to joining an online community. Apart from the aspects of access and skills there are also social and cultural barriers. Virtual communities can be just as problematic as “real” communities in terms of exclusion and bounding out of other communities and individuals.

My thoughts: This text is again very concerned about the topic of inclusion and exclusion which I am also interested in. It would also be interested to find out how many people actually want to belong to totally virtual communities. Often online communication is formed to keep in touch with real life friends and acquaintances. As my 17 year old niece was saying “Why would I want to chat to people online who I don’t know. It would be a waste of time.”

Bell, David (2001) Community and cyberculture, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp92-112 [e-book]

At the beginning of this week I was still looking at the visual artefacts made by other students and commenting on these.

I then turned to Block 2, looking at virtual communities and ethnographies. The lifestream reflects the readings I have done on this and shows some of the searches I have undertaken on the Internet to find a community which I could research. The two examples of virtual ethnographies I have read so far were interesting to read. Personally I like investigating interactions and making meaning out of these, though (as I stated in one of the posts) this makes me feel quite voyeuristic. I think the ethical aspect is definitely one worth considering, particularly the ethnography on “Happy Land” left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. It was also good to get back to the discussion board to see what other people are thinking of doing their virtual ethnography on.

Chan, A (2008) The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong’s Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line. Sociological Research Online. 13(4). [web site]

A Flickr Ethnography

This text gives a good illustration of what a virtual ethnography can be like:

There are some comments on how you could structure it:

“Broadly speaking, an ethnographic approach involves providing a description, an analysis and an interpretation of a culture-sharing group” (p.4)

The research centres around six questions (p.4):

“1. Is this a good place to study given the overall cultural themes we are tackling?

2. Can the individuals we see interacting here be described as a culture-sharing group?

3. What might be the main themes emerging from the investigation of this group and how does one go about identifying them?

4. What level of involvement is to be justifiably expected of the researcher? How will the participants’ perspective be given an appropriate voice? What are the ethical issues at stake?

5. How does the personal experience of the researcher come to bear on the analysis and the proposed interpretation?

6. How transferable to different sites is an approach which might work here?”

In the abstract provided Clari only offers answers to the first 3 questions.

1.She describes the flickr site and its differences to a real site. She compares it to a theatre setting. She describes it as a complex “deep” site worth investigating.

2. Clari offers a definition of community (p.7)

“In his Introduction to Virtual Communities Research and Cybersociology Magazine Issue Two, Hamman (1997) defines the sociological term ‘community’ as:

a. A group of people

b. who share social interaction

c. and some common ties between themselves and other members of the group

d. and share an area for at least some of the time.”

In this sense the individuals can be defined as a group.

3.In this section Clari focuses on the user-generated texts.

She comments on

-         their signature and their use of icons (p.10):  “The use of icons complements the text as a powerful tool in establishing one’s character, one’s identity on this stage: the theme of identity performance, how it unfolds and what affects it, begins to emerge here and will remain important throughout this discussion.”

-          the user-contributed tags which tend to “democratize” the picture and share it with a wider audience.

-         the user-contributed notes which interact with the actual photo

-         the comments of the participants: She distinguishes 3 groupsof comment: comments about the digital object as an artifact – comments about the ongoing interaction – comments on the actual subject of the photograph; all these groups interact with each other and construct meaning around the original object.
Clari defines the following themes which emerge from the interactions (p.25):
“the overarching themes of identity building and performance, of ownership and of power continue to stand out”

My thoughts: You feel quite voyeuristic when reading this ethnography! Maybe this is the nature of ethnographies though, you are “listening in” to what people are saying. I thought this was a very clear example of how you can construct a virtual ethnography. I liked the way she included the use of icons for the participants to construct their identity. This refers back to the text by Kress that we had been reading and the power of pictorial representation vs representation through speech. However, the identities here are made up of a mix of both (particularly as by clicking on the user names you can access their photo collections and view the identity they have created for themselves through these pictures).

The whole notion of having discussions around picture shows once again the power of this form of representation and how open it is to interpretation.

Clari, M (unpublished, 2009) A Flickr ethnography.

This text uses Virtual Ethnography in order to examine the concept of motherhood. The community being researched consists of a group of working mothers in Hong Kong. The author investigates this concept primarily through chats in a dedicated website for mothers called “Happy Land”. She has been a participant in this forum for a year before she starts investigating it. She has also met a lot of the participants off line and the off-line conversations verify and extend the online chats.

The author draws three conclusions:

a)      A lot of the chat shows mothers “performing” in a conventional mode as expected by society. This is shown in chats where mothers talk about their children in a positive way where they dwell on household issues, etc

b)      Some of the chat also refers to discontent. Interestingly, the reaction of other mums in the public forum is to pacify and to support. In offline conversations or private talk there may be different reactions like criticism or urging someone to leave their partner.

c)      Some of the conversations (online and offline) show the participants behaving “badly”, or somewhat subversively. The author interprets these moments as incidents where the mothers free themselves from their identity as mothers.

I enjoyed reading this text, as I’m personally interested in this subject. While the findings are interesting I don’t find them very surprising. I think they correspond very well to experiences I have of offline groups of mothers. I would also say that the larger a group is the less critical people would be with one another. Serious problems would be discussed in one to ones or in more intimate groups, while people in larger groups, particularly when they are new to the group would “represent” themselves in a more conventional way. I wonder whether the banter and “behaving badly” incidents can really be classified as subversive. This might be an opportunity to let off steam in order to “function” better again in the conventional mode.

I was quite concerned about the ethical questions behind this research. The author herself admits that this is borderline. I think if I had been one of the participants I’d have been quite upset about being observed and interpreted. At the very least it would have made me more vary in future to be open about private problems.

In short, although chatroom communication allows users more time to consider what they say and thereby greater opportunities for reflexivity, at the same time they are necessarily limited to certain masterstatuses by virtue of the way websites and chatrooms are set up and operate.

When chat is immediately objectified on the computer screen as one hits the ‘return’ key, the presentation of the self thus articulated and emerged is the product of a much more reflexive, dynamic and interactive process.

Chan, A (2008) The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong’s Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line. Sociological Research Online. 13(4). [web site]