I did not know how to encapsulate all I wanted to say about the lifestream in the final post of 500 words. So I thought I would write some:

Tips for Lifestreamers

1, Be aware of how your audiences can affect you. This is a public blog, so you are not only writing for an academic community, [...]]]>

I did not know how to encapsulate all I wanted to say about the lifestream in the final post of 500 words. So I thought I would write some:

Tips for Lifestreamers

1, Be aware of how your audiences can affect you. This is a public blog, so you are not only writing for an academic community, but also for a myriad of ears and eyes from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of expectations. I found that envisaging these audiences affected my writing and my choice of links. Sometimes I write in academic formality (see Multiple/Dynamic Identities) and at other times I use the more informal, a more blogging style (see A Cynical Take on my Lifestream). This multivocality may make you feel a little fragmented as a writer/producer of a lifestream. However, you will come to find, when you read Hayles (1999, 2006) that this is part of the posthuman condition, which is in part established with the resources of digital technology,  and nothing to be afraid of.

2, Lifestreaming is learning by doing. Although the need to feed the stream (see Summary Week 9) might seem like hoop jumping at times, it has its benefits. Foraging for feeds makes you go out into the internet and interact with that which constitutes what you are studying: digital cultures. Hine (1999) says that by interacting with the online we become familiar with it, and that is what will happen to you.

3, If you are not transliterate (Thomas, et al, 2007) now, you will be. As foraging for feeds entails interaction with the genres and discourses that abound within digital cultures, you will develop your ability to consume and produce digital media artefacts.

4, It’s all in the links. On face value, your lifestream may look like a series of links to a variety of websites and media. With all of these links I was afraid that my lifestream lacked cohesion (see Week 1 Summary). However, this is a characteristic of the genre you are contributing to. The affordances of digital technologies allow such links and although you are producing the lifestream as an academic text, it is still a digital artefact. You are crossing boundaries here – the academic and the blogger. By doing so you can give voice to your multiple subjectivities: you are being posthuman.

5, It is a process: And by looking over  your lifestream as a whole, you will see your learning process. I can now see that ideas that I posited in earlier weeks, ssss, have been taken up again in later posts. The lifestream as a whole is the product of learning; however, with its reflective element, it also captures the process of learning (see  Week 10 Summary).

6, Comment.  The affordance of interaction allows people to interact with your content and when this happens, the lifestream becomes both an artefact of an online community (Bell, 2001; Rheingold, 2000) and a facilitator of this community. Comments remind you that you are learning about digital cultures while you are engaged in digital cultures – forming digital cultures. If the driving force of the internet is links, so is the communication made viable by these links. By commenting you are linking your lifestream with those of others. By commenting and posting you are becoming what you are studying.

Cyborg?

I have just read the text by Shields (2006).  The content about cyborgs was interesting. He seems to questioning the human representation of the cyborg, preferring “a virus, a ‘mote’ or ‘crumb’”. The mote and the crumb do not make sense to me, but I am quite taken with re-forming the cyborg as a [...]]]>

Cyborg?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have just read the text by Shields (2006).  The content about cyborgs was interesting. He seems to questioning the human representation of the cyborg, preferring “a virus, a ‘mote’ or ‘crumb’”. The mote and the crumb do not make sense to me, but I am quite taken with re-forming the cyborg as a virus. It seems, at first glance, to be fairly appropriate as a virus and the cyborg contain many corresponding characteristics:

mutation

latching on

can be all encompassing

they spread

 they require hosts

However, the  image of the word ‘virus’ carries many negative connotations, too:

requires a cure

can be terminal

disease and dis-ease

it is a coloniser

it can take over

I can see all of these characteristics in the cyborg, too, but to re-name it a virus may pander to the darker perspective that is already ‘out there’. Also, in some ways, the analogy with a virus does not, as far as I am concerned, fit. A virus is blind, whereas for me, the cyborg and the thinking that it encourages, is all seeing, like Argos (the mythical creature with many eyes, not the ubiquitous store with many catalogues…). The cyborg can lead us into thinking in such a way that we become more vigilant tothe  multi-faceted nature of our surroundings and ourselves. It leads us into a kaleidoscope of subjectivities and dancing objectivities. So, not a virus, then, but possibly a spider: eight-eyed and weaving and woven by its own web.

