Blogtrax

I was steaming with anger! Flickr wouldn’t let me post to my blog likes its been doing smoothly for the last 5 years. 2 days in a row. That’s ourageous! I repeated that simple Post It keystroke time and time again. First patiently, then more firmly and then with expletives and finally with the plams-up appeal gesture so well rehearsed as a way of communicating with bad decisions from referees. How could this possibly happen? I tried again, hitting the keyboard hard, as I imagined that the faceless operatives at Flickr would sense my frustration telepathically through the keyboards. And then sotto voce ‘Come on you bastards!’

After an episode like this I usually manage to calm down again in a routine probably instilled in me way back in childhood. OK calm down there’s probably a perfectly good reason. Try another machine. ….same again. All right then look around Flickr and check the blog registration. No fine. That’s fine, so what’s really going on? Eventually I thought I’d check the boards (I don’t really like them which is why that was the last port of call) and lo and behold there’s a long long trail of similar complaints, reassurances from the Flickr people, advice from other bloggers and so on. I just put ‘Get it sorted’ and left.

Co-incidentally - I think - I went on and posted this on digital provenance using the Blogger picture function. The irony being that part of the digital crossing that I was tracing involved a direct reference to Flickr!
In the cold light of day, and in the reflexive spirit that is the Blogtrax project, I’ve been pondering on why the Flickr glitch was so emotional for me. Do I become socially or digitally dysfunctional when apps go out of wack? What would happen if blogger went down with the credit crunch/downturn/financial tsunami whatever? How many expressive tools need to shut down before one has to seriously reconsider one’s habitual identity performance?

Anyway it was so reassuring when coming around to posting these troubling thoughts to find a comment here. Sometimes Blogtrax feels like a lonely outpost on the digital frontier. Blogging has become so normal that its getting harder to ‘make the familar strange.’ Harder, but of course no less worthwhile because of that.

It’s very interesting to try to trace changing perceptions of the blogging phenomenon. Although some commentators are suggesting that interest in blogging is beginning to dwindle (or reach a steady state) and that most blogs have a relatively brief shelf-life, they have at the same time begun to attract more attention. Traditional media sources regularly comment on blogging - often snarling at any suggestion of citizen journalism - and stories about blogging incidents are certainly newsworthy. Most recently the threatening comments story attracted interest and the proposed ‘code of conduct’ provoked hot debate. But this was frequently turned on us, the blogging community, who were perceived as self-interested, narcissistic or simply irrelevant. I actually felt quite insulted by the ‘why would anybody want to blog’ tack taken by some traditional journalists. Why would anybody write? Why would anybody want to express themselves? Why would anyone want to experiment with new tools of communication? Why shouldn’t people remain passive and silent… need I say more? The so what argument is very irritating- and I don’t think that’s just a defensive reaction.

However, when blogger friends slow up in their posting and presumably in their enthusiasm, I suppose you do stop and think. But then I’m aware of how they only represent a small segment of the writing/reading blog culture, and so the blogging goes on. Interestingly, I was at a meeting of academics last month, when someone suggested that a new initiative required a blog. The ‘groan’ reaction was interesting - but I wasn’t quite clear whether it was a groan of reluctance (we’ve been here before), a groan of overload (not more reading/writing), or a groan that suggested that somehow the blogging format was now passe.

In an interesting contrast to this, as I begin to introduce blogging to students, there is more interest. It’s as if something exotic has now been tamed. And of course it has been in VLEs. Here blogging is behind bars. But I’m quite positive about that, because I’ve noticed that as students and teachers become more habituated to the blog (and wiki) tools - we use them in the Blackboard environment - they begin to understand the purposes and principles a bit better. And, at the same time, they begin to understand the limitations in terms of audience and functionality. I’m still quite content to blog away! Sometimes I have more to say than others; sometimes my postings are lightweight, sometimes they atempt to record ideas or trends that are significant (at least to me). A lot of the time, now it feels more like building up an archive and Blogger’s introduction of tags certainly helps to create this sort of mindset.

I still feel proud of my blog and rarely look back at postings and think ‘I wish I hadn’t said that’ - I don’t tend to edit posts after publishing except to mend a broken link or when there’ s a mistake that makes things unclear. The most personal side of my blog is my use of images. I’m not a photographer, but I like to have a visual element. What I really enjoy is the juxtaposition. Sometimes my Flickr image will have absolutely nothing to do with the written text, other times it will have a meaning to me (and maybe one or two others) - and at other times it will pun or simply illustrate the post.

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!!

