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 would have been impossible to predict the lifespan of a blog several years ago. There just wasn’t enough history. Perhaps we’re just about reaching a point where we can comment on some trends as try-it-for-a-bit bloggers fall by the wayside and yesterday’s online sodalities come untethered. Seasoned bloggers seem to find their own rhythms and frequencies whereas project and student blogs grind to a halt in this vaporous space of self-publishing. At the same time mainstream blogs, and often those associated with media or business interest, thrive and even seem to have become absorbed into the public imagination to such an extent that a mention of the word ‘blog’ does not evoke the same glazed expressions and eye-rolling that it once did - these paralinguistics now refocus on the word ‘wiki’ instead. And so it can be said that blogging has reached a rather early maturity, as those day-to-day postings aggregate and the trendy sparkle begins to tarnish. Why aren’t you blogging is now not as interesting a question as what keeps you blogging. Why keep up this purpose-built blog that once served as a repository of our autoethnography of academic blogging?

Well there are several good reasons, or so it seems to me. The first is entirely personal and perhaps may seem strange to some. I just like the look and feel of Blogtrax. It somehow invites longer posts than my personal blog, it feels more private (ie less visited) and it just looks great on the screen. Secondly, I like the idea of the autoethnographic postscript. The piece is finished, published and probably largely unnoticed but it still stands as a record of the sense that two academics made of the world of blogging and the kinds of meanings they read into their own blogging practices - and, yes, let’s pluralise that. In that sense it’s a frozen record, but I’m rather attracted to the idea that Blogtrax itself could map the contours of ongoing practice. Dr Joolz and I have now co-written two book chapters on blogging and a further chapter in our forthcoming book. That’s a lot of words about a practice which I still believe is developing. Thirdly, there is something about the accretion of meanings, the building of knowledges and the forging of new understanding and this builds on the previous idea of forward momentum that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

So, is there a sense in which a blog can really lead to development and to the creation of something new? Can we write ourselves into a new frame of mind? For some reason, that I haven’t quite yet fathomed, I get the sense that this is a distinct possibility. I wonder if I have developed my ideas through successive outpourings, whether I have become more skilled at appropriating the voice of others, whether I have written a new script for myself. Under what conditions do the stories we tell about ourselves become emancipatory, I wonder? This is not to suggest that I am subscribing to the romantic view that imbues writing with magical properties, but merely to inquire into whether a process of regular reflection - regular and relatively short-burst reflection has its own strengths.

The difficulty is one of how to unscramble such a chaos of conditions. The regular conversations, the reading, the other writing all appear to contribute to a sort of onward march of ideas. Certainly that’s the way it feels. And four years ago, when we started up this blog I don’t think I would have thought about it those terms at all. But that was then, and as I scroll down the tags, to find something appropriate for this, they all seem like postcards from another place. Oh, I suppose I’ll go for Blogging, Learning and Identity - they seem more or less OK.

Writing about the Theatre of the Oppressed and the fictional account of the Pandorama in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (here) calls to mind the power of representation in mediating and reflecting upon identity. It seems to me that representing oneself, telling one’s own story, creates the conditions for reflexivity. This is the sort of project we began here, on Blogtrax, part of which is now published in our study of academic blogging. Now of course, the two examples I begun with are products of an emancipatory discourse, being strategies for breaking the silence of oppressive conditions. Blogging as such, is too general, too diffuse a medium for that, but nevertheless one can still find good examples of blogs that provide that sort of counter-narrative, and to some extent some of the much-hyped ‘citizen journalism’ performs that function - but in a more general sense what I’m moving to is a sense of the power of digital literacy and a particular role that blogs can perform.

Not that we would want to confer blogs with some sort of universal power to create reflexive awareness of identity any more than we would subscribe to those ideologies about the power of literacy to transform cognitive processes. But still it strikes me that once we begin to make conscious decisions about representing ourselves, and once we begin to reflect on that process - particularly in dialogue with others - in terms of what is allowed, what is included and what is bracketed, we can develop clearer insights into the whole process of identity performance. And because blogs tend to the personal (my online home; the cubby hole; wunderkammer or whatever), identity performance through topic choice, hyperlinking and blogroll allegiances becomes more salient and more open to scrutiny.

Here’s another identity quote I like.

‘We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.’ Hustvedt, 2003: 120

It just says that old Giddens thing again but in a different way. I thought I’d add it in here!

I’ve just finished reading Siri Hustvedt’s novel ‘The Blindlfold’. Not surprisingly it’s all about identity and identity shifts, dislocation etc etc. But there’s one part that really stands out for me. The main character has just assumed an identity which involves adopting another name - a fictionalised identity. One of this character’s confidantes claims that ‘Fiction is not like life.’ - fair enough - but the response is brilliant, I’m sure I’ll use it as a quote sometime:

You know as well as I do that the line can’t be drawn, that we’re infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it’s inescapable.

So I’m now pre-occupied by that phrase ‘ infected at every moment by fictions’. Of course the suggestion of disease or infection seems to carry a value judgement, but the nonetheless it also makes us see how the fictions we consume and the fictions we live by influence our self-narrative. Perhaps also the most severe forms of political oppression are achieved by innoculating the populace with dangerous fictions.

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 like the whole idea of voice and have a feeling that this could be a distinctive feature of the written aspect of blogging. I say voice, but I really mean voices - in a sort of Bakhtinian way. I don’t have any strong theoretical reference points for the concept of voice, and I’m even uncertain how that really differs from style, but it seems to make sense that to the extent that blogs are keeping going the narrative of the self they almost inevitably have those linguistic traces that constitute voice.

What made me think this was reading a comment from Dr Joolz on my blog which went

Your blog is very newsy lately. You are so good at keeping uptodate and I am trying to copy.

And that sounded a bit like Julia, but also a bit like Julia pretending to be Kate. Now pinning that down is difficult and could also be WRONG, but I do get a real sense of voice in the comment. It’s also interesting that because of the power relations in blogging (you are, when you leave a comment, simply adding to what the owner of the blog has said, creating a sort of footnote, after all) most people tend to move towards a more informal speech-like register - moving in the direction of chat. Pehaps in chat, or at least in the way we write when we want to sound chatty, we get a bit closer to the distinctiveness of voice. It would be interesting just to focus on the linguistic features of people’s comments….

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’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.

I wonder if this begins to shed a liitle light on the idea?