Digital Literacies

From Heptinstall down the steep steps and path to Hebden. Lovely crisp and bright November weather.

We went to Hebden Bridge last week to see a band I love and also half a band that I love. The first was ChumbaWumba and the second was Becky Unthank from The Unthanks. I remembered all over again why I love country and folk music which does not carry with it all the paraphernalia of celebrity and useless stardom baggage. It is all about the music. All the bands were superb. In fact it was a Folk Festival so we also saw Grace Notes and a young band called Maia.

It is quite a while since I went to see a live band and it made me think about a few things. I do love listening to music on my iPod – either playing through speakers or headphones. But there is something important that digital sound cannot do for you. It is seeing the artists and understanding the physical and emotional WORK that artists do to produce their music that makes the live experience so fantastic. Especially when you see musicians who are really into it all because they have written, arranged or researched the music they are playing. I love the way they look to each other, that they produce music that reacts to the other band members that there is a kind of conversation going on within the band and aslo with the audience. I always feel that when you see a musician who is working so hard to produce the music, that you are being allowed to witness something intimate. Sometimes they even look like they are in pain; there is extreme concentration that you see; sheer physical hard work; enjoyment and a sense of fun – a full range of emotional STUFF. For me this very personal aspect of live music is so important and you cannot get it from your iPod alone.

So this is a post which remembers the value of things that digital reproduction cannot do for us and that it has its limitations.

I am looking forward to having my haircut next week … by one of the hairdressers involved in my research project. It will be quite interesting and different – having your haircut is an intimate thing. You have your hair and head rubbed, and combed and pruned, and crimped and it is all very PROXIMAL. I don’t think I have read any articles before which involve having your haircut by one of the research participants.

So that’s cool.

I am thinking about a number of things in the project …. about the way in which the young women immerse themselves not just in a lot of work where they groom themselves in particular ways to fit a very definite hetero-normative style; they also do the same for other women in a serving type capacity. There are lots of photos in their Facebooks which show them posing in ways that have a postural intertextuality – imitative of styles like Beyonce poses; Kylie stuff even; Britney Spears I can see in the styling. But also they have photos of themselves in prom dresses and sitting in stretch limos. These are all images that can be indexed in global ways. Yet there is also something very LOCAL in the photos … the homey ones show them in English pubs; with very English looking boys who have rottweilers on leads; who are in pubs and clubs that have a very local feel. There seems to be a continuum in their lives that they move across and through and this is all displayed in Facebooks in ways that do not acknowledge the different worlds they operate in.

Often their chat online os very girlish; they talk about their Mums and Dads and they present as daughters, as hairdressers and also as sexual beings. They also adopt language that is quite male at times – positioning women in often sexualised and even brutal ways.

I am looking forward to going to Oxford today to give a seminar and to meeting people from the Education Department – and this will be my first time as a visitor to the University.

Thanks to sisyphus007 http://www.flickr.com/photos/kiedyszko/5658404181/

The presentation is based on a paper I gave at Manchester and have re-written for Computers and Education. .

Slides available on slideshare and draft paper on scrib’d.

Silly wife

This image was sent to my husband in one of those emails that has about 25 jpg attachments. All were ads from the 1960s and 1970s collated presumably because they all seem funny now. Each ad seems now being used to laugh at ‘the way we were’. Old ads depicting a different era, helping us to feel sophisticated and clever and think ‘ How naive we were’. And “so glad we are not like that now’. It’s all a bit smug really.

One way of reading this particular ad is the feminist way: the man is the wage earner and he has kindly bought his grateful wife a Kenwood Chef. She worships him; she is so happy. We the latter day feminists feel she is foolish; a dupe who is unknowingly her husband’s slave. We, in the present tense, are apparently superior.

Nowadays though, media representations of women and technology are more of this variety:

Here the technology is sexy and liberating. The dancing figure is clearly female, loving her life and feeling in control. She has leisure time and she has the cash to buy her own sleek, hold-in-the-hand mobile technology. She is able to dance. She is iPod woman. She is certainly not thinking about cooking (or eating). She only knows dance and fun.

I agree the ‘iPod girl’ seems to be a liberated woman. Not to put too fine a point on it though – she is sexy and a fat woman galumphing about woud not sell the product. All is not as liberated as we pretend. The detail of the graphics are like the gadget itself – cool, cool, super-cool and minimalist – pared down as a dramatic but sparse line drawing (in fact animation) against a dramatic coloured background. The background by the way, is the same as the colours available for the ipods … coming in pink, azure, lime green and whatnot. It is woman aligned with product – or even – woman as product . The marketing campaign did a great job. , (I really like the spoofs by the way). And these are not really about liberation but getting your cash one way or the other.

