DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

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.

Oh how lovely on Valentine’s day …

But there is no need for us to forget what we are REALLY here for … the lurve of WEb 2.0

You Tube is NOT just videos of people at weddings . It is a rich resourrce for info of all kinds. Here are two useful bits about web 2.0

I really like this one:

This one is a bit less funky but a bit more controversial.

Well the UK Celebrity Big Brother is in the news globally it appears… housemates are being accused of racial harrassment and bullying by watchers of the show.

Shilpa Shetty the Bollywood star is said to be the subject of racism and its been on the news everywhere. The BBC reports here. And even the Indian government has taken up the issue.

There is debate though since it seems that while in theory we can define racism, in practice people disagree with each other.

Frankly I think that some of the housemates are being racist … Jack has used the word ‘Paki’; Jackiey referred to Shilpa as ‘The Indian’; and the others have variously referred to her country as ‘never never land’; ‘India or whatever’; and ‘wherever you come from’. They comment on her being dirty for eating with her hands (presumably they eat crisps with spoons and burgers with a knife and fork?)

Well it is all fascinating; Reality TV hits the news big time and is rocking the boat. people are wondering whether it is important that a few people are being racist towards each other. Does it become more significant when it is played out n Natinal TV.

This website however seems to be misconstrued as racist and I am convinced it is ironically jibing at racists.

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.)

These are not the girl gamers. These are three excellent academics who were part of this conference last week.

And that conference, (as keen readers will know) was closely followed by this.

I am not going to repeat myself further but want to just mention that I went to an excellent seminar yesterday, which Catherine again presented, on girl gamers. It was called

‘Would the real girl gamers please stand up? Gender, LAN cafes and the reformation of the girlgamer’.

and evolved out of research done by her and Claire Charles. (The presentation was originally done by Catherine and Claire together) You can also see an associated paper in Discourse see here.

As if the funky title were not enough, the seminar had some really compeling data and an interesting story to tell about some girls and their involvement in gaming. The data was drawn from an Australian cafe and focused on a particular LAN cafe where some girsl of south east Asian background, were keen and expert gamers. In a setting where it is nearly all Australian white men who play these games, these girls were quite a contrast to the usual sort ogf gamers. Catherine was looking at issues around how and why these girls are involved and looking at issues around feminine identity etc. Most of the girls got drawn into the gaming via their boyfriends but ended up loving the games andthe action it offered. Catherine’s work looks at the tensions in playing the shoot em up game, for girls who were fashionable, petite and in the main, strongly identifying with their culture’s mainstream notions of identity. Fascinating stuff and I did see parallels with my own work as in this paper here and here about ‘Negotiating Femininities online’.

I was also really fascinated to hear how common Internet cafes are in Australia, and have also observed the same in Toulouse, Rome and Berlin. I have also heard Claudia Mitchell talk about girls in South Africa in Internet cafes. I am now wondering why UK youngsters do not go to Internet cafes to do their online gaming. Or do they? As far as I can see all the attempts at getting Internet cafes going in the UK (including Edinburgh) were either closed down, or just used by occasional individuals. Nothing like the kind of rush of boys queueing outside the cafes to go in, in Toulouse. Apparently they all gather to play team games on the web, so that they can collaborate over tactics (shouted across the cafe) and then play teams from elsewhere via the Internet. So does anyone know of Internet cafes like this in the UK? If not, why don’t they exist? Does anyone know?

Across all of the talks I have been to lately, I have been thinking about the way in which the local is being played out on a global stage. Something which Jennifer and Anne alluded to at UKLA.

I was first acquainted with them here and here.

TT and I have been worrying about them ever since so it was a joy to liberate them with Moufle and C-monster.

We had a mission isnpired by the infamous ‘No Dude Left Behind’ mantra in the US. Did we manage to fulfil our dream? Wait and see.

New York is waiting to be snapped up. (By us with our cameras, and by the property developers with their diggers.)

I am unable to make any sense of all the photos I have been taking and to write about the people is going to take a-a-a-a-ages.

This IS fun though.

I am a Flickr activist trying to free the sugar dudes today. You just wait and see!

A few days ago I was a Flickr activist entering areas on the shores of Manhattan where controversial devlopments are taking place.

Nice slideshow of the day here.

I am being educated about street artists such as Swoon and Celso and I will write properly on all this later.
It all needs to settle into my cerbral cortex before I can arrange a narrative.