I started taking pictures of padlocks. As a matter of fact I copied the idea from someone else. Here’s a short exchange on my photostream

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Nice shot, I’m glad I’m not the only one who takes pictures of padlocks!

on-the-run Pro User says:
Actually it’s contagious. I thought your’s were so good that I suddenly found myself copying!!

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Thank you, glad to know I can inspire others to take interesting pictures

I wrote about this on my own blog, referring to visual memes, but all the time I was thinking about copying and the whole ambiguity of that culturally located concept of copying. I guess we are first socialised into the complexities and nuances of copying in school. We learn for example that:

- close imitation is good in certain contexts (such as letter formation, lining up, singing, turning somersaults, using technical vocabulary)

- imitation is bad, when we make fun of how people walk, speak and so on…that is as long as they are not legitimate targets (and of course what constitutes a legitimate target varies from situation to situation)

- imitation is good in creative tasks, particularly in the broad sweep of things such as kinds of representation, writing genres and so on

- imitation is bad in creative tasks when it shows a lack of originality and when it is a straightforward (literal) copy

In a nutshell, we learn by copying and we learn not to copy. Our academic life is shot through with similar notions about copying. Plagiarism is bad, summarising someone else’s ideas and acknowledging them is good. Doing a similar thing to someone else locates you in a particular discipline or field. Doing exactly the same thing is unoriginal etc etc. Underlying all this there seem to be some cultural constructs about individuality, originality, authority and authorship that are related to the way that knowledge and learning are conceived of and policed in the dominant Western paradigm. These are all concepts that new media and new technologies challenge. Yet, we still prize the originality of our blogs even if we riff off the posts of others; we celebrate the uniqueness of the images in our photostream even when we are inspired by others. Cut/paste, capture/remix, and rip/burn technologies suggest how we can make new knowledge or art out of the work of others. Originality and creativity is perhaps re-defined in terms of the juxtapositions we make, the new links we establish. What we do then is less like orchestrating new comments more like deejaying, seguing one idea track into another whilst still keeping our audience on the dance floor. Maybe copies our OK (after all they serve DJs well), we are distinctive in the versions we have and the combinations and sequences we make and, of course, the spaces in which we produce them. After all that’s where we perform our identity and develop our reputation.

I’m fascinated by the fluidity of the blogosphere. As texts blogs often appear to be unbounded - they change their look, their relationships, their links, paying little respect to any notions of fixity. Over a relatively short period of time we have re-skinned our blogs - Dr Joolz has changed provider - and we have changed the tools, processes and styles in which we blog. This fluid world is also characterised by frequent changes in reference points as the blogosphere reshapes itself. Our audience re-groups, we change our relationships to each other and we re-calibrate our frequency of commenting. Topics refresh and morph into new areas and some of our frequently-posting friends have for one reason or another become occasionals (Mary Plain and Simply Clare are cases in point). New bloggers have appeared and disappeared, and new kinds of possibilities have emerged. Some, like Kate, experiment with new forms… Professionally, apart from this shared metablog, we are both involved in Lets Get Digital and Critical Literacies - group blogs which aim to provide a forum for research and academic ideas - both difficult to promote and sustain. Is it, perhaps, that the real social affordance of the blog is about a performance of identity something that is harder for a group to achieve? Looking at the social architecture of blogging as opposed to photosharing, im or message boards one gets the sense of the personalised page - my space (isn’t the popular MySpace appropriately named, from this perspective?), an online shopwindow, a showcase, decorated like mine with my books, my CDs, my pics and so on. And I do, from time to time expend a little energy in arranging this window…yes, it’s interactive, yes, it is intertextual, hyperlinked and so on, but the starting point is me. The social architecture of other online spaces is rather different, and for me less personal. Commenting on someone else’s blog though is much the same experience as dropping a comment on a Runboard discussion group, or chatting on someone else’s photostream.

Recently, because of a project I’m involved in, I’ve been interacting with people in a virtual world. In a sense this feels much more like neutral territory - the social architecture is different, the interaction is far more conversational. Apart from the world itself, which gives the impression of fixity, the communication is far more ephemeral. Once I’m used to the subtleties of turn-taking (and waiting) in synchronous chat there’s an interesting freeflow of chat. Last night I met Andrew, who I know on RL and we talked about approaches to narrative writing in a virtual park - he was a spider, I was a dalek. I’ve also spoken to Susan in Michigan (who’s she in RL?) about building terraced houses, Zola and Rich in Finland (seen his pic on a website). Next time I visit that world is back to normal. I haven’t left a trace of myself there. My text has evaporated, my words erased. So this suggests a continuum - yes the blog rolls over (but it’s still archived); yes the blog topics change (but the old ones are still there). There is a leading edge to a blog. It’s right there where you just left it. It has a life beyond your posting, as does Flickr or a Runboard discussion and the archived memory is a key feature. Chat in whatever format is very different in texture.

