Carol's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Week 12: Where is my Lifestream going…..?

2011-12-11T18:30:10Z

Thinking back over the weeks of the course and the way my Lifestream has developed, I was suddenly struck by the word ‘lifestream’. As with many terms now used within digital media, titles for applications and so on wash over us and yet the idea of a Lifestream is quite a profound one. It suggests a representation of something more than just an activity for a course, with implications of representing some kind of onward digital journey. Not only that, but it suggests that this digital journey somehow represents our real life or that our digital and real lives have been blurred, again on top of the Lifestream’s ‘gathering’ implications, revealing the creation of a Lifestream as a posthuman pedagogy.

Daniel interestingly referred to the implications for education of the Lifestream as an everlasting memory. Using the Lifestream to record our online activity has revealed patterns where there might have seemed to be none, but it also functions as a kind of record to refer back to or even an uncanny memory of our activity. It has also been interesting to see how two distinct elements have made up my lifestream; those sites I have bookmarked, meaning that I have controlled when they enter my lifestream; and those which have come from RSS feeds and turn up without my knowledge but often provide timely pieces of information that keep bringing me back to themes of the course. One such this week has been some updates from Inanimate Alice. Called ‘School Reports’, one talked about this digital resource’s growing profile in teaching literacy, digital and otherwise, and in its use as a cross-curricular tool. Given my own role advising Primary Education students, this has kept me up to date with developments and provided a resource that I can pass onto students.

As far as sites that I have bookmarked this week, I have tended to concentrate on anything of relevance to my assignment. I found an interesting article on ‘The Politics of Pedagogy’ (2003) by Beverly M. John. She contends that ‘classroom dynamics, as well as the dynamics in higher education at-large, are a microcosm of the same conditions and factors present in the wider American society’. Although talking about the US, John’s statement reflects my own thinking in looking at politics, education and e-learning. Aside from worries over cuts in HE and rising fees, there is also a continuing worry about the commodification of education, where learning has become something that provides what the state wants rather than the individual.

Today I will be finishing up editing my Lifestream and writing my overall summary; all in all it will reflect how much I’ve enjoyed the process and how valuable it has been in getting me to think about how I access digital information. My Lifestream will keep going, although its course may be redirected, carrying with it new studies and work interests…

Week 11 Render ghosts and the ‘new aesthetic’.

2011-12-11T18:18:21Z

At the risk of sounding like a 1970s kids TV show, this notion of render ghosts caught my eye in a direct feed on my Lifestream from booktwo.org. There, James Bridle is talking about the bleeding into the physical world of digital imagery – The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines. Bridle starts out by showing pictures of Render Ghosts; that is the created figures who appear in the imagined futures of envisioned new buildings, on hoardings or perhaps digital architectural representations. As Bridle points out these ghosts inhabit a ‘notional space in which we imagine a possible future’.

Further to this he shows examples of how digital imagery has come into the real world, though such examples as ‘pixelated’ art or architecture.

Beyond this he starts to look at how digital technology can record or watch the world, through, for instance, online satellite pictures that distort or make alien our perception of the world, or to look at how we re-enact reality through the virtual, such as digital re-enactment where footage is not available.

Bridle’s main point is the bleeding into reality of the digital and seems to me to encapsulate elements of the posthuman, also linking back to my posthuman pedagogy of the monstrous or uncanny in exopedagogy. Buildings represented as pixels change our aesthetics to something which embodies the not real. The Render Ghosts are uncanny in that they represent possible people from a possible future but they also represent ideal visions of our world where the ghosts are families, young people, professionals, socialising and living out possible lives in public or private spaces. As such they represent a ‘world coming into being’ (Bridle) and this made me think about exopedagogy as an ‘education out of bounds’, Sian’s ideas on digital spaces and learning as uncanny, and Edwards’ suggestion that posthuman pedagogy might conceivably be, rather than a relationship between subject and object, a ‘gathering’ (to my mind a term which has it’s own uncanny connotations).

