Well, I am enjoying myself collecting things for my lifestream, though my collecting is still very experimental as I am not sure a) what to collect or b) why I am collecting (other than because it says I should in the handbook).  However the pleasure of collecting has already superseded the desire for obedience, so I feel like I am amassing baubles and trinkets.  Which made me think of magpies “oh shiney” and then bower birds:

Bower birds and magpies have good reasons for their obsessive collection of pretty things – they do it to attract a mate.  Is that our reason?  Are we just trying to attract attention?  I suspect this is the main reason for almost everything we do online (apart from education of course).

I was just reading Hand (2008) and pondering how:

Power in digital culture indexes an increasing tendency toward the total surveillance and administration of society, now conducted through globally gathered and sorted digital information. The results of this will paradoxically be greater insecurity, an intense amplification of existing social divisions, and the consumerization of democratic citizenship. (Hand 2008, p39)

Hands comments that:

But such regulatory machines may be user-generated in wikis, or subject to top-down political intervention (as in China). Indeed, Poster (2006) observes that the territoriality of the subject is minimized in digital culture, but it is not eradicated. (Hand 2008, p38)

This reminded me of a colleague had posted on his Facebook status updates (not sure how) that he “cant see anything thats going on in Facebook as he is stuck behind the Great Firewall of China!” and I thought I would share it with my #ededc colleagues:

lahirondelle #ededc a friend of mine can’t view FB as he is “stuck behind the great firewall of china”; Thai gov blocked U-Tube for months – thoughts?

This was posted at 16.08 and at 16.37 I recieved the following tweet from 12vpn:

@lahirondelle We can help your friend access FB in China, also U-Tube in Thai, https://12vpn.com

That is just plain spooky.  Feeling a bit insecure now.

I have neglected my blog and lifestream a bit because I have been immersed in visual artifact creation.

[Interesting aside: the work of artifact didn't naturally flow into my lifestream because once 'in deep' I didn't think to digg or reference my sources and wanderings. One of two things need to happen for lifestreaming to be a real record of my learning journey - either I get better at placing my learning into a archive-able form (like tumblr or delicious) or lifestreams have the functionality of working with your browser history.  The former is unappealing as it would seem artifical and break the flow, but the latter would be pretty cool as long as I could filter it of course.]

Anyway I thought I would make a quick post about Twitter before I forget what my main breakthroughs were.  When I started this course I was a bit anti Twitter, but eager to give it a go as so many people had bought into it.  My original reservations we that all the tweets I received were boring.  Not individually, but as a stream.  I like Facebook status updates as they are part of something bigger – like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.  But Twitter is just… all chorus.  As much as I tried, I couldn’t find a place for it in my online life – it didn’t add value.

Now I understand it a little better.  I ‘get’ how hashtags work, and why we might retweet, reply to, and direct message.  However my improved understanding has simply given me more confidence to eliminate it as a contender in the ‘must have’ social networking compendium that our lives are undoubtedly gravitating towards.

Why?

Twitter only really works if you don’t have anything to say.  Once you have something meaningful to share 140 keystrokes just doesn’t cut it.  Yes you can attempt to be succinct, but 140 keystrokes requires you to do this to the point of glibness.  Valid and interesting points loose their clarity and relevence.  They even loose their appeal, and for me appeal is an important point of sharing anything on the net, where messages must be appealing in order to get (and retain) an audience.  Yes I can follow bloggers who will kindly tell me about their new post thanks to the shortened url and phrase combo, but by the time they have tweeted their update  (and I have read their tweet) I already know they have posted because my Google Reader / Feedly combo has told me.

Also, in the context of our #ededc experiment I live on the other side of the world from my fellow tweeters.  Therefore when I am chirping away they are sleeping and vice versa.  At times I felt like a budgie talking to my mirror (and if I want to talk to myself I can do that at length in my blog).  Twitter seems to straddle synchronous and asynchronous communication.  Tweeting to me felt like getting up in the morning, reading a really interesting Skype convo that some friends had had last night and then trying to join in.  Yes I got responses to my tweets but they often got buried so what could have turned into an interesting discussion on a forum, became a bit of a “look at what we could have talked about” anti-climax.  I would also find a very interesting response to a previous tweet and rummage through the past several days looking for what it was responding to because we didn’t always use the ‘reply to’ function or our replies were complex and related to several tweets, or an emerging theme. If you could slide tweets into past, more pertinent, points in the convo it would be helpful.  Google Wave will, I believe, offer this kind of structuring.

