Week twelve – review

I feel sad that I am writing this last weekly review because that means the course is coming rapidly to an end. And there is still so much that I want to do, experiment with, read about and discuss.

This week, I have discovered Camtasia which I downloaded as an attempt to stabilise my ethnography. It worked, and now as well as having a *slightly* less annoying presentation, I also have another 26 days remaining of a free trial with a software that is not only useful, but very easy to use. And I have lots of tumblog ideas for it, alas a little too late.

I have also begun my reading in earnest for my assignment. The Crang and Graham article is fascinating, and I allowed myself a moment of ‘threat’, which felt somehow satisfying, like I had come a full circle within the course. Returning to the binaries of promises and threats; utopia and dystopia. The fact that this article was written in 2007 was really interesting because much of the mobile technology we have now was in its infancy then, so this prompted some further reading around the subject. And fortunately it appears that the ‘threat’ of ‘omniscience’ has not come to fruition (Or has it? And how would we know either way?). Linked to this was a quick post of an image on thinking cities. Probably, each thought bubble would only have ones and zeros in it, but it’s good to muse. And it would have been nice to invite my classmates to muse too, on a collaborative artefact of some kind.

I tried to examine the British Library’s digital archiving quest through a posthuman lens. I suggested that not knowing in advance what the collection is for, and what it will become to mean, is perhaps a good thing. And that’s how I feel about this tumblog, but more of that later in the final review.

Finally, I have spent time responding to some of the comments that my classmates have posted to my entries. In many cases that’s been been truly belated, but I feel that I have a responsibility, and a desire, to say thanks, or to acknowledge in some other way their contributions to my learning.