At the beginning of creating our Lifestreams, Anna and I discussed the process as writing or as aggregation and, last week, Grace agreed with the view in my blog that our Lifestreams were perhaps only to be made sense of in retrospect. As such our Lifestreams would then be a posthuman pedagogy, a gathering or coming into being, and perhaps a notional representation of ourselves as render ghosts.

Week 10: Full circle.

2011-12-11T18:16:00Z

One of the things I’ve liked about the Lifestream has been the way that links have become apparent between weekly or two-weekly topics because some feeds that I have subscribed to, with one topic in mind, have provided interesting insights into later topics. This week newwaysofinteraction dumped about 6 feeds into my Lifestream and I followed the links to find a ‘different’ site than I had originally considered it. I subscribed to newwaysofinteraction when we were looking at visual artefacts and digital literacies as it had a lot of really interesting exhibits, films etc. I think, in fact, it was perhaps Daniel that pointed me towards it. This week on looking back I see that it has great resonance for our consideration over the last few weeks of the posthuman. The site advertises itself as:

A collection of projects about newer ways of human and physical interaction, hosted by Jens Franke.

It features interactive installations and systems with a strong focus on technologies such as multi touch, tangible and gestural interfaces, augmented reality and physical computing.

As my Lifestream has developed I’ve been trying to work out if it is an active creation, a by-product of my following interests of the course or something entirely random. I think the case lies in all three, but the interesting thing is that, probably because of the structure of the course, often connectivity is only obvious in retrospect.

As well as coming full circle with the feeds, my thinking has constantly been coming back to the political aspects of digital culture, from Hand’s musings on the utopian/dystopian uses/misuses of the internet and social networking, through the, often, political communities of the ethnographies produced and onto Harraways’ politicised cyborg. Thus, I have decided to write on digital culture, politics and e-learning for my assignment and have spent some of the last few weeks’ lifestream entries looking at examples of political usage of the internet, through to the Occupy movements use of the internet and, in particular, social networking to not only organise but to advertise and educate. I’ve also been looking at where HE currently sits in the political landscape, with much being said on how it currently too often fulfils governmental needs rather than questioning them. And, on from there, I’ve been thinking about how e-learning might engage politically by looking at ideas such as edupunk. The following is a mindmap plan (click on it and it’ll become clearer) of what I might hope to cover in my assignment, and comments would be gratefully received!

Posthuman pedagogy task: Exopedagogy

2011-12-11T18:13:16Z

I took my lead in thinking about posthuman pedagogy from considering Hayles’s critique of anthropocentrism and Pederson’s critques of, firstly, the ‘”humanist” tradition, where the human subject is considered both the instrument and the end product of education’, and, secondly, the ‘distinct human-animal boundary’. On the instrumental level, as Pederson points out, we might consider animal-assisted therapy. However, what I felt was more problematic was to consider notions of education without the human subject as the end product. This might mean learning that does not recognise humans as being esclusively able to learn in what we consider to be a ‘human way’ because there is a biological continuum from human to animal; for instance to be seen in research into animal language, originally expounded on in LaMettrie’s views on teaching apes to talk, but now carried on in reserch into animal communication.

However, thinking about breaking down the ‘distinct human-animal boundary’ and where that was part of our imaginings of what it is, or is not, to be human, I came to think of firstly monsters, both biological and technological and often a cross-over between human and animal, and secondly the monstrous or other-worldly. On searching on the monstrous and pedagogy, I found Tyson E. Lewis and Richard Khan’s book ‘Education out of bounds: reimagining cultural studies for a Posthuman Age’ and a number of other exopedagogic studies or commentaries, mostly linking back to Lewis and Khan. Exopedagogy, exo- meaning on the outside, and its pertinency to learning, is touched on in a medieval studies group blog, In the Middle, that quotes from Lewis and Khan’s book:

