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.

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.

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.

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.

In an unprecedented outburst yesterday on DrJoolz I ranted about an article on how a mother, whilst praising the new blog craze for teens, also talked about the need to write contracts for her children to sign.

(Mental Note: Must not use blog to rant as this can be very offensive to others. Have learned valuable blogging lesson.)

Writing about that has since prompted me to think much more carefully about my view of The Internet generally and my view of blogging specifically.

Whilst I was under the impression that I was being a good little academic and aware of my positionality in relation to my work, I realise now how my experiences of the Internet are ofa very specific type- and so are those of my family .

I had not thought before about how our cultural capital extends to our online identities and that this has protected my family and I from unpleasant Internet exeriences. And how we do not ‘go’ to places that are the Internet equivalent of scarey alleyways - just cos we are not curious in such directions …

I was thinking about how I do not, (unlike many people I know) receive porn in the form of e mail spam (How have I escaped?) . I was also thinking about how I have only ever seen online pornography once. This was a pasted series of images in a comment on Justin Hall’s blog in response to his infamous crying episode. That was a link I picked up through Guy.

In fact Guy was upset about this as he felt he had inadvertently put porn on HIS blog, because he had linked to it. He felt he was tainted by association.

And our blogs’ fabrics are constituted of our links as well as our words and pictures (etc). Other people’s texts become part of ours, because we weave them in. And when we do that, we have to be careful that we do not misrepresent other people’s views (as I did yesterday), especially as we can potentially lead new readers to read the source in a way the original author did not intend - so therefore Will and Anya defended themselves in comments on my blog. (This is a great use of blog comments, to come back and say something in one’s defence.) All these affinities can be very positive and lead in the end to greater understandings as we visit and talk with each other. But my point here, is about how our blogs are continuous texts with each other; our links tie us together and are mutually constitutive (if I can say that?) . So in building texts we constantly re-affirm and regenerate what the group is. We are our associations. And that is why it is important the associations start off OK.

But look. Guy is an academic; Anya is an academic. Will is an academic. We have found each other through common interests through a series of links, through degrees of separataion. We have traced paths via each other and kept within a group with some pretty high status cultural capital. No wonder we love the web; we talk to people ‘like us’ and we go through the links on many people’s blogs in this way. Our network is safe.

Ok, back to the point. Many rightly worry that their kids’ blogs (etc.) will become tainted through association with others’.

An example: A hairdresser comes every now and then to our house to cut my daughters’ hair. Earlier this week she was talking about trying to keep her son off the net because of all the filthy pictures his friends send him via MSN. She said ‘they talk dirty’ and are nasty to each other. My daughter and I were amazed. ‘Why doesn’t he block them?’ she said. Our hairdresser explained that these were his ’so-called friends’ who he did not want to block.

Now all my daughter’s friends are ones she has met online; some of them come from a core group connected to a message board run by a charity for kids with ME. The others have come via recommendations from friends through this. So somehow they have come through a vetting system. Cultural capital of a sort. (On the other hand maybe my daughter has missed out on this essential adolescent bickering… is it important to go through? Maybe.)

In my little family I think we have kept to paths without realising. Bauman has written about how people trace paths through cities and experience cities differently from each other - and would describe the city very differently from each other.

This is what the Internet is like and I think I have taken this long to realise. So the lesson is, ‘be more patient with those who are nervous. ‘ They clearly have reasons, since they may have traced through paths which lead to areas where I never go or maybe they have only heard of these scarey areas and they might not know there are many safe places to go on the Net. I think I need to respect this a bit more and to be more aware of my priveleged position.

I have written about how our lives off line are blended with our online selves but had not thought about this in terms of cultural capital before. Our identities online remain tied to our offline selves in more ways than we know.

OK I am wanting to describe the affiliations we have on the web in our online affinities.
I am planning to write an article on blogging academics for Discourse, (and is this too public to declare that here? Is it dangerous? Or does it help me stake out a space at an early stage?)

And I want to include the idea of power, not just about a lovely, cuddly creative commons, as there is clearly a pecking order, a hierarchy etc etc. I also want something in there about how the coming together of people from a llover the world allows for exciting dynamics and the creation of new cultures online. Do these then impact on our work as researchers?

Nice phrases I am thinking about:

· Third space

· Co construction

· Satellites of temporary coherences

· Cultures of participation

· Affinity spaces

· Communities of Practice

· Emergent/divergent cultures

· Glocalisation

· Glocality

· Synthetic cultures

· Synergetic cultures

How about …. Digital Glocalities??

This is all embryonic but I am thinking hard.

1.Originally, I started keeping a blog to see what it would be like to write something that would appear online. Having written about others and their online interactions, I wanted to know if I was right in some of my assumptions. I admired what I was looking at and wanted to do it too.
2. I find writing helps me to think through some of my ideas and I like the discipline of writing regualarly - however busy my day is with other things… I try to force myself to write daily.
3. I like the hybrid nature of the writing - it is part work and part play. As Anya said, something about boundary shifting. I think it is true that the boundaries of work/play merge for most academics and their inability to to distinguish is reflected in the blogs of many academics I think. Thanks to Anya for this insight.
4. I like the public/private tension of the space.
5. Writing helps me develop my ideas and I write them in my blog in a semi formed state; not ready for peer review as such, but open for peer commentary.
5. I like being part of an affinity space. This space is slightly uncertain as it is transitory to a degree and I am not quite sure where its boundaries are.
6. I like taking things from my meatspace experiences and rearranging them in cyberspace to look at as new text, s a narrative of sorts. These reconstructions come in the the form of digital images I take with my camera; words on the web-page that narrate aspects of my life; hyperlinks to show places I have been, things I have read, etc.
7. I like being part of digital culture network; I like the interaction.
8. I like producing texts that have hyperlinks and that have a range of modalities; it seems important as a cultural develoment and I want to be part of it.
9. I think this is a new form of writing and I want to research it.
10. I can communicate with people I know and people I do not know; I like not quite being sure who is reading.

Apologies that this post repeats a lot of what has gone before … but that is the nature of developing ideas and learning… it is circuitous.