Digital Literacies

I have been interested to see that the British tv and radio have had quite a lot of stuff about diaries recently. Richad E Grant hosting something, ‘Dear Diary’ for example. This documentary features diaries kept by a number of people over many years… the iplayer info explains:

Richard E Grant, a diarist since childhood, uncovers the power of the diary. He considers the diaries of Joe Orton, Kenneth Williams, Erwin James, John Diamond and Rosemary Ackland and asks whether a diary should, or could, ever be totally honest, wholly accurate and absolutely true.

I was surprised to find the first in this treble episode series to be quite riveting; Richard is quite posh so I found it fun watching him amble about poshly and awkwardly asking nosey questions (pretending not to be famous and giggling like a kid) – there is this great part where his wife calls him while he is doing a webcam thing and he answers ‘I’m just doing the diary programme’ or some such. Anyhow this is all quite weird as we watch him question diarists about why they keep diaries all their lives. He asks whether people should be totally honest – and I thought that interesting as paper based diaries tend to be thought of as quintessentially private writings – unlike blogs, of course. So it is strange to ask whether people should be honest – when there seems to be moral outrage if blogs do not seem to be honest. Why would you be less than honest in a private diary? Today the radio mentioned that the Green Goddess has kept a diary since she was a kid (and is now 70) . Then (Lady) Antonia Fraser was on book of the week reading her diary about her life with Harold Pinter.

So all this stuff about writing in a private way and going public with it is totally age old and I just find it fascinating that there seems to be this widespread interest … also Dr Irving Finkel is assistant keeper in The Middle Eastern Department of the British Museum and his collection of private diaries, written by ‘ordinary people’ appears in the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives’ which runs until April. (I would like to go) It was funny as he was talking about how apparently boring diaries are interesting as they show us things about ourselves. On the radio he read excerpts which included things like ‘ I really hate Lindsay; I hate her hate her” etc…. showing that teenagers have always been the same! But I will be very interested to see if any critics slate this exhibition for being banal – in the same way as they often slate Twitter, or blogs for being so. Or will the fact that they are written on paper (and are a bit less than contemporary) save them this fiercesome criticism? I think that we love to see traces of people – and I like to see the lives of ORDINARY people. There is something that immediately makes things seem special if you put them in a museum – maybe it is the glass cabinet effect that CHANGES the meanings.

Fascinating also, is the stuff you find on Flickr that is so diary -ike. Check out this custom made diary from Traveliter

see all the interesting comments under the photo. And then of course there are all the 365 groups which ask for one photo a day per year – and thousands of people commit to this. Fabulous, I say.

Interesting this desire to leave traces of ourselves everywhere; the web allows us to distribute the narrative across spaces and time and to share aspects of our lives and to provide a particular version (or brand) of ourselves.

The Guardian reported today on someone who one day, scarily, burned every photo he ever took …a professional photographer who had had ENOUGH. he said ‘Photography was dead by 1972′

I am so glad he is less right; i.e. wrong.

Here are some traces of people doing identity work:

It seems to be taking ages to get the year off to a start. The snow is still slowing everythng down and so I hardly feel I am off the starting blocks. In January there always remain a few post-Christmas traces…. not just the extra weight on my scales… but also stuff like unfinished chocolates:

and bits of tinsel still stuck between the carpet tufts. Beautiful as it sometimes is, the snow has been making it hard to get about. It seems quiet everywhere.

As I have been mentioning the last few weeks, I have been getting into Flickr again and been thinking about good shots to take and enjoying looking at things others are taking. I really love Sophies’ Photos and was interested in how this particular image draws on the book by Annette Kuhn – something I have used in an article I wrote for Discourse. What I have started to become interested in now, is images which show traces of what has been; which show a history. You have to be like an archeologist and look for clues – look at the layers of meaning, at the traces of what is there. This idea relates in some way to palimpsest; there is a good definition(illustrated) in the Palimpsest Flickr group here. Palimpsest might be this kind of thing:

this paring away of text is something that appeals to me and reminds me of the research process which involves tracings and the discernment of patterns – making sense from little things you gather. I am looking forward to February when I will FINALLY have the space to write my article on Streetart and spaces and how narratives can travel across time and space – often aided by online technologies. I talked about this kind of thing in Toronto – July 2008; details here.

