Digital Literacies

Barnardo’s has issued a video in defence of the young – against comments that position the young as problematic and transgressive:

This comes at the same time as the continued moral outrage about ‘Baby P’ lines the newsagents’ shelves and pours constantly out of tv and radio news. Here the outrage is against social services and other agencies.

Children are alternately positioned as victims and as perpetrators of irresponsible acts.

So which is it?

This is a blog post trying to speak out against the lack of subtelty of media discourses where there seem only to be goodies and baddies.

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.

This font conference is marvellous….

Does it count as new literacies if fonts come to life and interact with each other?
And another thing … when did we ever before word processors, know the names of more than twenty fonts? Or of any fonts? And when did the word ‘font’ become so commonplace? Huh? Hh? Not so stupid now, are we? We know new stuff.

Oh dear. I had one of those days where technology got the better of me. I spent the ENTIRE day trying to send a Keynote presentation to YouTube.
I managed to get it on there with NO SOUND, but apart from that: NOTHING.

So, despondent and deflated was I that TT suggested I use JING.
Hooray!!

What a good idea.

I just ran the presentation and recorded it on the screen and uploaded it to Screencast.

Five minutes, job done.

Marvellous little package is JING. And so too Screencast. All free. All easy.

Now… go tell your friends about the OnlineMA. in New Literacies:

Really love this little people streetart project which Tim told me about. (Thanks Tim).

I am putting together an article about the convergence of streetart and new technologies for the Visual Culture journal. Last week I presented in Manchester on this called: Location Location Location: streetart and online spaces – a traveller’s tale.
So I am really enjoying the Channel 4 shorts at the moment on streeart:

Am going to London at the weekend and will do this tour and hope to look at the exhibition. SO EXCITING!!!!

I didn’t realise that the government had videos on Youtube ….

here is the launch of the Byron report :

and here is something from the outtake genre of video …

funny what you come across when you aren’t trying.

So0arcOz has a great post here about a tv programme that I have not seen – maybe it is only available so far in Oz, but it is a satirical sopa opera based in aschool.
I love that the kids in this school have the same uniform as kids in a local private school near me.

Aaaanyway I think the programme looks just spot on for use in the classroom as it provides hot topics for kids to discuss and would also be a good media studies topic in itself – ‘what makes popular culture so controversial?’

Check it out.

Hilarious. I really wanna watch it on our tvs in the UK. Please can we buy it Mr BBC?

The Today Programme had a piece about how some kids are arranging suicides online – an ‘internet suicide cult’. (Listen to the first three minutes of the 8.30 section).

It refers to the 7 young people who have recently committed suicide in Bridge End, Wales. They suggested that it is websites that seems to be encouraging the spate of suicides. This is obviously a very serious business. And for some, BEBO gets the blame.

The MP interviewed suggested that young people ‘lose reality’ when they are online. The MP also said that she wished that young people realised that they could talk to ‘real people’ who could help them when they are stressed. (Mind you,closer reading of the newsreports shows that most of these people also knew each other in face to face contexts too.)

The Sun reported in this lascivious way. The Telegraph also ran this on the story. And they let readers leave comments. One person writes:

Posted by Steve (UK) on January 23, 2008 2:47 AM Report
this comment
It seems that many kids find it easier to talk to a computer
than to their parents. It is no longer sufficient for parents to leave their
adolescent kids to find their own way in life, hoping that they will eventually
turn out like themselves. Kids are being enticed by role models in the media
(including “cool” aliases on the Internet).

And there is also this vile remark:

Posted by K.Evans on January 23, 2008 1:43 PMReport
this comment
“I don’t know much about South Wales, but here in New South
Wales, Australia, my kids are too busy surfing, climbing, exploring, camping and
having FUN to be sitting, gibbering over some Internet site.” Well, there’s your
big difference! This is England and all such activities were banned years ago by
the government in case someone bumps their head and empties the local authority
purse in compensation payments. The streets are therefore silent regards happy
playing children, all victims of the ‘no ball games here’ culture. Instead we
have bored, badly parented gutter snipes drowning their empty, hopeless lives
with cheap alcohol and the other end of the spectrum we have those whose best
friend is the social networking site. Well at least they’re not out on the
street either drinking, battering law abiding citizens or getting knifed eh!

Aside from the sweeping statements about a whole nation (do we call it racist?) there is also the assumption that those who go online are lazy, ‘badly parented’ and so on. Hmm. Interesting stuff – they used to say that about people who watched TV, or before that, read popular culture novels etc. (Actually am glad that K.Evans keeps offline in the main – although what is s/he doing putting comments on virtual spaces?)

The Today programme mentions that there are ‘memorial websites’ and that young
people are wanting to have a site dedicated to them, when they commit suicide. I
found what they were talking about here. And here is one that has been set
up for one of the teens who committed suicide in Bridge End. The argument is
that the teens are attracted to the idea of having such sites. They like the idea of a memorial.

It did not take me long to find weird stuff on Google by using key words ’suicide’ and Bebo‘ - and certainly I think this blog is somewhat creepy.

Aaaanyway … what do I think? I can only comment in terms of the Internet, rather than say something about teenagers’ suicidal tendencies. In general it remains the case that teenagers’ mostly interact with people they already know from face to face (f2f) situations. There is a smaller group who sometimes connect with some people who they don’t already know from f2f situations; an even smaller group who exclusively talk to people who they only met and know from online spaces. So usually they are not confused by the virtual and the real. This makes me think that those who do get involved in this stuff, are already a bit ‘lost’ and impressionable.

Secondly, and most importantly, while I think that the Internet is GREAT and a wonderful opportunity in so many ways, it is definitely the case that parents and teachers need to understand what their kids are doing and guide them. Just as we give guidance to kids when they go out on their own, so too we need to guide them in the online spaces they go to. Many parents and teachers don’t understand about how the Internet works and they need to know so they can guide their kids. BEBO and other social networking sites have, frankly, enriched the lives of far more people than they have hurt and I think we have to be very careful about what we say about popular cultural phenomena – an easy way to alienate the young is to tell them what they are doing is bad, dangerous and wrong.

So. The Internet is not about to go away. It is going to increase its presence in our lives. So we all need to learn how to read texts; how to protect ourselves and be aware of how persuasive/seductive some texts/ online cultures can be. This is the role of Education and Educators. Like me.