JAG-wire.net Blog

Why You Should Be Afraid of Apple

2011-11-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

I often have people ask me why I'm not a fan of Apple. I thought I'd try to gather my thoughts into something with a bit of organization. I had hoped it would be short, but it turned into a long rant. It's also pretty coarse. Here we go:

Practical: They want to control as much as they can to cost you money... and freedom.
Ideological: They don’t want information to be a public good, they want it to be a monopolized commodity.
These philosophies, in turn, get implemented in their products.

Simple as that. Not enough? Let’s go through some examples, starting with this one:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/jon-stewart-rips-into-apple-over-lost-iphone-debacle-thats-going-to-leave-a-mark/

This post is a little harsher and has a more aggressive tone to it. Just envision me on a soap box and take it for its points of interest, not religious doctrine.

The iPhone trap and the new iPad threat

First, let’s tackle the mobile.

The App Lock

Johnathon Zittrain outlined this issue in 2008. If you buy an Apple phone you have to get/buy applications and music for it from iTunes. They limit what apps can be created and sold, and limit which devices they can be used on (own more than 5 devices in your lifetime? Tough luck, buy all your stuff again). If you buy a new Android phone later you have to then get/buy an entirely new set of applications for that phone. This means people who buy apple are locked into using Apple, because switching out of it costs you a lot of time and money. The same goes for Android, but at least it’s supported by all carriers and has many more phone manufacturers.

iPads are essentially big iPhones. People are starting to use them instead of laptops. They inherit all of the constraints of the iPhone, which means they are primarily sites of information consumption (not creation), and this consumption happens only on Apple’s terms. If they become as pervasive as laptops we will have a very large body of users who will be at a disadvantage. The social norms of computing will begin to change for the worse. Instead of buying and using software however, whenever and wherever you want, you will have to use it however, whenever and wherever Apple wants. They will find ways to make you pay money for various kinds of use, and you won’t have a choice to use something else, unless you want to pay a lot of money.

Alternative: Run an OS like Windows 8 (not available yet, but I’m investing all my hope in it) that will run on all hardware platforms (phones, tablets, game consoles, computers) and run any software built by 3^rd party developers. Just like a real computer. On more powerful devices (computers, tablets like iPads) you will probably even be able to run a virtual machine to run Apple software!

Another Alternative: Jailbreak your iPhone. Install whatever you want. Sell it unlocked years later for more than you got it for.

Yet Another Alternative: It seems that Apple's high-price and unreasonable restrictions are causing it to start to lose the tablet battle, as the Nook and Kindle push their way in. While they still lock you into media library collections, these devices can have Linux installed on them...

The Hardware Debacle

iPhones are not modular. You can’t upgrade memory or [easily] switch in a new battery (unless you pay them mad $$$$ or void your warranty). The USB/power adapter for an iPhone only works for iPhones. You are unable to use an iPhone as a mobile hard drive.

Alternative: Apple could make it easy to switch out the battery, use micro-SD or common memory types that can be used in many devices, and make the USB connector something universal, like mini or micro-USB. Allow for users to partition up to 80% of the storage space to be usable as a mobile hard drive.

Redefining Information

Historically Apple has asserted control over iPhones that eliminate choices. They used to be an AT&T-only device, and now only have a few carriers. They used to not allow multitasking on phones, like if you wanted to listen to music, surf the web and deal with text pop-ups at the same time. And they still do not support Flash, blocking users out of a major form of web content. iTunes infests every file you download with digital rights management (DRM) that makes it only usable in certain conditions.

Why does this bother me? Well, let’s think a minute about the market, economics, and information. On the one hand we’re seeing Apple prevent healthy competition. On the other hand we’re seeing them impose artificial limits on information to make it a much more easily controlled commodity, one that they can have exclusive access to. What are the economic qualities of information? Presented in three relevant sets:

Easily searchable (harder to exclude users)
More persistent (arguably non-rivalrous)
Easily replicable (low marginal cost)

The traits make it easy to argue that information could be a public good (non-exclusive, non-rivalrous, with low marginal cost and likelihood of positive externality). Apple wants to be the one who controls all replication, search and persistence.

Information technology (IT) benefits from network effects (the more people with Facebook or Windows the more valuable it becomes)
It crosses many genres (e.g. we feel uncomfortable with commodifying “personal” information)
Its true value is determined by use or knowledge

Apple wants everyone to use Apple, so that the value of their product is higher.

It is easy to create, but hard to trust
It is easy to spread, but hard to control

Apple doesn’t want to promote creation (unless it is on their terms, on their devices and within their constraints) and definitely wants to control the spread of information. It is trying to counter the social norms and economic possibilities of information.

