Week 3 Summary

October 9th, 2009 - 
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References
Kress, G (2005) Gains and losses: new forms of texts, knowledge and learning. Computers and Composition. 22(1), 5-22.

Rose, Gillian (2007) Researching visual materials: towards a critical visual methodology, chapter 1 of Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. London: Sage. pp.1-27.

I See What You Did There

I’ve already had a great big whinge about how I felt after reading Carpenter, so I’ll use this weekly summary to talk about two other readings and some of the ideas that sprang to mind as I worked through them.

Kress’ central assertion – that purely textual representations of meaning are more restrictive than visual representations – rings slightly hollow for me. I’m not contesting the notion that visual representations afford greater degrees of playfulness, multiple-meaning making and come loaded with opportunities, perhaps, for a more user-centered experience. Unquestionably, visual literacies can provide opportunities for engagement, meaning construction and dialogue which a purely textual representation may not have, but I can’t help feeling that Kress rather overstates the case, seemingly asserting that there is an inevitable shift towards a more visual means of communication in online environments.

Discussion forums, with their affordances of image and text posting might be a good example to look at. Several threads on a forum which I spend time on (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty) have purely visual threads. But they are not yet so common that they are becoming the dominant form of communication. Indeed, their novelty and stark difference to the standard textual conversations is what makes them so popular.

There are two long-running threads which I am thinking of here: one for animated gifs and the other for random, obscure, weird and amusing images. Whilst both are enormously popular they are largely so because they represent such a different form of conversation to normal threads – a more playful, less-obvious and fluid dialogue. No-one here is asking ‘do you see what I mean?’ or seeking clarification on their ‘view’ of things – it’s merely a game. An extended, asynchronous game of visual connect the joke gags.

This is not to say that other conversation threads do not include visual fabric – they do – but they are often posted as supplemental, illustrative and addendum-like ephemera, to add some humour to a point, provide a riposte to a previous response or act as illustration of a subject under discussion. I’m quite sure that should the forum suddenly be rendered incapable of hosting such images, the discussion would carry on just fine. This is, it would seem, a far cry from the ‘ocularcentralism’ which Rose talks about.

Even Better Than The Real Thing

Staying with Rose for a moment, I was intrigued by the discussion of the rise of ’simulacra’ in post-modern culture – the idea that it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to distinguish reality from virtual reality. I couldn’t help thinking of the somewhat salacious newspaper and television reports we regularly see, exposing the seedy sexual underbelly of spaces like Second Life and their new afordances for non-physcial infidelity.

Visual Representations

Some questions for myself:

Does a visual representation of meaning afford a wider spectrum of meanings for audience members than simple text?

Can a visual representation be truly visual? As Rose points out, even the most impenetrable of modern art pieces usually comes with a explanatory gallery label.

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Week 3, Weekly Summaries

Of Genres, Boundaries and Plain English

October 9th, 2009 - 
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Reference: Carpenter, R (2009) Boundary negotiations: electronic environments as interface. Computers and Composition. 26, 138-148.

Much of cyberculture academia seems to concern itself with the observation of what Carpenter identifies as ‘genres’ – means or modes of expression with their own cultural sets of rules and behaviours. Wednesday night’s Skype tutorial clarified a lot of this for me – most especially the example that ‘blogging is a genre of popular culture, whereas broadsheets are a genre of academic culture’. A very useful example I thought, illustrating the possible boundaries between these genres: one which made me think how the lines between the two have become so wonderfully blurred in the last two years or so.

What sruck me this morning though,  is that in reading these studies of cyberculture and the genres and activity systems within them, we are being exposed to another genre: that of academic writing on these subjects. If genres are largely defined by the unspoken, undocumented sets of behaviours and ‘ways of being’ that form them, we could go as far as to make a study of those doing the studying.

And it makes for an interesting set of behaviours in and of itself. Carpenter’s article starts warmly enough, with a humourous account from his undergrad days of trying a transliteral presentation and the anxieties it caused both him, his fellow students and his tutors. It made a refreshing change from the somewhat obtuse and impenetrable language of some of the readings within week 1 and 2. But then, on pg. 140, we get this:

‘This reconceptualization of genre calls for a reinterpretation of interface that extends beyond user-system interaction to include interactions between the user and multiple, sometimes competing, systems as well as between systems themselves.  Such a view allows us to examine systems relations not simply in terms of juxtaposed boundaries but rather as dynamic boundary negotiations mediated by genres that are themselves mediated by the boundary interface.”

Come again?

I’m sorry, but I have never met, heard, seen or been told of a single human being on planet earth that actually talks like this.  Stephen Fry doesn’t talk like this.

I find it peculiar and fascinating that a discipline of study which examines cyberculture and its endlessly fluid, constantly playful, hilariously subversive ‘genres’ is so frequently reported on in a form of language which is not just a thousand miles from the culture which it is studying, but seems a world away from the general speech patterns and communication forms of the average human being.

Where does this come from? Why do so many academics in this field insist on using this tortured, alienating form of language to communicate their ideas? It’s baffling in the extreme. For a group of academics driven by the motivation to reveal the hidden cultures of cyberspace and the popular culture which is its beating heart, they seem singularly determined to make sure that vast majority of human beings can’t understand them.

Boundaries indeed.

I realise, reading back over this text, that this may come across as another ill-tempered gripe about academia, but it does occur to me that a study of this ‘genre’ itself could be highly revealing; not just for a window into cyberculture studies itself, but into those who engage in it.  Why this use of language? Why this highly selective and exclusive choice of vocabulary? Who does it serve? Who are they trying to impress?  How does it ‘function’?

Or am I just becoming a hideously out-of-touch, grumpy old man who can’t keep up with the kids?

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Week 3