Silvana's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh

Lifestream Summary

Dec 13

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | 1 Comment

I was attracted to the idea of a lifestream as an adaptation of the 17th century practice of ‘commonplacing’ but I had no idea how a digital version of this would work in practice. Before I started the MSc, my digital presence was very limited. Since starting the MSc, I started to use Delicious as a tool as well as a wiki for collaborative writing. To a much lesser extent I was using Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. My perception was that I was not very digitally engaged.

In my second week summary, I had blogged that I was still grappling with what the stream could technically capture and that I felt that it could not capture my process when I was reading course material. However, reviewing my lifestream, I feel it gives a good account of my engagement with the course. At the time it seemed a bit chaotic but reviewing it I can see a logical account. I am surprised how even my tweets seem coherent. Perhaps it is just the process that appears chaotic – when you are in the middle of collecting a range of information – but reviewing it I can see my progress. The weekly summaries were a good discipline to make me reflect weekly on my stream but I think they are ‘in the moment’ of the process. Going over the last 12 weeks of my stream is giving me another perspective. Maybe over time the chaos coalesces into an archive – a curation as Jen called it.

I learned to use the lifestream to:

Process my reading

I had realised early on that I could use Tumblr to capture my reading, but while I created an account in the first week, I did not have the time to figure out how it works until Week 5 when I added it to my feed. I stopped mindmapping the articles I was reading and used Tumblr as a tool to reflect on key quotes. I would right click on the links in the lifestream to open them up in a new tab (because of technical problems in getting the content into the feed). I could then review them and write up my thoughts in my blog albeit in a different format.

Collect information and data

During the virtual ethnography I started to use the lifestream as a data collection tool – holding the videos and other information that would make up my ethnography. I copied selected comments from the videos onto Tumblr. It proved an effective tool to construct the ethnography.

I had blogged that while the lifestream aggregates the disparate information we collect as we traverse the digital world, it is our minds that make sense of it: The ‘machine’ provides no interpretation or sensemaking of the material it aggregates. Our human mind makes the connections and provides the context for why this information was noted in the first place (see blog relating Giorgi’s phenomenological approach and the lifestream).

Link to my lifestream.

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Lifestream, phenomenology and being public

Dec 13

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

Before summarizing my lifestream experience I want to reflect on two insights I had while reviewing my own lifestream.

Lifestreaming and Giorgi's phenomenology

As a qualitative analyst, I was struck as I was reviewing and in a sense analyzing my own lifestream the similarities between the lifestream process and Amadeo Giorgi's approach to analysis.  I am not a practitioner of Giorgi's existential phenomenological approach but I have worked with a few people who use his methods.  I am aware of the basic principles and have quickly added to my lifestream some quotes that illustrate his technique. 

His method is to first capture the experience of the individual as a whole – create a 'life-text'.  In a sense, the lifestream is a kind of 'life-text' – the difference is that rather a researcher producing it, the individual his/herself selects bits of information and the lifestream application aggregates it together. 

As Von Eckartsberg
comments (1998, P.21) about it:
We go first from unarticulated living (experiaction) to a protocol or account. We create a “life-text” that renders the experiaction in narrative language, as story. This process generates our data. Second, we movefrom the protocol to explication and interpretation. Finally, we engage in the process of the communication of findings.”

-  Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

The key to Giorgi's analysis process is to divide the account into 'meaning units'. 