Alternative: I’m not asking for a completely socialist system, or a purely open market. I’m asking for Apple to not be a jerk. Let me buy a song or app and use it on any device I own. I should be able to make an audio recording on my phone and transfer it to my computer without buying some expensive app to do it. Apple should support common standards like Flash, but allow for new competition, like running other OS’s on iPhones or running iOS on non-Apple hardware. Interoperability and negotiated standards are what benefit consumers the most!

The MacBook Monster

Now, let’s talk about Mac computers.

Mac People

Are you one of us?

There are extremists out there when it comes to any kind of opinion or position related to something. I’ve certainly met “Linux people” who wonder why you would ever use a graphical user interface (aka colors, shapes, buttons, desktop, icons, pictures, etc…). There is no single character to “Apple” people, exactly, though I think that Apple’s marketing would indicate one. I’ve only played around with a little bit of content analysis of Apple ads, but they’re usually white and well-off, which is really no surprise or difference from most IT advertisement. What I’ve actually gotten more of in person from “Apple users” is condescension. It’s the “we’re better-than-you” club because we know to buy macs because they’re better. Why? "Because they’re pretty. And not PC’s. DUH, gawd, get with the times you narc-bum." In America we get wrapped up in this tangled mess of consuming as a way to augment, project or otherwise construct your personality and identity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say “but graphic designers use macs because they’re better for that.” Graphic designers are using the same programs (e.g. Adobe) on Mac or PC, and actually I’m convinced dual-display is better than a single iMac display any day. The real reason graphic designers use Macs is because other designers do and they learn on them, not because they’re better in any substantively measurable way for design. I also occasionally get the “I use Macs because I’m different” response. This feels a lot like when 500 sorority girls walk down the street all wearing the same T-shirt that says “Be Greek, be Unique.” Apple is incredibly normative, if you want to be truly different run Linux.

Macs do carry the vestiges of the “Thank god I switched away from Windows XP” with them. Yes, Windows XP is a bad operating system, and no this is not news. It’s a decade old and, by comparison, now terrible. I wish Vista weren’t a disaster, I’m not going to defend it. But this doesn’t make you wiser for choosing Apple, not in 2011, when we have Windows 7 and are on the cusp of launching Windows 8. Ubuntu and Chromebooks have caught up as a viable options for any user who's not producing media, playing games or doing power computing.

I don't have an alternative for this one, really, it's more just what I've observed Apple users to be like in-person, anecdotally. I just don't want to be one of those "better than you" people, I want to bring as many people into computing and the internet as possible, and empower them along the way. I don't want them to have to pay more money to be part of it, and I want them to be able to express themselves to the world on their own terms, not Apple's.

Outrageous Cost Does NOT mean Quality

Not only does Apple find a way to charge you for everything because it’s all proprietary, but their computers cost a lot in the first place. Tremendously so - two to three times more expensive!

And no, this doesn’t mean their hardware is any better. I can buy a computer that’s nearly two times as fast as a mac for what someone would pay for even an entry-level mac. And no, Mac computers don’t have the best graphics. In fact now that they’re stocking the new Sandy Bridge chips their low-end models have Intel Express graphics, which are pretty poor "onboard" chips. AMD processors, while they might be slower overall, offer better integrated graphics. Apple also didn't get SSD's with TRIM support until Lion, placing them way behind in the storage race. Their 'solid unibody construction' is certainly no more durable than the equally-priced Lenovo (previously IBM) business travel Thinkpads or the military-grade Panasonic Toughbooks. Many people say Apple products are tougher and last longer, but I'm pretty convinced these days they have the same degree of planned obsolescence as everyone else - they want you to upgrade every two years and sign a new contract of some kind.

In other words Macs don't have the fastest or highest quality hardware, and are often not at the cutting-edge of speed and technological development. They're certainly not budget-buy machines, but they're not the best either. They're just priced high.

Apple Hardware Compatibility

Apple controls their hardware in many ways. They don’t want you to know the model number for your computer, so that they can prevent you from upgrading it on your own. This way you must take it into their store and pay them to do it. In fact even under “about this Mac” you won’t find model numbers, but instead a vague “early/mid/late 20xx.” They also like proprietary plugs. VGA adapter type has changed with virtually every generation of Mac, and this, combined with obscured model numbers, makes it very difficult to figure out how to buy the right one. Apple power adapters also only fit Apple computers. They are better (the magnetic thing is neato!) but this means you can’t easily borrow one from a friend unless they have a mac. And finally, it’s harder to swap in modular parts even if you do want to do it on your own. Many hard drives and videocards require special firmware for Mac.