The Kenwood Chef is now seeing a revival and the whole cooking thing has been re-configured. We have all these TV programmes celebrating the frilly apron style of cooking again. It seems that the zeitgeist stuff of make do and mend; of home baking; of home grown; of ditsy cooky cutesy fashion, is also making a breakthrough and we need no longer feel ashamed of our cooking impulses.

Thank goodness because I wanted one and got one this last week. Yes dear readers. My husband bought it for me and I have been making bread, cakes, soups and even mashing potatoes in it. Because I love technology no matter what. And so we turn back again – is this a fresh look at feminism. I suspect not; I think it is a clever marketing move on the back of the recession, which pretends that if you make it yourself, you are doing it cheaper. But the love affair with technology lives on.

Just do this stuff with your eyes open. It is all consumerism. Whatever.

Most mornings you will find me jogging along happily on a treadmill at the University sports centre. I love it. The scene: rows of treadmills, bikes, cross-trainers and rowing machines arranged in lines facing six tv screens. I will be on one item (starting with a warm up on the bike and then the mad behaviour on the treadmill); I will be wired into my ipod, wearing a heart rate monitor and staring at the tv screens, but probably thinking about work. I watch all the screens, reading across them all rather than getting involved in just one. The whole thing is quite surreal and scuppers the notion that technology breeds couch potatoes. But that is another blog post entirely.

(pic from here Thanks.)

On Monday morning (my day off) several things got me thinking – first of all that the latest Beyonce video seems to be pornographic and also seems to celebrate male violence against women; I find it embarrassing to be in a place where there is porn (in my opinion) being screened.

Secondly it is so weird how many people who are on Facebook say that they hate it. The Jeremy Kyle show, as usual had anti-social people yelling at each other about their dysfunctional relationships. One young woman at some point started describing how her estranged boyfriend had been ‘mouthing off’ about her on Facebook. She also told how she had ’slagged him off’ on there and that she had ‘dissed’ him and lied about him and boasted about having a great number of sexual partners. She dumped him publicly on Facebook. At the end of all this she said ‘I hate Facebook. It’s crap. Only bad things come of it.’ It is interesting how people criticise the medium as opposed to their own behaviour.

Then on another channel at the same time this was all ‘kicking off’ on Jeremy Kyle, there was a tv advertisement for something called ‘Cell Phone Spy’. Yes seriously. You can use it to spy on what people are texting. I thought this would be illegal but apparently not. This is advertised on MTV. I found it online, but the site looks dodgy so you may prefer not click on the link – and I am not sure how long the link will be live anyway.

In my google search though, a huge list of results linking to sites advertising similar products showed how you could spy on ‘cheating spouses’, or become a ‘mobile spy.’ To me it seems the software is moving faster than legislation can keep up. Very sinister indeed. Maybe I am starting to realise why some people are so nervous of new technologies.

Oh I so hate it when supermarket staff try and make you check out your own shopping at the supermarket. This is one area of technology I cannot STAND. If you have a bag of golden plums to weigh, they will not have a picture of them to press and the ‘lady’ has to come and help you. If you buy pre-packed stuff, the bar code won’t scan properly. If you pick up something reduced it freaks out. But the worst thing is when you put something in the bag, it starts screaming that ‘there is an unexpected item in the bagging area’ and no matter what you do it keeps freaking. What does it expect anyway? I won’t even begin to tell you what happens if you don’t want to use their cruddy carrier bags but use your own environmentally friendly (and more stylish) bag.

I think I prefer old fashioned shops where you get served; where you don’t have the moral dilemma of all the buy one get one free offers (and the pain of throwing half of it away too); and in general where you don’t have to buy vast quantities. I also like to have a chat with the shopkeepers and they rarely want to say much when they are sitting at the till with a massive queue of people to deal with.

I wonder though, what technology would improve the shopping experience in supermarkets. Any ideas?

Yesterday my daughter sent me a link to a video on YouTube. I thought it was brilliant and decided to send it to my husband the next day. But he beat me to it and sent me the link this morning. And so did a colleague. It was this:

It really made me laugh and is of course up my street as it showed how people learn to use new technologies – even older people who feel nervous – by just twiddling about with stuff and experimenting. (Actually the guy in this does a bit too much twiddling imo). I remember I accidentally filmed myself when I got a video camera about 12 years ago … it was recording and I did not realise. Can be quite comedic. But anyhow putting this kind of thing on YouTube etc gives us rare insights into how people learn at home . there is a lot of this stuff online – but not always as funny as this (remember the one when the guy slings the Wii controller into the telly?)

