Katherine's EDC blog

Live-blogging the readings was something I started doing for An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning, the first module in this course.

Now, when I take notes for academic writing, I use the Cornell Method–which is analogue (handwritten on paper), atemporal (designed to be used again and again across a writing or research project, and its multiple revisions) and strictly analytic (that is, the thoughts, comments and notes I include fit squarely into the tradition of academic writing and logics). It is also, interestingly, less linear, more map-like, with its multiple panes for meta-analysis and reflection.

Live-blogging is is rather a stream-of-consciousness (or rather, I suspect, a form of “free indirect discourse“), rag-bag of links, thoughts, quotes and responses to the reading. This makes it messier than my neat notes, but it makes it more linear chronologically. It therefore lays out clearly my route (rather than my map), my growth and way of getting there. If this sounds fragmentary, repetitious, and kind of modernist, it is. Eliot wrote: “And all is always now“, and texts are always present to the person reading them, and yes, I was thinking about Mrs Dalloway (and Ulysses) when writing this paragraph.

I think that makes it less interesting for anyone else to read, but useful to keep track of my progress–in the same way the ‘Lifestream’ does.

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So, on with the reading.

In which we nod at the Post-human, the Cyborg, and Homo faber

I’ve already engaged with some of these ideas in a 3-part ‘web essay‘ for IDEL, ‘Embodying Learners in New Media Literacies: Cyborgs, Androids and the Dance Apocalyptic’, which makes extensive use of two of the secondary readings:

Haraway, Donna (2007) A cyborg manifesto from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds),  The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) Towards embodied virtuality from Hayles, N. Katherine,  How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25, 293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.

The web essay also makes some use of Clarke (2002). I would like to read more on this, starting with Shilling (see list below). Latour’s later Reassembling the Social is on my summer reading list  already.

In which we get to the bit where mobile phones change everything

I’m always sceptical about these claims, what I have called before the “things are all different now, because interwebs” claim. (Yes, this is another blog-post for IDEL that I reblogged for a wider audience).  I always read these claims about, say, the mobile phone, and wonder… ‘yes, but what about the letter, the telegram? what about film, about portraits, about dageurrotypes? what about short-wave radio, and the telephone?’

For example, how might be understand Van den Berg’s (2009) claims about GPS compared to other traditional methods of navigation?

Okay, this is clearly different from, say, an (imaginary) wild tracker who looks at how the moss grows and the direction of the sun and navigates that way.

But I wonder how much this might be like the sailor with his sextant navigating via star charts? Or a cross-country runner using a compass and an ordinance survey map (as in orienteering) ? Or a driver on a motorway, chosing one of a score of identical-looking  exits because of the road signs? All of these modes of navigation also use a “God’s eye” view, a typical aspect of maps since… well, here is an example from 500BC, so we’re looking at 2,500 years.

“Baylonianmaps“. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the fascinating discussion that emerged from my earlier rant post, I said:

I agree that the internet has made major differences to degree, speed and scale of reading and writing.

And I continue to agree that the ways in which we might be present or not present through mobile phones are made easier, quicker and more portable than ever before. No longer do I need to take an image in a professional studio with a camera the size of a small suitcase, holding my pose for some minutes. The image does not need a complex, multi-stage development and fixing process. Without wrapping it carefully, franking it, and walking it down to a postbox, I can share it with those who are emotionally connected to me but physically distant. Moreover, my recipient needn’t wait for weeks for the steamship to cross the oceans.

But anyone who thinks that people in the past were mentally and emotionally ‘with’ the people around them, or ‘in’ the spaces they inhabit, has clearly never read a novel. Not read The Catcher in the Rye, or The Scarlet and the Black, or Northanger Abbey, or seen The Cherry Orchard or The Three Sisters.

Or

Rant over.

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To Read:

Shilling, Chris. The body and social theory. Sage, 2012.

Licoppe, Christian. “Connected presence: the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape.” Environment and Planning D 22.1 (2004): 135-156.

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Review: Since this was a live-blog, I didn’t go back and edit  what I wrote (except to correct typos etc). However, it’s interesting that I was thinking about literature and maps in my reflection about this as a way of taking notes, long before I got to the bit where I was having qualms about mobiles changing human relationships.  I’d quite forgotten about that, though clearly it was still in my mind.