Alternative: Apple, get with the program. Just make your hardware flexible, labeled and modular like everyone else. It's not good to be different if different is incompatible or unnecessarily more costly. Oh, and can you release your OS for install on any computer hardware? That would be handy. And... like... Windows and Linux??

Virus? Coming soon to a Mac near you

While historically Macs have been a safe zone from viruses, I am confident this will change in the future. They aren’t as tempting as large corporate bot networks based (on windows) that can be used for spam and DOS attacks and the like, but they do have three factors going for them that could easily make them the up and coming go-to target:

Users with money
Users who are less digitally literate who purchased a Mac because it’s “the easy computer”
Apple is increasingly “the man”

Yes, I am insinuating that many (nMac users are “rich people who are bad at computers” and this will make them targets for viruses with clever social engineering. This will likely spread to iOS as well.

Alternative: Uh, well, anti-virus for Mac is going to become more common...

The OS – Real Problems?

Clearly people get used to certain operating systems. They get annoyed switching because there are slight differences between them. Sometimes those differences do matter in a substantive way. For instance Exposé is really handy for managing many windows on a single screen, and is native only to OSX. By contrast the ability to truly get a full screen view of pictures in a folder and adjust them to be any preview size you like is only available in Windows 7 and Linux. I don’t honestly think these are big issues. Apple, like Microsoft, has made mistakes in charging their interaction models that defy previous norms (OSX Lion switching the scroll direction), but this isn't all that big of a deal. The biggest complaint have I have about the OS is more of a complaint about people being disorganized but it's worth noting because there's a dimension of abstraction and learning.

The File System Display: Apple obscures the hierarchical relation of folders and files. In Windows you have a C-drive, subfolders and so on, and you could easily illustrate this structure as a tree. Mac has this too, but if you have a folder open in Finder you will just see yourself in a place like “documents” or “pictures” or “applications”. I find this causes users to do silly things, like downloading and unpacking an archive for a program into applications, installing it in applications, and leaving the install files there floating, to create a bloated mess. Besides this, what happens is users lose track of sorting files in an organized fashion. They learn to just use spotlight to find things they want and kind of just put stuff wherever, without having a good model in their head for knowing where it is. Don’t get me wrong – this happens on PC’s all of the time too – especially with Windows 7’s new “libraries” system or just dumping files on the desktop, but I think OSX encourages the behavior by always hiding the true location you’re in (the path or address bar) and abandoning the file address metaphor. I don’t think relational search and organization is bad, I just want to train users how to do both hierarchical and relational. I've met a lot of people (remember 5 years as a netech and several years as a technology education person, I’ve met hundreds of computers and their users) that can’t keep their files straight. They’ll have 10 gb videos laying around from 2 years ago in some strange directory that they’ve forgotten about. A gagillion programs installed that they don’t use. It’s sad and frustrating, and I think Windows does an ever-so-slightly better job of helping people to have an idea about how a computer is organized beneath the GUI.

Alternative: Include a file path in the top of finder windows, one that can be turned off via view options. Include the true path and extension of a file in the properties for the file. Really the better solution to this is to teach people to be more capable of effectively organizing information, something I'd argue is a part of digital literacy education.

Does Apple do anything well besides make money and control people?

Turns out yes.

iMovie.

The only low-cost easy-to-use video editing program that lets you map music to media via timeline, includes a hefty sum of excellent templates/effects and helps you to manage your assets with other integrated sound and photo editing programs. Check it out if you haven't already. I even figured out how to do OSx86 and run OSX 10.6.8 on a Virtualbox install to try to get it… but sadly you need a true mac with video acceleration to run it.

Thesis ideas

2011-08-08T20:18:00.001-07:00

Someone asked me how to come up with an idea for a dissertation the other day, and here's how I responded:

...Most PhD programs in the US require students to take a couple of years of classes so they can better work out their academic interests and determine where they might best fit. It's usually a process of socialization and indoctrination into the norms and expectations for the field as much as it is familiarization with content.

My cousin, however, is pursuing a PhD in Canada, and apparently they don't have classes there, they just go straight to working on their thesis. I don't know if they even have advisors.

So if your school format is more like the former system, I'd suggest you identify some general topics or themes you're interested in, and begin to ask questions. Find classes that relate to these and build off of ideas you encounter.

