In order to be a bit more
creative and experimental, I wanted to move away from purely text based posts.

Prompted by Poster (2006), and
in order to question the levels of morality we ascribe to non-human artefacts,
I created an ambiguous entity and he/it invited comments on its like-ability.
Jen’s response was the type of answer I was hoping for, so for a first attempt
at a multimodal entry I was satisfied. The experiment was, though, fairly
unsophisticated, and perhaps didn’t create a great deal of meaning.

My next post was an attempt to
disrupt text by displaying it as a mirror image. Kress (2005) says that ‘The
still existing common sense is that meaning and language is clear and reliable’
(p. 8) and that the reader follows conventions of order, for example starting
left to right. My aim was to disrupt this stability and force the reader to
defy convention.

I added two posts that linked
music and dance to the ‘being human’ theme. I chose not to add much text, and I feel that these entries are weak – ‘fillers’. Maybe the choices were
just wrong; maybe I was too restrictive on ‘no text’ and have presented
meaningless bits of media; maybe I have not yet embraced curation and fragments.

Finally, I veered into imagery
to support my thinking about ‘cities’ within digital culture. I toyed with the
idea of uploading the image alone but decided that without explication the
image would not be representative of my thoughts/learning.

Johnston (2009) alludes to the metaphor of ‘Internet as a physical place’ and quotes Wellman and Gulia (1999) who positively view the impact of the internet as ‘… as if most North Americans lived in the heart of densely–populated, heterogeneous, physically–safe, big cities rather than in peripheral, low–density, homogeneous suburbs.’ Hand (2009) also describes apparent ‘promises’ of the digital urban landscape as a blend of new technologies and the Greek Polis. However, he also outlines the perceived threats of segmentation, surveillance and de-democratisation. Bell (2001) tells the story of the cyberpunk genre, in which the virtual world is described variously as ‘data stacked like a neon city’ (Gibson 1988 quoted in Bell 2001); a ‘digitised parallel world…in which no one can get the bird’s eye view of the plan, but everyone effectively has to operate at street level in a world which is rapidly being re-structured and re-configured’ (Burrows 1997 quoted in Bell 2001); and which Bell himself describes as a ‘datascape…populated by console cowboys’ uploaded consciousnesses, avatars, artificial intelligences, personality constructs – unthinkable complexity at ‘street’ level. with gangs forming around ‘technophilic’ identities’. (Bell 2001) In addition, Massive Attack’s video for Splitting the Atom travelled around a futuristic city reminiscent of many sci-fi movies such as Matrix.

This focus on the ‘city’ may suggest there is disconnect between the digital/virtual world and the countryside. It would probably be too blunt to immediately invert the various descriptors, metaphor and stories above to suggest that the rural world is undemocratic, data poor, parochial and static. However, it could be argued the urban representations fracture the privilege of the organic-ness of rural life – the meat – or to put it in other words, the human.

(Which can’t be accessed on iphone or iPad – yet!)

Hand’s commentary on the political dimensions of digital culture (the promise of ‘social inclusion and empowerment, interactive citizenship, and participary democracy’ (p.16) and the threat of individualism and rejection of the state) led me to link into commentaries on the recent Arab Spring movement.  The commentator I selected presented an alternative to the utopia/dystopia binary – cyberrealism – which seemed not to tell the whole story, perhaps presenting a more dystopic sense of ‘inevitability’ than the author intended.

The film review postings were a whistle stop tour of notions of digital cultures that Hand introduced, blended with ideas put forward in the Synchtube tutorial. I made connections to themes of digital culture in societal and economic spheres – sometimes bending the the themes to fit my readings of the pieces.

Finally, while watching a BBC documentary about the emergence of the railways in the industrial revolution and I was struck by the similarities in attitudes towards promise and threat of technology and in particular the view point of Carlyle. The struggle and tensions for the acceptance of technology into everyday culture seem to me to be timeless.