Once the researcher has read the protocol and has a sense of the whole, she/he has to divide the protocol or description into what Giorgi calls Meaning Units. The task in this step is to discriminate the different units or blocks that express a self-contained meaning (Polkinghorne, 1989, p. 53). It is appropriate to bear in mind that we have to look at and understand these units or blocks in terms of the whole meaning, as Sokolowski emphasizes. Giorgi comments that the units are divided by looking at the different key terms, aspects, attitudes or values that the co-researcher expresses in the description. In this way, the researcher has to be aware of the changes in topics and meanings in the description. When the whole text or description is divided into meaning units, the researcher can analyze each of them easily because shelhe has now manageable units.” – Alberto De Castro, Introduction to Giorgi’s Existential Phenomenological Research Method, Psicología desde el Caribe. Universidad del Norte. No. 11: 45-56, 2003

In our use of the lifestream in this course, we were analysts in the sense that we extracted from the vast amount of information available on the web, the information or data that related to this course; that helped us to understand digital culture and ultimately how it could influence a digital pedagogy.  Each element of our lifestream could be seen as a 'meaning unit'.  However, 'meaning units' do not make sense on their own (hence the chaotic feel some of us expressed while in the process of constructing our lifestream).  It is viewing the meaning units as a whole that we get sense of the whole experience.  I know I am adapting Giorgi because we are not having an external 'analyst' extrapolate meaning from the lifestream but we are doing it ourselves – as lay analysts.  This is a very recent insight so I need more time to reflect on it.

On the public nature of the course

I am not aware of anyone outside the course viewing our posts (except for those like my friend and colleague Judy Davidson who were invited onto the course).  So the public nature of my posts and lifestream did not feature in my consciousness when I posted on my blog, or Twitter etc.  However, what I have appreciated is the public nature of fellow course members'  posts. I have learned a lot from reading other course members' contributions. And it made me reflect on the nature of education.  As students our assessments have been a private matter between us and our tutors and external examiners.  As students we are in 'competition' for grades. To view another student's work is considered 'cheating'.  The academic world is structured so we are rewarded for individual contributions to knowledge – to producing an individual doctoral thesis; to the number of articles we have published in high prestige journals.  But if our objective is learning for learnings sake, surely we learn so much more by sharing what we individually have found and thought about and collectively build upon it.  I think the structure of this course enables this. And in my final assignment I hope to explore this more in looking at virtual communities which encourage learning but which are not formally educational.

 

Week 11 Lifestream Summary

Dec 6

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

This week I have been thinking about my assignment topic. I had a Skype Chat on Monday with Sian which was helpful in clarifying my ideas about a topic area. (see blog)

I have been using my lifestream to collect information, links etc which I may use in my assignment. Tumblr has been useful as a way to add links to my lifestream (as well as Delicious).  I have been collecting information about Twitter and lifestreaming as well – as I am interested in both.  May find a way to weave them into my assignment topic.

I have only been able to work intermittently this week as I had three days when I was running all day workshops – can't really explore the internet when I am doing these 9-5 workshops as I am 'on' all the time – either demonstrating or helping course participants.  I have four days of the same next week but one is an 'away' gig which means I can work on the train and in the evenings as I'll  have no family obligations. 

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Mulling over assignment topic

Dec 6

Posted by silvanad in Assignment | No Comments

I had a chat session with Sian on Monday on my assignment topic  – my ideas were fuzzy at the beginning of the chat but started to take shape during our chat.

One thing I was clear about. I want to take a non-linear (non-assembly line) approach to how I would present my essay – similar to the approach I used for Davidsfarm. As for a topic, I thought about doing something related to virtual communities. By the end of my chat with Sian my topic area took shape as – Learning from informal educational online communities.  My definition of 'educational' would be broad – to capture those online communities whose intent may not formally be educational but whose members share information, tips and learning.  I thought that Sarah P.'s quilting community and John's online music community were good examples of that as well as the 'How-to' videos in Davidsfarm.

What struck me about the virtual ethnographies that we did about virtual communities was the wide-range of types of communites – from those which are simply a network of individuals who share some utilitarian need and are not really a community – to those which illustrate a range of support and intimacies among members.  It is the latter type of virtual community I hope to focus on and see what virtual features members use that encourage the sharing of knowledge. And what formal online educational communities can learn from them.

I hope to get Sarah and John's permission to use their ethnographies as exemplars but I also hope to find other exemplars.  Ideas from anyone are welcome.