Here the prefix “exo” designates the beyond, an education out of bounds, whose location resides at the very limits of the recognizable – where we learn to study the zone of unin habitability that indicates the untimely arrival of a swarm of monsters and strangers. It is, in other words, a pedagogy that concerns the sudden appearnce of “strange facts” (Daston and Park 2001) that exist beynd the field of common sense. If monsters have traditionally been banned from philosophy as dangerous obstructions to be sacrificed or as mere illusions (Kearney 2003), then so too had education more often than not been involved in projects that (a) repress the monstrous within or (b) project the monstrous onto the outside world…Exopedagogy helps us navigate the various narrative of the monstrous emerging from our state of phantasmagoria – reactionary monsters, commodified monsters, and creative/constituting monsters. At its best, exopedagogy utilizes the bestiary in order to intensify the savage and zoomorphic vectors of a radical imagination beyond the law of the community (the sacrificial strategy), the law of capitalism (the expropriation of surplus -value), and the law of the human (the anthropocentric valorization of human creative power, linguistic production, and cognitive capacity). In this sense, exopedagogy is both savagely critical and creatively posthuman – producing new political narratives emerging from seemingly uninhabitable terrains. (Lewis and Khan)

The blogger indicates that the book would be of us to those interested in monsters and/or the posthuman and that is, for me, the interest in the exopedagogic approach. Lewis and Khan’s book does talk of monsters faeries and the like, but the exopedagogic approach is not merely one of subject. The monstrous was first of all of interest to me through Victorian studies, considering cultural phenomena such as freak shows, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, but also, in and beyond Victorian studies, to look at representations of sexuality or otherness as monstrous, such as in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, surely a text for posthumanist study? And the study of the monstrous could also be extended to the strange, the other, the borderline, the cyborg and so on. Given the usage of the word monstrous in relation to women, ever since John Knox’s ‘The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regimen of women,’ one can also often identify the critique of the monstrous with aspects of women’s and feminist studies. for instance in some readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, the importance of the matter is what it tells us about meaning and about the exopedagogic approach. The expopedagogic does not put man at the centre but rather suggests that we look at the borders and the edges, at the strange and the different, or even make the familiar unfamilar. The blogger’s following comment suggests a pedagogic approach that matches with Sian Bayne’s work on the uncanny within learning:

What’s most challenging of all, though, is [Lewis and Khan's] call to make teaching spaces — not just classrooms, but public spaces — zones for uncanny happenings, affective communal undertakings, uncomfortable becomings, and the intensification of the “savage and zoomorphic” imagination.

Lewis and Khan’s suggestion that exopedagogy use ‘the bestiary’ to disrupt the norms of society, law and pedagogy takes us beyond only looking at ‘monstrous’ subjects to consider the learner as zoomorphic, able to understand and learn through questioning what the human is. An excellent example of this is a friend’s Moodle course which combines both matter and meaning, a demo version of which is to be found here - Out of the Digital Dungeon: exploring gender and technology in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Week 9: Are we human?

