‘…the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’ - Donna Haraway

Digital Essay. January 3rd 2010.

Assessment Criteria.

Part 1 – The Rabbit Hole

A lifestream-based learning presence is a rabbit-hole to a wonderland, the can-opener to a madhouse. It encourages fun, playfulness – the harvesting of content and resources from previously ‘un-academic’ areas and the exploration of surprising avenues of cyberspace – a playful learning experience.  But just how mad is the madhouse? And do we care?

Tweedle-Dee

If we are to ask our learners (and indeed ourselves) to willingly embrace a cyborg pedagogy, to jump down the rabbit hole, perhaps we need to think about ways in which we can use the affordances of the new media which can help us provide guidance and help in the new space?  To provide guidance towards Haraways ‘fruitful couplings’ and away from the Tweedle-Dums and Tweedle-Dees of the internet – the voices that will talk nonsense if you stop to listen.

A digitally-mediated, multilocated cyborg pedagogy may encourage new forms of embodiment, new ontological constructions, new textual and and visual tropes by which to make the learning process more playful and immersive, but it also brings with it new challenges: a reconfiguration of ‘authenticity’, troublesome tropes, digital ticks and conspiracy winks and the dangers of a new, hydra-headed ‘grupen-think’ where the web facilitates a condition where meaning-making and authenticity become potentially hostage to a swirling sea of badly-researched, critically unchallenged assertions which masquerade as ‘facts’, repeated over and over until they are heard so often that they assume the status of authentic.

Is there a place for new forms of embodiment in supporting learners in this challenge? Is there a way to provide a digital form of what Williams and Palmer identified as the ability of a good ‘teacher to ‘enact the pleasure and seductiveness of knowing in their posture, stance, utterance, gaze, gesture as well as the written and spoken texts they generate as ‘subject content’?

How can we help the learner distinguish between well-researched, credible work and what attempts to pass as well-researched credible work?

Or is there a bigger question still? Does an application of a cyborg pedagogy render such questions irrelevant?

Conspiracy Learning

As part of the Digital Cultures semester, I undertook a virtual ethnography; a study of an online community of my choice, in an attempt not to decipher the truth of this community’s statements and interests but rather to try to arrive at an understanding of how this community decides on what is authentic ‘truth’ itself. I chose the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and found myself disappearing down on of the the dystopian rabbit-holes which I had mapped in an earlier project - an entrance to a place I tentatively called ‘Disturbia’.

In this soup of paranoia and conspiracist thinking I found myself wondering about possible connections between the manner in which conspiracists create naratives of authenticity and which ‘learners’ create their own naratives of meaning from digitally-mediated online learning and wondering if there were any lessons to be learned, questions to be asked and new towns to be mapped which might help us better understand a digitally mediated learning experience.

To this end, this digital essay will explore one more conspiracy theory – often called the original conspiracy theory – and in doing so try to explore how such lies, such shoddy research, such outright charlatanry continues to be propogated and consider what this phenonmena might have to tell us about our emerging cyborg pedagogies.

The Mad Hatters

Whilst cyborg pedagogies might offer us new opportunities for learning, it’s worth noting that there are parallels between the construction of meaning from a fractured, aggregated learning stream and the manner in which a conspiracy theory seems to be put together. I would like to suggest that perhaps it’s in our interest to understand how mediated meaning-making for a learner saturated in information can lead to new uncertainties in learning – with the foundations of empirical ‘facts’ or ‘narratives’ shifting, mutating and squirming around the web.

At best this can provide a new ontology of learning – at worst the near total breakdown of critical thinking and the spreading of lies, falsehoods and the fostering of the worst kind of group-think.

A study of conspiracy theories, with their accretion-based construction, endless repetition, inherent virality and disaggregated centres can provide us with cautionary tales about the construction of learning and meaning-making in a ‘cyborg pedagogy’ – perhaps most crucially showing us the value of learner embodiment in such a pedagogy. Through the embodiment offered by a tool such as a Lifestream, learners are faced with issues around the authenticity of ’sources’, the veracity of ‘facts’ found online and the need for a heightened sensitivity around any collation of these ’sources’ and ‘facts’ into a narrative.

Guiding Questions

The ultimate purpose of this digital essay will be to arrive not at a set of recommendations for learners and designers engaging with a cyborg pedagogy, but rather to furnish them with a set of critical questions which they may apply to any narrative they encounter whilst studying or researching online.

Go to Part 2

Antipodality is the experience of (dis) location – of being neither here nor there but both here and there – created by vectors of transnational and globalised communication – Usher and Edwards.

In the same way that the antipodal nature of the elements that made up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion allowed it to flourish, the same trick allowed the Pyramid of Learning to replicate and replicate. A lifestream could be similarly misunderstood – it’s aggregation of disparate elements seeming to give credence to a flawed narrative.

So how do we sift through the lifestream? How do we tag and categorise the data? We require a means, a technology or a filter through which to ensure that we engage with content external to the walls of the learning institution in a critical way.

Again from Usher and Edwards:

… universities are less able to control access to knowledge when it increasingly takes the form of information circulating through networks outside the control of eduational institutions. With these developments comes a need to think anew about what constitutes research and it’s relationship with pedagogy and learning.

So what are the tell-tale signs? What digital winks can enable us to spot when a narrative constructed from a cyborg pedagogy is in danger of being driven by what we might call ‘conspiracist thinking’?

If this is the nature of a cyborg pedagogy, then what questions should a learner within a pedagogy of multi-located, digitally mediated narratives be encouraged to ask?