But there is so much to say about Flickr and online offline affinities and tiers of association.
How is it that we have managed evrytime to meet people from Flickr who are just like us? Who we love to be with and conect with so well? How did we learn these skills? (So much here on cultural capital and social know-how.) We have met people for the first time who we feel we already know. This is fabulous.

Importantly I have bought handmade Cowboy boots (ha ha ludicrously marvellous to wear when listening to Laura Cantrell etc.) ; jeans and t-shirt from Gap; presents from MoMA; bag for son; so much so much. So much more.
Love it here.

At the weekend I went to two Flickr meets.

Firstly met Moufle from NYC who came into London; she was joined by Bingo Little and .danimal from Bristol, as well as .Danny from Cambridge. Quite a brigade . We had lunch in Bloomsbury and took a little walk down to Shoreditch where we went to the Eagle on City Road. (See its mention in this nursery rhyme here.)
There we met the London Flickr group and did half their walk with them. (We left early as had to do other stuff).
It was grand to meet people and cemented the idea that while it is great to communicate on a global scale there is never anythung quite so humane as being in aface to face situation.
On Sunday we had our own Sheffield Flickrmeet in The Showroom. It ws our fourth meeting and a couple of new people came along which is good. We voted on the winer of the Cathedral shot competition and have set up a series of new projects. We are also planning an exhibition of our work and want to show it somewhere central. Bristol have done something similar. It is interesting again that while we enjoy the mixing on a global scale we relish the idea of meeting new people in our locality … all people we would never otherwise have come into conatct with. Fascinating. (However there are those who do NOT come to the meets and so we cannot run far with that idea.)

And finally, in checking out arrangements for when we go to NYC in a couple of weeks, we found that the New York group is using Wayfarer to show aspects of their city as they see it. I love this idea of bringing a personal perspective on the maps available and labelling the world in this manner. You add a photo and a description to a wayfarer map. This is Niznoz’s work .. must have taken him ages. (Small world, Niznoz is Moufle’s cousin.) TT also had a go here.

We have come a long way since the ol metaphysicals drew up maps and discovered the world was round .. but that really was quite a discovery!

Here is Moufle:

and here are TT and Little Bingo (thankfully in the controlled zone):

Oh yes. One more thing … I got chucked out of a Flickr group today … have yet to discover why. Now I am over the trauma (do I look like I care?) I am amused by all this and must consult Iona and Peter to check out why some kids on the playground feel compelled to set up rules so that they have hardly anyone left to play with… (the group has gone down to only 8 members now - from loads and loads)

From Tampen we have familiar looking exotic images:

The images are ones I would expect to be able to see in many locations in my home town.

While the exotic exotic images today come from Rigamarole:

I would not expect to be able to see these scenes anywhere in the UK.

So the first two, taken by Tampen of his daughter, show me somethng from my everyday world but with the feel of the exotic - they are richly semiotic. And the second two photos show us Rigmarole’s images from Bombay. These are sights which belong to ‘other people’s’ everyday experiences and are probably mundane to them, but unfamiliar to me. I think that both the pairs of photos show us images which are ’strongly cultural’; they seem more heavily saturated with semiotic stuff than many other images from the same culture may have been. They tell me all sorts of things about how life goes on, values etc. That is to say the images say so many things about the culture from which they come and I think that this is why I find both pairs very powerful.

I like the way I can see such a rich cultural mix of images on Flickr, and looking at the images side by side like this, we can see the primitive roots of aspects of western fashion. Photographs from less technologically advanced countries are the ones which seem the most exotic and ‘othered’ on Flickr however. i think this must be because they are mainly (but not exclusively) brought to Flickr by people from technologically advanced cultures. This is ‘the norm’ of the Flickr perspective.

for a really great day.
What a line up of wonderful researchers and practitioners.
Here are photos ..

Firstly here are some of the contributors to Kate and Jennifer’s new book. We are:
Gunther Kress, Barbara Comber, Hilary Janks, Jennifer Rowsell, Kate Pahl, Julia Davies and Pippa Stein.

Jennifer and Kate were our wonderful editors:

And the day today was not only a book launch but a showcase for excellent research arsing from Creative Partnerships locally and excellent practice globally. See here, here and here.

You may be interested to know I have been writing this post whilst having the multimodal experience of listening to a Flickr podcast from New York: from here. Fabulous - they have a documentary, interviews, pictures from NYC and a map of the tour they made whilst recordeing the broadcast.
TT was very excited as Star not Star was mentioned - a group he set up aaaages ago. And our friend moufle was on.