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 got excited on Friday. I’d spent an hour or so working on a book review and had just run out of energy. I took a break, had some tea and surfed a bit. Playfully looking around, I came across a programme someone had written. It generated letters a numbers from other people’s Flickr images. I wrote my name, quickly grabbed the accompanying html and pasted it into my blog with a ‘wow look what I’ve found’ or words rather like that. Along comes Mary Plain with a ‘Pray tell’ sort of comment. And then, of course later I spruced up the original post with some reflections (yawn) and the link…the link itself which Mary Plain (being a cool hunter) really wanted. That then set me thinking about links.

1. We can be quite dictatorial in our links. I’ve done it. I’ve seen others do it. No real comment- just look HERE they say. Or HERE, HERE and HERE. This is cool. This sort of link tries to drag the reader away…but does it? Probably not.

2. There’s the hyper-referencing link. So and so (linked) argues that, blah, blah, blah, blah but I think blah, blah. There’s an option here you can read the original or pass on. The writer gives you that choice (a bit like academic referencing it points you to the source).

3. Then there’s the name- check link that takes you to the person’s homepage, blog or photo. This sort of link just adds local colour.

4. Hybrids of the latter- place, company or self-referencing (also adding local colour, providing free advertising).

5. Affiliation-linking sometimes includes 3 and 4, but really strives to demonstrate allegiances, networks and so on. Affiliation linking shouts out THIS IS WHO I AM; THIS IS WHO I KNOW; THIS IS THE KIND OF PERSON I WANT YOU TO THINK I AM.

6. Source-linking. Well I think that’s what Mary Plain was after. I want to play this too, but can you tell me where to find it.

One of the things about blogging as hyperwriting is that it gets you to understand more about how linking works. And this has a knock on effect when you start reading and following/not following other people’s links. I think you get more discerning. Either that or you slip into bad habits. Some places I go and don’t really bother reading - just follow their links. Other places, what the person writes is usually far more worthwhile than following the links.

Hyperwriting is about making choices. Deciding when to link and when not to link. I know I’m very unsystematic. On some occasions I find I’ve found a lot of cool stuff during the day and I end up stitching my blog together around the links. The links end up being more important (to me as the writer). Other times I’ve got something I want to say. Maybe it doesn’t really need links, so it’ll depend upon whether I’m busy or not. On such occasions I might add a few links to pep it up, to add another layer of meanings or just for fun. If I’m pushed, tired or stressed I’ll probably think ‘Ah what the hell who needs links anyway.’ Now funnily enough that must be hyperwriting too. Deciding not to include links.

I had an experiment in mind, but it may take some time planning (sounds like hard work already). That’s to make a text that has a very thin slice of meaning on the page itself but is composed almost entirely of links that would communicate meaning through their very juxtaposition. I expect someone’s already done that, but it would be worth a try. One thing for sure - it would get you thinking about linking!

Last week I finally caved in and signed up for a Flickr Pro account. Why? Well, January’s a long month, I’d run out of free space for my photostream and the thought of three or four days not posting or doing pictureless posts was bugging me. Interestingly, when I started my blog I wasn’t that bothered about image content, but gradually as I began to visit more blogs (and think more about multimodality) I got into the idea of the visual element. I’m not big on photography, but interestingly having a Flickr photostream has changed my attitude. I like getting pictures of my neighbourhood and doing ’still-life’-type things (fruit, flowers, juggling balls etc). But with the blog, the words are in charge. I feel they’re my prime purpose. Image is decorative, illustrative or even tangential. Mostly I want the words to stand on their own…links to add depth or reference and images - well yes, I want them because they make the page look good. So there’s an aesthetic of design at work, but it runs secondary to the communicative act. If I had more time, my story runs, I’d learn how to tidy up my page, make the codes work for me etc. ..but it’s good enough for now.

I think what’s really interesting about this though, is that dynamic (or should I say organic?) quality of blogging. My blogging horizons have grown from very modest beginnings. I’ll have a go at this blog thing, nobody’ll find it, and even if they do, it will be anonymous or uninteresting. So I began with a few words, a few links - messages to myself really. Well, it’s a whole different ball game now. Working on Blogtrax has influenced my way of writing on the blog. Engaging more with Flickr has changed my attitude to digital images. The whole thing’s morphed and I’m really attracted to that… just recently, I started doing more diary-like descriptions of what I’ve been up to. Snapshots in words. Why? I just wanted to, and that’s the wonderfully free way you can approach blogging.