DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Tropical

Originally uploaded by Trois Têtes (TT)

Went to Peace in the Park on Saturday. Some interesting stuff to photograph and saw a wonderful band Just Potatoes. The lead singer had the most beautiful rich Blues voice but could also belt out the Waits’ Chocolate Jesus, giving a momentous performance.

(This is the singer from Just Potatoes.)

I found out about the event in several ways - all of which were to do with my ‘life online’ Firstly I took a photo last week of a a performer advertising the event - but only found out about the event after I took the shot for my Flickr stream (not yet uploaded); secondly I heard about the event on a discussion thread on Flickr; thirdly I heard about it via a contact on Facebook.

While I was there, I was intent on getting good shots to put on Flickr … but most uncanny was when Ian Jones came up to me and said ‘Hi you’r DrJoolz aren’t you? I recognise you from Flickr … Life Online, huh? Blending Identities.

(Thanks to TT for the images.)

A few months ago I brought you this story - from my fridge.

And now I see that there is a wonderful blog here all about ‘passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers’

Do other people find notes round their houses?

This is the latest one in my house:

Rosa likes to leave notes … another one here…

I think it is interesting the way people leave text around the place. Sometimes with no hope of seeing most of their audience.

This one is quite bemusing:

And I like Lemon2’s shot here which captures a moment where the text seems to have a relationship with the person in front:

But the relationship is only made by the reader. There are just two items in the image and we as readers join them in a narrative; we make connections between one element of the image and another.

I am really interested in the ways in which environment can change the meanings of text and vice versa. I am interested in the way text changes over time. This one is funny:

But really I am interested in interactivity of the environment - including people, and even the weather - with texts that are in the street …. specifically streetart and grafitti. The life and meanings of street texts.

I feel a a new project coming on ….

Holga trying to enjoy an English bank holiday

Originally uploaded by lizjones112

And the forecast was rain. So we have had two solid days of it.

If I had wanted rain I would have chosen to live in Manchester or Wales.

So this is NOT what I expect or want. It is COLD as well as wet.

Liz Jones, also fed up with the weather and also from Sheffield, has whiled away the hours by uploading photos and the photo on the right is an excellent example. (I love photos of dolls. They are just so ABSURD in my opinion. THIS is one of my favourites ever.)

And in the meantime I have been documenting the further liberation of Sugardudes. See here for latest story.

The story ends horribly:

This is not the first time people have been involved in their rescue. See here.

The whole thing is a story of global bonding through PLAY. Play that happened through the meeting of Flickr people from New York, Sheffield and even Sweden.

I love to take photos and then fiddle around and use photoshop to crop or fiddle with colour etc.

Lots of people are against such post-photographic tampering. But I see it as aprt of the whole photographic process. Even in the ‘darkroom’ used for processing film, there are decisions to be made about chemicals, exposure time etc etc. The type of film used brings about differebnt results, and of course printing can make a qwhole lot of difference in terms of colour outcome, type of paper (glossy or matt), size and even borders.

I like to use photoshop and because I think that because you have to frame the image, focus in a particular way, shoot at a particular angle, wait for the right moment (etc.) the image is always just a representation, never ‘real’. It is not a snap from reality but a version. It is the photographer’s view; it reflects a set of choices or circumstances. It is amazing how you can get so many different types of image when many people take a picture of one thing. (Compare the shots of the same Banksy stencils, for example.) .

I photoshopped this image:

I wanted to also play with the idea that you can shoot in black and white or colour. I called this ‘Shooting in Colour’.

I also wanted to show my position on streetart - that it brightens the environment and can improve and humanise negelgted and forgotten spaces.

I like this video about transforming a model through photography. The video is supposed to shopw how shallow we are in having only one version of beauty. It is apart of a campaign for ‘real beauty’. What is ‘real’? I like the transformative process. It interests me a lot. And what do we mean by ‘natural’ or ‘real’?

I have a very crap myspace account. I only opened it to see how it worked etc. I don’t pay much attention to it,
But looking at it today I discovered a new link to a site which lets you load in your photos to make slide shows. It is here.

This is what I did. Display of some street art.

In the meantime Flickr has added functionality to its site letting you make collections and letting you display your images differently on your home page, like this.

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.

I have been at this conference today and tomorrow I will be giving my paper… ‘Chilli, stylist’s own: Online presentations of the Domestic’.  I really enjoyed meeting people from across the university today and it was great chatting in the breaks and finding out what everyone is up to.

This week has been fun on Flickr. I took a series of photos on Monday, telling a particular story:

Then TT uploaded this image to Flickr (while I sorted out the alcohol). Strange though because having uploaded that picture of alphabetti spagetti on toast (don’t ask) TT got abuse from other Flickr people … which he had to delete. All very weird as I would have thought the picture was pretty inoffensive, but there you go. He deleted the offending comments and blocked the users from his stream, after which the offending parties’ fiends all started with the aggro. Quite rare on Flickr but there you go. 

Anyway, that’s a glimpse of our domestic life this week.

for a few days with TT. It was a wonderful break and the SUN SHONE. Twas really warm. It is a really good idea to save up some holiday every year to go away late October or November (not in half term) and go somewhere warm. It is a real tonic.

Barcelona? Well there are some very interesting photos to be had .. the tourist run is good, with all the Gaudi architecture everywhere; some excellent art galleries (not as good as Berlin) and some graffitti - but it has been mainly messed up by scrawlers.

By far the best thing was people watching and the weather.

As for my thinking … I have been thinking about NARRATIVES and IDENTITIES. On Flickr we tell stories within our photos, through our photostreams and we show how we want to structure the narratives by the sets we make and the tags we choose. We also weave narratives across the groups we belong to - this is what I think can be called ‘distributed narrative’ (Walker.)

So boing boing have a piece about Flickr trying to patent interestingness.

Hmm well that is interestingness in itself because I have been noticing the number of photosharing sites that are around and that are copying bits of Flickr (as well as having some new ideas). It is obviously getting to Flickr.
Also it seems, that Boing Boing, according to their report don’t thing that interestingness is very original.
however there are many debates on Flickr by members about how on earth the algorithm works and it clearly is something that matters to people.
So I reckon it is worth cash.

And funnily enough THIS one crept into explore the other day:

And the very cool thing is that I did not see anyone take this at the same time