And then I will focus on Facebook, where I will be researching how multimodal narratives travel across spaces via multiple, dispersed authors. Yes. That is what I will be doing soon.

Davies, J. (2007) ‘Display; Identity and the Everyday: Self-presentation through online image sharing’. In Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 549_564.

Aaaaahhh. That feels a lot better now.

It seems that it is becoming much more common place to accept that social media is OK; that the big media people are coming along with us. That journalists and social commentators are getting stuff published which says that we can carry on Tweeting, blogging, facebooking, YouTubing … etc. Cory Doctorow has this in The Guardian. He argues that:

Criticising social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is as pointless as knocking people who discuss the weather.

Such a relief to read this kind of stuff which recognises the social function of online activity. You never know, one day people may no longer have to defend the fact that they watch Coronation Street (or deny that they do). It seems that it is still not the case that television has ever totally shaken the ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ type of snobbery it attracted when I was at school (some 33 or more years ago). If things get popular really quickly then it seems that there is always some kind of backlash which assumes that just because the masses love it, it must be bad. There is an assumption that mass consumption means mass idiocy. But maybe, just maybe, lots of people can recognise a good thing when they see it.

Anyhow, here’s a tree which looks vaguely rhizomatic and networky:

Hm. Do you need your reality augmenting? You might not think you do, but maybe the product creates a need. (I know I need my ipod)

TT brought my attention to this site just before Christmas. We duly printed off a piece of paper with an image of wind turbines,switched on our webcam and …. WHOA!!!!! We saw a 3D version of the picture. If you don’t believe me I reckon you should give it a go.

Wikipedia explains here, beginning with an explanation like this:
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

Benji Lanyado chats here on video about a possible way of using he same kind of technology. The application he demonstrates shows how you can overlay the reality you are currently in, with information from your iphone. The technology is still in its infancy and look forward to see what will happen with it since it really does blend the virtual with the real in a way I have not witnessed before; as Lanyado points out this type of technology could easily be taken over by advertisers to push particular info at you, but nevertheless it could also be a real help when you are in a new place with not much time to find your way around. The problem is, as with all these things, it looks quite complicated to use at the moment and is only accessible to a few. It seems to me that while research abounds in its celebration of what we can all do, I just think that the divide between those who can do this stuff and those (for whatever reason) who can’t, is going to increase. My guess is that there will in a decade’s time be a whole bunch of people who opt out of what they will see as incessant, insistent change, and those who keep up with it. It is very hard to know what to run with and what not to, and so I think a lot of people will opt out since they will not be able to, or will not want to, keep on dealing with change.

I first opened my Flickr account way back in 2004. I only joined so that I could use it as a place to upload pictures to my blog. At that time you could not directly upload images into blogger and so I would upload to Flickr, get the code and paste into my posts. It was not until a while after I was using Flickr that I started to realise there was fun to be had looking at everyone else’s images, commenting and (most fun of all) joining groups and setting them up. Then started my OBSESSION with photographing my life and putting stuff up online.

However, I could not continue at that same rate forever and so I have gradually wound down so that last year I hardly used Flickr at all. This last couple of weeks, with more time on my hands, I am now uploading again and really enjoying it. It helps that TT bought me a fabulous new camera for my birthday – a Canon Powershot G11.

Much more portable than my SLR, but it still works so well – really versatile and can cope with some challenging macro stuff as well as handling night shots:

I feel like I am getting back in touch with the real me now that I am walking around with a camera again!