But I do also love how these things go viral so quickly – and this couple is very sweet. I think they warmed the hearts of people all over the world and that is a very new thing brought to us courtesy of web 2.0 technologies. Who said social networking was a bad thing? This couple is totally heart warming!

At the same time as Rosa sent me the link to this, she also sent me a link to a meme that really made e laugh. It began with this rather innocuous image here:

It has been spoofed by lots of people here and it has really made me laugh. This is what I think of as a true meme. I have more stuff on memes in this blog – type ‘meme’ in the search box on the right and see more examples.

I was telling some friends of mine about the next stage for my Facebook research. One of them was immediately excited about this, saying how much she hates Facebok … ‘I think it’s terrible. Even when he is at home with us, he has to keep up appearances with is friends. They are forever commenting and LOLing. I just wish he could sometimes just relax, be a kid with us and not be forever on call. It’s like he has no time just to be my son.’
A very interesting insight I thought. It made me wonder. I suppose it means he is ‘enacting being a friend ‘ when he is in a context away from his friends. He is ‘doing’ an identity that belongs to another context. But to him, he feels he is with friends when he is on Facebook.

This is Clare after she had taken a photo of me. She emailed the shot to my husband. (Dobbing me in for bad behaviour). So sometimes in real life, you can’t get away from the fact that your behaviour is reflected out elsewhere. These days, we have distributed identities.

For me, films come and go and I so often only remember them very sketchily a week or so later. However I saw Never Let Me Go more than three weeks ago now and I still think about it most days. Similarly I saw Oranges and Sunshine about a fortnight ago and it it haunts me.
I have not yet read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel but will do before long. Oranges and Sunshine was not a novel but a social-worker’s account (originally published as Empty Cradles) of how up to 150,000 children were deported from the UK to Australia between the 1940s and 1970s. The children, once in Australia were treated very cruelly – often involved in child labour, and often being lied to that their parents were dead. This all seems pretty incredible and more so that no -one seemed to know about it until the mid 80s. It was one of those things that was whispered about by those involved. Why did no -one blow the whistle? Amazing.
Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, a work of fiction, describes the relationship between three children brought up together in a boarding school for cloned children. Their destiny is to become donors of organs until ‘completion’ (ie till they die). The setting seems to be around the 1970s – 1990s. I think maybe because I was at school in the 1970s this seemed so resonant and so real. In some ways it seemed more real than Oranges and Sunshine. Perhaps it was the way most of the setting of the film is totally credible; set in a very authentic past that stayed true to the era throughout. Mixing in fiction with historical ‘reality’ in this way makes the thing ’stand up’.

So much of this weird scenario rang true, especially looked at beside Oranges and Sunshine – which exemplifies how whole scale mistreatment of people can become condoned by those who may at first object. We very quickly turn away from human rights issues when they seem to happen on a grand scale, thinking that is the way it must be. If some people behave as if there is nothing wrong, then others seem to fall in with that way of behaving; it is normalised.

Strangely, these films were not the best acted, nor the best produced films I have seen lately. But they have really penetrated my thoughts in a disturbing way. Each one is so different, one is based on fiction, one on non-fiction. Both are about children and we often see children as a subset of people, who have not got rights yet; who will become people to take account of when they are adults – kids as ‘people in the making’. . Across the world there are groups of people who seem to be seen as subsets of humanity and we do not recognise their rights in the way we should – often to do with where they are born, or when. These films place human rights squarely in the frame and while one may seem surreal, it has very strong roots in the real world.

I love the way technology insinuates itself into so many areas of our lives. It helps to make everything join up together – making all these connections between people, things, activities , interests.
One example is the website walk, jog, run. My neighbour told me about it. You can use it to plot your running routes so others can follow. But you can read other people’s routes and follow them. You can use the site to hook up with other runners and find out about local events. I did this run designed by someone else. It was quite exciting as I hoped to see the designer of the run – I may have done as I saw a few people jogging along. It makes the whole affair companionable. I like the way I can use this software in such a local way. It is yet another example of how we use the WORLDWIDE web to usually do stuff in our neighbourhood (preferring LOCAL to GLOBAL).. (I have written more about this kind of stuff here ).
Perhaps better still are sites like this one which connects with wearable computers you run with – equipped for example with a GPS and heartrate monitor and so on. It taps into all the obsessions of so many runners (cyclists etc) and allows them to display everything on Facebook – for example. here is another example, where someone can log a run and show all the details of their run, their heartrate and speed etc.

I think it is amazing that some people hate that we are constantly being monitored n the street by cameras, yet others (or maybe the same people) , show the most intimate (I think) details about how their body works, (and more) to all their friends (and more) online. This is not just about tracking our performance, but inviting others to do so as well. Some would say this was showing off, some would say it is about sharing.

More info here. Note the 340++ reviews