DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Really have had trouble blogging lately.

Thought I would try and blog regularly again by not allowing myself to write much in each post. Then maybe I would want to. Straining at the leash, so to speak.

So no more than five sentences allowed … starting from NOW….

I have come back from Berlin ….a crazy mixed up city with people pulling in all directions, trying to lead in deciding what the culture IS. So much streetart, so many people wanting to express themselves out there.

Here then is a photo from the last day of my holiday … strangely misty:

This is supposed to be a moody shot showing the mix of architectures across the ages and reflecting the extremes of politcs and culture. The Palace is now being carefully dismantled and there are big placards explaining that is is not being ‘demolished’ - see here

Soo… people keep taking photos of everyday images.

there are things on Flickr which can become cliche, but I like it. Check this out here.

You could join this group if you want.
Does this make peg shooting a meme?

Well sometmes I hate email but look at this received late last night ….

Eureka
I found it.

I found the theme for the question. Took me 3 days of sleepless continuous
deliberation between myself and my favourite bottle of scotch, but I did
find it. Now I need time to develop it.

I have taken off most of the crap written in my draft.

Just wait and see har har har. Just wait and see.

P

This is from a doctoral student who is writing his proposal …. oh the pain of writing!! This expresses it so well.

I love the sponaneity of this too. You could not write a letter like this. Only on email or MSN. It’s very cool to be able to write this in the wee hours of a Maltese morning and send to your tutor. (Who coincidentally had just spent a lovely evening in Sheffield UK with two other Maltesers from the same university…)

I am trying to write a paper for BERA … and just cannot get on with it. The pain of writing and the ease of procrastination… But I have found a really interesting paper on ‘arenas of innovation’ and it talks about ways in which creative arenas arise so that new ideas can be generated. The writers compare the development of radio with that of the internet. Did you know for example, that radio broadcasting was developed by amateurs? It was a by-product of radio communications.

Look at this extract:

It was the stubborn refusal of renegade amateurs to comply with the larger institutional framework that resulted in the identification of broadcasting as a new means of communication. Frank Conrad, in early 1920, started transmitting phonograph music, as part of his ongoing experiments, over a radio transmitter. His signal was picked up by amateur radio buffs and their enthusiastic response led Conrad to schedule regular concerts, which attracted much newspaper coverage and publicity.

Ring any bells? Does this not look similar to the way in which things like Napster developed?

This article is interesting:
Arenas of innovation: understanding new configurational potentialities of communication technologies Harmeet Sawhney and Seungwhan Lee in Media, Culture & Society 27(3)

Check it out.

Anyway I discovered where all our time went ..

This has been a post about writing, innovation and time wasting, but hints at the idea that we need to play a bit before big ideas can come.

I see people take photos.
Lots of the people are taking pictures of themselves.
It is so common to see the self portraiters when you are out and about these days.
They seem to want to have pictures of themselves everywhere.
I think that partly they just like to use their gadgets.

They often share them and talk about them in groups, gathering round and looking at the little screens.

It is so easy to hold the technology and take your own photos in different places. VicCarrington talked recently about how she and her partner are pretty obsessed with this activity… and refuse help from kindly passers by who offer to take their photograph for them.

I am interested in the idea that we want to see ourseves positioned in spaces; the way we want to take control of the images. Berger talked of the ways in which women in particular view themselves as if through other’s eyes. This is becoming an obsession for everyone. But if we hold the camera it is as if we are taking control over other people’s gaze.

Putting the images on a website is taking one step further; viewing ourselves on the global stage. Look on Flickr and you will see so many self portraits. Under the tag ’self portrait’ or see the group ‘ of me’.There is something important going on which is to do with identity positioning.

I have never printed off photos taken by my digital camera.
I have 1,407 photos on Flickr. They have been viewed 29,856 times.
Wow.
(I have one self portrait.)

Have worked from 9.15 a.m./ to 10.30 p.m. non stop today (apart from replying to comments on my yesterday’s post).
So no time to do the blog post I planned. Just time for this:

Radio 4 told me the Internet is 15 years old today.

