Digital Literacies

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.

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.

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.

I am planning the next step in my Facebook research – wanting to look at how female trainee hairdressers ‘do friendship’ through Facebook.

One of my all time favourite studies is Jen Coates’ book ‘Women Friends‘. It is a study of language – and how women enact friendship through the language they use with each other. I want to do a similar study but within Facebook – and look also at other ways my research participants enact friendship, e.g. through Facebook updates that include words, images, games and so on. This research will combine my academic interest (you could say passions) in several areas – language, gender and new technologies.

It will also be fun working with hairdressing students and I think that ways in which they negotiate and present their emerging identities as hairdressers will come through the work. I can’t wait. Nothing better than having a good old chit chat with young women. For me to access the girls’ /women’s Facebooks, they will need to let me ‘friend them’ (and I will reciprocate).

I have submitted my ethical review and the first reviewer has already come back to me asking how I will deal with the ethics of other people, additional to my research participants, who will be visible to me online when I am looking at my participants’ pages. I have answered I will be involving groups of friends and will follow their interactions with each other and will not cite or get involved with others. However this is a complicated area – and I am not sure how feasible this will be. I may have to end up asking for additional consent if it becomes to hard to disentangle some of the data.

What it will also mean of course, (and my reviewers have not noticed this) is that my participants will also be able to see all my updates and any contributions that my friends put on my wall. So I guess if and when the research starts I will need to alert my Facebook friends.

I really hope I will get some students wanting to be involved in the project as I think it will be so fun. Oh yes. And a fantastic contribution to research.

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

When I first started research into what kids were doing online, it was oh so different then. I seemed to be one of the very few literacy researchers who knew about this weird stuff that the kids were doing – way back in the late 90s. They were keeping ‘online diaries’ and playing games and talking in forums about the software they were playing with. They were building personal websites and then came the explosion that we call Web 2.0. (My first article on this stuff was published in 2003 having been two and a half years in review!!)

I quite liked having the empty playground, where I could run round finding stuff out and leaving new footprints in the new snow that had fallen.

But now lots of research is happening and there is quite a wealth of material to refer to in writing up research data. I am having to read what everyone else is saying about Facebook. And then say what I am saying in the context of that. It all feels overwhelming now that the area is getting so established. What I don’t like … and maybe this is too honest … is the way that old fashioned and somewhat staid ways of writing are now being foisted onto me. To be specific, I am writing for journals who requite me to write in such traditional formats that I feel I am no longer in new territory. I feel like this horrendous structure is being forced onto the research so that it looks like it is about something else. It is very dispiriting re-drafting work in ways you don’t like.

I want it all to still feel new … not fusty.

The riots in the UK have rightly kicked up a different kind of storm. Politicians, parents, community leaders – pretty much everyone I know – have all got something to say about the riots. And if you know someone who had their entire home and contents burnt down, (as I do) it is hard to stay level-headed about it all.
However it seems to me very extreme to start talking about banning people from using Social Media, simply because it was used as a vehicle for communication amongst the troublemakers. And this sentence in particular seems senseless to me – where two people who tried to start riots elsewhere – but failed – were imprisoned because of their attempts to incite. It strikes me that the medium is being imbued with a negativity it does not deserve.
Frankly, if someone incites a riot and violence through social media, banning their access to this will not mean they start thinking differently. I go back to my roots. Think of The Tempest, where Caliban says:

You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

Clearly it was not wrong to have taught Caliban language – indeed it is he who has the most beautiful speeches in the play* – but that in teaching people ANYTHING at all, you need also to teach responsibility in its use. Here we fall back nicely … into the arguments for teaching Critical Digital Literacy as a major thread in the school curriculum.

* Lovely speech …

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

(maybe I am arguing that in thinking about what we should do to prevent riots, we should think of all our looters as if they were Calibans. They are all Potential Poets. ) (Just Joking. I just mean that we should educate our young. )

It is really hard to concentrate in the summer. Somehow the more time you have, the longer it takes to do anything. I find myself drifting into Facebook; re-checking emails and … not working on my to do list.

I am supposed to be working on a re-draft of an article about teenagers’ uses of Facebook for Computers and Education … where the two reviewers are asking for different things – contradicting each others’ requests. All very frustrating and all reinforcing what we know … that even with peer-reviews, things are subjective. Writing in academia is pressurised … we are all so aware of the REF . It’s not just about quality it is about Impact and being able to demonstrate that once you have published, that your work is relevant to others.

Writing about Facebook for academic peer-reviewed journals seems to be the antithesis of what Facebook is about. One of the great things about FB is the way it embraces spontaneity; its write-now, publish-now affordance, and the immediate feedback that goes with it.
I like the way online social networking texts are at once ephemeral and permanent. Permanent because the texts stay online … but ephemeral because readers write things intended for the moment – and so they usually won’t get read more than a few days after being written.

So FB distracts me from writing about FB – I am after the immediate gratification it gives me, rather than the three months later, get your writing deconstructed by someone you don’t know.

I am tempted to look for another distraction and to write a book proposal. Cup of Jasmine tea?

We all now know that poor old Gordon got caught unawares talking about a prospective voter in unflattering terms. After a walkie talkie stroll a couple of weeks ago, he had to try and be diplomatic with a woman who had (at best) some seriously strange views and weird questions to ask. At worst, she was a bigot – and maybe many of us would agree.

I think it is very normal to do what Gordon did; grin and bear it, be polite to her face, and slag her off afterward. This according to most linguistic ethnographers is normal; Ron Carter found that the most common topic of everyday talk is about other people. Also sociologist Erving Gofmann would say that Gordon just wanted to save the woman’s face and not attack her in public; so was polite to HER, but then slagged her off after. I know we all pretend we don’t do this; but you and I know, that this is what we all do.
The advent of new technologies meant that Gordon got caught being normal. He thought he was talking in private, but his comments were broadcast publicly because he left his microphone switched on. So he attempted to talk privately; journalists overheard, and then publicized it across worldwide media. Gordon was revealed saying something in private, and the reaction given was outrage. He was slated in the press for this incident days and weeks after. I anticipate it will be re-called repeatedly in years to come. Poor Gordon.

Technology broadcast the words of Paul Chambers also, in ways he had not anticipated. Tweeting in exasperation about the closure of Robin Hood airport, he joked to his friends (he thought) that he would blow up the place:

“Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Poor old Paul; his tweet got read by a wider audience than he imagined, and he was contacted by the police … then done for time wasting.

How many of us tweet away; rabbit on on Facebook; blather on our blogs; (etc) without ever dreaming that more than our envisaged readership is reading?

We often forget how technology can make what we think of as a private space, a public one. By the same token, we sometimes confuse a public space with a private one.
We have to learn to be careful with new technologies. (Even when we remember their power most of the time …. sometimes we forget).

Here’s some nice technology for teachers: