Silvana's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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

Archive for November, 2009

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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Hayles and Skeuomorphs

Nov 13

Posted by silvanad in Readings | 2 Comments

“The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.” (Hayles 1999, 3) One of the structuring principles of this course – the lifestream and the learning environment itself – is about disaggregation and reaggregation – taking things apart, scattering them across the network, and then having them put back together by the machine. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?

Tiger irisOne of the key aspects of Hayles’ argument that resonated with me is her notion of the history of intellectual and scientific development having a seriated pattern – in the shape of a tiger’s iris.

In the history of cybernetics…[ideas] were fabricated in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation, a pattern that I call “seriation” (a term appropriated from archaeological anthropology)…[where] changes in artifacts are … mapped through seriation charts…[by] parsing an artifact as a set of attributes that change over time…The figures that … emerge from this kind of analysis are shaped like a tiger’s iris – narrow at the top when an attribute first begins to be introduced, with a bulge in the middle during the heydey of the attribute, and tapered off at the bottom as the shift to a new model is completed. pp.14-15 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press

Linked to this notion of seriated development is the importance of skeuomorphs:

A skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time. [this term is borrowed from archaeological anthropology]… Skeumorphs visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication…they are so deeply characteristic of the evolution of concepts and artifacts that it takes a great deal of conscious effort to avoid them. p. 17 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press

She continues:

[Skeuomorphs] call into a play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new. p.17 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press

uncomfortable couch 

The lifestream aspect in the course is a way the ‘machine’ aggregates and assembles for us the disparate information we collect, the stray thoughts we may have etc. as we traverse the digital world. BUT it is us who provides meaning. The ‘machine’ provides no interpretation or sensemaking of the material it aggregates. Our human mind makes the connections, provides the context for why this information was noted in the first place. This is consistent with Hayles’ notion of an embodied virtuality. And blogging about the lifestream on a regular basis is important – otherwise, meaning would be lost in an evergrowing lifestream list. In designing an online course ’skeuomorphs’ may need to be designed into the course to make the new elements more acceptable.  I hesitate to say that a blog is a ’skeuomorph’ as it is a new digital form or genre.  But it has elements that hark back to journal keeping – albeit a very public one. Maybe for some types of students it needs to be kept private – as it is the case in IDEL.  The keeping of a private blog is in a sense a skeuomorph – harking back to an old form but a more comfortable form that may help make blogging more comfortable for the novice.

comfortable chair

 

 

 

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Reflections on Haraway, dualisms and the promise of Cyborgs

Nov 11

Posted by silvanad in Readings | 1 Comment

I can’t say I found Haraway an easy read – partly because I needed to understand first the context in which she is writing.  She is a biologist and a socialist feminist and the Cyborg Manifesto is a critique and an alternative to the brand of radical feminism that was dominant at the time of her writing.  Theresa M. Senft has provided some very useful background and notes on the Manifesto at http://www.terrisenft.net/students/readings/manifesto.html 

What interests me is her argument about the Cartesian dualism that is dominant in Western thinking and the Cyborg as an alternative.

The dichotomies between mind and body, human and animal, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. p. 44

In the first block of this course, when we explored digital culture, the images were very black and white.  A lot of films view the machine, the cyborg as a threat to humans.  Yet, ironically, Haraway sees the cyborg as the saviour.

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

Michael Wesch has simplified this argument and made it more accessible and popular in his video – the Machine is Us/ing Us

YouTube Preview Image

 There is one point in the video where he makes this point very clearly:

When we post and tag pictures, we are teaching the machine. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page teaching the Machine.  The machine is using us – is us.

The words above Wesch has extracted from an article in Wired by Kevin Kelly – We are the Web. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html?pg=4&topic=tech&topic_set=

I suddenly made the connection with Wesch when reading Haraway. The machine is us/ using us is not a dichotomy but one and the same. We both control and are controlled by it. Rather than a dichotomy of either/ or, it is both.

It is late. Does this make sense?

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Week 7 Lifestream summary

Nov 8

Posted by silvanad in Lifestream | No Comments

This week was spent mainly analyzing and constructing my micro virtual  ethnography on YouTube’s Davidsfarm.  On Monday I flew from London to the States where I am working over the next two weeks.  While on the plane I didn’t have access to the internet (someday it will be possible), I spent most of the time outlining the structure of my virtual ethnography in Word.  Last week I had been tagging relevant Davidsfarm videos to my Delicious account and copying selected comments on the videos into Tumblr – both of which fed into my lifestream.  When I finally had internet access this week, I had my lifestream open in one tab of my browser and the WordPress pages where I was constructing my virtual ethnography in another.  I found the lifestream a very effective organizing tool. It enabled me to find the relevant videos for me to embed into my ethnography as well as pull out the comments from Tumblr. I was still collecting more information about Davidsfarm while I was constructing the ethnography so these were fed into my lifestream this week.

xray

The challenge for me was to take advantage of the affordances offered by the internet in the representation of an ethnography. A major criticism of qualitative analysis in the past is that the analysis process is not transparent so not subject to scrutiny.  With the introduction of software for qualitative analysis, such as ATLAS.ti, MAXqda and NVivo, the process is transparent but despite this software being around for 20+ years it is still not part of the toolkit of many social scientists (although this is changing) and it is certainly not something that can be easily picked up.  However, a virtual ethnography if constructed well, offers the possibility for anyone to explore the logic of the representation and have access to the same data the ethnographer works with.  And there is the possibility to interact with both the ethnographer and the elements of the ethnography – as well as contributing further elements (or data) – and interpretations.  Although there is a linear argument in the ethnography I constructed, I encouraged readers to dip into the ethnography, mirroring the experience of visitors to Davidsfarm who initially come across any one of the types of videos he produces by chance and who then elects (or not) to explore further Davidsfarm and become an active fan, commenting on videos and interacting with other fans and with Dave himself. 

After finishing my ethnography, I enjoyed very much exploring and commenting on fellow students’ ethnographies. I was amazed by their richness and the number of issues that they raised about virtual communities.  There seems to be a range of types of communities – from loose associations or what Tony calls ‘digitally mediated networks’ to communities where people are very open about personal issues and give and receive support – such as Sarah P’s quilting community.  Another issue that comes out clearly is power and control – examples are the communities that Sibylle and Bill explored.  This seems to be related to the motivations and personality of the founder members.  And for me in my ethnography in Davidsfarm, there was a real difficulty in discerning what was real, what was constructed and what was imagined. And I was puzzling about whether something constructed or imagined becomes real and what is ‘real’ anyway. I look forward to reading more of the ethnographies.

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My virtual ethnography

Nov 5

Posted by silvanad in ethnography | No Comments

My virtual ethnography is finally ready.  I constructed it in WordPress but in separate pages.  Below is the start link but you can also access it from the top menu bar on my blog.  I haven’t figured out how to get these pages in my lifestream though.

Davidsfarm Ethnographic Sketchbook

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