2011-12-11T18:09:46Z

A strange disconnected week. I spent much of my time at Glasgow Sheriff Court waiting to see if I would be picked for jury duty and pondering what it is to be human in a place where the complexities, the tragedic and the comedic in life , are so evident. People leaving chastened or led down to the cells prompting censure, empathy, compassion and making me think of what it is to be human - ‘Will your system be alright/When you dream of home tonight?’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve had interesting discussions with Daniel and with Jen on my blog and on twitter (although I do find twitter difficult as complex ideas are so difficult to express there) about what it is to be human and where morality/ethics fits into the human/posthuman. My feelings on Harraway (2007) were that her myth of the cyborg allowed her to sidestep the thorny realities of being human – ‘in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ (35). What is more useful, I think, is Hayles (1999) problematising of what it is to be human which is also found in Edwards’ (2010) consideration of the term ‘post-‘ as something that deconstructs rather than follows on from/negates the previous idea. However, as I discussed with Daniel, perhaps the term ‘post-‘ is a redundant one because ‘human’ already contains the germ of the problem of being human. Terms such as (Post)modernism and the (Post)human are not meant to be historically chronological ones. Modernism, as a reaction against the supposed (moral) certainty of the Victorians, is often identified with the early 20^th century, a point that is emphasised by, for instance, Modernist architecture. And yet, arguably, Modernist deconstruction of certainty and of human beings as individuals with stable identities, is evident in literature and philosophy throughout written history at least. Postmodernism might be said to hold many of the same values as Modernism, lack of certainty being one of them, but the ‘Post-‘ indicates a certain playfulness or self-irony. Indeed, Harraway’s posthuman cyborg is ‘resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’ (35). The possible losses and gains in using irony are all to do with meaning. Irony both represents and undermines meaning so Bakhtin can say that ‘irony is a special kind of substitute for silence’ (‘From Notes made in 1970-71′ in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1986) – it speaks but never says anything definitive. In this we might see something of Edwards’ critique of the separation of the subject and the object, the matter and the meaning, and Harraway’s and Hayles’s projects to engage with and question the liberal humanist subject. However, one of the problems I have with all three viewpoints is their shared view that dualism lies at the heart of the problem: dualism is characterised as polarising when this is a simplistic rendering. A dualism of polar opposites does mean a separation which also entails a strict system of representational epistemologies however dualism need not be about polarities but about an endless discursive engagement between differences. At either end of the dualistic scale there are the polarised and the unified views (the latter being, for instance, that body and soul are one because spatially or ontologically unified in the human subject) – I am interested in the more problematic view that dualisms exist but create meaning by their, often contradictory, relationship. In this way irony and dualism are similar – they acknowledge but question meaning and I suppose this shows a similarity with the posthuman project to problematise the ‘human’. To return to morality, I suppose one could say that the posthuman proposes an antidote to a human-centred, prescriptive morality and replaces it with a more humble responsibility (something we are looking at in week 10 with posthuman pedagogies and particularly in animal and environmental studies). I still have my reservations though – the role of irony in the postmodern (much as I am keen on its ability to express the human condition rather than to solve it) and it’s implications for other ‘posts’ can lead to such a constant oscillation between representation and deconstruction that no stable meaning can result and, with that, no common ethical stance and, surely, morality has something to do with commonality?

The Lifestream process this week has been somewhat hit and miss. I’ve been looking at online resources for my assignment which will be centred on digital culture, politics and e-learning. Sometimes I feel a little disconnected from my Lifestream – it seems lacking in a unified view and here I come back to earlier discussions with Anna (Week 2: Rhizomes and portals, Oct 4 2011) over whether it is a kind of writing or an aggregation. The lifestream I think is both but more so the latter as it is a collection and often a slightly disconnected one, whereas the blog entries are more about making sense of the lifestream through a process of writing. One might also say it is a posthuman pedagogy, a gathering, but that is for next week!

Week 8: What are you, a freakin’ cyborg? What does that mean?

2011-12-11T18:03:18Z

My lifestream this week has been taken up with looking at three areas, the latter two as preparation for deciding on and writing my assignment: the posthuman; politics, digital culture and e-learning; and transliteracy.

