Blogtrax

I’ve noticed a number of academic contacts slowing-up on their posting frequency and I don’t think it’s just a seasonal thing. Maybe we’ve passed the first flush of blogging - saying this, I’m really thinking about a fairly limited group of academic bloggers in the UK . Elsewhere in the blogosphere, people come and go, change service and so on. That seems like a natural rhythm.

Although posting is sometimes a bit of a chore, it’s become a real habit for me and there’s no shortage of stuff to put up there. So I can’t really see slowing-up myself at this point in time. Recently, my posting has been much more focused on digital literacy and from time to time I’ve found myself commenting on education which is a bit of a new departure for me.

I have my blog set as my home page, and therefore tend to look at it regularly. I use the sidebar links a lot, particularly while I’m working. So it’s identity performance, regular updating and a handy bookmark all at the same time. I do most of my blog reading at home. My patterns vary a bit, but I check my favourite blogs every couple of days, others every week or so. At the moment I’m not using any feeds, because Snap gives me a quick page view which does just as well.

Usually when I’m writing (and reading more) there are more links to papers and stuff. Other times the posts are like observations, proto-thoughts or field notes. Currently blogging is quite a quick process - maybe 10 mins or so, but every so often I have the need (or interest) to build up my photo-stock on Flickr….so that can add to the length of time involved.

I don’t spend a lot of time tinkering with the look of my blog, although I do wish it looked a bit less busy (like the Critical Literacies one). The last thing I did was add Snap - then before that I just wasted about half an hour one night working out how to put a space in between my photo and the blog title (how sad is that?). The other thing I do on a regular basis, as it happens, is update my reading/listening bit through 43 things. That’s very personal - I love doing that - but I don’t thing anyone else cares at all. No-one’s ever commented on that on the blog or face2face!!

OAAghh, I keep on saying

I use the terms ‘anchored’ and ‘transient identity’ to distinguish between positions which are profoundly influenced by a long history of socio-cultural practices (such as gender or religion) and those which are more easily made, re-made and un-made (such as affinity groups or fandom). These are not simple binary divisions, but poles on a continuum. We suggest that interactions, contexts and events are likely to make certain aspects of identity more or less salient at any given time and in any particular social interaction. Examples of anchored identities are: gender, position in family, religion, age, social class and geographical location. They relate to aspects of children’s lives over which they have little control and are least likely to change. On the other hand, transient identities change over time, being influenced by maturation, changing cultural conditions and peer group affiliations. These identities are defined in relation to media narratives, popular music, sport, commercial toys, video games, and iconic objects.

But after a few outings and plenty of discussion there’s some things to qualify, change and adapt. First these are not binaries…in fact, it’s often the case that anchored identities are traced through transient identities (eg: gendered artefacts; iconic figures who are salient for particular social groups). So a particular expression of fandom is played out against the backcloth of wider social forces. In a sense, and at least for a time these identities are braided together. But the distinction remains important simply because we exercise choice over our transient identities. We can choose or refuse to choose an identity as a football supporter of a particular team. In fact football works quite well as an example. Personal histories, the geography of residence, and sometimes social class -although admittedly less so nowadays - and maybe gender as well, influence the expression of our allegiance to a particular club. In some regions there is a religious texture in there, too (Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, for example), but although we may profess to support ’till death’, a change of fortunes can quickly lead to changes in our sense of ourself as a supporter.

It’s a very different picture with anchored identities. Changing or concealing the biological or factual indices of who we are is far more challenging. It is overtly transgressive, often having deep-rooted consequences - and even raises legal issues. But, of course, some choice still operates; and that is the choice of how much we emphasise or perform that particular identity. And this, in turn, is relevant to our sense of ourselves, our self-presentation, and our acts of impression formation in an era in which actively creating the story of ourselves has come to the fore. Perhaps we need a deeper understanding of the nuances of identity performance in the shifting social networks of our lives and a more sophisticated appreciation of how we orientate ourselves to artefacts and narratives in this process. We perform, after all, to an audience and in a particular context. And so the particular figured world is a significant influence as we draw on a repertoire of behaviours and semiotic devices to communicate this sense of self.

I think I half-promised to do something around social software, and since that’s more than likely to be the organising feature of the up-coming book, it could do with some attention. JG was of the opinion that the label ’social software’ was unhelpful, because many forms of software have a communicative (social) function, and may be used by particular bounded groups and also as work, or at the very least task-orientated affinity spaces. I think I’ve got that right, and it’s a good point to make, because drawing up a boundary may exclude all sorts of interesting stuff and depending on your point of view, that ‘other’ stuff becomes less interesting. Alternatively of course those vibrant and hugely popular tools and communities could simply be dismissed as only being social, being less in some way or another.

In the discourse around online communities the term ’social software’ is of course regularly used (not that that alone invalidates JG’s point), but I was using it in that accepted sense, assuming that people knew what I was on about. I ended up suggesting that it was something to do with community, participation, and low content software - in hindsight I could have said transparent. Transparent because there could not really be a blog at all until someone posted on it.

So I suppose the point of social software is to create a space for participation, for the development of community and that is its sole raison d’etre (irrespective of its particular software history). Isn’t this the essence of the killer MySpace - that has become so hugely popular. If MySpace is about anything, it’s about what people put on MySpace and how their individual stuff inter-relates. From Wikipedia, I got the singularly unhelpful line posing as a definition, suggesting that social software is

the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result in community formation.