Spider

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things can be said to touch on the issue of Reflexivity. Foucault examines the history of western thought since the Renaissance and argues that each historical epoch (he identifies 3, while proposing a 4th) has an episteme, or “a historical a priori“, that structures and organizes [...]]]> (Wikipedia, Nov 12th, 09 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory):

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things can be said to touch on the issue of Reflexivity. Foucault examines the history of western thought since the Renaissance and argues that each historical epoch (he identifies 3, while proposing a 4th) has an episteme, or “a historical a priori“, that structures and organizes knowledge. Foucault argues that the concept of man emerged in the early 19th century, what he calls the “Age of Man”, with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He finishes the book by posing the problem of the age of man and our pursuit of knowledge- where “man is both knowing subject and the object of his own study”; thus, Foucault argues that the social sciences, far from being objective, produce truth in their own mutually exclusive discourses. 

Is this what Hayles (1999) is talking about – that we make our own discourses by putting them into practice? If this is the case, then is it a case of if I think ‘posthuman’, I am posthuman. Anyone know how to put that into Latin?

http://web.physik.rwth-aachen.de/~hebbeker/lectures/ph3_0203/escher.gif

I have found the theme of transliteracies really interesting, even if I am not completely sure what the term means, yet. As you can see from this week’s posts, I’ve been looking on YouTube for videos which explain the concept, but they all seem to be saying different things. Maybe this is just because there [...]]]>  

I have found the theme of transliteracies really interesting, even if I am not completely sure what the term means, yet. As you can see from this week’s posts, I’ve been looking on YouTube for videos which explain the concept, but they all seem to be saying different things. Maybe this is just because there are so many facets to the term.

Kress’s (2005) article was provocative. Looking at this lifestream, I wonder how I would go about assessing such an artefact when so much seems to be left unsaid. I still cling to this summary as a bit of light relief, a chance to put my thoughts in a linear fashion – an opportunity to make sense of everything I have been doing throughout the week. Having said this, however, this lifestream, of all the assignments I have written, even going back to being at school, is the most mine. I feel very engaged in it and I feel great ownership of it. I am not sure what it expresses about me academically, but it does allow me to put across different parts of myself, and in so doing, it enables me to learn, in a way that has only previously occurred while actually physically and emotionally engaged in an activity, that is  learning while teaching.

However, this lifestream still feels very piecemeal. I am unhappy with the patchwork feel and look it has. Maybe that is just to be expected of the genre as there are so many modes and voices within it. However, I fear that this lifestream will come across to any reader as just a an incoherent collection of  ill-formed and ill formulated ideas which leave the reader dissatisfied. Indeed, the media and the modes lend themselves, I think, to this type of representation. I want to keep things short and sharp, so there are ’soundbite-like’ titles; I want my readers to be able to browse what I am posting – basically I want to provide a series of ‘quick hits’ rather than prolonged rhetoric. All of this is because I am writing for an assumed ‘digital’ reader who I assume has certain expectations. However, I feel that I should be spending much more time properly formulating my ideas, probably away from the computer, and then posting them while using what the internet affords in order to enrich them, rather than structuring the ideas around what the internet has to offer.

I was talking all of this through with a geologist friend of mine, lamenting my plight, when he mentioned laminar and turbelent flows (he’d just been lecturing on rivers and streams). Apparently laminar flows are something or other – water that just flows in one direction and gets to where it is going along with all the other water. Turbulent flows, on the other hand, are water that gets sidetracked before it reaches its destination. That is the streams of one body of water may bump up against a rock or some such and get a little distracted from their course, but nevertheless, the whole body of water eventually meets up again at its destination.  My lifestream is a bit like a turbulent flow – it is going somewhere, but it is going a bit off course from time to time. That made me a feel a bit better.

So, onto the digital artefact. I decided to use Flickr as I couldn’t work out how to use anything else. That meant that what I wanted to represent and what I eventually ended up producing were not one and the same. A little frustrating, but I am still on the learning curve where the technology and applications are concerned, and I can happily accept that. Making the artefact made me think really carefully about what we read when there is no actual writing to encounter – and how much of this type of material we do encounter  and how significant it is.