Ania's E-learning and Digital Cultures

I spent the whole week 7 in the field, tracking down the connections between people, sites and doings within the chosen community (#eltchat). The idea of connectivity established by the three components appealed to me a lot.

While jumping from one place to another, trying to polish the final shape of my ethnography, I kept thinking of the lifestream and whether in a way it could be regarded as an ethnographic artefact itself. Could it be perceived as a community, at least in the meaning of texts, documenting my connectivity, connectivity between me and other nodes on the Web or even auto-connectivity between various online facets of myself (following the view of identity as prismatic) as represented on a number of sites feeding into the stream, tumblr for quotes, diigo for bookmarks, this blog for musings, youtube and flickr for things watched and seen respectively, Twitter for whispers or shouts … or is it stretching the idea too much?

I liked what M. Wesch said about subjects vs subjectivity, declarative transmitted knowledge vs  a way of seeing, feeling and understanding, characteristic for a given group or discipline. That could be perhaps extended when doing ethnographic research, looking at the subjectivity of the community, rather than its subjects, which would require overt, not only covert observation of the community. What would be the subjectivity within this field or rather a stream? Maybe the way of understanding the dance between the technology and the human, the student on this course (me) in an attempt to embrace the uncanny and enter the posthuman productive borderland. I would not attempt that without the stream, would I …

~ by Ania Rolińska on November 14, 2011 . Tagged: connectivity, ethnography, subjectivity, week 7