At least that emphasises the importance of communication. Here, though, there’s plenty of ongoing discussion of social software. So much that you can almost abstract what it is from the examples given. On the linked page, for example, one discovers the list meme and that really does seem to pin it down through exemplification. So here goes:

I’m kicking off an informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I’ll start:

1. (drumroll, please)… Flickr. Shocking, I know.
2. del.icio.us
3. My Web 2.0 — I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.
4. Memeorandum — when I need news fast, which is all the time, this is what I use.
5. YouTube is emerging as a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.

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.

I’m probably just as enthusiastic as ever about blogging, but notice recently that I’ve been developing a couple of identity/themes. One is around the writing I’m doing - sort of chucking out ideas to see what they look like published, and to see if I get feedback. The other is much more day-in-the-life type narrative. Of course they blurr - I like that hybridity. (Interesting that’s the style adopted by Sue Thomas in her book Hello World.)

But the first of these things - the blog as a means of test-driving your ideas can be a bit frustrating. You either get no reaction; a reaction to the joke you put at the end; or a genuine bit of feedback. You can’t expect anything, but I guess I like the last one. For example, it happened here. But then it was the next day, the blogosphere rolled over and I don’t think many people are really going to comb through my archives. So maybe the blog is limited in this respect. It’s quite timebound and the level of interactivity has the status of marginalia. The blogger’s in charge.

Keeping the story going, seems to be the way our blogs work. We people them with our identities and our artefacts…and a bit that’s location-specific. In this repect, I wonder how useful Paul Ricouer is:

- we make sense of ourselves like characters in a story
- we follow the trajectory of a character through plot, aims and plans - in much the same way we author the self
- characters/identities can be refashioned in the course of the narrative
- characters/identities connect or interesect with others

Maybe this all works into a theory about self-presentation in the blogosphere.

I was just wondering …

But I wanted to comment that I have noticed that people interact with me over different things in different spaces. The observation is this:
When I post pictures on my blog, people do not comment much or interact about them. So for example, on this post here I had only one comment - and that was received after a few days of the post being there. It is significant who commented - Mary Plain - she has asked me about photoshop several times and is also thinking of getting a camera. But in fact, I think she was just being polite in commenting - I had just commented on her blog.
Comparing this post (and there are other examples) with ones where the content is about areas of my research, people are much more keen to comment, like here.

Conversely, photos get lots of comments on Flickr. Now this might be an obvious point but lets move to some analysis.

Gee says that affinity spaces are about CONTENT. And people ARE selective over what content they want to interact about. There is a degree to which the stuff is just social. There is a lot of reciprocity that goes on, in terms of comments to and fro, but it has to be more than just social. There has to be a content PULL.

But this is just about comments. I wish we knew more about the silent lurkers - or blurkers - as Jackie would have it.

But also … why do you think hardly anyone reads this blog?

In trying to interrogate the concept of affinity space(s) in the activity of blogging, I’m wondering how helpful an understanding of play and social networking might be. Are the blogs and bloggers we feature most part of an existing or emergent social network that already exists, but is somehow extended and propelled in the blogosphere? And is that space more like a playspace than an affinity space?

Play is pointless in the sense that it very rarely has a primary purpose which exists outside of itself. It is essentially non-functional, although of course, various rhetorics of play do import notions of extrinsic worth (development, therapy, learning etc). Affinity spaces, according to Gee, seem to be much more guided by purpose.

what people have an affinity with (or for) is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavour or interest around which the space is organised

So, blogs could, of course be affinity spaces, but the ones we talk about do not easily constellate around a clear ‘endeavour’ or ‘interest’. Perhaps setting play and affinity in opposition will not stand up to scrutiny, but, thinking for a moment about meeting at BGC, there were times in which we inhabited a fairly unbounded (in a sense, pointless) playspace: eg at Zoots; and other times in which we entered an affinity space (more or less purposeful) to get something done. There is of course leakage, but nevertheless some sort of distinction here.

The emergence of affinity seems to happen when we begin to migrate from simply hanging out or making everyday meanings into the activities of categorisation, reflection or knowledge exchange. In tagging what we’ve said or what we’ve seen, we begin to move out of our own space, imagining, at least, a social world. A tag cluster signals the possibility of a group and shared interest. Or at Zoots we slide into a conversation about resizing photographs or the role of comments. [In this way we drag our blogs into meatspace like identity appendages.] And Blogtrax, too, and the whole enterprise of researching blogging, drags the activity out of play space into an affinity space.

I’m spending a lot of time again thinking about my blog. I posted before about how fast moving this liquid world is and I was reminded of this talking to Dr J on the phone today. Even the affinity space is changing. Trois Tetes is silent, Mary Plain and Simply Clare have entered the arena. Strange thing I thought I heard their voices, and the geographical information suggested I might know them, but I was reluctant to reach any conclusions. Dr J revealed their true identity and only then did I feel OK about linking them on my blog. There’s something about inclusion in a social network here …that and the overlapping of real and virtual worlds.

Play, not surprisingly, is also on my mind (as a result of the up-coming ESRC series). I’ve been thinking about blog play and message play. The latter seems quite straight forward since it’s an extension or development of informal language games. But, blog play? Well blogs are quite playful…they can be frivolous (but not necessarily), they are boundary-blurring, but also they can be a bit like work, too. Can the blogosphere be seen as a play space? The play

…becomes an experience changing the person who experiences it…For play has its own essence, independent of the conciousness of those who play. Play also exists - indeed properly…where there are no subjects who are behaving ‘playfully’…The players are not the subjects of the play; instead the play merely reaches representation through the player.
(Gadamer, 1982)