DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

ReadingFaust
Originally uploaded by tommigodwin.

Earlier this week I gave a short presentation about Web 2.0  and its relevance to English teaching… 

As is always with these things I came away thinking more closely about issues that were raised in questions and discussion. By doing a presentation it shakes you out of your smug comfort zone a bit. I think that after a while of living with my own ideas and evaluations of my experiences, I forget to articulate for everyone the processes I have been through to get to the viewpoints that I have. In other words I sometimes forget to explain properly and simply assume that everyone else is thinking what I am thinking and have learned things that are similar. So it is good for me to get out of my box every now and then and listen to people. 

So yeah … I was showing a series of blogs like this,  this and  this . I mentioned that Riverbend’s blog has also been published as a book .

and also that one of the things I like about the web is that you can see lots of people’s perspectives  and experiences-such as seeing life in Baghdad from a number of viewpoints. 

But then one person pointed out that I was taking a lot on trust and that the sites may be fake; i.e. they may not be written by the people who say they are writing them.  This is of course true and there have been cases where people have had fun this way doing ghost writing (as they do in novels too, for example) or writing ‘as if’ someone else. Sometimes they have been clear about this from the start that they are writing ‘in role’ or under a pseudonym … but others have been found out and had to confess - for example Lonelygirl15’s video blog.

 But back to my Web 2.0 presentation thingie. The example that was cited was this blog  from which I had just shown one screenshot. I was quite staggered really as I had never questionned its authenticity and I think that is because I have read it for so long.  And in fact it was only when I drove away after the presentation that I started to go over in my mind how I just KNEW that this blog was for real …. . I started t think about how I had come to my viewpoint and the journey I had travelled. I have somehow developed a way of finding blogs (etc) that I trust.

I began to think about how I have somehow created a kind of way of guaging authenticity and so on; how I do carry out some checks in a fairly sub-conscious way. I have decided hat these are the key elements: 

1. The reputation of the person which is seen through their associations with others… the blogroll; the comments; the links to other sites; evidence of the person’s engagement with communities both on and ofline.
2. The length of time the person has been blogging / flickring (etc.)
3. The consistency in what they say, how they say it - the use of language.
4. Photographic images of their life and others in it.

 This is how it happened with tommigodwin:

 Firstly just as with people I meet face to face, my default position is trust. There is something too, to be said about associations and the affinity space. So on a blog, one can look at blogrolls and other hypertext links to see if/how the person is networked with others. One reads the blogs of others and sees the complexity of the network - and if it is quite complex, it is hard to fake. Also if that person is associated with another blogger you trust - well, that helps too. There are a number of interesting links on the Sentinel 47 blogroll. Just reading through the blog and following links off the blogroll etc, I not only could read around the ‘affinity space’ but also found tommigodwin’s Mum’s blogs here. (She is ‘in’ education, has lots of blogs and is into cultural theory and digital media like me; moreover she has lots of the same links on her blogroll as I do!!) . Now I did not do this survey in order to check out authenticity .. but it all starts to accumulate as a picture one can trust It happens on a fairly subconscious level I think; it is only when one is challenged by suspicion that you start to re-count how you ‘know’ things. (I am glad I was questioned as it made me think about how I evaluate authenticity online.)

But then I also remember how I had initially come to see this blog having found a picture of a soldier reading Faust on Flickr.  And I  looked at many of the images on this Flickr account so I could see the extent of the real life being depicted.   When you see a set of images like this for example, it seems impossible to dispute authentcity.  These points all refer to my ‘Number 1′ and ‘4′ above.

Secondly I have built up an impression that has accumulated over time. The time issue is crucial I think; but of course on blogs time can be condensed so you can read across months in a short sitting. So you can scan across past posts and then see posts go up bit by bit as the days go on; this embedding in real time and so on is possibly also a good test .. are the blog posts reflecting aspects of things which we know to be the case in that time and place where the blog is set? I guess this is a ‘currency’ test.

Then thirdly  there is the language thing which is harder to describe; sometimes we think someone is a bit ‘fake’ in a f2f encounter just because of how they phrase things - maybe they are inconsistent or over- effusive or SOMETHING. This is all on a pretty subconscious level I think to do with previous experiences and encounters with others. Maybe also it is to do with what is talked about. (I guess this is the same radar we use to check out lying when we meet f2f with someone.)  

Now, I am not surprised that someone should say to me that we should be suspicious of what we read online; I think that it is true we must read with care. When I write this I am not being cross with the person who asked the question and am not trying to win an argument. I am being critical of my lack of refelxivity. What I am saying here is that I am sometimes not a very aware researcher/presenter as I do not always realise/articulate why I believe something. So I was grateful for the questions asked of me.  I had simply shown a screenshot of a blog and expected people to understand all the depth of the full text which went across years of blogposts and across out of the site into Flickr and into other people’s blogs too. I needed to describe all of that.

There are important things that need to be carefully articulated about how it is that we can develop skills to fathom whether something or somone is being genuine online. And we need to be able to teach this kind of thing … it is about being critical readers of texts.

Postscript…

Funny thing is, Rosa has recently utterly refused to watch the news on tv as she says it is the National Lies. Now I CAN see her point; and having moved from a position (when she was about 5)  where she believed the weather man decided what weather we had, and that the news readers told only facts, she has now gone all out into a mode of suspicion. There is a happy medium to aim for I guess and we just need to be alert to the notion that the TRUTH might not actually be OUT THERE, but there are many versions to sift through.

What wikis do and what blogs do is show us that here are many ways of seeing and being. More on wikis (and search engines)  later I think. That’s enough for now.