Digital Literacies

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:

*(Title refers to a paper: PublicDisplays)

Interviewing a group of 17 – 18 year old students about their uses of Facebook yesterday reminded me of a few things. Firstly, that there are a great many ways of engaging with the same thing; secondly, that even if the activities that young people are involved in over time might change superficially, young people remain pre-occupied with the same identity and social issues as ever.

Before I explain, I think maybe I should say that I don’t think I will try to discuss anything and audio record it, with as many as eight people again! That aside, it was very useful to have done this, as it reminded me of the dynamics that exist amongst young people who are attending courses together and how they banter and tease etc etc This was a good reminder of the meatspace stuff that inevitably filters into the Facebook activities.

Number one finding – the students all told me that they did not like completing their Facebook profiles; most had only put in their name, photo, date of birth and city where they live. After that, they say they rarely update their status; they do not write on their wall, and don’t like it when others do so. They said they mainly chat on the instant messaging facility in Facebook and that they also join groups. The groups are for joining and looking at , but they rarely write anything. They spend a lot of time looking at girls’ photos, talking with each other about them and trying to get the girls to ‘add’ them as friends. So my first point is that while there is a lot of looking, & some reading happening, there is not much writing or much straying across to lots of other sites to get links etc

The boys are making lots of collections however; they have lists of which groups they belong to (automatically created by Facebook) and they can display, in their ‘friends’ section, the profile pictures of the girls they have managed to add; there is something here of the collector; the groups are about funny things and the girls are to do with sexuality. (Many of the pictures of the girls’ pix are sexually provocative etc). These are the public displays of connection the boys seemed keen to share on their Facebooks.

This was all a really fascinating wake up call for me and reminded me of stuff I had been writing about ten years ago for my PhD thesis around boys’ demonstrations of hetero-normative masculinity in school…. (Paper here: expressionsofgender)…. In the classroom, I noticed these demonstrations had to be made on a regular basis, so that they would be construed always as ‘proper’ male and as heterosexual. In the classroom, such displays were often highly disruptive, anti-academic and anti feminist. In being interviewed, in showing me the Facebook pages, the students continued to banter the whole time, licking each other into shape, making each other behave in the hetero- normative ways. I liked this group of kids; don’t get me wrong. But they are a far cry from the Facebooking people I had been envisaging for a while – who have been writerly, keen on presenting themselves in text and looking for alternative possibilities. These boys were reflecting their college selves into their Facebook selves, that’s true. But the digital revolution is not one that is transforming these essential aspects of young men.

When I have managed to transcribe the recordings, there will be more to say no doubt.

Below we have a piece from Charlieissocoollike – with his take on teenage boys. Charlie is clearly VERY middleclass and has now, I noticed, got an international following of adoring girls. These girls make video responses to his films and echo many of the techniques that he sees in his work. A fascinating cultural phenomenon – we see some memes across these videos – some of which are multimodal – but I do not see Charlieissocoollike as demoonstrating anything like what is typical in Internet use. Anyhow – have a laugh at this:
.

There is something very Adrian Mole and certainly very English in all this. Now a video response from a fan in Australia ….

(!!)

Kristen Purcell from Pew Internet Research has this today:

I wonder if the statistic about using the Internet more if you are a ‘wireless’ user indicates that having wireless facility MAKES you use the Internet more .. or if it is that you get wireless as you are already mad crazy about online stuff. Prob a bit of both. We ‘went wireless’ approx seven years ago … just as we had so many people in the house using the Internet and could not afford to put routers everywhere. then we gradually all got laptops and drag them round the house with us, room to room. We take our computers with us when we go away, storing all our vital stuff and our stuff that seems vital (but probably isn’t).

I am not surprised that the SNS usage is most popular amongst the young (73% se SNS); while those going into Virtual Worlds is just 8%. I would have liked to have seen stats on gamers too… we hear often in the popular press about the huge sales of video games and about the immersive activites of gamers. But I think the gamers get attention as they are SO immersed and that involvement in game is extra to Real Life stuff … as opposed to augmentive of, RL stuff. Gamers seem to use the computer to ESCAPE, while SNS people use it to KEEP IN TOUCH.

In the February 2010 report, Social Media and Young Adults, Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, Kathryn Zickuhr explain that:

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009.

Again, I am not surprised… when I was looking at young people’s uses of Diaryland and of personal websites on servers like Angelfire.com, Web 2.0 had not really arrived in the way it now has. We can produce bite size (byte size) chunks of text, that is ephemeral and possible to generate while on the move. The early versions of blogs were hard work and actually I think were used by those who already loved writing (or would have done if digital processing were not an option). Maybe they were for the ‘writerly’ type of young person. Now, with blogs being a bit more accepted, a bit more embedded in the culture, the oldies have taken them on and they are being used by them as ways of indulging their writing desires. But also those who blogged as teens in the early millenium years may now be in their twenties and some of them will be blogging still. SNS sites allow you to drop by, do something else and then drop by again. They allow for in and out attention, as opposed to blogs which tend to ask for sustained work.

looking forward to reading the report later.

