Blogtrax

It’s interesting how robust social networks seem to be layered across different communicative spaces. So when I checked my Flickr contacts I saw a new picture from Anya titled Gus. I wondered whether it was Gus Andrews we met in Miami. I clicked the photo and decided it didn’t quite look right and she couldn’t be in Sydney anyway. A couple of days after Anya posted something on my blog (and told me she ‘owed’ me an email). So later I thought I’d better check Anya’s blog and there ’surprise-surprise’ is her account of meeting up with THE Gus in Sydney.

Dr J is local of course, but what’s interesting is our face2face conversations regularly make reference to goings-on in the blogospere and the Flickrverse…and the other way around too. So I have a picture of Emma on my blog and, of course, also on my photostream and it’s there that Dr J left a comment about the knitwear I was sporting last time we met in meatspace. Well since I’m going for the Gerv Phinn Knitwear Prize, I was most flattered! But the point is the conversations (and networks) carry on across media and online platforms - they create a sort of unity, even though we perform identity in subtley different ways in these contexts.

I’m thinking about the architecture of blogging and photo-sharing environments and how they offer different possibilities, or social affordances for identity performance and networking. You could see the blogosphere and the Flickrverse as buildings or city-scapes which we inhabit, claim, belong in and interact within. Of course, we know there are other places - virtual worlds; MUDs; MMPOGs etc etc, but an in depth analysis of what happens, how meanings are made, how allegiances are formed and how identity is negotiated within these smaller, often inter-related domains is what really interests me.

I suppose it’s a case of belonging somewhere, having a sort of neighbourhood - a digital arena you play in. Mostly feeling comfortable in these two zones, being socialised into them and having neighbours helps. And of course you get to know people in different ways - and in turn maybe that brings out different things in you.

It’s also interesting how both blogging and photo-sharing seem to promote a heuristic frame of mind. Eve Bearne said that through reflective writing themes emerge. That’s spot on. Could you also extend that to reflective imaging? When I heard what Eve said I went wow (inside)…thinking about all those blank-page-moments of my own school life and even later those moments that education seems to run over and over again. What are you interested in? What’s your research question? Starting from scratch.

It would be tedious to trawl back through the blog, but themes develop through a process of refinement and sedimentation - other possibly fruitful lines die off in the process. Same with the imaging process. Sets in Flickr provides that organisational function, the heuristic tool (YAY!) to identify what’s beginning to emerge through the messy process of collecting.

Both the identity performance theme and the heuristic theme don’t, however, happen in isolation. So, the social affordances, the architecture of these virtual spaces seems to be what makes us feel at home in displaying our wares and inviting different kinds of interaction and, in turn shapes what we do.

Well Guy and I have now completed the chapter for the sampler’s book and a good time it was writing it.
We have come a long way in the writing and were wondering today whether the experience of keeping the metablog has influernced trhe way we write on Drjoolz and Myvedana.
I have found it hard to keep up both blogs simultaneously as I think I still like to write about blogging itself on the DrJoolz space. In the summer I kept these things separately and I wrote in a very much more light hearted way all the time and so ‘over here’ was the serious spot. But even then I had to be discilpined enough to resist mixing everything up in the way I am inclined to - that ‘part serious/part frivolous’ boundary being blurred.
Actually one of the things we have rarely done in this space, is make it clear who is writing when - and I-anya told me she always wants to know. Today I have made it clear . I think we never intended to hide our authorship from one to the other; but hevertheless it is interesting that we even subconsciously chose to do so. A joint ethnography; a double handed auto ethnography, as Guy would say.P
Anyhoo, we will continue to write here, thinking about what paper Two will be about and when…
So not an end of an era thank heavens.

Well, waste not want not! Here’s the alternative conclusion to Inside Out, if I don’t put it somewhere it’ll get lost forever (which may not be such a bad thing after all!)…..there are a number of significant issues for literacy educators that derive from the deep learning of our engagement with these new literacy practices. We beklieve that our study throws some fundamental features of writing into sharp relief. These features apply to paper-based abd screen-based texts, but are differently nuanced (!) because of the potency of online practices which are dynamic and immediate.

Firstly, writing is essentially an act of self-representation. What motivates or inhibits writers (irrespective of medium) is as much to do with the desire to communicate or the affective pull as it is to do with content or skill.

Secondly, understanding the material affordances of the textual form are central in the sense that they offer limitations and degrees of freedom. he mulimodal and hypermodal affordances of blogging software allow for new ways of writing. We learn to work with the affordances through situated social practice.

Thirdly, communicative purposes are intertwined with our imaginings of audience and our writing, as a social practice, is located within familiar and unfamiliar social networks. In our blogs these are mulitlayered. Audience is important to our performance of self, whereas textual affordances determine the nature and character of interaction…..

Well that’s the unedited version of what I wrote on the plane. I reckon what will become the published version in the New Literacy Sampler book will actually be better. But there’s a couple of germinal ideas in this that might be worth hanging on to.