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Week 10 Lifestream summary

Nov 30

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

I spent most of the week reading the core texts – Usher and Bayne – as well as some of the secondary readings. This is reflected in my Tumblr listings in the lifestream. I also spent more time this week reading and sometimes commenting on fellow students’ blogs. I have found this process very illuminating and helpful in clarifying my own thoughts. There are no blog posts from me this week – partly because of a technical fault in my WordPress editor – where I have lost all the tools in the visual field and also cannot see what I am writing. I finally got round this today when I wrote a post up in Word and pasted it into WordPress but it still required fiddling to get italics and paragraphs in. I hope we can resolve it this week.

I think this week’s readings made it a lot clearer on how digital culture (and the way we have been working) impacts on pedagogy. Now just to find a final assignment topic!

Interesting bits and pieces I picked up this week were a BBC report on What happened to Second Life? and a blog report that Wikipedia is losing its editors – hailing the end of free user-generated content. The BBC report cites that Second Life is not the great marketing tool that corporate businesses that it would be – with many pulling out. They mention the sharp learning curve needed to learn how to operate in Second Life and to build things. However, Linden Labs claim that the number of new users are growing but the real challenge will be getting a mobile presence, given the amount of memory needed to run SL. However, IBM still are enthusiastic about SL.

The report on Wikipedia states that Wikipedia is still very popular for readers but it is losing its editors. The report ends:

But if users are generally tired of contributing to a site without receiving any compensation, that is a big problem. Similar endeavors, like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, pays contributors according to the popularity of their entries. In a world where individuals increasingly have outlets to share their opinions, whether it be on blogs, Twitter or personal websites, a business model that depends on free content that does not promote or pay its editors is likely to change if it wants to continue growing.

I think the significance of both these reports is that they may be signalling a change in digital culture – a disillusionment of sites such as Second Life as being a marketing and business opportunity for big business and the beginning of the end (maybe) of the utopian idea of free user-generated content. I don’t know.

This week I also purchased an iphone. So another tool for my cyberself!

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Embodied absence, uncanny pedagogy and prosethetic devices

Nov 30

Posted by silvanad in Readings | No Comments

00 Me Collage2

Above is a digital collage of all my presences on the web – I tried to put this up on Wallwisher a few weeks ago but I couldn’t embed it. At the time, I commented ‘my fragmented and distributed self’ and now having read Sian I can see that it is also evidence of my embodied absence on the web.

On registering on a social site, we are invariably invited – almost as a first step – to ‘upload an image’, to duplicate ourselves visually in a piece of identity work which invites artifice and play as much as ‘authenticity’ or its semblance. In that our images and profiles – and, in more visual environments, our avatars – represent a ‘re-embodiment’ within the terms of the digital, we scatter our ‘bodies’ across the web where they gain a kind of independence as nodes for commentary, connection and appropriation by others into new networks and new configurations. These versions of ourselves become representative of uncanny ‘embodied absence’ as much as ‘disembodied presence’ (Hook 2005); our actual and immediate activity on the network at any given time is less important than the presence of our representation, our ‘ghost’. p. 6

My initial view was that I was scattered in several places in cyberspace. I understood it as both evidence of the cognisphere and also as an extension of myself as a cyborg. But I found the notion of being scattered and fragmented uncomfortable – scattered and fragmented being seen as negative states. However, conceptualizing this as ‘embodied absence’ makes me happier. I see it now as having ‘bookmarks’ in several places; that my representation of myself or my avatar hold my views and musings or artefacts that I constructed which others can reflect upon and comment upon without my being present in real time. That I can have multiple conversations simultaneously yet asynchronously – bending time and mind. I feel the lifestream is important as a device to collect my scattered selves. It is a tool to help me reformulate my fragmented thinking into a new whole.

The relation to pedagogy, I would like to reflect on Usher quoting Green on learning as traditionally being seen in terms of ‘interiority’.

