Digital Literacies

Just thinking about yearbooking myself.

Aside from the clear detrimental effects the Inmternet is having on our language, the Internet is also having a disgraceful effect on us getting all above ourselves and hoity toity.

Now the yearbook I think is a lovely example of new technologies giving a new twist to the old -
there are amany examples of the ‘book’ online – such as some sites quaintly ask ‘visitors’ to sign the ‘guestbook’ and so on – and a great many ask us to sign in – and then out – as we leave. (and don’t forget we still insist on referring to web pages.)

But I digress.
What I am talking about today (if I can only keep on topic) is the way we are constantly invited to DISPLAY ourselves in so many ways.

And don’t we just love it … filling in those facebook profiles, (you can even pay for help)uploading dozens of images laying a trail of our online self all over the digital web.

Thus we have sites and pages on eBay – with a profile pof our buying and selling; we can have a YouTube profile and a space to customise; we have our fabulous blogs and Flickr streams blah blah blah.

I am thinking about how we have these cubby holes, these HUBS, which store our digital selves and we lay threads frpom them, reaching out to other spaces. There is this idea I am playing around with that is about writing and multimpodal text making where we develop an online self – the self as textually constituted – that pays homage to our off line life and each infleunces the other. Jill Walker writes about ‘distributed narratives’ and this is an idea to which I keep returning – and I am thinking now about distributed identities – that we produce through text.

But hey look at this – this is a grand way of the Internet playing with identity.

This evening as I was answering comments on my last blogpost I heard a voice saying ‘who is that? and ‘Who is there?’
I could not work out where the voice was coming from but then realised I had leant, without noticing, on my pc mouse. This meant that I was accidentally talking to Mrs Cassidy in Canada -.
WoW!!!! The Mrs Cathy Cassidy.

I wonder when I won’t get excited about stuff like that? Will I ever take these technologies for granted? Part of me never wants to just get accustomed to it all. I want to always feel the magic of an event where I can be at home on my sofa, and talking to a teacher in her school in Canada. I don’t want to think of it as ordinary or mundane. I think it is fabulous!

Mrs Cassidy’s blog is just fantastic – as are her students of course who must be amongst the luckiest kids ever!! It seems that the yackpack gets used quite a lot by people, check out this post.

Check out yesterday’s video:

But the thing I really love about Mrs C’s latest finds is pictaps.

If you are interested you can put a walkie talkie channel on YOUR blog too .. how about it?

A few years ago someone said that I had no way of knowing that Riverbend was a real person – that she could be lying about her identity.
This same person also suggested that I could not authenticate tommigoodwin who had been keeping a blog Senitel 47.

At the time I was fed up to be doubted like this – to have it suggested that Iwas being duped. But in retrospect I see this was an understandable suspivcion from someone who did not spend much time online – and it made me work out how Iknew that these bloggers were not ‘fake’ – whatever that might mean.

I realised that I had undergone a subconscious checking prodecure – just as I might in other areas of my life – just as when I meet someone new face top face – . In face to face situations I am not naturally suspicious of people but I guess obver time you learn how to pick up inconsistencies and can then spot someone who does not seem quite who they say they are – the person they say they are is not the same as you see enacted. Goffman writes about this as ‘telling’ signs – you can articulate one thing but your behaviour tells another.

What I find interesting is the way we want always to move beyond the text onscreen, back out to the lived life beyond the virtual world. When I was studying English Lit many years ago, I was atold always to keep to the text. To analyse just the text and not worry about the author’s life. This is now an unfashionable approach I believe – I think now that in English Lit they learn that context of the writer is part of the meaning of the text.

And so too I suppose onscreen. We have to take into account the context of the writer.

Thus we tell people in our profiles where we live and who we are . People read this stuff and are angered when it is not true.

Just thinking aloud today – for once in months.