DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

That’s all really.

dirty girl

Originally uploaded by kreativekell.

From KreativeKell … who is fabulous and who I met in New York in July.

I wanna go baa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack.

I like this photo which seems to imitate an advertisement which is imitating life.

The other week when YouTube was bought by Google, the site had a great deal of press. Here is a Youtube member responding.

One of the results of this was that the nature of the videos on there got slagged off.

For example on ‘Have I got news for you’ Andrew Neil talked about the drivel on YouTube and intimated that anyone who looked at the videos were stupid.

It seems that for a long time we have wanted our entertainment to be increasingly polished; we have wanted no chinks to shine through. We have wanted performances to be polished, the visuals to be beautiful and the dialogue clever.

But. I think that people are now going back to an enjoyment of the rough and ready and people are enjoying the amateurish. people are liking it when they see how things are done; where they can see throuh the chinks. They love the films made in people’s bedrooms or where people laugh at the wrong spot.

It reminds me of how people used to let Mummers in their houses. Or of the daft players in Midsummer nights dream - the play within the play - where no one can be mistaken that this REALLY happened. It is unashamedly, people just pretending.

See these Mummers:

See this from Midsummer Night’s Dream:

similarly so many of the youtube videos are easily penetrable - that is it is obvious that they are ordinary people making films for a range of reasons. They are unashamedly filmed in houses and tell simple stories about ordinary people. They are not supposed to be polished. See this one called ‘Drama Queen’.

Then there is

Or Hope is emo.

There are squillions of these little stories.

Anyway I was listening to a programme on radio 4 about the resurgence of story tellers. (my brother is friends with two of the people on the show - Ben and Hugh - how famous is that??) Anyway the show was talking about the phenomenon of ’seeing the whites of people’s eyes’ as they tell the story. This is partly a metaphor; although they meant it literally too, that part of a live story telling experience is in the physical intimacy. I think it is also about the ability to detect the person who tells a tale as ‘like us’, as ‘close’ as ’sharing the same space’. Is this part of he appeal of Youtube’s amateurishness?

I have decided that my next piece of thinking is going to be around the ways in which social networking allows people to produce and to share in narratives in a way that has been part of our culture for hundrreds of years. I want to write about this some more.

Human beings are naturally tellers of tales and suddenly we are wanting other types of tale in addition to the polished ones that we have been getting from tv and film over the last several decades.

Better late than never … I am finally announcing Google literacy which is described by Google as a place where you can:

Find books, articles and videos about literacy, or start your own literacy or reading group!

But in fact I am not clear what Google Literacvy is offering beyond Google scholar - and I think that ifd `i do a search on something related to literacy I would notr want to rule out info coming fr6m other disciplines.

For example , I ewould not want to rule out digital games as relevant.
which reminds me, it is half term in the UK and so how about a trip to London this week to look at the history of computer gaming?

This is a mangosteen.

Who would have guessed from the outside?

There is a big fuss at the moment about not being able to see beyond outer layers. Such as the news story here.

Quite an amazing picture this:

I wonder how the photograher wants us to read this? Despite, or because of, the veiling, camera looks as if it was being very intrusive. It gets too close to someone who seems to be hiding. But maybe I am wrong. maybe she is not hiding and I am making a wrong cross cultural assumption. maybe rather than hiding she is showing; showing us Islam.

I wonder what we look like through the hole in Aishah’s veil?

And I am wondering what are the points of view of the children Aisah helps in class? (’Points of view’ being an interesting metaphor in this case.)

I am just thinking about the scenes I have seen and remember from infant school days where teachers use exaggerated facial expressions and do a lot of smiling and visual feedback to the kids. But that may just be a cultural thing. In the news it reports about the teacher’s ability to do her job wearing a veil but we have not really heard about how the face is used in infant school classrooms.

If we think of the person as text, what kind of text do children need? And is there cultural variation? In the work of Kress, Jewitt and others, they include a look at the teacher’s body - e.g. spatial positioning, gesture and expression as part of the multi-modal analyisis of classroom as text. And certainly children are extremely expressive in terms of gesture and facial expression. I am thinking of Roberta Taylor’s work here. She has an article in the latest edition of English in Education -not online) Do they need a teacher as a model in this? Does it matter?

Yesterday went to a Photography festival in DERBY???!

We went by train and as usual TT was behaving just a tad pretentiously:

there were exhibitions going on all through the town and I especially enjoyed the work by:

• Julian Germaine (exhibited by bus stops in the city - HUU-U-U-U-U-UGE pictures;
• Nudrat Afza - (bizarrely exhibited amongst great big Rolls Royce plane engines and such) - poignant images of isolated people;
• Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin - incredible pictures of Chicago - in the middle of a desert in the middle east - a place where wars are rehearsed

It was all pretty wonderful and a surprise to enjoy the riches Derby had to offer in this respect … and we discovered it has a wonderful Arts Design and Technology department at the university. I would like to go to this lecture

Finally Format 2006 had a project for kids going on too with a very interesting teaching pack too which you can download from here. Very nice.