…Green (1993) …argues that learning has traditionally been conceived in terms of ‘interiority’, a particular kind of cognition and mental development, linked to a normative view of rationality…new technologies [can be seen ] ‘as amplifiers of human attributes and capacities, and hence of human potential; as prosthetic devices which enable learners to operate differently’ (Green 1993:28) p. 4

Usher, Robin (1998) Lost and Found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research, Research, teaching and learning: making connections in the education of adults, SCUTREA, Exeter.

While Sian correctly pointed out during our chat session that this is another duality contrasting traditional and new approaches to learning, I think the concept of interiority is worth reflecting upon. Perhaps Green’s distinction is too sharp; that there is a place for ‘interiority’ when using new technologies in education. I would argue that in reflecting on an academic article, for example, one would go through an initial process of ‘interiority’, assessing the article in terms of one’s previous knowledge, linking it to other relevant articles etc. What is different in the idea of ‘prosethetic devices’ which enable learners to learn differently is when, for example, the student then blogs about their initial thinking about the article and is open to comments from multiple sources – not just the tutor but also fellow students as well as anyone else who cares to read the blog.

What I found accelerated learning in this course was being able to read other students’ blogs and comments. In traditional teaching essays are a private interaction between an individual student and tutor. And I wonder whether this is linked to traditional assessment criteria that the assignment has to be the work of the individual student only. However, if the objective is learning not assessment then the ‘privacy’ of individual work is no longer important. Feedback from a variety of sources is what is important. We need to let go of the notion of our ‘ownership’ of ideas. Of course, this is counter to academic career structures where you need to show evidence of your individual publications. And it might not work so well in primary and secondary education where one needs to gain confidence in one’s own ability first before sharing it for scrutiny by others – I don’t know. However, I think it is relevant for post-graduate work. For example, most research is done by teams yet we insist that dissertations and theses are sole works. A newly minted social science PhD may never had any experience of collaboration in research but that is what they are likely to do if they pursue a research career.

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Week 9 Lifestream Summary

Nov 22

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

Reflections on cyborgs, embodiment and cognispheres

This week my lifestream reflects the readings I have been doing on Gies, Badmington,  Hayles, Shields, and Muri.  I have continued with my experiment of copying out into Tumblr passages from my reading on which I wish to reflect.  My usual method is to outline writers’ ideas in MindManager – mapping out their logic.  However, in my MindManager approach I also highlight key passages so that aspect is replicated in Tumblr.  I then am able to review my selected passages in my lifestream.  I was nervous about doing this initially but I am finding it interesting.  My gleanings this week are:

Gies:

virtual selves leave many traces, are monitored, and it is difficult to maintain anonymity and multiple identities (see separate blog)

Badmington:

remnants of humanism in posthumanism

Hayles:

the cyborg is now obsolete because it is not networked enough; the notion of the cognisphere captures the dynamic relations and interactive exchanges between global  networks of machines and humans

Shields:

the cyborg can be updated but the scale should not be at the human level but at the nano-scales of biotechnology as a potential counter-space

Muri:

debunking disembodiment when bodies are everywhere etc. – separation of mind/soul from body and distaste of body has routes in Christianity; gives cynical reasons why academics have promoted the idea of disembodiment

soul leaving body 2soul leaving body

The way I decided to pull out summaries of these writers mirror the impression I get of their arguments from just reviewing the lifestream.  However, in my lifestream I also have some links to current developments that I think link  into the  literature I have read this week.

The first link raises the issue of whether the cyborg is really obsolete.

Contact lens with built-in virtual graphics (article from New Scientist)

 Contact lens with built in graphics

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

On the one hand, this development seems to support Shield’s contention that we must look at cyborg developments at a microlevel but at the same time, it contradicts this, as the  lens is to be worn by whole human body and the visual experience will incorporate both viewing the real world AND some projected virtual world.  Will real and virtual intermingle? Is this where the cyborg joins the cognisphere? Driving while talking on the mobile phone seems safe in comparison. The body is in the real world!