Travelling to London

It’s been a bit of a toughie week for me in a number of ways. Firstly my Twitter account got hacked on FOUR occasions. This meant that not only did I send out hundreds of pornographic Direct Messages to all my followers ( and others besides), but that I also had to read hundreds of messages from people I had sent these messages to, telling me my account had been hacked. I have spent a LOT of time this week sending polite thank yous to all those people, apologising and explaining that “Yes, I will change my password.” What a pain in the B. U. M. A plus side was finding this video on YouTube telling me what to do if my Twitter account got hacked:

talk about laid back! I love this guy’s style. In my wanderings, looking for a hacker solution I also came across the good old Hitler ‘Downfall’ meme which this time has a Twitter slant:

Anyhow, that aside I have also been irked by the inane criticisms of those who ‘tweet’; the criticisms are usually about how Twitter people write banal rubbish all the time. This morning we had to endure comedienne Bridget Christie on Broadcasting House moaning on about how tweeting is

‘adolescent and childish and undignified and ridiculous’.

Reading a report if The Sunday Mirror about the policeman who uses Twitter and sneers at him, reading out his tweets in mocking tones. Obviously I don’t want to moan on too much about dear Bridget, and I am sure she was only trying to make us laugh. But basically, Twitter is going to represent the thoughts of a cross section of society, some of whom will get on our nerves, some of whom we will dislike intensely and some of whom we might even admire.

But it is just people talking to each other. Think of it like people talking on buses. Some groups of people on buses will talk to each other – and if you want, you can probably listen in. You can even JOIN in if you feel brave. Or you can listen to your ipod and tune them out. These people will be talking about all kinds of stuff and maybe the topics of their conversations will reflect something about the kind of people they are; or how they know each other; or it might have to do with where they are going. Sometimes the stuff they say will be profound and sometimes not. When we hear people saying stuff that is not interesting to us, or that is only about the weather, well that’s fine. They may just be doing their whole phatic thing and this is part of human behaviour. It’s all about saying hello; are you OK? I acknowledge you and your humanity and your right to be in the world. So. Leave the people on buses alone. And by the same token, let people say what they like on Twitter.

They will sometimes be talking about stuff that interests you and sometimes not. And yes, I know this stuff has all been said before.
But I will probably say it all again soon too. Because that’s what life is like. Bakhtinian Buzz.

Talking on the bus

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:

Hmm. Like, … whatever!!!

The Guardian ran a few reports here and here (one day after another in fact) …. and here.  And yesterday Twitter went crazy with a new trending topic when news hit from Nielson that Teens were not tweeting. I guess it all makes a welcome change from people moaning about kids being online all the time and from hearing the wonderment about all our little digital natives who are born wireless and with inbuilt bluetooth (etc.) It is a new refrain that implies disappointment that kids are not obsessed with the latest fad – that it is the oldies who are doing it.

As Apophenia has pointed out many of the tweets on Twitter’s 3rd most trending topic at the moment are from teens protesting that they do tweet.

Le’s face it hardly anyone uses Twitter – a fact you will find confirmed if you announce that you do so, to a bunch of people down the pub (unless they are all your tweeting friends). So it is not a surprise that not many teens tweet – and despite their protests, the tweeting teens don’t seem to be typical – just like their tweeting oldie counterparts.

Teens tweet Tweet Tweeting

I think it is interesting as we have become so convinced that all kids are all online and up for technology for technology’s sake, that we are in a state of shock when we find this is the case.  Facebook (and Bebo and Myspace etc) offer a space where you can do much more identity work than on Twitter. Facebook lets you play in lots of ways, Facebook is a fun thing to do. Kids seem to prefer it on there and frankly I think are glad if the adults migrate to twitter away from Facebook where they had made a brief and unwelcome appearance. Different online spaces have different affordances and I sense that as we are all maturing in our uses of online spaces, we are making decisions according to what we want from something. We know that teens migrate through the social networking sites as friendships change and develop – switching from Bebo to Myspace, to Facebook (etc.)  Twitter may not serve ther purposes so well… for me I closed down Facebook when I realised that all my friends were mixing with colleagues and ex students, present students were all mingling in my space. I found it unnerving to have brothers in with post grads  (for example) and could not manage to feel relaxed about writing on my wall in such a social mash-up!   Maybe the young don’t have such diverse networks and anyhow worry less about saying things in front of the ‘wrong’ people. For me Twitter is a space where I can custom build my network and have it as a space where I mainly talk as if in work, in my academic comfort zone. It’s like a very select staff room.

So yes … I feel a comparative study coming on … luckily I already have the ethical review complete and can start work on this in September!! And as I said on the blog yesterday, this stuff needs researching from both ends … looking at the data online and the stats … but also TALKING to the people.

In the meantime New Media & Society has this.

…. the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has warned …..

See the BBC report here.

It’s a funny old world. Surely people who use facebook are aware of the difference between making contacts on Facebook and making ‘real’ friends. The archbishop’s concerns are around the way people are using text instead of face to face interaction….

Archbishop Nichols said society was losing some of its ability to build communities through inter-personal communication, as the result of excessive use of texts and e-mails rather than face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations.

He said skills such as reading a person’s mood and body language were in decline, and that exclusive use of electronic information had a “dehumanising” effect on community life.

Interesting idea – ‘excessive use of texts or emails’ …. I admit I get fed up of too many emails but this is because they signify an increased workload over the decades. This is not about reduced capacity to communicate – maybe even the reverse.

I am not aware of the research that says we can no longer read each other’s body language – and must admit I doubt this. I would argue that Facebook (and other sites) are not used instead of face to face communication for most people – but ‘as well as’ . It is about keeping in contact when it is not possible to see each other. Thus for the majority this kind of virtual contact is additional to other kinds of interactivity. Take Twitter users for example – the 140 word quickies mean that we can keep in touch on the hoof and that we are able to balance a whole range of complex relationships whilst doing other things at the same time. We are perfectly aboe to read the body language of others as well … especially that rolling eye movement when people discover you are addicted to Twitter!

Further it cannot be underestimated how powerful it is to meet somebody for the first time who you previously only knew online. But anyhow, that aside, it is the case also (e.g. see Sonia Livingstone’s work or Benkler ) that most young people keep in contact with just those people who they already know through face to face networks.

Finally, there are many people whose only networks are through online interactivity. I am talking here of people who are isolated through disability, illness – or even because they are carers – who find great friendships in online communities. To be forever reading in the press that such relationships are not good enough or are of lesser quality is a value judgement that puts such individuals in a deficit space. It is bad enough to be isolated without having condemnatory remarks made about what may be the only relationships that exist beyond the home for some people.

Nice little vid showing how the world can go ALL WRONG if we start behaving in RL how we behave in Facebook…. (don’t have nightmares now) ….

Gosh. I wish I had known this before. Apparently going on Twitter and Facebook (etc) can lead to Cancer. It has got everybody all of a flutter (as well as twitter) commenting on articles and on blogs all over the place. (They should know better).

The National Health Service ran this summary of the report; it seems that the ’study’ upon which the report is based is largely data free. The report argues that social networking sites actually ISOLATE people. Gosh. So much for my little blog post yesterday. Even the infamous badscience blog gives the ’study’ a mention but does try to exert self control.

Gosh. Why oh why are people so scared of online social networking? They are funny. Honestly I sometimes think they are joking. But it’s not really funny that they are saying these things cause cancer. I am having enough trouble keeping off the red wine. (or on it).

Twitter can help save lives as well though – since it allows surgeons to communicate quickly and effectively, supporting each other across the network as they operate.

Just to show I am not a complete cynic, I like this website about science.

I would have imagined that anyone having three months off work would immediately take to incessant blogging; uploading zillions of back logged photos onto Flickr and even …. even …. starting to write the book she had been thinking about doing for a while.

But no, no no. This is not what has happened to me … so far. Just the opposite. I have been hiding under the keyboard and feeling strange and in a funny space of not being at work and not being able to think in joined up sentences. I have been off work now for about 7 weeks …. but look at this … I am blogging.

What has helped me feel brave enough to plunge in again? The culprit is Twitter …or specifically people I know Twittering me ….. allowing me to just dip my toe in and help remember how nice it is to get glimpses of your friends online… getting messages through of just a couple of lines has helped me back in somehow and maybe just maybe, when I get back to work I won’t feel so twitty having first been tweeting and blogging my way into digital literacies again.

So this is an interesting little use of social networking … a vehicle for helping people to make their way back into communities after absence.

What have I been doing meanwhile? Not a lot … but I have read this (yesterday) by mad old Janet Street Porter; this (REALLY hilarious); and this (not hilarious but totally not put downable) . I have over the last weeks been forced into reading articles about Jade Goody like this and it has driven me batty. How can anyone bear this stuff??

I have been eating healthily in extremis lately and so I have been reeling from looking at this blog which beautifully illlustrates the path to fattiness and obesitydom.

