Oct
21
Week four: The eye of the beholder…..
October 21, 2011 | Uncategorized | 52 Comments
The latter half of week 4 has been taken up with the posting of and commenting on our visual artefacts. What has become clear, if it wasn’t before, is just how much a visual representation of any kind is not, as Kress (2005) suggested, a specific symbol, but has as much interpretation involved in its ‘reading’ as do written texts (if not more). As Rose (2007) convincingly argues, the images of the world that are rendered visually are ‘never innocent. These images are never transparent windows onto the world’ (2). The use of the word windows is an interesting one, I think, as it makes me think of the way in which our eyes/minds are considered as receivers of images, with all the implications of perception running from, for example, a physical, and passive, reception of images via the eye (Locke et al) to that which we see as constructs of the mind (Berkeley). As with previous weeks on this course, the themes of relation between the signifier and signified (whether word or image) and of authenticity are raised by considering perception. What is the relation between how we see and how we think? Rose’s paper (2007) provides a really good framework at least for starting to think of how images are produced and viewed and reinforces that intention, interpretation and cultural/social contexts and constructions all combine to inform how we view an image. I particularly like Rose’s categories of ‘the site of production’, ‘the site of the image’ and ‘the site of audiencing’ alongside the three modalities of ‘technological’, ‘compositional’ and ‘social’. To a certain extent this systematic approach reminds me of how I might consider a written text and that made me think about whether we ‘read’ pictures, or rather ‘rede’ (to interpret or explain). Looking at all our visual artefacts, we all brought different comments to the discussion, so does that mean that ‘the modern connection between seeing and knowledge is stretched to breaking point in postmodernity’ (Rose, 2007, 4)? I think no more than in any other area of interpretation but that is part of the relativist project that has arisen from postmodernity. At some point though we do interpret and that interpretation has to be based on a critical foundation, as Rose provides.
I am now finding the process of the Lifestream has become, not easy, but a process that I enjoy – particularly true of this and last week’s visual theme. One of the things I find with the internet is that, often there is really good stuff out there but finding it is happy coincidence or recommendation (the latter, a particularly good part of this course I’ve found). What I think I haven’t done so seamlessly (and obviously with the tardiness of this week 4 summary) is coordinate my Lifestream with the writing of my weekly post. There has been some slippage between weeks and, often my blog has been left in the slipstream of my lifestream 
.
Oct
12
Visual artefact
October 12, 2011 | Uncategorized | 8 Comments
Here’s the link to my visual artefact. I decided to use glogster as it seemed quite simple for my simple technological skills and because it allowed me to create an aggregation of images, videos, links and text that had to be thought about as a whole as well as the sum of parts. The poster deals with quite a few of the ideas covered by us on the course so far….popular culture/digital culture, the word versus image or word alongside image, the posthuman, logic and so on.
Oct
12
Week three: Transliteracy, metaliteracy…..Carol’s head explodes!
October 12, 2011 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments
Last week’s and this week’s ‘theme’ of visual literacies has provided me with more (literally) eye-opening ideas, links, and resources than is possible to deal with in two weeks. I have loved the pages that my fellow students and tutors have pointed me in the direction of and those that I’ve found, very often, serendipitously.
HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome)
However, from the variety of ‘artefacts’ found, everything from digital novels and plays to digital art that deals with issues surrounding digital culture, I have also started to think about what we really mean by literacy and whether, even if we are enthusiastic about the possibilities of multiple literacies, there might be a negative impact on the ‘old’ literacies of reading and writing. As an English literature researcher, an ex-secondary English teacher and someone whose day to day job involves helping students with academic writing I am concerned about the ability to read and to write.
So concerned are many universities with students’ writing skills that they are developing online diagnostic tests of grammar and ability to structure a sentence through to an argument. Unfortunately these may too often take the form of ‘quick-fix’ solutions with no attention paid to the holistic relationship between learning, teaching and writing. As a secondary teacher, I used to ask my pupils what they liked to read and the answer was often that they didn’t and that they preferred DVDs. Should we be worried about what seems to be a drop in reading among school age kids, or about university students some of whom do not seem to know the basics of grammar? Can we blame an increasingly digital culture for this, where text-speak and an increasingly image-led engagement with the world may well be edging out the written word? There are no clear answers to these questions, although we may be right to be worried given that we view our culture as one where any ideas of value are communicated through the written word. However, as Thomas et al point out in ‘Transliteracy: Crossing divides’, the period during which the word has represented the logos is perhaps less significant when we view it in light of what came before where ideas were passed on through the spoken word and through the visual, such as cave paintings. And, arguably, we are entering a new phase, enabled by ever-increasingly sophisticated technologies that are changing the way we can communicate. Perhaps the emphasis on the written word, for our pupils and our students, not least for every one else, is ignoring the possibilities to, or even the need to, develop new literacies.
However, this does not mean that we should reject one for the other. Transliteracy, according to the Transliteracy Research Group is ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’ (http://nlabnetworks.typepad.com/transliteracy/#tp). The TRG then are suggesting an embracing of all literacies, from ancient traditions of orality through to modern technologies. One should not supersede another, but there is always the possibility that if only one literacy is encouraged, the other(s) will fall away. Carpenter’s point that ‘some have argued that students’ pre-existing literacies can be tapped and utilized to facilitate the development of academic literacy’ (2009, 139) suggests to me that this can work both ways if approached thoughtfully in learning and teaching. Digital literacy and/or visual literacy (and we are back at the ‘digital natives’ argument!) could be used as a way into considering writing. On a very small media scale, with my secondary pupils who didn’t like reading, we looked at screen versions of literary texts, the best example being with secondary 2 pupils who read ‘Goodbye Mr Tom’ then watched the film and produced a visual resource and a written piece on the difficulties of adapting a book for TV. Their final evaluations actually came out in favour of the written word as something that encouraged, rather than just ‘provided’, the imagination. However, I think it is important to recognise the complexity of both word and image. Kress’s contention that ‘words are (relatively) empty entities’ whereas ‘depictions are full of meaning; they are always specific’ shows a naivety about the complex relationship between signified and signifier (2005, 7&15) and a simplistic notion of the way that readers and/or spectators interpret what they are looking at. One of the fascinating projects that I looked at over the last week, and continue to do so as I’m hooked, is http://www.inanimatealice.com . This is an excellent digital novel, aimed at, I think, primary school age, that is:
Transmedia – designed from the outset as a story that unfolds over time and on multiple platforms, the episodes are available on all devices capable of running Adobe’s Flash Player. ‘Alice’ connects technologies, languages, cultures, generations and curricula within a sweeping narrative accessible by all. As Alice’s journey progresses, new storylines appear elsewhere providing more details and insights, enriching the tale through surprising developments. Students are encouraged to co-create developing episodes of their own, either filling in the gaps or developing new strands. (http://www.inanimatealice.com/about.html)
With its multiple platforms, and its nod to Web 2.0 issues of ‘flattening’ or synthesis of consumption and production of culture, inanimatealice also seems to me to be of some import in considering how we can use new literacies to encourage new skills but also an interest in old ones, such as storytelling. Taking some inspiration from this, I and a colleague are hoping to develop a project within our university, perhaps starting off from the relatively low-tech idea of a wiki-novel (one of the producers of inanimatealice, Kate Pullinger, was also responsible for the ‘A Million Penguins’ wiki-novel (no longer available but information is to be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_fiction ). One of the challenges, which I have also found through this week’s task to produce a visual artefact, is that there are multiple layers of challenge in looking at new literacies, from having technological knowledge and ability to a critically evaluative approach to content and collaboration. Thus, I come to the latest term I have alighted on, Metaliteracy:
Through this overarching approach to information literacy, we examine the term within a new media environment. Metaliteracy promotes critical thinking and collaboration in a digital age, providing a comprehensive framework to effectively participate in social media and online communities. It is a unified construct that supports the acquisition, production, and sharing of knowledge in collaborative online communities. Metaliteracy expands upon the traditional skills-based approach to understanding information as somehow disconnected from emerging technologies and related literacy types. Standard definitions of information literacy are insufficient for the revolutionary social technologies currently prevalent online (http://bradmatthies.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/from-information-literacy-to-metaliteracy/)
This then would seem to incorporate everything, all types of literacies as information literacy
But with the added meta-analysis of emerging technologies and their cultural impact.
Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise
Oct
4
Week two: Rhizomes and portals
October 4, 2011 | Uncategorized | 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.
Sep
27
Week one: Floating down the lifestream…..
September 27, 2011 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments
The first week of getting my Lifestream going has been challenging both in terms of getting to grips with the technology of the blog and conceiving a way of having a Lifestream that is not too random a collection of tweets, links and so on. Or perhaps a Lifestream should be random if one thinks in terms of how we often access digital culture. Nevertheless I hope to develop my Lifestream so that it reflects what is going on in the texts and activities of the week. In the first week my getting to grips with the technology and the ideology of a Lifestream was limited in its success. On the technological side I want to introduce more streams to make the Lifestream a little more interesting, and on the ideological side I want to have a more focused approach, weaving in the themes of the week more clearly.
However, this week there were two issues that were, in particular, raised for me in terms of the film festival and the reading. Firstly, I was particularly interested in Hand’s description of the utopian/dystopian views of digital culture. On the Utopian side, the notion that digital culture can have a democratizing function was interesting from the point of view of recent uses of Web 2.0 in social/political events over the last 6 months. The use of Facebook in communication during the ‘revolution’ in Egypt was well documented although this is not to say that the use of digital technology is inherently democratizing. Hand discusses governmental uses of digital culture, for instance in encouraging public participation in policy, presented by politicians as democratizing. However, in the case of the Arab Spring, we have also seen how besieged governments also seek to use the internet to their advantage and there can be few of us who do not greet government web consultation with a degree of cynicism. And if we are to see digital culture as a means to empower citizens in the face of larger political organization both national and international, then what do we make of the use of Web 2.0 in the organization of the London riots, and police and politicians averred intentions for counter-use in the future. It might seem somewhat ironic that ‘in governmental circles, it is thought that digitization will help overcome the fragmentation, dislocation and anomie of contemporary civic life’ (Hand 2008, 23) given that digitzation may have led to (and the jury is out on this one) a greater organization of an expression of that very dislocation.
Trying to decide whether digital culture empowers or disempowers is a bit like deciding whether charity works: on a larger, geopolitical scale, it would be easy to be cynical, but on an ad hoc basis, as one hears of successes, the uses of the internet seem to have positive political effect, as in the story on social media giving Iranian women a voice from the Guardian this week – http://t.co/dbA98hkr.
‘Bendito Machine’ inspired the second issue that struck me this week. The people in the short film were portrayed as unsophisticated natives with the technological devices being almost godlike. This fitted well with Hand’s concern over how global digital culture might disrupt or even destroy local ‘authentic culture’ (Hand 2008, 18). I think there is something to be explored about digital culture in terms of colonialism and post-colonial theory. I am particularly interested in Hand’s talk of the ‘”info-rich” or “info-poor”’ (34). One might agree that a lack of material access as well as a lack of ability to use digital technologies would leave some parts of society, some countries, parts of countries or cultures behind. And yet, given Hand’s caveat on the possibility of digital culture disrupting ‘authentic culture’ (and it would be worth thinking about the implications of the difference further), I cant help but be reminded of programmes such as ‘Tribe’ that showed us peoples whose ways of life were being destroyed by the encroachment of modern industry, all being highlighted by the use of modern media. I think there is a danger of some kind of colonial notion, not necessarily geographical, that digital culture is the preserve of the enlightened with the automatic assumption that means it is desirable – ‘in other words, those with existing social and cultural capital may be best placed to take advantage of these new resources’ (Hand) – and ultimately should be desirable to all.
Sep
20
getting to grips…..
September 20, 2011 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments
Just starting to mess around with my blog and think about my lifestream. It’s like one of those exercises where you are asked to think creatively and your mind goes blank…or at least mine does! I am looking through some of the suggestions for feeds but, for the moment, sticking with twitter and trying to find out how to make good use of delicious!
Sep
18
Hello!
September 18, 2011 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment