Blogtrax

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 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!

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.

Last week, or maybe the week before DrJoolz called me on the mobile about the paper. What was interesting was her comment about being ‘stuck in the middle’. She said something like ‘you know, that point when you don’t think it’ll ever get finished.’ That’s what I like about collaborative working – learning from each other about what it’s actually like! Her comment captured a very familiar feeling.

Now, a bit further on it feels like we’re working our way through the middle. The end isn’t quite in sight, but it’s imaginable! One of the interesting things that’s dawned on me is that we don’t need to tidy up/agree on things. If our super-ordinate categories are suitably robust our individual bloggings and meta-bloggings can afford to be out of harmony. In fact it would be more likely that they would be, at least some of the time.

From the methods bit, I’m putting up this draft paragraph, because I’ve been talking to various people about research positions in studying digital culture. Here goes:

If the complex interactions between people and machines lie at the heart of communication through digital writing, methodological questions about the nature of enquiry and the position of researchers are equally important. Existing work in the field of digital writing shows how researchers can adopt a number of possible relationships to the digital culture they study. This suggests that it may be possible to identify specific research positions. The list below shows our emerging ideas in relationship to these and we recognise that these may overlap, shift or indeed expand.

• Researcher as identifier of new tropes (Ito,1995; Rheingold, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2004)
• Researcher as insider (Markham,1998; Sunden, 2002)
• Researcher as analyst (Werry, 1996; Shortis, 2001; Burnett et al, 2004)
• Researcher as both subject and object (Mortensen and Walker, 2002; Guy and DrJoolz, this paper)
• Researcher as activist (Gee, 2004; Prensky, 2001)

We’ve created some bigger categories for this autoethnography and this has involved creating clusters of tags from our existing coding of Blogtrax postings. This is a leap forward. Since our last F2F, I’ve slightly reworded them. I expect they’ll change again. But currently they work like this.

1. Publishing the self which includes specific issues about performing online identities, our sensitivies as bloggers to impression formation and our decisions about what to post and what not to post. In considering the content of our blogs, we look at how postings can work on the boundaries between private and public life. We also include the affective dimension of blogging in this category (such as feelings of pride, embarrassment and so on) and their relationship to respect and reputation in blogging communities.

2. The nature of the text as an interlinked and constantly evolving work, that is fluid, visual and, at least in part, created by readers, other bloggers and the comments that are added. Here we consider the idea of the blog as a visual display (how do I look?) and develop the idea of blogs as a three-dimensional patchwork.

3. The fabric of the text is concerned with the tools used to construct meaning. Predominantly this is a about the use of written language to signify group membership, reference to shared understandings and humour. However, we are also keen to show how visual and audio modes are used – and in this case, in particular, the use of photographic images. Here we include the use of add-ons such as side-bar links, site meters and feeds. (Flickr albums?)

4. Social networks looks at how interactivity gives rise to the notion of blogging as a shared endeavour, a network than can lead to the development of a community of practice or an affinity space and how this relates to other platforms for online interaction (email, Flickr, MSN, shared blogs, others’ blogs) as well as to offline interaction.

So that’s the beginning of the middle, the middle of the beginning, or just another posting, depending on how you want to read it!

The Blogtrax enterprise speeds along its timeline towards the Inside Out paper and the Miami destination. Destination or station? It seems more like a journey or a duration than anything else. In some sense Blogtrax was complete at its inception, as good a part of the process of turning inside out as any. Blogging seems to work in an inside-out-sort-of-way. Face to face we may begin with academic/professional persona (maybe later on some personal stuff floats in); in blogging we start with ourselves (or the MilkTray version) then bring the academic/professional in from time to time. Maybe.

inventive and ephemeral media need to be sustained (…..) that are sites of experimentation for practices of writing and linguistic performance; for language, both written and spoken, is everyone’s commodity, the site par excellence of anonymous practices of creation and circulation, in which culture, and thus a freedom, is crystallized and concretized. (deCerteau, 1997:128)

Our edited, reviewed, revised and published texts begin and end, are complete and bounded despite the fact that we claim they are part of an ongoing conversation, but our postings are much more spontaneous, even at times inchoate, rambling, half-connected and never complete. Perhaps at best they are insider stories. They turn inside out - and this autoethnographic process does this, too. The inner workings of jottings, musings, impressionistic thoughts and emotions go down, go public prior to substantial reworking. And as they go along they collect and discard readers, comments, and other links. Later postings begin to allow new readings of old ones and what seemed like a well-worn track along which the research process progresses becomes one path among many.

Still, there’s analysis, and summation, writing up and the whole tricky business of presentation. The part where you start to lose depth by attempting to achieve coherence. We have to learn to handle complexity and turn that multidimensional patchwork of bloglives into something else, something more conventional and bounded. But, really, to be faithful to the enterprise, even the early drafts of paragraphs and fragments and bits that will eventually be hidden or deleted are potential postings on Blogtrax. Another avenue for publication, capturing the process on the move as far as one ever can.

I was driving somewhere in the car last weekend and :blush: I caught myself thinking about my blog and getting a little glow of satisfaction from the idea of people reading my most recent posting. Whatever it was, I must have thought it was pretty good! And that reflexive thought was, I must admit, a little bit uncomfortable. Boiling it down it’s blogging as SHOWING OFF - and, of course, my socio-cultural upbringing always makes me wary of showing off - and it does rather reduce being a blogger.

Sometimes though, when I read blogs, I get the sense that others are showing off, or to shift the idea, they are parading or promenading - displaying what they see as the interesting bits of their lives. And of course they really are interesting (sometimes). But also the more casual, throwaway postings capture my interest too. A blogger is having fun; a normally quite intense commentator leaks some ‘personal’ information or expresses an opinion with uncharacteristic vigour or a jokey blog suddenly gets serious. Even the trivial stuff - S blogs there’s snow in New York when it’s spring here, or A blogs spring flowers in Sydney when it’s autumn here - can turn out to be interesting.

So what am I really getting at? I suppose I’m underscoring the power of the reader (both the commentator and the passive consumer or blurker). The blog environment gives the reader plenty of freedom. OK, so the writer may glow with pride, thinking of her latest posting, but the reader may move quickly, perhaps dismissively through her links or even spend a desultory few seconds misinterpreting what’s there or even doing something else at the same time. But who, I wonder, spends the longest time reading my blog? Well I’m pretty sure it’s me. I love my blog and I like the way I say that stuff! It’s my space, and I like writing it and I’m now quite at ease with that fleeting thought that it’s vanity blogging. So, as a writer, I have the power and I’m in control at least for 10 or 15 minutes a day.

Reading Don Leu (Handbook of Reading Research, Vol.3) made me think about how the publish-as-you-go literacy research that is at the heart of Blogtrax had a further rationale. Here’s Don:

Since literacy is so intimately related to the technologies of informtion and communication as well as the envisionments they inspire, rapidly changing technologies make it difficult, if not impossible to develop a consistent body of research within traditional forums before the technology on which it is based is replaced by an even newer technology. Unless this situation changes, and strategies for publishing research in traditional forums speed up their processes or new forums appear, it is likely that traditional research will play an increasingly less important role in our understanding of new technologies and new literacies.

I was thinking about writing in the public domain, and how mine is mostly hidden between the covers of books and journals in formats which assume a certain kind of readership and address relatively narrow concerns. I don’t think I have much else in the public domain (although there’s plenty of everyday writing for private, interpersonal or closed groups). So, blogging is another dimension altogether. And it’s not really about staring at a blank page, or breaking a long silence, but more like adding a piece to a kaleidoscope of ongoing patterns. Nevertheless there still is a sense in which you are sticking your neck out, gaining public space.

Dr Joolz said that to blog is to be brave. I chuckled at the time, thinking perhaps it was just her way of putting things, but on reflection she’s right. Sticking your neck out is brave (although the consequences are unlikely to be guillotining!. It’s particularly brave when you broach sensitive or new topics. Dr Joolz’s disclosure (15 March) is like that, I think. That’s brave and that’s going public in a really interesting way. I mean where else could you write something like that?

Middle Earth Duck Pond
Originally uploaded by BobJack.

My ephemeral digital posts lengthen with time, expanding with a confidence to say new things, and garnished with a certain recklessness. More involvement with an online community of bloggers, readers (both known and unknown), and Flickr-sharers is a causal factor, put together with an increase in blog consumption. So my/our blogs evolve, including this one, as we develop heteronymic works, discover new voices, new ideas and new skills.

Dr Joolz has talked about the kind of osmotic learning that takes place around blogging: a bit of html, the subtle art of tagging and so on. Recently, I’ve been wanting to index my posts but found the Blogger advice too dense. Easy to get lost in the hinterland of geek technology. Then I got into Blogstreet, attracted to the neighbourhood/proximity concept, but I find I’m out of my depth there too. And most recently of all I’ve been looking at RSS feeds but can’t quite grasp how they work, or even if I’d have the time or energy to engage with them.

Is this technological hinterland a place to colonise, or is it best left alone if all you’re interested in is the writing? The trouble is the writing itself and the technology to write subtley infuse one another. Perhaps, to be lost in the hinterland is to wish for a map.