Go to Part 8

Course Criteria

Knowledge and understanding of concepts

Does the assignment show a critical engagement with the content of the course? Does it demonstrate breadth of understanding of the concepts and theories covered?

Knowledge and use of the literature

Have the relevant key references been used? Have other relevant sources been drawn on and coherently integrated into the analysis? Is a critical and creative stance taken toward the new kinds of literatures which exist on the web?

Constructing academic discourse

Is the assignment produced with careful attention to the quality of the writing and the skilful expression of ideas? Does it use digital modes in an effective and appropriate way? Is it scholarly in its approach to topic and form?

Personal Criteria

Does the work draw attention to some of the potential problems, pitfalls and challenges presented by use of a cyborg pedagogy?

Does the study and analysis of conspiracy theory raise any questions about how learners and tutors must be supported within an online environment?

Does the work help us understand how learners establish meaning and authenticity in a post-foundational, technologically mediated, ‘postmodern’ context?

Again, my apologies for the late posting of this.

Week 6 has seen me ploughing into my chosen subject matter for a virtual ethnography – the 9/11 conspiracy theories. As previously stated, my objective here is not to determine whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are ‘true’ or not, but rather to determine how members of that community determine ‘truth’ themselves.

This is proving a great deal trickier than I thought. Very simply, the size of the of the field site is enormous. Bearing in mind the short amount of time for this, I’ve had to pare back my ambitions for this quite a bit.

The discussion forums (my first port of call) are numerous, sprawling and really quite difficult to focus on. I’m not averse to the idea of studying a fora, but looking for the ‘winks’ which Geertz describes (in order to carry out ‘thick descriptions’) is proving much, much trickier than I thought.

So, I’ve decided to focus on the 9/11 conspiracy theory movies. There’s a plethora of them out there and, in point of fact, they are the seminal element in the birth of the 9/11 Truth movement. I know that an online movie doesn’t quite fit the classic definition of a ‘field site’ and that seeing these movies as a community might be open to challenges, but for me they are the kernel at the heart of the nut: generating debate, modelling behaviour and narrative structures, informing use of language, metaphor – in a sense acting as the ‘totems’ at the heart of the community (to borrow from Durkheim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totemism#Totemism) – a place to gather, get energised, seek connections and like-minded souls.

My lifestream for week 6 is reflective of this shift in focus with more links to the movies themselves and the numerous sites, debunking, rebunking and re-debunking.

In terms of how I am framing this, this quote from Hine is central:

Ethnography in this strategy becomes as much a process of following connections as it is period of inhabitance. In similar vein Marcus suggests that ethnography could (should?) be adapted to ‘examine the circulation of cultutal meanings, objetcs and identities in diffuse time-space’. He suggests a range of strategies for ethnographers to construct fields in the absence of bounded sites, including the following of people, things, metaphors, narratives, biographies and conflict
- Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66

In particular it’s that notion of ‘following people, things, metaphors, narratives, biographies and conflict’ that resonated. In these 9/11 movies certain narratives get repeated again and again – the collapse/’demolition’ of WTC 7, the ideas of black ops propaganda, the details about the structural flaws in the towers and so on. I’m intending to pick out about three or four of these and track them across the various movies and the blogs that cascade out from them…

Week 5 has been the best so far for me. As I said in a mail to Jen and Sian earlier this week:

‘I studied Anthrpology for a year at Uni (having to drop it after year one to concentrate on other subjects) and I’ve always harboured fantasies about going back to it. In a way this course feels slightly like I have. Having a ball.’

In addition to snippets of the main readings from this block, my lifestream (notably my Tumblr feed, which becomes more and more useful by the day) for this week is a mish-mash of quotes, sketches, videos and random links all around the subject of ‘virtual enthnography’. Clifford Geertz and his ‘thick descriptions’ have really caught my attention.

Here are some that have really resonated for me and will feature as guiding principles as I set out to do my ethnography:

‘The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’

Geertz, C. ‘Thick description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in ‘Anthropology in Theory’ eds. Moore & Sanders. Blackwell, Oxford, 2006.

And then Hine:

The point for the ethnographer is not to bring some external criterion for judging whether it is safe to believe what informants say, but rather to come to understand how it is that informants judge authenticity.

Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66

But what about ethical issues?

Ethical concerns over netnography turn on early concerns about whether online forums are to be considered a private or a public site, and about what constitutes informed consent in cyberspace (see Paccagnella 1997). In a major departure from traditional methods, netnography uses cultural information that is not given specifically, and in confidence, to the researcher. The consumers who originally created the data do not necessarily intend or welcome its use in research representations. Netnography therefore offers specific guidelines regarding when to cite online posters and authors, how to cite them, what to consider in an ethical netnographic representation, when to ask permission, and when permission is not necessary (Kozinets 2002). As quoted on Wikipedia.

And finally, the notion which has struck me the most:

Clifford Geertz’s own fieldwork used elements of a phenomenological approach to fieldwork, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about “webs” instead of “outlines” [15] of culture.  From Wikipedia.

I’ll return to this notion of ‘digital winks’ in another blog post, specifically trying to see how Hine’s observations about virtual ethnography might be compatible with Geertz’s ‘thick descriptions’.

Linkage

Finally, I also bookmarked a few blogs and papers that may be of interest to others.

Researching the Internet, by Dr. John Postill, Sheffield Hallam University.

Virtual Ethnography Course, University of Philipines

VKS Ethnography Blog

Ethnography.com

There’s more what that came from, in my Delicious feed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transliteracy PART group, as mentioned in Thomas et al. Watch the full playlist here.