IBM Press Release on Developing a Computer that can simulate the human brain

computer brain

IBM (NYSE:  IBM) announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data — two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip. 

These advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions. The team’s work stands to break the mold of conventional von Neumann computing, in order to meet the system requirements of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow. 

As the amount of digital data that we create continues to grow massively and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there is a need for new kinds of computing systems – imbued with a new intelligence that can spot hard-to-find patterns in vastly varied kinds of data, both digital and sensory; analyze and integrate information real-time in a context-dependent way; and deal with the ambiguity found in complex, real-world environments.

The last paragraph supports what Hayles is saying about the cognisphere – that most of the interaction is between machines.  A cognitive computing chip would accelerate this  process.

Cyberwar is now a fact (BBC News)

cyberwar

“To go to physical war requires billions of dollars,” he said. “To go to cyber war most people can easily find the resources that could be used in these kind of attacks.”

The targets of such future conflicts were likely to be a nation’s infrastructure, said Mr Day, because networks of all kinds were now so embedded in peoples’ lives.

In response, he said, many nations now have an agency overseeing critical national infrastructure and ensuring that it is adequately hardened against net-borne attacks.

Again, the notion of the cognisphere is supported by the statement that ‘networks of all kinds were now so embedded in peoples’ lives’.

I think Hayles is correct in saying that the unit of analysis is not the individual – whether human or cyborg – but in relationships and networks.  And that is where ultimately the cyborg metaphor fails. Individualism has been a mark of the 20th century with roots going back to  the Enlightenment.  I suggest that we are moving away from individualism but it may be painful – and the realities of cyberwars may awaken us to this movement.

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I am in awe!

Nov 20

Posted by judyd in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Dear group:  I am Judy Davidson.  Silvana invited me to your area, and I am in awe of what you have been doing.  I am an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell’s Graduate School of Education.  I teach qualitative research and related topics…and thanks to a research project I was on several years ago (Hanau Model School Partnership studying the initiation of networked technology in a K-12 cluster of schools), I am also the instructor for a course called “Planning, Technology, and School Improvement”.  Silvana and I have been collaborating for several years on projects related to thinking about qualitative research and digital technologies.

I apologize for being so slow to get on board with the invitation to view and think with the class.  I could say I was extremely busy, but who isn’t.  As you know from her posts, Silvana was here last week and she showed me around her lifestream and the various ways your class is connecting.  We talked about both articles (more on that later).  But somehow trying to get in without my trusty guide was a mental barrier for me.

I got myself set up with Tweetdeck and I’ve been looking at your tweets as a kind of warm up.  This morning I said I’ve got to go in and really drive this thing myself…so here I am.  I’ve been meandering around in various spaces related to your work, and I AM IN AWE.  I’ve been teaching online for several years (first in Intralearn and now in Blackboard), and after this morning I would definitely describe these as ‘medieval’ compared to what you are doing.  The implications of what is going on pedagogically in your online world is staggering.  I was amazed by the richness of connections that were developing around the discussion of Haraway and Haynes.  I found myself jumping from tweet to blog to youtube and back again.  I thought–this is the most incredible textbook I’ve ever encountered.  I defy the traditional publishing company to create anything like what I see emerging here.  Again, I am in awe, and I am honored to have been asked to participate.

As Silvana mentioned earlier, the Haynes piece came right at the right moment for us, particularly her discussion of ’skeuomorphs’, which was exactly the term we needed for the discussion we were editing.  So thank you so much for assigning this reading at this particular moment!

I had actually read the Haraway article (probably about 1994) in about my third year of graduate school as part of a graduate student owned and operated campus-based discussion group on the philosophy of science and technology.  I was surprised when I went back to look at it to participate in this discussion what I remembered and didn’t remember about what I had read.  I remember her as having feminist leanings, but my overall memory about the article was the cyborg argument vis-a-vis technology…I was really focused on the technology.  Now, going back and re-reading it, I thought, “The argument about cyborgs and technology is really instrumental to what she wants to say about feminism and Marxism and what she is trying to say about the dead end they had backed themselves into–why did I miss that before?”

