It’s been a real pain getting this presentation – my micro-ethnography of a virtual community – published. I’ve had problems with BT Broadband, my new Mac, YouTube and Vimeo (and, just in case you wondering, no, no it’s not user error;-)!).

I am currently hating technology with a vengeance and wondering where I can get an application form to join the Amish (yes, I’d like to spend my days building barns and milking cows).

Anyway, here it is – click on the screenshot below to access it (WordPress won’t let me embed):

I didn’t upload the most recent version though which omitted image citations so here they are:

• Slide 4: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Anatomy_Lesson.jpg
• Slide 6: Map of online communities
  http://xkcd.com/256/
• Slide 13: Archaeology pit
  http://www.conservationhalton.on.ca/uploads/images/Archaeology%20Pit%20at%20Crawford%20Lake.jpg

I’ve was up at 6am today (Saturday!) recording the audio for the virtual community presentation. The family sleeps and the house enjoys a rare moment of quiet.

However, it made me think how much easier it is to create a textual artefact. The noise of kids, TVs and radios, Xbox 360s etc, can be sort of filtered out as I type but not really as I record. I made a few slides last night but had to bribe my children with lollies for just a couple of minutes of (relative) quiet.

Anyway, all this to say that multimodal artefact creation in an already noisy multimodal world is quite difficult. I may go all Godard on my next multimodal artefact and include some of the above-mentionned background noises – the traces of the material conditions of the text’s production. Or I may just write text … LOL!

A propos of my study of a virtual community, I’ve just made a Keynote (PowerPoint for Macs) presentation which I’m trying to convert into a Quicktime movie. It seems to do this ok although I keep falling down when I try to upload it to YouTube. I suspect it doesn’t like the option I’ve checked for manually advancing each slide. I may have to rethink this as a Slideshare presentation.

Grrr …

Looking forward to reading other’s ethnographic accounts though.

I’m quite drawn to Cassetteboy’s YouTube remix of Nick Griffin. Both Nick Griffin and Cassetteboy were ‘trending topics’ today (23nd October 2009).

I like the speed of production – caught from television, remixed and uploaded to YouTube within hours, entering the twittersphere and going viral, becoming part of watercooler discussions – physical and virtual – all over the control.

I think Cassetteboy’s a bit of a social media John Heartfield – digital video montage instead of paper and scissors. Same take though: exposing the unsaid in the discourse of racist demogoguery.

I love the pulling bit of language out of context to make him speak the ‘truth’ of what he thinks – a nifty revisioning that mocks Griffin’s own revisionist views.

I think this is exemplary digital culture – although I’m not sure where the ‘community’ is. I’m not absolutely sure it’s found in the comments to the YouTube video

This week, I have mainly been reading and thinking about virtual ethnographic field sites and communities. It’s got me trying to define ‘community’.

At the end of this post is an extract from a book by Clay Shirky. I like his robust defence of bloggers against those  who denigrate them (yes, I’m talking ’bout you Brabazon!). What’s interesting in the context of this week’s discussions is the distinction he makes between audiences and communities. A community, he argues, is defined by what he calls a ’social density’; an audience, on the other hand, has ‘fewer ties’.

Here’s the Shirky extract in full:

… dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less.  [...] And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing – why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. [...] We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack [emphasis mine]. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you could go to the food court and find a group of teenagers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public, and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to one another? They’d be saying, “I can’t believe I missed you last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED off your ASS!” They’d be doing something similar to what they are doing on LiveJournal or Xanga, in other words, but if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one. (Shirky 2008: 84-5)

References

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press

I’m reading a bit off-piste now as I get interested in  trying to define a virtual ethnographic field site. I like this:

I conceived of my field site as a network composed of fixed and moving points including spaces, people, and objects. [...] Another advantage of defining the field site as a network is that it is produced as a continuous space that does not presume proximity or even spatiality in a physical sense. Continuity does not imply homogeneity or unity; it implies connection. The continuity of a network is evident in the way that one point can (through one or more steps) connect to any other point.  (Burrell 2009: 189-190)

References

Burrell, J. (2009) The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research. Field Methods, 21(2): 181–199

It’s early in the first week of Block 2 in which we’re exploring notions of both ‘virtual community’ and ‘virtual ethnography’ as a preliminary to doing a micro-ethnographic study of an online community.

One question I have is why we are using the concept of ‘community’ instead of the concept of the ‘field site’ – the latter, from what I’ve read so far of virtual, digital, cyber- or multi-modal ethnography, looking like the more common term applied to the space – both physical and virtual – in which participants engage in different kinds of activities and transactions.

Let me give you an example. I’m writing an article on Twitter conference backchannels. I take a single academic conference as my case study. I don’t know if I can call the participants who are tweeting during the conference a ‘community’ as it raises some big and possibly distracting issues. They may have never interacted with one another before and they may never interact with one another again. Some may be seasoned Twitter backchannellers, others newbies unfamiliar with Twitter conventions (RTs, @ messages etc.). They have a shared interest – the conference themes – and probably come from the same professional sphere (education, training). However, are the 20 or so individuals tweeting using a shared character string in their posts for the duration of the conference a community? I’m not sure.

On the other hand, I think I can say that there is a ‘field site’ that I can demarcate: a physical one being the conference venue, its main presentation and breakout rooms, display, coffee drinking and socialising areas etc. as well as a virtual one created through the shared use of a conference-specific hashtag. I can mark out the shared space of interaction (with a virtual scene-of-the-crime yellow and black tape?). Having demarcated my field site I can explore the kinds of interactions taking place within it. Only once this is done am I able to decide whether it’s a community or not?

Sian’s comments on one of my visual artefacts has got me thinking about the arguments of Gunther Kress. In this post I want to summarise a couple of the key points Kress has been making for the last few years and in greatest detail in Literacy in the New Media Age.