I have to admit, on the first subject, I find Haraway’s style detracts from meaning. I am used to the excesses of theory and post-theory writing but Haraway’s often adds more of effect than meaning. By making statements such as ‘the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’ I presume she is rejecting a male-centric academic discourse of rationality, but the effect is to draw the eye away from the more interesting points she makes. For instance she goes beyond the notion of cyborg as machine or part machine, to make very clear its distance from myths that have underpinned gender politics – ‘Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction[…]the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense’ (Haraway 2000, 35). So the cyborg is not born of woman nor does it relate to the story of Adam and Eve and is therefore devoid of the biological and religious connotations that have inexorably led to the construction of male and female genders. This is interesting, but problematic. If the cyborg is ‘not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’, what of the notion of sin? Or of the complexity of gender relations and of the identity of those who believe their biological make-up does not match their real identity? One could argue that the posthuman allows these questions and complexities to be overcome by questioning what Hayles (1999) calls ‘the liberal humanist subject’ (4), the idea that human beings are stable, subjective beings with problematic, constructed concepts such as sin, sexual nature and so on. However my problem with Haraway is that cyberfeminism is ‘an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ instead of an effort to deal practically, politically with the issues of gender which are very real, if constructed by us. Haraway’s idea of the cyborg is, in her own words ‘as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’. It is also ‘an ironic political myth’. Of course myth and fiction can be used politically to explore possibilities, to inspire change or to challenge perception, but the myth of the cyborg seems to me to bypass the thorny problems of gender rather than deal with them head-on, a notion explored by Ilan Gur Ze’ev. Perhaps I am too hard on Haraway (after all she has somewhat of a cult following) but I increasingly find myself impatient with writing that is so self-consciously performative.

On a more practical level, I used my lifestream to document my search for articles on posthumanism and biomedicine/biotechnology as I think that it is within this area that posthumanism is most relevant through such notions and procedures as IVF, prosthetics, genetic enhancement, extreme human enhancement, continued life and health and even cognition and emotion enhancement – one of the obvious questions hanging over biomedicine is the ethical dimension. This has been a particularly fruitful line of enquiry for me as it has brought together this course with my interest in Medicine and the Humanities. However, one of the questions I have been asking myself is whether using technology, even combining the technological and the human or finding the human in the technological, makes the human any less, or more, than it ever was as if it was to be rejected for something new? Does using a PDA make us posthuman or is it no different from someone 50 years ago using a notebook? I don’t deny that AI along with biomedical enhancement seem to blur the lines of what is human but I think we have to be less wholesale in our assessment of what the posthuman means.

Week 7: Some breathing space….

2011-12-11T17:59:53Z

This week I was in the relaxed position of having posted my ethnography, partly because I misread the timetable and partly because I knew I wouldn’t have time to do much later on in the week. This meant that I could spend the week looking at others’ ethnographies and commenting, but also keeping an eye on anything relevant to my own ethnography. I added LibraryThing to my lifestream, although at the moment I’ve only added a few books that I have just/am currently reading so they’re not really relevant to the course, but it’s interesting to see how it could be used as a kind of community of readers. Previously I have used reading apps on Facebook as a way of recording and recommending reading to friends, but I will need to investigate the advantages of using LibraryThing further in academic terms as well as personal. I’m thinking about my blog and lifestream in the long-term as my line manager has asked that I investigate if it is possible to export content that I’ve generated during this course and extend it to become a regular blog that can be linked to our Learning and Teaching Centre site at Glasgow. The idea would be for me to carry on blogging and lifestreaming on issues to do with my job as an effective learning adviser, and also on e-learning issues.

There was interesting discussion this week surrounding our posted ethnographies. I found it particularly interesting, the way in which members of the course had chosen a variety of ways to present their ‘findings’, with, fittingly for the course, a fair amount of visual content as well as textual. It was also interesting, given the debate within the literature over what constitutes an (online) community (Rheingold 2000; Bell 2001 and Kozinets 2010), the variety of communities that my fellow course-members chose to study. As opposed to Sardar (as quoted in Bell) who dismisses being a member of or posting to an online usergroup as not really constituting an identity, which might be argued as a community indicator, I was more interested in Bell’s discussion of a community being defined by its own members’ beliefs that they are a community, and by the notion of the affective as defining a group. Certainly, in my own ethnography, I felt that there was a feeling of community among the members and this came across in the other ethnographies posted. I did fine Rheingold’s rather ‘downhome’ version of community anathema to my own but this may be cultural with Rheingold referencing the homestead history of the US. A common theme in the ethnographies and discussion was the distance, or lack of, between ethnographer and the community studied (Hine 2000; Gatson and Zweerink 2004). Among us all, I think, there was a certain discomfort in finding our place as ethnographer, but there was good general discussion and, I think, consensus, on the need for a self-reflexive approach.