In comments by several others you’ve identified the issues regarding the time within which Haraway was writing.  When I read the article the first time, the World Wide Web didn’t exist…Mosaic was released the following year (1995)…from the Univeristy of Illinois where I was a graduate student, so Haraway’s arguments aren’t about an Internet connected world, they really grow out of knowledge of biological cyber research.  However, whenever I thought back to Haraway–my mind assumed she was writing about the Internet, and yet when I read it I realize that I was conflating my world and hers.  And yet, she was really on target with what was about to emerge.

Again, I am in awe, and I think that the value of the discussion, for me, is not Haraway or Haynes, so much, as the opportunity to see what you have done with them.

It’s raining here in Lowell–hope you’ve got sun wherever you are.  Good wishes.  Judy

Gies, embodiment, biometrics and anonymity

Nov 18

Posted by silvanad in Readings | 4 Comments

biometrics physical

Gies states:

The rhetoric of digital disembodiment is manifestly at odds with the increased use of surveillance technologies which are rendering the body more traceable than ever before. p.316 citing Aas, 2006

Since 9/11 national border security has been computerized so that passports have a digital signature. In the States, visitors have their fingerprints taken and photography has been used on exiting visitors at the UK border and they are experimenting with iris identification. DNA samples are used on a regular basis to identify criminals and CCTV is ominpresent in the UK, monitoring our movements in public spaces and is regularly used in criminal investigation.  So Gies’ statement rings true in our everyday experiences.  The body is the source of identification.

He also states:

it would be wrong to suggest that it is only now that the material body is becoming fully relevant in online interactions. Embodied communication has always been present on the internet: even before broadband technology brought a global multimedia complex into the home, text-based discourse on the Internet already revolved around discursive markers capable of revealing the identity of users. p. 317

Gies argues that the way we use language reveals us online in terms of education, class, nationality and possibly gender.  But there are other behavioural biometrics that can identify us.  Handwriting has a long history of identifying individuals.  We do not reveal our handwriting online but we do reveal our keystroke behaviour. Apparently, during the Second World War British female codebreakers learned the ’voices’  of  the German telegraph transmitters. This enabled them to identify important or false information. Keystroke dynamics focus on the ‘flight time’ – the time it takes to move from one key to another, and the ‘dwell time’ – the time one spends on any one key. (MIS Biometrics wiki http://misbiometrics.wikidot.com/keystroke)

There are other behavioural biometrics that can be used to trace us online. It is also possible to recognize someone online by the strategy, knowledge and skill  used in interacting with a piece of software. There are also indirect human-computer interactions that can be analyzed such as system call traces, audit logs, program execution traces, registry access, storage activity etc. (Yampolskiy, R. and Govindaraju (2010), V.  Taxonomy of Behavioural Biometrics – http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/excerpts/34647.pdf). A problem with a number of these is that they can generate too much information to sift through.  For example, an audit log can contain CPU and I/O usage, number of connections from each location, whether a directory was accessed, a file created, another user ID changed, audit record was modified, amount of activity for the system, network and host. (Yampolskiy and Govindaraju 2010 quoting Lunt 1993) However, Yampolskiy and Govindaraju suggest that a random sample of these might be sufficient to distinguish normal behaviour from suspicious behaviour.  Yampolskiy and Govindaraju point out that a lot of effort is being put into developing behavioural biometrics as they are useful for a number of fields including marketing, game theory, security and law enforcement (p. 30).

