This is the Guardian’s third article on the as-yet-unseen, probably-might-exist-sometime iWatch. They’ve also published pictures of what it might look like.
‘Thrilled to be part of the hive-mind that is #edcmooc . Am in awe of the brainpower of 32,000 online educators!’ @lizcable 17 Jan 13
‘Social Media: hive mind, privacy apocalypse, mind control, and social revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Ml_zax4A0&t=7m3s some books there I will read #edcmooc’ @hopkinsdavid 4 Feb 13
hive mind: pod people? the internet? community?
FaceBorg: collective consciousness…’threaten to assimilate your individuality’
Wiktionary definitions: sci fi, sociology
‘hive mind’ disambiguation page: collective consciousness; swarm intelligence; universal mind; group mind; groupthink
but what about…
“social media” “hive mind” (first page):
I got these bits of spam on Valentine’s day. Mr MacKeeper (or whatever the character is called) seems to be dreaming of a human woman, as well as keeping my Mac safe and operating at its full capacity. The marketing strategy here is apparently ‘holiday + girl + brand name = money’. And just in case you don’t know what Valentine’s day is, they’ve lifted some helpful (if slightly misinformed and Ameri-centric) info about its origins from what we must assume to be a rather dodgy internet source.
It’s the sort of ‘digital artefact run amok’ quality that I find particularly interesting–a logo here, a character there, some clip art, a bit of text, an address in Sunnyvale, trying to make it personal (Candace.nolan), invoking phrases like ‘friends and loved ones’.
I suppose spotting all this stuff–the elements that don’t quite add up–is a kind of digital literacy in itself. (Although…guess what I installed on my MacBook a few months ago…)
I was thinking about the two senses that the digital can currently reach, and the other three that it can’t. Smell and taste are pretty much ignored, and touch, although made the most of in the naming of various tablet devices, is conspicuous only in how it relates to visuals and sound…the actual touch sensation is always the same. Even in the corporate videos last week, every digital surface is smooth, and there is no indication that texture is digitised. This is a departure from the VR ideals of 15 years ago, as is the abandonment of touch and taste.
This does reflect a good quantity of analogue art and communication generally; with notable exceptions, even more tactile art like sculpture is usually not meant to be touched, and certainly a dinner or scent may be praised and valued, but isn’t usually meant to signify meaning (prosaic or artistic).
What the Onion expertly demonstrates is that the strangeness of the nose buds is mostly subjective. Why shouldn’t popcorn be the punk of the smell world? Why shouldn’t pine signify the conformity of easy listening?
I’m going to directly contradict my week 4 summary and write a bit of text…because I want to!
I am very grateful for a ‘taking stock/breathing’ week. My past fortnight has been ‘challenging’ and it’s really good to be able to look at everyone else’s artefacts in greater detail and have time to think and comment.
The challenges of the past two weeks actually exemplify one of the issues about that we’ve been discussing, so this isn’t a ‘digital detox’ in the sense that I’m removing all traces of digital (which would be rather counterproductive on WordPress); rather, I’m using a very simplistic digital medium (text) to tease out the places where I haven’t quite adjusted to the already-ubiquitous digital that is a part of my life.
So here is an outline of what I was up to:
Tuesday, 29 January: Working diligently on EDC at home; answering work emails as necessary
Wednesday, 30 January: Urgent updating, proofing, testing of VLE sites
Thursday, 31 January: Same as above
Friday, 1 February: Same as above; work from home in pm because of sick child; 1pm: start creating webinar presentation to give at 5pm
Saturday, 2 February: Update CV & cover letter, email both; Skype with family
Monday, 4 February: More VLE corrections; make webinar recording available
Tuesday, 5 February: Work on EDC, but mostly VLE updates; receive email about interview on Monday; request wine & chocolate via email (different correspondent)
Wednesday, 6 February: Final VLE updates; evening to myself used to start digital artefact
Thursday, 7 February: Demonstrate VLE & answer questions; evening to myself to finish digital artefact
Friday, 8 February: Arrange for people to produce e-tivities; plan Prezi talk
Saturday, 9 February: Skype
Sunday, 10 February: Use Google Drive to create presentation for interview on Monday
Monday, 11 February: Survey stat aggregation; more e-tivities; more Prezi; interview
And here is all the stuff I did that I didn’t immediately think of when trying to pick out the digital for the diary above: Facebook, Twitter, MyFitnessPal, email, texting, taking photos with iPod and phone, ordering groceries, checking bank balance, ordering presents, trialling Education City (under duress), helping find Horrid Henry on YouTube, sending emails with Maily, internet radio, music on the iPod, on-demand TV, editing videos, requesting links to journal articles, requesting book digitisation, backing up mySQL…
So why did the digital in my diary stand out? I think there are a couple reasons.