I went to Lewisham yesterday and talked to Primary ICT co-ordinators about New Literacies, Social networking and the future … I had enjoyed the weekend preparing for it … putting together a list of sites and examples of wikis, blogs, and so on. The conference participants were really welcoming, enthusiastic and fab. I really enjoyed talking with them.

I gave examples of:

1. Flickr.com – photosharing;
2. Bubbleshare; – photosharing where you can add speechbubbles etc
3. Voicethreads; – photosharing and you can add sound and text;
4. Evoca; – podcasting;
5. 21 Classes blogging software;
6. Blogger – blogging software;
7. You Tube – video sharing;
8. Making the News - podcasting and more;
9. Radiowaves - podcasting and more;

Well all seemed OK and at the break people talked to me about how they were going to try some of these ideas. Am excited at the thought that a few said they were interested in doing the online MA in New Literacies at Sheffield.

Then came the presentation from Kent Local Authority who talked about how they had totally banned all social-networking sites in every school in their region. (And Lest we forget … Kent still has grammar schools and wotnot). They had distributed more than 100 thousand leaflets to parents which includes information on discouraging use of chat-rooms and social networking sites. The leaflets promoted the use of pcs for educational purposes only and suggested also that young people should not ever use computers unsupervised. Here is an example poster.
I feel OK about most of this but am unhappy about only going to websites that the teacher has set out or to never use chat is not really responsible in my view. We have to teach students how to independently research in a safe way.

This is the policy document…. here. Again a lot of good stuff but some areas where I think that they have used a hammer to crack a nut and I do hate the idea of banning things. (We once burnt books you know.)

This is all on the same day that the much awaited report from Dr Tanya Byron brought some similar approaches – with children constructed as totally manipulable, passive, uneducable dupes. The Guardian reports:

Byron, who shot to fame with the BBC series Little Angels, was asked by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, last year to complete the study. She will say the pace of the online revolution has left parents as “the internet immigrants” and children as “the internet natives”, often causing worries for parents struggling to stay in touch with technology.

There is a funny thing going on here, with on the one hand children as expert in technology, but unable to make any kind of moral choice. Also I am not keen on the terms native or immigrant; they have negative connotations at the best of times and undermine the complexity of what it might mean to be competent. Education is what is needed for everyone, including parents. We need to run classes for them too. Classes where their kids show them things and we show them things and we all learn from each other. I definitely think we need digital literacy researchers involved in future research in this area, not just psychologists who see children in quite strange ways sometimes!! (Dr Tanya is the one who suggests that to teach kids to behave you can sit them on their own in a room – I am just not into this kind of punishment malarky I have always believed in talking to kids in a reasonable way at every stage.)

So without spending my whole day on this blog rant I want to identify reasons why I think Social networking sites should NOT be banned from schools:

1. Social Networking is here to stay. People will use them even if they are banned in school. Children therefore need to be taught how to use them safely.
2. Students use social networking out of school, – so do many parents and this number will increase. We will (continue to) alienate learners if we ban what they value.
3. Some children do not have access to the Internet out of school. Schools are places where we should try to balance out inequalities and provide equal access. Children (and adults) increasingly use the sites to continue social activities begun elsewhere (and vice versa).
4. Students can be shown the value of citizenship journalism and the need for other voices than those officially constructed by mainstream media. This is an important social literacy practice for citizenship education.
5. In a classroom context students can be shown how to enjoy, control and be wary of the power (their own and that of others) in online text production and consumption.
6. If teachers use SNW sites in school, they can talk with students an ongoing basis, without using scare tactics, about how to stay safe online.
7. Students can be taught to read online texts critically and discern ‘hidden messages’ – for we know that some insidious sites, such as Nazi sites, KKK sites appear innocuous at first. If we ban all sites like this, they will only read them unsupervised.
8. The nature of literacy is changing; to ignore social networking sites is to exclude a whole area of literacy practice from the educational domain – thus making the school curriculum a dinosaur. Multimodal texts are easy to produce using social networking software.
9. There are excellent educational benefits in using social networking software – even when it is not used to actually network with others – such as using Voicethreads and embedding work into a blog.
10. Social networking software is changing all the time and thus brings constant fresh and exciting FREE material into the curriculum.
11. Children are motivated by using such software – especially boys.

Let’s hear from the kids: Top Ten Reasons to Use Blogs in the classroom

There is a need to treat kids as responsible people and to show them things carefully. Not ban things as you will never be able to keep it all out. So you need to teach them to protect themselves and to ENJOY what there is online and not pretend that the Internet and pcs are only there fore boring educational sensible things.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that really. Apart from that the slideshow for the conference is here:

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