If your school format is more the latter, then I'd suggest you think about a few key things:

1) The sorts of academics you'd like to model yourself after - namely active research professors and scholars you think are ideal
2) The types of research methods you find fitting - LIS is quite interdisciplinary, community informatics does well with ethnography and participatory action research, but these methodological frameworks would not be accepted in, say, bibliometrics and knowledge organization. Often researcher experience and personality type helps to determine what kind of research suits a person best.
3) In stride with what I suggested above, ask questions. Look at the "why's" and the "how's" behind social processes and work to link them to existing literature.

I think there's a lot to be done in many areas. A few topics you might consider that I've always wished I could more deeply explore:

Cultural aspects of the digital divide and digital literacy; identifying and understanding social practices with technology that shape information sharing, expression and creation.
Positive impacts of values embedded in technologies. Critical pedagogy could be interlaced into the construction, interface, and teaching agendas behind initiatives like OLPC or other ICT4D efforts. While these technologies might bring negative corporately-driven values, like consumerism, they also bring other possibilities, such as student-driven learning or [more] gender equality.
Development and prototyping of media creation and analysis tools, like image annotation or collaborative video construction; exploration and best practices.
Fostering and encouraging social-justice and egalitarian thinking amongst videogame communities; the next steps of what to do after we find evidence of structural oppression in social media and games.

Digital Literacy

2011-07-19T00:54:00.001-07:00

Ordinarily when I say digital literacy, I am careful to premise it with the descriptors critical and creative, terms that, upon first impression, might seem a little ambiguous. After all, each word has at least two meanings. In this case the use of the word critical could give the impression that this is an essential or important incarnation of digital literacy, and I would argue it very well may be, but my main intention is to invoke the analytic meaning of the word: to interrogate, deconstruct and discern value. Likewise creative is often read in the sense of creativity, the process of hatching worthy and original ideas, which actually would lend itself to the critical component, which requires some measure of divergent thinking. Instead I don’t require that creative include uniqueness or discovery, just conscientious construction of objects and ideas, with the possibility that they may also be innovative or even deviant. Such distinctions provoke a preamble, this section jumps into digital literacy as it is seen in recent literature and lands squarely in the definition that inspires[G1] my proposal[G2] .

Defining Literacy[G3]

Literacy finds many different definitions in varying contexts, but one of the most globally conscious, as well as universally adopted, is that is put forth by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2004):

Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute,[1] using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential and to participate fully in their community and wider society.

In presenting this definition UNESCO (2004, 2005) thoughtfully positions literacy as a set of social practices rather than a singular skill, and elevates it to the level of a human right (the right to education[G4] , UNESCO 2005). It suggests that meaningful acquisition and application of literacy provides the basis for positive social transformation, justice, and personal and collective freedom. Although this characterization establishes desired outcomes that match those of the ideological component of Cyberpower the UN report purposely restricts their focus [G5] to text and written materials. It is at this juncture where digital literacy comes into play.

In the vernacular, literacy often is taken to be equivalent to competency, proficiency or functionality, and is often affixed to other words to create compound meanings[G6] , such as information literacy, (new) media literacy[G7] , and stranger and debatable pairings, such as emotional literacy.[2] Digital literacy is another one of these duos, and like the others it has a surrounding body of literature and discourse. However, I think it stands apart[G8] because it is well-positioned to appropriately frame research on libraries, information technology and empowerment, as will be explained.

Many definitions of digital literacy have turned up over the course of the past two decades, but they can generally be sorted into two major categories: (1) conceptual (abstract) definitions, often advocacy-laden, and (2) “standardized sets of operations intended to provide national and international normalizations” (Lankshear and Knobel 2006:21), or, more simply, comparable described[G9] skills. In a sense this is just theory and application, but the examples are so numerous and vague that they become difficult to track, especially when someone is seeking to determine which theory leads to which application. Even still, digital literacy research is largely international,[3] which makes direct comparison and universal classification difficult, and the majority of it seems to be focused on youth enrolled in K-12 education,[4] which delivers an incomplete view of the issue. Reviewed here is not a comprehensive or catch-all literature review of all ‘digitally’ associated literacies [G10] but instead a simpler concrete and outcome-oriented alignment of commonalities found in several apprehensions and models of digital literacy that I think are important[G11] . In other words, this framework provides the basis for my research approach.

