In many ways, the blog had become too post-human. It collected things automatically, in ways that made sense to the machine.

Since the beginning of this semester, I’ve struggled with that. It was ugly. It was hard to read. It was unfriendly to the audience I was trying to reach–primarily the rest of the MScECD cohort, who are humans… and me.

The machine reading was glitchy too. The tags didn’t work, there were no analytics. I had no idea if the bots are crawling over my text and finding useful metadata to feed into search engines and algorithms.

And there there are my very human glitches. I wear glasses, partly because I’m short sighted, partly because I have strong astigmatism. I’m also slightly dyslexic. And I get travel sick very easily. I usually have great coping strategies, but I can’t bear it when things flicker or move. Or when it’s hard to scan the text, and the text starts to move on its own (or rather it moves somewhere between my retina and my brain). That makes me feel ill.

So we have a truly embodied reading experience. A human reading experience. A flawed reading experience at the centre of this.

And so this week I moved to curation, to clickbait headlines, to careful selection of a broad stream of sources. I think that will help.

So, this first week’s reflection is practical as much as intellectual.

Rather than reflecting directly on the course content … the purpose of these weekly postings is to synthesise and review the content of your lifestream. It is expected that each summary post will contain references to the content from that week. (EDC 15 blog).

The obvious way to do that was to look at my IFTTT analytics:

• Instagram #mscedc, set up but never run.
  • I will start adding some visual aspects to my stream, which is currently very text and hyperlink heavy.
• WordPress comments, run 5 times (and failed 3).
  • I read through everyone else’s blogs. There was a great variety, from people who hadn’t even started, to people who had beautifully crafted lifestreams.
  • The theme I’m currently running was used by PJ, and I really liked it’s clean design. I also liked Ed’s use of his graphic design background, and Nick’s use of Pinterest. (And I said so in their comments).
  • I was grateful for Sian’s useful comments on my blog.
• Twitter #mscedc, run 26 times.
  • I tweet a lot (43 non-#mscedc posts since 12 Jan).
  • So I have changed my IFTTT recipe to “If new tweet by @katrinafee with hashtag #mscedcls, then create a post on your WordPress blog”.  This allows me to talk to the #mscedc group seperately from posting on this blog, so we don’t drown in tweets here.

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.

***

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?

Miller (2011) p 221

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.

Miller (2011) p 221

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

Source: http://www.observatoriofucatel.cl/la-necesidad-de-un-diario-publico/

Rant over.

***

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.

***

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.