So although I enjoyed this part of our Digital Cultures course Twitter isn’t for me.  But this is a valuable lesson. I get it now, and I still don’t want it.

This ability to eliminate is an important skill, and one we can all aim to teach our students.  As citizens of this brave new new digital lifeworld we are being bombarded by more and more tools that offer new ways of connecting and communicating.  Selecting the ‘right’ ones sometimes feels as scary as choosing the right stocks for your portfolio, yet we can’t use them all so the ability to test, evaluate and reject (without anxiety) is going to be valuable.

This little budgie is ready to hang up her mirror.

Ok I can’t resist I have to formally weigh in on Jen and Andy’s Cabinet of Curiosities discussion (and I have loved and been inspired by the interactions in this block – an idyllic learning environment indeed).  To summarise, the metaphor of lifestreaming as curatorship poses several ethical questions regarding the collection of items of interest. Quoting from Tony’s blog:

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.

The ethical question posed here is the power inherent in being associated with a collecting elite.  Whether the prestige garnered from owning a collection is social, economic or (in our case) intellectual we are involving ourselves in a power game – and potentially gathering influence by having the ‘right’ things in our collection. In the world of material artifacts whether items are gathered for private  or public collections there is often an issue of legality in their appropriation.  This too has a parallel in our digital collections.  None of the images I gathered for my video were from creative commons sources, though I did relent and use Audioswap to remove my copyright non-compliant soundtrack, replacing it with something from You Tube’s library.  However I think the illegal appropriation of copy-righted images (and sound) is an important topic as is the ethics of collecting.  What about the future? Will the dynamic user-generated momentum of Cyberia carry us into a a virtual lifeworld everything is up for grabs? If we can all own everything will prestige come only our apparent discernment over what we have included (and chosen to exclude) and the consequent approbation from our cyberpeers registered in hits and comments?

If so will be be moving forwards or backwards?

After a quick hit and run mission on google to appropriate images for this post (see below) I notice that this topic has many miles yet.  Ethnography is just as much a controversial and power riddled issue as the collection of visual artifacts. So don’t put your pith helmets and shrunken heads in storage just yet!

Ladies who collect, from l2r: Alexandrine Tinne, Mary Kingsley, Delia Akeley and of course Lara Croft (below)

Just a quick post to let you all know hubby and I are mounting the trusty Phantom (if only we had bought the Steed like he wanted that sentence would have been so much funnier) and heading for the hills and dales of Northern Thailand once more.  I won’t be gone long – just 5 days, but I will miss the beginning of the enthographic brainstorming (I am taking the netbook but don’t hold out hopes of much net access).  Hopefully I will be able to grab the ends of the discussion, by which time I will be as well read as a person who has had nothing to do all day but soak in hot springs and read pdfs.  I have loved, and I mean LOVED this first block of our cultural journey together and can’t wait to see (in a multimodal sense) what the next segment brings.

See ya’ll on Thursday *hugs*

I feel like I am getting a little behind (this always seems to happen in the middle of a course) I get distracted by stuff.  Stuff in this case being two rather different things.

Firstly (and this is the good news) my chosen focus for my digital ethnography – role-playing, which means of course I have got back into ROLEPLAYING and filling my lifestream with Dungeons and Dragons related links and quotes, and 20 sided dice references which just makes me want to blow the dust off my tired old Goddess of The Underworld and give her a new look.

Secondly the Fluff Friends Trick-or-Treat 2009 Halloween Hunt, which is addictive cos I have to Trick and Treat on lots of people’s fluff pages to get candy points (and actual virtual candy which I can feed my fluff) and then I can convert my candy points into candles, which also give me golden candle points.  And If I get enough golden candle points… I get a scarecrow with which I can scare the crows off my pumpkin patch – and something about a lantern, and a haunted house and a candy bowl.  Anyway I am addicted but not sufficiently addicted to make the grade so this is another Fluff contest I failed at.  Just like the egg hunt – but at least I don’t have blisters on my clicking finger this time.

This was a week 6 update wasn’t it?

