DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

I have received a range of information about new things happening digital literacy wise.

Has anybody else received about fifteen emails informing them about ‘One laptop for every child’?  If like me you have, then I am sure you will not click on  the last link … oops sorry if I misled you there into clicking.

Frankly I am not sure I agree that what every child needs is a laptop, but think that what everyone needs is free and easy access to online tools and social networking. This may or may not be Internet based in the future. Laptop technology is not necessarily here to stay.

Next up, I got an email telling me about Suzanne. Now that is worth a visit. You get emails everyday which  provide a narrative over a period of three weeks. (Mind you, only the first three emails are free; after that it really is a mere snip at $4.99)  The emails comprise the correspondance of characters in a story. I wonder if it will be as spooky as online Caroline was?  (Here is Jill Walker talking about online Caroline.) Walker calls this kind of thing ‘personalised narrative’. The reader has choices to make and affects what Caroline does. Caroline emails you if you don’t make any decisions or visit the site. It is, as I say, spooky. Have a go. Get spooked.

The best of all I think was the email telling me about this new publication ‘Their Space’  from Demos. It is very good, a booklet giving details about young people’s use of the Internet.. If I were you I would save the free download on your pc.

All this stuff. All part of my digital world.

So.

We continually story our lives for ourselves and for others; that is to say, I believe that individuals perpetually structure (and reconstruct and even deconstruct) their lives. They tell stories about themselves to themselves, and offer versions to others; trying out their narratives in social arenas sometimes.

We do this with our images too; taking photos of ourselves in familiar places, in new places and with different people. We look at things with our eyes, through camera lenses and on screens. We use images to tell stories, to reinforce stories, to collect data; we arrange and re-arrange the images and look at the world in different ways.

I think that in creating the narratives about ourselves, we draw on larger ‘grand narratives’ about life; the story of a marriage; of a person growing up; of a person having a career, for example.  I think we structure our stories in relation to others we know and understand the meanings and significances of lives in relation to others we see. Our local stories are saturated with the cultural values of our social worlds.  So, I value things in my life which my culture values. (it is hard not to.) 

Schriffin says that:

‘we construct our own individual experiences as a way to positon ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations’ 

 (Schriffin, 1996:2)

And Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 139) say that this is a ‘kind of interdependency betweeen personal stories and culturally circulating plotlines’ .

I am interested in this and the way this happens; that we draw on narratives around us and see our lives in relation to them and perceive our own stories as being similar to, or different from, these.

I am fascinated for example, by the story of transformations that are so commonly told on tv;the ongoing project of the self. Self improvement, self enhancement - looking 10 years younger; better dressed; fitter; slimmer; richer, etc etc. The ‘truth’ of these stories is so embedded in our culture; i.e. that it can only be a GOOD THING to live a life where one is forever on a JOURNEY, to one or another of those things.

Here are some figs:

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.