One of the ethnographies, Daniel’s on Diaspora, got me thinking about the political aspects of the course, from Hand’s views on the dystopian/utopian uses of the internet for political aims to some the possibilities for activism online, particularly in light of the Occupy movement and the role of digital culture in what is sometimes called a corporatocracy.

With the assignment looming large, perhaps this would be an interesting way to go, however, I am struggling to think about how this might include a learning-related focus. Alongside using my lifestream this week to think about our new theme of posthumanities, I’m going to explore some possibilities for the assignment.

Week 6: Magpie lifestream

2011-11-05T10:28:22Z

It’s been a strange week in my lifestream. Last week was very much focused on finding information on ethnography and on online communities, with an emphasis, once I had decided to look at Mumsnet, on all things woman and blogging/chatting. This week though has been one of magpie activity…the collecting of shiny things! I’ve continued to look at Mumsnet and other sites, but I didn’t want to stream any comments from chat into my lifestream as, although the chat is public, I felt it was intrusive to stream personal conversations into my blog. And so I began collecting shiny things – anything that attracted me to it and that I wanted to keep. I had been inspired by Neil’s project the week before to record all his activity online rather than to just focus on anything relevant to the course. I’m not sure I quite did that, but I did decide to stream anything that was more broadly relevant to the course, rather than just on this block’s focus.

Most of these ‘shiny things’ have been collected through Stumbleupon which, as I said last week, appealed to my sense of the random. However, it also got me thinking about what digital culture is and provides us with. If there is the opportunity for community, as we have been considering the last few weeks, or, as Bell points out, the threat of destroying what little RL community we have left, what does the vastness of the internet leave us feeling. If the internet represents an opportunity to experience and connect with, not just other people and cultures, but also a new kind of (digital) culture, then does its vastness and speed of change and usage –

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7iJEVG/www.go-gulf.com/60seconds.jpg

mean that I am just as limited in my ability to experience it as I am by my ability to experience the physical world? The ability to explore (money aside!) is dictated by knowledge. If I do not know what to look for, then how do I find something? I think Stumbleupon is useful for this but obviously has its own limits – I found a lot of sites it took me to were entertaining but, ultimately, nothing more. One site – http://www.makeuseof.com/ - had some practical information but it’s section on ‘geeky fun’ was a looming black hole that it was easy to fall into and, ultimately, procrastinate over.

On a more serious note, I find myself streaming a fair amount from the Guardian such as the article on social media censorship in China. This spoke to issues of online communities as the Communist party struggles with the ‘growing boldness of microblog users’ . Having experienced the lack of social media in China on a trip last year, I found it, at first, very strange to be unable to keep in touch on Facebook. Within a day or two though of trying to go through proxy servers (blocked) I became entirely unconcerned. However, the issue is not whether the loss of Facebook is really an infringement of freedom (one can feel quite ‘freed’ without it) but where censorship might be used to quash community discussion and activism – this took me back to thinking about Hand in week one and his discussion of the utopian/dystopian and the political use of Web 2.0, and to what freedoms digital culture might afford us. Perhaps we often confuse choice with freedom.

Mumsnet ethnography

2011-12-11T12:37:57Z

I really struggled to upload this ethnography as it was originally in powerpoint and slideshare wouldn’t accept it. Have uploaded as a movie to youtube but, unfortunately it’s lost its soundtrack. Just imagine the theme to Charlie’s Angels in the first few slides and I’ll try and fix tomorrow!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Week five: A reflection of the community

2011-12-11T12:36:35Z

Week 5 has been taken up with reading on ethnography, searching online for papers or other sites on ethnography and on communities and trying to find an ‘online community’ that would be interesting and ethically viable for an ethnographic study. In terms of my lifestream, I’ve become aware that I tend to use the same particular feeds, twitter and delicious, most. This is because through twitter I can communicate links, ideas etc. directly with my classmates as well as posting to my lifestream, and because I like delicious as a way to bookmark not only for my lifestream but for my own record of sites, papers etc. I use tumblr for quotes only, as it often freezes my desktop for some reason so can be a bit unreliable. I’ve also tried to remember to use youtube this week. Some of my feeds are reliant on how often an RSS comes from a particular website, such as Christopherbaker.net, which can be infrequent. This week I tried to add readernaut but, although I signed up, for some reason I’ve not had an email to validate and on investigating have not been able to sort it out so I will look at using a different reading feed. I’ve also added stumbleupon which is a bit hit and miss but I quite like the random nature of it.

In investigating ethnography, so that I knew what it was I was supposed to be doing this and last week, I started out with Hine to get an idea of ethnography, and specifically virtual ethnography. What interested me here was Hine’s description of ethnographers as moving from looking at distant cultures to looking at more ‘limited aspects: people as patients, as students, as television viewers, or as professionals’ (41). This seemed to reflect a more global than geographical emphasis in digital ethnography, although as I have looked at online communities (and Bell quite rightly problematises this term), I’m not sure that there are not still geographical boundaries, as well as social ones, that circumscribe those communities. For instance, on Twitter, @abuneil highlighted online communities that were of particular interest to those from a Bengali background.

On social boundaries, Bell (2001), considering the arguments against online community, points out that ‘bunkering in [sheltering from RL in a self-selecting online community] means cocooning oneself from the “contamination of pluralism’ found in the RL city’ (106). The ‘community’ I eventually decided to look at for my ethnography, http://www.mumsnet.com/, has been accused of having very particular geographical, class, social and political boundaries. Early on in our discussion for this block’s task to create a virtual ethnography, @DGdotNET asked whether it was possible to be an ‘objective digital ethnographer’, a view Hines also takes saying that ethnography ‘faced challenges concerning objectivity and validity’ (41). At the time I turned to Foucault’s The Order of Things as I do like his notion that our viewpoint is often dictated by fundamental codes, but I also like his view that we create taxonomies through which to view things.

This lack of objectivity could be even more of a problem for the digital ethnographer who may come, as I did, to study their community through a filter of existing media perception. This will be something I will consider in my ethnography as it must be acknowledged:

Toby Young

Guardian CiF

As well as looking at media reactions to Mumsnet, I’ve been looking more generally at women blogging and particularly at the phenomenon of ‘Mommy blogging’, a problematic label which might be perceived as positive or negative. The logo of Mumsnet, with its reference to Charlie’s Angels, perhaps unwittingly encapsulates this dilemma of female empowerment:

One of the issues I will be considering when looking at Mumsnet is whether it can truly be described as a community and, also, what a community is for. On the first point Bell’s chapter gives some useful insight, in particular I want to consider: the idea of a community existing if ‘participants imagine themselves as a community’ (102); whether Sardar’s view (quoted in Bell, 101) that merely belonging to and posting on a bulletin board does not confirm a community identity is a reasonable one; whether Dibbell’s criteria (in Bell, 110) on ‘social contracts’ as a sign of community holds true of Mumsnet; and the idea of the ‘Bund’ as an alternative to community in relation to how Mumsnet functions. I very much liked the idea of Bund as ‘an elective group, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong sense of belonging’ as a way of assessing Mumsnet, although the notion of the affective and emotional does play into the hands of those who marginalise Mommy Blogging as confirming the private domain of women as lacking in importance, as against those who claim it as an empowering ‘radical act’.

I wonder…….

I became interested in what a community might be for partly through reading Bell on whether online communities come about as a desire to replace the perceived loss of community in RL cities and his quoting Willson on community membership as self-serving – ‘the benefits of membership are often described in terms of the individual member’s quality of life, rather than in the quality of relations between subjects’ (109). In our idealization of RL community we imagine being part of a whole in which the individual is supported and supports, but is this the case with online communities, or are they, as Bell explores in some critiques, leading to increased individuation?