In a sense it is.  Fluff friends may look like a bunch of adults, who should know better, petting cartoon animals, but it is a great community.  Very warm and supportive, full off the spirit of sharing and gifting; which is rare in large communities like this.  I have never seen a flaming or spamming post on a Fluff page – just lots of thanks and praise.  It like Little House on the Prairie digitized.

Of course when it comes to digital ethnography we get nervous around words like ‘community‘  how do we define our terms.  How do we prove that what we are observing (or participating in – another kettle of fish) a community if the members never meet?

“an online community is a community if participants imagine themselves as a community” (Baym, 1998 via Bell, 2001)

I think self-definition is important, but one thing I have learned this week is we are in a dodgy branch of a dodgy science.  Ethnographists get sneered at when they are knee deep in their meatself muddy ethnographic experience and have the mosquito bites to proove it, and even they sneer at virtual ethnographers (in between recurring bouts of malaria probably).  The question of community on the internet reminds me of the question of personal authenticity on the internet.  I think we are only discussing these issues (and the discussion is important) because we are relative new to this medium of… communication? Communication seems such a small word for what happens when we get online these days, I would prefer to call it medium of being.

I like Hine’s (2000) take on authenticity:

A search for truly authentic knowledge about people or phenomena is doomed to be ultimately irresolvable. The point for the ethnographer is not to bring some exernal criterion for judging whether it is safe to believe what informants say, but rather to come to understand how it is that informants judge authenticity.

You get frauds, liars and false communities in face to face environments and yes the internet makes it easier for them to operate – but you are soon able to sense a genuine community as you can a genuine person, through sustained contact, whether that contact be meeting them over dinner, reading their posts, or petting their unicorn (yes we are back to Fluff Friends again). The question of whether or not an online community is invalid because of their lack of face to face contact will I am sure become invalid soon enough.

In the meantime I imagine Fluff friends is a community because:

• When I am busy my neighbours drop by to feed and pet my wallaby.
• If I give someone’s lecoon a cinnamon roll they leave a thank you note in my letterbox.
• There are rules and if I break them I will be cast out (temporarily or permanently depending on the severity of my crime).
• It has informal standards of acceptable behavior (more subtle than the rules) and if I don’t follow this I will be scorned by my neighbours.
• If I work hard, am generous and mindful of others I am rewarded with success and approval.
• But, most importantly… because a friend gave me a little blue werewolf despite the fact I couldn’t give her my golden candle points, because she knew I loved him and I couldn’t afford him.

Here he is (with my baby wallaby and my regular wolf):

This week was taken up with recovering from my ethnographic experience and viewing those of others.  Thus my lifestream got a bit neglected.  Pity the hard work of ploughing through Haraway doesn’t show up on it.  I have to admit  reading this text, ironically, made me regret for the first time not having face to face tutorials.  I could really do with help, the kind of intense help you get with a face to face discussion.  While I understand the overall message there is so much I just don’t get.  It is like a treasure chest of ideas that are meaningless to me.  So many of her statements left me crying “Why? What do you mean by that?”

Anyway, I will leave deeper ponderings to another post, in the meantime – check out your cyborg name:

Get Your Cyborg Name

I prefer the term posthuman to cyborg.  I think as the digital world we see today was emerging in the ’90s and early 00’s we misunderstood the effects of the relationship between ‘us’ and technology.  Much of this misunderstanding was idealistic and hopeful – Haraway anticipated we would be cleansed of gender and bias for example.  I enjoyed Muri’s interpretation – that we veered towards using technology as an imagined escape from the scatological and reproductive messiness of being human.

This encourages me to look for a more realistic relationship as seen through popular culture and blogs – while technology is not about to liberate us from the need to buy toilet paper anytime soon – we do seem on the brink of being liberated from the need to buy computers (phones and online storage are the way froward).  Our use of the net will change the way we think, and relate to the world – we will be connected 24/7, cloud computing and real-time searches will take the integration with technology further.  I think we will feel more cyborg as the human / digital interface becomes more transparent – as the gadgets we use to access information become smaller and less obviously intrusive (although ironically more literally intrusive – with implants and discrete accessories replacing the clunky laptop).