But first, here’s what Sian wrote:

But isn’t Kress’s point not so much that the written text is dead, but that contemporary (digital) texts are designed according to the ‘logic of the image’. In other words, even if they are mainly textual, there are multiple ‘entry points’, user-defined reading paths and many ways in, in terms of where we start with making meaning. And this would apply to the YouTube screen, to the hypertext or to the new visually-informed print textbook design equally?

Firstly, I do think that Kress is arguing that the textual is being eclipsed by the visual as we move from printed pages to digital content viewed on screens (the ‘new Media Age’):

Two distinct yet related factors deserve to be particularly highlighted. These are, on the one hand, the broad move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image and, on the other hand, the move from the dominance of the medium of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen. [...] language-as-writing will increasingly be displaced by image in many domains of public communication [emphasis mine]. (Kress 2003: 1)

I think a problem with Literacy in the New Media Age is that, published in 2003 and therefore pre-dating the extraordinary developments in Web 2.0 and social media, it hasn’t the chance to absorb the array of new textual practices (tweets, status updates, tags etc.) associated with or enabled by those technologies. Kress views writing, as what he calls “lettered representation”, as on the way out for all bar political and cultural elites. However,  from the vantage point of late 2009, text looks in rude good health (how many txt msgs, tweets, status updates per day from ordinary folks?). It’s way too soon to inter textuality.

Secondly, I have a problem with the distinction Kress makes between text and image and the two very different ‘logics’ that inform them:

The two modes of writing and of image are each governed by distinct logics, and have distinctly different affordances. The organisation of writing – still leaning on the logics of speech is governed by the logic of time, and by the logic of sequence of its elements in time, in temporally governed arrangements. The organisation of the image, by contrast, is governed by the logic of space, and by the logic of simultaneity of its visual/depicted elements in spatially organised arrangements. (Kress 2003: 1-2)

I think my problem with the distinction Kress makes is that I’m not sure I apprehend visual elements on a multimodal web page as simultaneously as he claims. Rather, my eye is drawn to one page element – for example, an embedded video on a YouTube page – and then on to another page element – for example, thumbnail images of video responses to that video.

What I’m saying is that I read a YouTube page as a ’sequence of elements in time’ (first the video, then other parts) just as I might read a web page allegedly informed by the textual logic of temporality, sequentiality and linearity. There aren’t multiple entry points – the embedded YouTube video is located centrally and at the top precisely to gain the viewer’s attention to what is the core part of the screen (its entry point) – although I’d acknowledge there are multiple reading paths on the periphery (I can scroll down to read comments, or click on related videos, to find out more about the user who created and/or uploaded the video).  The same goes for Flickr which also enables users to create slideshows – i.e temporally arranged sequences of images.

In short, then, I’m not buying the distinction Kress makes about time-based (text) and space-based (image) logics either.

I’ve been having an interesting exchange with Jen about the cabinet of curiosities recently.

Although it comes carrying some big, heavy ideological baggage, the concept seems attractive still to a lot of visual ‘creatives’ drawn to the idea of a space in which to display in close physical proximity a range of artefacts.

Here’s a cabinet of curiosities from my friend Jake, who’s an illustrator:

I texted him last night for a picture of his cabinet of curiosities and got the reply “Wot? Cabinet wot?”. Was Jake feigning ignorance as part of a comic distancing himself from what the Wunderkammer represents? Is it possible to rethink the notion of a display space for disparate/dissonant artefacts of idiosyncratic interest purged of historical baggage?

Really loved Jen’s visual artefact but I felt that there was something not quite right about the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ metaphor.

Cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammern are collections of ’strange’ and ‘primitive’ artefacts – some natural, some hand-made -  acquired and displayed by mainly wealthy collectors. They belong to a culture of aristocrats, gentlemen or aspiring gentlemen and are also part and parcel of the phenomenon of the grand tour. To be one of the curiosi, is to reveal a fineness of sensibility, an appreciation of the sublime but also an understanding of what’s really art – and what’s just … well …  ’strange’ ( a ‘curiosity’).  So, I see them as being one of the ways in which a particular class of men distinguished themselves aesthetically, and through this, socially.

Cabinets of curiosities reveal a fascination with the Other – with Otherness in all its forms – but reek of a patronising and superior attittude towards the cultures whose artefacts are collected.

I don’t think Jen’s cabinet did this – I suspect her digital cabinet of curiosities is more informed by surrealism and its reappropriation of the wonder cabinet to articulate an aesthetic based partly on the strange (”the beautiful is always strange”, said Baudelaire) and on bizarre juxtapositions. There’s a nice scene in André Breton’s Nadja (1928) where the narrator describes his trips to the flea market (I think it’s the one at Clignancourt – still open, Métro Porte de Clignancourt): “on the lookout for these objects one cannot find anywhere else, outmoded, fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible, ultimately perverse in the way I appreciate it or like it”.

Breton, by the way, had an amazing cabinet of curiosities, bits of which (maybe all, I’m not sure) can be seen in the Pompidou centre.

Anyway, all this to say that I think the cabinet of curiosities/Wunderkammer is not simply a collection of objets trouvés but found objects of a strange, grotesque, and hybrid quality that are always Other.

Maybe commonplace book is a better metaphor?

I couldn’t embed my Flash animation into a blog posted so exported as an avi and uploaded to YouTube.

I tend to revolt when I hear talk of a digital revolution.

So here’s my sarcastic take a – 4-second Flash movie called Gutenberg.

I prefer the metaphor of a ‘digital turn’. Similar metaphor to ‘revolution’ I guess although I imagine it more like an oil tanker changing course (slow, so very slow) or a flower turning (tropism?) towards the sun.