Sarah's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I have to admit that much of the time I detest reading academic papers! They can be dry, uninspiring, and they often make assumptions that make me want to scream out loud in frustration. Hand with his ideas that the Internet removes power from traditional centres and places it into the common people has to be a huge simplification. These centres of power are the only ones with the resources to be empowered enough to communicate their ideas across a wide audience. In this instance power = readers – powers. No matter how good the message, it is irrelevant if no one gets to read it! Can a single citizen have true power when the individual would have to wade through so much rubbish before they saw the message, that most people wouldn’t bother. It is a fact that most people wont travel beyond the first page of a google search, so if the author cannot get themselves up the listings they are simply shouting at the dark!

Kress was another one that made me wonder what virtual world he actually inhabits! He laments the fact that reading forces a linear progression and that “this gives authors a specific power: readers are dependent … on sequence and sequential uncovering”. I thought ” well of course!”. In my reality, time is sequential, and therefore the events that occur in any given story has a sequence, and therefore I want the author to tell me the story in sequence. I don’t want to know ‘who dunnit’ before the end of the tale. Also, in many case authorship = authority, and I am reading precisely because I want them to tell me something. I want an answer, not the opportunity to enter a debate.

He also states “because words rely on convention and conventional acceptance, words are always general and therefore vague” (pg15) How can he say ‘always’? That has to be a pretty major assumption right there. I tell you that ‘I am going to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea, would you like one?’ Is that vague? I could try to ask you the question through images, or the medium of mime but words would be better!

Use of image as a form as communication surely removes the power of the author to pass on their message to the viewer (especially if the message is more complex than ‘fancy a cuppa’). The author has to make assumptions about the relative cultural position of the viewer and therefore try to communicate meaning within those boundaries. This is an issue that I am coming up against whilst trying to devise my digital artifact. How do i ‘know’ that what I ‘mean’ to say is the message that is projected?

While I agree with Kress that words alone do not always convey true meaning and can lead to vagaries, images alone seem to me to be just as easy to misinterprete and misunderstand. Thomas’s interpreation of a ‘lifeworld’ (pg 5) which is a “combination of physical environment and subjective experience that makes up everyday life” ensures that reactions to imagery and symbolism is purely subjective and therefore must be individual. Therefore your response to my images are equally individual.

So there is my lament on assumptions made by authors; possibly to inspire debate, or due to the limitations of the media meaning that they cannot explore all options, or maybe simply to annoy me (probably not the third option!)

So dont get me started on the language! As a fellow MScer Damien blogged on Friday:

“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.”

My job as a trainer is to take complex ideas and reduce them to a series of simple nuggets that can be easily digested by the learner. If I spoke to my learners using this kind of language there would be complaints and I would end up having a series on ‘chats’ with my supervisors. So if I cannot get away with using this use of language – how can these authors? Is it intended to be exclusionary? To prevent ‘outsiders’ from interacting? Or simply to make them sound knowledgeable?