The Research Assesment Exercise (RAE) is carried out across all UK universities every five to seven years. It is supposed to be a way of measuring the quality of research carried out in each university, in each department. It is supposed to be about quality assurance and universities are given points and put in a rank order and money is dished out according to how well (or not) you do.

What gets me is that although my department did well in the last RAE we are always told we have no spondoolix.

That aside.

The RAE drives everyone batty and we all have to have our work graded and assessed by our institutions before it is then passed on to the proper thing. We are currently preparing for the mock RAE. We have to also hand in a list of ‘markers of esteem’ about ourselves … e.g. offices held; prizes won, etc.

Funnily enough, meanwhile in the lovely jubbly cuddly online world, we are forever rank ordering and grading ourselves there. People give each other grades and comments on ebay such as ‘Great ebayer!!!! A +++++’ - you can get that just for paying for something. It is a marvellous confidence boost.The feedback comes quick and clear. On Flickr we have comments and numbers of views that we can happily tot up (see here the info under each image) and we even enter mad competitions.

In myspace you can notch up kudos by having loads of friends and people who come into yourspace on myspace; on blogs you might appear on other people’s blogrolls (esteem factor); or you may even get listed on blogger’s interesting blogs list.

And it is wondefful if you can get a photo into interestingness. What a reward. It gets the punters coming back everytime.

If you are really into the whole Flickr hing you can go to fd’s gadgets and find out how many of your photos are n the interestingness group at anytime. As I am feeling in a very self-disclosing mood, I will tell you I have the page bookmarked.

Today I am very excited as one of my photos seems to be getting a whole stream of popolos . Hopefully I will do well and will have to move my pic to popfabulous!!

And I made a new poster of my photos which are in interestingness ….which is here:

What I was wondering, is ‘Can I list this in my RAE esteem factors list?’
Will I get put in RAEfabulous?
And is it fun in RAE fabulous?

My son uses the Internet for three things:

1. To use MSN with his friends. They all have mad names… he has ‘Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens’ and he used to have ‘there is no I in team, but if you look closely there is a me’.
2. To download games and play them.
3. To find jokey web sites.

Today he showed me these two sites:

1. A visual joke - with a cross cultural feel about it. It is called ‘Uncomfortable restrooms’.
2. This video which is a spoof of ‘Mortal Kombat’ a video game.

He used stumbleupon to find the sites.

If you have never stumbled online then you really ought to as it is a great way of browsing - you tell the search engine the kinds of site you like and it finds them for you. Try it.
Litrate told me about it and I have been having fun with it ever since.

So different people use the web for different things and my son and his friends mainly use it for fun and laughs. they tell each other new web sites to look up.

Really my son should be looking up info about where to go to university. But in fact I think he cannot believe he is old enough (neither can I).

Anyway, I found this on the web (hahahaha) …. hope you’re not scared of spiders:

So.

Here is a thing from YouTube, showing Judith Supine at work on the streets of New York.

In this instance Supine uses found texts to produce something new; the art process consists of a reconstitution of the found texts which is then processed digitally and then put straight back on the streets. It is a kind of re-arrangement of the environment to make you sit up and notice. And the use of commercial art in this way is ironic; cutting up the magazines, transforming the beautiful models into something ghoulish, staring out from the walls at passers by.

Here is some stuff from MOO. If you are a member of Flickr then YOU TOO can get cards made with your own images. I used a big mix of images to see what I would like best and then plan to order some more of the ones I really like.

Today’s post has been about how we can use and re-use texts to make new ones with new meanings. I have become very interested in the idea of PROVENANCE; the way texts collect additional meanings from the journeys they have made and the associations they have picked up from being in other contexts.

More from Judith:

There is a lot more to understanding digital texts than at first meets the eye.

you may feel pleased with your technology skills when you can copy texts from one place to another, moving info around to various gadgets. After all the gadgets are made that way and digitality cries out for copying, manipulation and tweaking.
In fact it is all about sharing.

however you may be breaking laws without knowing and the French are getting mad about this, or so reports the New York Times.

the fact of the matter is that if for example, you download music onto your itunes software on your pc, and then transfer it to a machine made by anyone apart from APPLE, you will be in trouble. (and itunes is always invasively asking to be downloaded onto your computer…)

Those meanies have written stuff into the small print of the agreements you unwittingly ignore, which says that you promise not to download the music onto anything but an i pod. At any moment now, Apple can prosecute anyone not obeying the copyright legislation and they may also release mean things onto your MP3 layer or computer next time you link them together to download itunes.

They have done this already many times to unsuspecting people who attempt to use their software on more than one computer.

I fell foul of this when I tried to download Keynote onto my new Powerbook. I had bought the software for one Powerbook; when I upgraded that one for a newer model I could use none of the software again so had to buy all new. It basically just all refused to be uploaded onto my new machine.

Digital texts are great in one way; but they have a way of reminding us that we are dealing with businesses every now and again.