First, it was simply what was occupying most of my time, and perhaps causing stress because of deadlines or anticipation like a planned Skype session. None of this is about these things being digital really.
Secondly, however, I think I picked up on the blurring of work and home in the two corporate videos especially because of my recent experiences. There is a lot of technology in both of my lists that makes it a lot easier to be connected to everything all the time. In the past, I’ve usually been quite strict with myself in, for example, not checking work emails when I wasn’t at work, or resisting fixing ‘just one thing’ until I was back in the office. But when place becomes less important to the ability to do work–when it can be done from anywhere–and when there are emergency situations like a web space needing updated in time for an event, or a sick child needing to be looked after the same day as a synchronous event is running…the blurring is better than the alternative of things just not getting done.
In which case, I should be happy about all this and stop moaning. The problem is, though, that my use of these technologies has outpaced my expectations–perhaps my comfort zone. I perceive different spaces and times as ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘study’, ‘self’ etc. When one of these infringes on another’s time and/or space, this causes me discomfort, if not stress: the convergence of different technologies has led to the convergence of my life spaces. I guess it’s not so much the case of ‘there aren’t enough hours in the day’ as ‘there aren’t enough hours in the time I’ve allotted to X, and its usurping time from Y’.
I’m not so much complaining (really!), as realising that I’ll need to adjust my perceptions of these spaces and times and perhaps adjust the way that I ring-fence them to keep myself sane while remaining in the 21st century.
I wanted to reflect just a bit on creating a digital artefact versus writing…a blog post, for example. Despite years of experience in creating digital ‘things’, starting with some cheeky newsletters circa 1987 and going right up to my IDEL assignment, I still see the non-text-based option as the easiest. I know it’s not. I know it takes much longer and there are a lot more uncertainties and things that could go wrong, and that after all that work I usually feel like I didn’t get across half the things I wanted to say.
But frankly it’s much more fun. This could just be down to the fact that I’ve not been asked to produce anything apart from an essay in any academic context for the past 18 years, so there is a definite sense of novelty. On the other hand, I do produce digital content–video, audio and text at least–on a daily basis at work. I think, then, that it’s the creativity, the implicit expectation that I’m going to do something that engages different kinds of intelligences, that makes the digital artefact more appealing. And perhaps it’s more fundamental than that–we experience the world through all of our senses, so what’s more natural than representing it back using at least two…!
This article quickly retracts the alarmism of the title and shows how the studies to which it refers conclude that the internet, in tracking our behaviour, is just reflective of societal racism… Not the happiest of findings. In the context of this module, however, it’s interesting that you can still give articles titles like this, that we don’t always trust the tools that we always use, and that the democracy of the internet can betray unpleasant facts about the society it represents.
Here is my attempt at a digital artefact, developed around the discussions about ‘A day made of glass’ on the boards and Twitter:
A couple notes that didn’t fit into the themes of the prezi, but I thought were interesting anyway…
This week I‘ve been thinking about image and language. I think I’ve come to the ‘conclusion’ that medium is to message as pedagogy is to technology. You can’t say that any message is best transmitted by one single medium any more than you can say that one message can be successfully transmitted by any medium; this is not because ‘the medium is the message’ but because they enter into a mutual relationship before, during and after the transmission. The message–if we roll it back to a pre-inguistic thought or idea–must be translated into something before it can be understood by another person.
(And we wouldn’t want the alternative: Belcerebons)
I’ve also been aware that most of the media I post is ‘pop’ culture rather than…I guess, Culture Show culture. I suppose this is mostly because I’ve interpreted ‘digital cultures’ as referring to de facto culture, out of which springs artefacts rather than artefacts that attempt to ‘say something’ about culture. This is a tenuous distinction at best. And the real answer is probably that 1) I know a lot more about pop culture and 2) what I do know about culture culture is largely written down in my undergraduate notes in a box somewhere, unable to assist me in remembering who said, e.g. ‘linguistic structures enable complex thought’ and things like that.
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