Oct
4
Week two: Rhizomes and portals
October 4, 2011 | 94 Comments
I’ve been looking back at how my lifestream developed last week, keeping in mind my thoughts on its, possible, randomness and it struck me that, rather than random it was developing in a different way than we normally expect any piece of writing to do so. So I took a look back at Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘Rhizome’ and it seemed to be quite apt in more ways than one –
http://ensemble.va.com.au/enslogic/text/smn_lct08.htm
The above is a link to a site on electronic writing, with examples, theory and so on, that quoted D&G’s explanation of the rhizome, including – ‘It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’ – which seemed rather apt, along with the notion of a rhizome as an organic, non-linear, interconnected, manner of ‘writing’.
The site also suggested that ‘the concept of the Rhizome as developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus is highly relevant to a discussion of ‘a shifting configuration of media-elements; a conflation of language systems’ and goes on to discuss the notion of signification of image, sound and text. This already links my first week’s thoughts, from Hand, on ‘the global circulation of information (whether images, text, sound)’ (p.18), and my looking back at Barthes Image Music Text, with my second week’s thoughts on how the lifestream is developing, and forward to this week’s reading of Bayne on the strangeness of digital space, presence etc. and of Kress on signifiers and signs and the relation of words or images to things. I’ll leave any more thoughts on Kress and linguistic theory and on ‘a shifting configuration of media-elements’ until the end, or perhaps middle, of this week’s lifestream.
Carrying on from last week, and in relation to Hand on whether digital culture is a promise or a threat, a freeing or an enslaving, there seems to be a stream of stories in the news that continually address aspects of this dualistic, or sometimes polarized, view. Looking for good scholarly sites on digital culture I came across
http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com
and looking back through the editions found an article called ‘Look at me! Look at me! Self-representation and self-exposure through online networks’. The nuances of representation and exposure seem to me to exemplify the fine line between promise and threat. Our society values the notion of individuality, self-representation and expression and online networking provides a global stage. However, as discussed this week with a colleague, we are increasingly worried about the selfishness of our society where self-expression, or exposure, often takes precedence over a communal approach. Of course it could be argued that Facebook is a global community, and it has that element, but it is also a place to perform and sometimes its excesses and dangers are all too apparent. Or one might think that, in fact, Facebook and other social networks, offer no individual expression or freedom at all, but are just new ways to control as suggested in the Guardian’s article on ‘digital serfdom’ –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/27/facebook-open-graph-web-underclass?CMP=twt_gu
Perhaps the problem with digital culture is that the promise and the threat are co-existent and difficult to control given the internet’s lack of boundaries spatially and, perhaps, ethically. For instance, I looked at the Guardian story about an ITV programme mistakenly using video game footage as ‘factual footage’ –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/28/danger-youtube-factual-footage?CMP=twt_gu
I thought this interesting in light of Mark Poster’s question ‘how can mediated cultural acts be evaluated?’ (Poster 2006, 141). His discussion over whether the same ethical values can be applied to new media, or even if those ethics exist(ed) outside new media, left me asking if it really mattered. Of course it should matter that a news programme, albeit mistakenly, uses an ‘unreal’ image to illustrate a ‘real’ story. But with media manipulation, and the fact that we never really know if what we see online or in the media is authentic, I wondered if using a false image really mattered if it represented the real. The rhizome-like nature of my lifestream again becomes apparent, looking forward to the notion of words/images and authenticity this week.
I suppose somewhat fittingly, I was also thinking about portals last week, with the theme of other worlds; portals being links between the ‘real’ and the ‘other’, or as often seen in fiction, ‘fantasy’. While watching the Matrix clip (I have to admit never having wanted to watch the film…) I noticed Neo referred to the Matrix as ‘everywhere….it is all around you’ and I began thinking about ways that reality and other worlds are related. In much fantasy literature the real and the other are separate entities with a portal through which characters must pass to go from one to the other; think Harry Potter or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe or Star Trek’s The Guardian of Forever:
The Star Trek portal is interesting in that it links an ‘other’ SF world with what we consider ‘real’ historical worlds. Of course there are fantasies of other worlds that are self-contained and do not reference any authentic world literally, such as Lord of the Rings. But perhaps, as with the clip from existenZ, digital culture increasingly blurs the lines between the ‘real’ and the ‘other’. And with that we are back to the rhizome (un)structure, looking forward to Bayne’s paper on uncanny spaces and identities.
94 Comments so far
Ania and Jeremy will want to ponder the rhizome with you, I think! Carol, do you mind if I use Twitter to draw their attention to your excellent post?
I really like the digital culture and education journal, and the Mallan article you’ve mentioned as well. I cited this in a chapter I wrote (in press) about cultural conceptions of blogging, and how these might be affecting students and teachers in their engagement with online reflective practices. I argued that there are profound tensions around the need for authenticity, accusations of narcissism, the risk of disclosure, and demands for personal branding online. Add to that your point about users-as-products and you have a very complicated set of negotiations for digital participants to engage with.
I think we pay less attention to this in e-learning than we should. One of the secondary readings for this week, Carpenter, argues that there actually are no boundaries between academic and popular literacy practices, which means we need to be aware of how popular practices are playing out. As we move out of ‘walled gardens’ and into the wider web for some or all of our educational activities, these things become all the more salient.
That’s no problem to flag it up to them on twitter Jen. Would be good to carry on the conversation as it seems very relevant on more than one level.
Authenticity in reflection, and even more so in online reflection where there is more of an audience, is, I think, a continual problem with education and so I agree it should get a fair amount of attention in e-learning with blogging in particular becoming something I see increasingly in ‘professional’ courses such as social work. I havent read the Carpenter paper yet but I do think the line between the academic and the social/popular is being increasingly, and intentionally, blurred as recognition of, or an imagining of, students as creatures who live their lives online.
An interesting perspective – I found it striking that you referred to your lifestream as a piece of writing (albeit the second time you used inverted commas, meaning ‘a kind of writing’, which is reflected later in your point about a shifting configuration of media-elements) – something that has never occurred to me while thinking of the streaming activity. For me it’s always been a mere act of aggregation but now when I think of it, by collecting your online traces, threads and feeds in one place you do weave them into a collage, an enunciation assemblage, to borrow D&G’s term. A variety of input, online conversations, film likes, longer blog posts, visual artefacts (to come) make it have a richer, rhizomatic texture, certainly a new ‘uncanny’ way of ‘writing’ and also ‘reading’. Thanks.
Re: openness on the web and branding oneself, there is a BBC feature on an extreme take on the issue: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15167917
Steve Wheeler is also talking (very generally though) about digital identity in his last blog post http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/10/identity-play.html. He makes a point about the badges he displays on his blog as potential signs of his credibility. He often talks about changing academic practices like blogs becoming accepted academic sources which might tie in with what Jen, or rather Carpenter (haven’t read the paper yet) says about the interplay between academic and popular practices.
Thanks for your comments Ania – a lot to think about! I guess I say writing because my background is in eng lit and writing is a big part of my life. Even though I totally embrace new literacies, writing is my comfort blanket:) I think too we automatically use writing to refer to what we do online…even the old phrase ‘write to disk’. I like the idea of aggregation though…..I think the whole lifestream thing is really interesting and quite challenging to someone like me who really just wants to write papers and so on. The process has opened my eyes to a lot of great websites etc but seeing how it has developed is an interesting process. I like the D&G stuff and need to look at it more. Thanks for the links…I’ll take a look at them.