The thing I like about Christmas is that I get hardly any emails from work; normally when I am on holiday, nobody else is – like in the summer we take holidays one after the other so that there is always someone around to deal with ’stuff’. So the place keeps going and the emails keep coming. It is the down side of going on holiday – you choose whether to keep looking in your inbox while away, or whether to come back to a deluge. But at Christmas we all take a break and it is such bliss knowing that my inbox is not getting crammed full of demands, whines, instructions, requests etc etc. I am less afraid of my computer at Christmas and so in that case feel more relaxed about going online .. knowing I can come along and play on Flickr and do blogging, facebook and Twitter (etc), with no pressure from elsewhere.
Doesn’t sound like me?? Much as I wax lyrical about the wonderfulness of technology, (and you can barely tear me away most of the time), it does mean that my work can get at me 24/7; even when on a weekend away or a holiday, I will always look at work email as it is always just a window away or sharing the mailbox with all the other messages needed to run my life. It’s a click that takes you into work … and a click that can get you so totally stressed out very quickly. This merging of the public/private and home/work identities can be a ball … but it is sometimes SUCH a tyranny. (And I know you all know EXACTLY where I am coming from here).

So yes, I have been having some time to play with my camera, take photos for fun and mess around in photoshop. So I have been into town and taken in an exhibition .. ‘Can Art Save us?’ Seriously it was incoherent and just yet another excuse for Sheffield Museums to drag out the old Ruskin stuff again. It dominated the exhibition and I have got bored of reading about his philosophy of art and education. (There was a Tom Hunter portrait but I have seen it before and it was one of about three pieces I liked). Don’t go – save your self the £4.00. (Better to go to Graves Gallery nearby as we did yesterday and see the Mapplethorpe show and The Comedians).

Checked out the street art (by Phlegm) I had seen on Clydehouses’ Flickr stream the other day; and took a few shots myself:

I also loved today this website which hosts ‘one sentence stories’. Made me think you could play with that idea on Twitter.

Don’t you just love new toys?? I got a polaroid Pogo from Amazon – ordered yesterday and received it today. It is just so cool – and only 23.00 squid. Marvellous. I always loved polaroid cameras and this is probably the next best thing … maybe even better as you can choose which photos to keep as digital and which to print. As before, the papers you use have to special ones impregnated with chemicals. This means that you need use no ink cartridges. It takes just 15 mins to charge up and then it’s portable. Obviously I love gadgets and this is no exception although I cannot actually think why I will want to print off 3 x 2 inch paper copies of my shots, but I am sure that in time I will think of a thousand uses (or one would be good). Dunno how I missed these when they first came out … but I am glad I did as they were £100.00 when they were first out last December. So I have obviously saved myself LOADSAMONEY. This is mine:

And this is it in action:

Seriously you should get one. (NB It does not come with the music. You have to supply this yourself- mine is Feist).

Getting to the end of the year, so I guess I am like most people and am looking back on the last one and thinking ahead to the new.
Last year was a funny old year; my first book out (authored with Guy); launched the Centre for the Study of New Literacies (with Kate); Got funding from ESRC for this series; put in a bid for FP7 funding. Momentously Rosa started getting out a bit more and even went to Devon on the train. Could not believe it. Here she is picking plums in Dorset (on one of the best holidays we have ever had):

TT and I had a great time in Paris too, at the start of this month. Went on the Eurostar and that was a first:

So much going on and it all seems more poignant having had surgery and treatment for breast cancer too. I like to think that I can show people that it is not too bad a thing to happen and you just have to get on with stuff and look ahead. And of course all my friends, family and colleagues have been wonderful. (I just thought I would mention it.)

Good to be in Paris again after a few years of not visiting. We really notice how the city has a nostalgic feel about it, somehow not feeling as busy as London (for example) and certainly not as covered in adverts etc etc. We have also noticed there is not as much traffic as in London – although the level of crap car-parking on the kerbs and over zebra crossings is as bad as it ever was in the city – and the authorities seem to be encouraging cycling. Ranks of bikes are easily seen across the metropolis and you can simply swipe your credit card and hire the bikes by the hour. Very cool, I think. (Although of course it keeps out those without bank accounts). Here’s a picture in sepia – just to give you a spot of olde worlde atmosphere.