Gies also points out that it takes a lot of skill to manage an anonymous online identity:

…it is important to point out that identity play is difficult to maintain, even in settings which afford anonymity and disembodiment: pretending to be someone else is hard work and requires considerable cultural competence. p. 318

split personality

This was borne out this week by the ’self-outing’ of Belle de Jour who has been blogging since 2003 about her secret life as a prostitute.  Her blog was so successful it led to a series of books and a television drama.  She is in fact a 34 year old research scientist who was a prostitute for 14 months to support herself while she finished her PhD.  Noone was able to discover who she was; there were theories that she was a man, that because of her writing style a number of male writers had been mooted as being her.  But in the end, the psychological constraints of maintaining a hidden identity proved too much.  As she said in her blog last Sunday:

Belle will always be a part of me. She doesn’t belong in a little box, but as a fully acknowledged side of a real person. The non-Belle part of my life isn’t the only ‘real’ bit, it’s ALL real. Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.

So a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances drew me out of hiding. And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters.

So despite her success in thwarting those who tried to trace Belle and identify who she was, it was the difficulty of maintaining  two separate identities that led to revealing herself.

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Week 8 Lifestream Summary

Nov 15

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | 1 Comment

I had quite a busy week.  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I ran all day workshops – 9-5 non-stop while in the evening I was fitting in reading Haraway and Hayles. Thursday and Friday I was working with my friend and colleague Judy (face to face as I am in the States at the moment) to fine tune a chapter we are writing together. Judy has also read Haraway and Hayles this week and quite amazingly Hayles proved very pertinent to the ideas we have developed on our chapter – which gives an overview of the development of qualitative data analysis tools and how we see the future in Web 2.0 tools.  Hayles gave us the vocabulary for ideas we didn’t have the words for.  I used Tumblr which fed into my lifestream to pull out key quotes to reflect on. Haraway was new to me and as I didn’t have the time to read her in one sitting. I was initially frustrated as I felt she was really addressing issues about the direction of feminism and couldn’t figure out initially where cyborgs fit in. I noticed in the tweets that others were having problems, too, so I searched the web for material on her and the Cyborg Manifesto and found something that gave information on her background and provided a good summary of the manifesto which I tweeted to the class.  I also benefitted by other class members doing the same and tweeting links to other articles and videos about Haraway or Hayles. I felt twitter worked this week as a good medium to help each other find material to elucidate two challenging texts.

I had to keep reminding myself that Haraway was writing in the mid-eighties before the World Wide Web and with her background in biology, a lot of her notions of cyborg come from medical developments of the time, organ transplants, pacemakers etc. I have always been sympathetic to arguments that challenge dualisms so her vision of the cyborg as taking us out of dualistic thinking is attractive – although I find also a bit fuzzy. I understand that the cyborg is outside of the male/female dualism as being neither and that our relation with machines is intermingled with us – we create machines, we use machines, they do not dominate us, they are us – an aspect of our embodiment. And I guess while the thrust of her argument is about feminism, what we can take from her for digital culture is that the notion of  cyborgs can support an embodied view of digital culture.

Brain Machine Interface

I found Haynes more accessible.  Her mapping of the history of cybernetics, the politics involved, the erasures of certain ideas, the re-writing of history illuminated for me the background to some of the dominant ideas of digital culture

By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places, I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious. Many factors affected the outcomes, from the needs of emerging technologies for reliable quantification to the personalities of the people involved. Though overdetermined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially informational patterns. p. 22

For me, the most illuminating quote was from an interview with Hayles earlier this year – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhFYkaift4

…what we see with digital media is not so much the death of the author, as the distribution of the author function in new ways. …if you create a digital work, you are collaborating with the software you are using to create that work. And the people who created the software, in a sense, are your remote co-collaborators. And you are also collaborating with the computer hardware. And all of these have constraints and possibilities that you can explore. Hayles, N.K. (2009) Interview with Stacey Cochran, YouTube – 28 March 2009

It is the idea of distributed cognition, which Hayles mentions later in the same interview, that makes us posthuman.  We are interacting with machines, with software, with applications which shape and are shaped by us.

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