Once again Buddhist doctrine makes for an interesting parallel.  Once we come across something with our senses, we experience either fear and aversion or desire and craving (kleshas).  The readings so far have made me realise our approach to digital experience is no exception.  The potential of being successfully posthuman is for me, finding the middle way.

I was getting quite frustrated with the readings on cyborgs and posthumans, not that they weren’t interesting, but they were so embedded in western ideas of self and being and what it is to human (and therefore cease to be human) that I was beginning to think that mandatory courses in Eastern philosophy might be a good idea for anyone wishing to put font to pixels.  Then at last week 9, I got to Hayles (2006) and at last, something I could identify with, the potential for our relationship with a computational universe to reveal to us a deeper truth:

What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together.

and

The cognisphere takes up where the cyborg left off. No longer bound in a binary with the goddess but rather emblem and instantiation of dynamic cognitive flows between human, animal and machine, the cognisphere, like the world itself, is not binary but multiple, not a split creature but a co-evolving and densely interconnected complex system.

From a Buddhist belief system (via wikipedia) we have:

Some consider that the concept of the unreality of “reality” is confusing. They posit that, in Buddhism, the perceived reality is considered illusory not in the sense that reality is a fantasy or unreal, but that our perceptions and preconditions mislead us to believe that we are separate from the elements that we are made of. Reality, in Buddhist thought, would be described as the manifestation of karma.

The Buddhist concept of dependant origination states that any phenomenon exists only because of the existence of other phenomena in an incredibly complex web of cause and effect covering time past, time present and time future. Stated in another way, everything depends on everything else. A human being’s existence in any given moment is dependent on the condition of everything else in the world at that moment, but in an equally significant way, the condition of everything in the world in that moment depends conversely on the character and condition of that human being. Everything in the Universe is interconnected through the web of cause and effect such that the whole and the parts are mutually interdependent. The character and condition of entities at any given time are intimately connected with the character and condition of all other entities that superficially may appear to be unconnected or unrelated.

Because all things are thus conditioned and transient, they have no real independent identity and thus do not truly exist, though to ordinary minds this appears to be the case. All phenomena are therefore fundamentally insubstantial and empty.

Is it possible that our relationship with technology and our understanding of a ‘computational universe’ might lead us to a more instinctive and essential understanding of reality? Quantum physics has already done this in the field of theoretical science, but maybe we will make the experiential connection through the ever decresing membrane of our interface with our computers and through them the world – the real world, that is… not the illusiory one we percieve with our senses.

To quote John Eccles (the neurophysiologist)

I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.

What is left then, but energy, information and flow? Tat Tvam Asi.

Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1998). Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research. SCUTREA 1998, Exeter.
.

Our new pedagogies may be uncanny but it was with a sigh of relief I returned to the familiar realm of education.  The jaunt through cultural studies has been extremely interesting, but I was getting a little lost without a peg to hang it all on.  It was the readings for this block (especially Bayne and Usher) that made everything fit into place.

I understand the dislocation of online learning, and it is the strangeness that draws me.  I find it liberating – the lack of fixed rules that melt away with the disappearance of classroom walls and chalkboards.  I am interested how this uncanny nature disconcerts some and exhilarates others.  I have never been convinced the the native / immigrant divide that we explored way back in the days of IDEL – if it is that simple then why do I feel so at home in this virtual world, when I didn’t have an email address until my boss begged me to get one in 1997 (the same guy who took me shopping to buy my first computer in 2000 – I think he knew I would never get my Dip TESOL finished without one)?  As I was pondering these issues I kept coming back to Bayne’s paper on smooth and striated learning spaces, which we studied in the Course Design module.  Maybe a posthuman student (and indeed teacher) must be a little in love with chaos, and strange learning.  We have to get comfortable with alternate democratic sources of knowledge.  I remember when it was announced (on the internet of course) that Wikipedia was as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica – I have no idea if it was true and no intention of researching it’s veracity – other than googling it (here, see? 2005 – it must be EVEN more accurate now) but I got a thrill of smug vindication when I first read it.  Maybe this is what makes us cyborgs – becoming posthuman is a leap of faith, not technology.

Bayne, S. (2004). Smoothness and striation in digital learning spaces. E-learning 1(2): pp. 302-316.

Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]

Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1998). Lost and found: ‘cyberspace’ and the (dis)location of teaching, learning and research. SCUTREA 1998, Exeter.