Ian McMillan read out this poem:

CONNECTED

Before, when you got mail,
It was a chap in a cap with a sack packed full;
Before, when you researched
You sat and sweated in a library that was just this side of dull;

And when you booked your holidays
You stood there in a queue
Behind a family of five and a pensioner or two
And life seemed so much slower, somehow;
There was acres of last week and just half a glimpse of now;

Today you click
On a mouse
And you can shop till you drop without leaving the house
And now you send
Your blogs
Right across the globe and the photos of your dogs
Can appear on your site in the twinkling of an eye
And in a tick you get a picture back of Grandma saying Hi!
Framed against the backdrop of a California sky…

And it’s been fifteen years from before to this
And now we’re living in a universe of constant cyber bliss!
And like the first fire in the cave
Or the first turning of The Wheel
The internet is changing how we think and speak and feel
And in the next fifteen years the net will turn and twist again
And go down murky sidestreets far beyond this Barnsley brain
And one thing’s certain: the net is here forever,
Constant as taxes, unpredictable as weather…

And before I’m dragged right under in a growing tide of spam
I’ve time for just this one last post: I click therefore I am!

Great Poem. I love Ian McMillan.

I cannot go in to the office this week as they are removing asbestos from the building and it is VERY DANGEROUS for ordinary people to go in.

Nevertheless….

#The beauty of the web is that it allows me to nevertheless work 12 hours at home:0)
#The Internet also allows me to be bullied into responding to around 50 e mails on average per day.
#It allows me to receive info on more conferences I can go to in a life time.
#It pounds and pounds me with assignments and drafts from students who somehow think it is OK to repeatedly ask for help when they would not have dreamed ofgiving me that number f paper based drafts and pre drafts and plans, and diagrams.

The Internet is so lovely in so many ways - linking me with lovely people on my blog and through Flickr. But it has changed the work space into a relentless thing with no bounds at all - crossing into my home, my home life and giving me deadlines and infomation I cannot cope with at all.
But apart from that I am fine.

Look what I found in my kitchen:

Makes you want to get out the disinfectant doesn’t it?
It never ceases to make me wonder what there is in front of you, but which can only be revealed by sophisticated technology.

I have been very house and family oriented in the last few weeks - I have found it hard at least t think about work matters. Probably even resistant….

But it was BRILLIANT to see people discussing on my blog on the last post. Very exciting indeed to read contributions even from people who have not spoken to me before. (You NEVER know who reads and does not comment. Well that’s not true, sometimes people tell you and site meters tell you a bit. But it is always a surprise to ME.) The funny thing is, that on this global stage , the people who commented are all local. I know who they all are - even though I have not met them all. I am very struck by this; the idea of SEEING THE LOCAL ARENA ON THE GLOBAL STAGE. Local people talking together, in front of witnesses, in front of a potentially global audience. I am thinking a lot about this and am in the middle of writing THREE papers one of which will expand on this idea of LOCAL/GLOBAL identity performance.
(Sorry re caps. I am not shouting.)

Anyhoo.
Very wonderful to have Peter and Sheila commenting on my last post and how welcome to see that Michele and Colin are generously sharing the draft of their updated New Literacies text online.

Peter, in one of his comments quotes that in their draft of Chapter 3 they argue describe literacy as:
‘socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses ….’

I do think still that the texts should be encoded inletters to be part of literacy; but would want to still insist that a text can be far more than just lettered encoding. Thus in order to understand some texts, one’s literacy skills needs to account for the role of other modes such as images, sound etc. But I think that an image and no written words does not need the skills of literacy in order to be interpreted in some way. I think that images ARE however, complex texts and that we learn to read them in different ways. Crucially, one picture can be read by people who speak a million different languages from each other. (I agree of course that the image may be read in many ways and that cultural conventions (etc.) may impact on readings) The same could not be said of a text that is only encoded in written words.

Sheila mentions that many librarians dislike the term literacy because the converse is ‘illiteracy’. I also really dislike deficit models and would not be inclined to use such a term. It is as if ‘literate’ is the default position and that to not be able to de-code lettered texts is some kind of personal deficiency. Anyway all fascinating stuff.

Tomorrow I will be blogging about urban renewal, urban re-development, gentrification and the like - with reference to New York; Sheffield and possibly …. BERLIN.