I’ve been thinking ahead to my teaching next week – for the MA Educational Research – on Image based Research. So I have been enjoying the photography exhibitions. Loved it at The Polka Gallerie and saw some lovely portraits from Francoise Huguier like this one:

A life saver for us also, was our visit to The European Photography Gallery. It was completely pouring with rain (I took photos and will show later) and so we were pleased to dive in and see an exhibition which surpassed expectations. We saw the work of Delpire:

‘This exhibition looks back at Robert Delpire’s career and gives him an opportunity to thank the various people who have accompanied him in ‘this exciting adventure as a book publisher, advertising art director, exhibition curator and film producer’.

and it was interesting to see how much modern photography is influenced by the work of advertising – like Delpire’s stuff (with Sarah Moon and Henri Cartier Bresson) – for Citroen & Cacharel – which is all about selling a certain lifestyle and image. This was early work which thought about identity and consumption, presenting a lifestyle to identify with & buy into.

Other stuff of interest included images by Robert Frank – Les Americains - as they say over here. His work was controversial at the time of publishing the collection, since his social commentary style was less than complimentary about aspects of American Life – his depiction of institutional racism for example, as shown in this image of passengers on a trolley-bus in 1955 New Orleans:

Frank is often described as a journalistic photographer … presumably with an intention to show and report aspects of the political and social world in order to make people more aware. This is different of course to holiday snaps, to advertising images, to story book pictures … and probably also different to the intention of photographers who use images as part of their research data. I wonder – are the photographs only different because of their intention – or can we use the same photos for many purposes`/ Do we make different kinds of image when we have different purposes or audiences in mind?

Also saw some work on children’s book images – and we watched a French video of ‘Where the Wild Things are’ – and in French ‘Max et les MaxiMonstres’ (!!)

That’s it though … apart from to confess that we have had to come to MacDonald’s in order to use the free Wifi (pronounced WeeFee) as our hotel doers not supply it. Tant Pis.

I do love the Wii Fit which Rosa got me for my birthday last year. We have had a scream playing on it – enjoying it as a family and ending up really competitive on the leader board.
It is obviously fast becoming the centre of family fun for others too. Flickr is full of images tagged as ‘Family’ and ‘Wii’ and there are marvellous shots of people having a great time – many of whom you would imagine were not ‘into’ technology. Such as this.And this.

There are some fabulous groups for people to put their Wii photos in as well. One of my favourites is Wii Motion here.

Of course if you are not satisfied with the aesthetics of still photography, YouTube has some classic shorts now. Take for example the much loved bowling one.

Tragic.

Oh No. It just seems so real when you are playing:

It seems that schools have cottoned on to the fact that people who don’t normally play sport, will actually participate in Wii activities. The Mail has this piece today, talking about how one school is allowing kids who are too embarrassed to do ‘conventional’ PE lessons will do Wii Fit stuff. I am interested mainly in the comments that follow this piece; they vary from those commending the school, saying that PE lessons in the past have often been of a bullying mach nature (etc ) and that this is a welcome change – to the ‘they have it too good these days’ type of approach. For example we have Beckie from Bristol saying:

Oh diddums – when I was a kid we HAD to do physical exercise – PE. Like it or not you did it and no excuses. Forgot your kit – no worries, the school always had spares. Funny thing happened – no fatties back then

While Derek says:

At least it’s a constructive approach, when I was at school the games teachers were a byword for sadism and sarcasm unbridled by any notion of their true value which was a big zero.

I love it that you can make comments on news reports these days and I also love it that you can vote for which comments you agree with.

Despite the fact that many commentators worry about new technologies making for isolated individuals who have nothing to do with each other, I see a lot of evidence that technology aids participation. This is confirmed By Pew’s report about Technology and Social Isolation.