In the Abstract

Conceptual definitions of digital literacy include a call for an alteration of the media and mode limitation seen in the aforementioned UN articulation: reading and writing with physical text. Some interpret this as broadly as the ability to comprehend information however it is presented physically, no matter how complex[5] (adapted from Lanham 1995[G12] ), while others provide a new concentration as a stipulation: the ability to understand, evaluate and organize information represented through ICTs (among the first to propose this was Gilster[6] 1998, there have been many others since). The field of New Literacy Studies is so bold as to suggest that digital literacy[7] is a facet of entirely ‘new literacies’ and that though these literacies include practices mediated by post-typographic forms of text[G13] they also inherently involve social behaviors and patterns, such as being ‘participatory,’ ‘collaborative,’ or more ‘distributed’ (Lankshear and Knobel 2008, Jenkins et al. 2006, Mills 2010, Hague and[G14] Payton 2010). Such practices may dramatically transform the production of knowledge (Warschauer 2010); this implies that new sets of cultural or social relations may be necessarily represented through information sharing and expression with ICTs. Stated differently, it could be said that these new social practices are value-laden, and these values can get intertwined with the process and medium of ICTs.

The power digital literacy, to some extent, actually lies in its flexibility and lack of strong structure. In the 80’s scholars grappled with the idea of computer literacy, and later, in the 90’s they incorporated a broader view of information literacy (Bruce 1994, 1997). Bawden (2008) explains that the roots of digital literacy are interrelated to a host of other terms: library literacy (Bawden 2001), network literacy (McClure 1994), informany (Neelameghan 1995), mediacy (Inoue, Naito, and Koshizuka 1997), and e-literacy (Martin 2003, 2005). Though the objective is not to create one master form of digital literacy, Lankshear and Knobel (2008) suggest that a view of digital literacies (plural) is appropriate, and can account for the underpinnings of traditional text literacy, computer literacy, background knowledge, central competencies like knowledge assembly, and attitudes or perspectives, like independent learning.

As a result, digital literacy is notably situated in related sociocultural debates (Koutsogiannis 2007, Williams 2003), topics like textual design [G15] and multimodality (Kress 2003[G16] , Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001), the trajectory of education in the global information age (Cope & Kalantzis 2000[G17] , Luke & Carrington 2003), what forms or adoption processes the social practices of literacy take (Lankshear and Knobel 2008),[8] and in envisioning new media as potential sites or environments of learning (Gee 2004). This discourse may be, in many cases, a reproduction of previously-encountered literacy debates (Collins & Blot 2003), and a great deal of the extant reports on digital literacy could stand to benefit from integrating a broader range of disciplinary perspectives.[9] Conversations too far removed from practice may give insufficient attention to cultural tradition, the role of identities[G18] and local economic[G19] factors, to the point where we may fall into the trap of reinforcing digital capitalism, in a variation on a broader theme of the digital divide (Pieterse 2005, Koutsogiannis 2007). Despite all of this, the rhetoric does illustrate the sheer assemblage of ideologies on the topic, as well as the powerful interdisciplinary constituency of scholarship.

In Application

The fragmented theory from the numerous academic disciplines surrounding digital literacy are inherited in its application in research; many measures of digital literacy exist in recent publications. Similar to education and other intersections of humanities topics and social science, digital literacy seems to be most often measured in two ways: (1) in terms of flexible (qualitatively described) examples and typologies[G20] of best practices as well as (2) specifically measured aptitudes and behaviors, usually seen in the performance of tasks .

A complete review of studies employing these types of measures is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, reviewed here are two exemplars that give an idea of the ways conceptions of digital literacy might be applied.[G21]

First is the model for participatory culture discussed by Jenkins’ et al. (2006). In their report the authors argue for the existence of an emerging culture tied to digital literacy, described as having “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins et al. 2006:3) The authors suggest that the recipe for participatory culture includes many social practices connected to engagement with ICTs, such as affiliations in online communities, digital expressions and circulations, and distributed problem-solving. They see this social action as related fundamentally to other challenges, such as digital inclusion and participation, transparency of information, and the question of ethics in the proliferation of new media. Out of this they draw a set of skills and cultural competencies and give examples that include teaching scenarios and encouragement for best practices. For instance, they describe transmedia navigation, “the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities” (Jenkins et al. 2006:46) by presenting the case of Pokémon, a fictitious set of creatures for which there is no single core source of information. Children learn about Pokémon by following stories of their experiences and characteristics in a variety of mediums with different affordances and systems of representation, including card games, television, videogames and websites. Though Pokémon appear in many contexts, children still have a grasp of who and what they are. The application of digital literacy seen here is helpful in that it constructs useful and flexible categories and instances of social practice, but without chaining them to specific information technologies.

Second, Eshet-Alkalai and Hamburger (2004) and Eshet-Alkalai and Chajut (2009) introduce a compelling model in their operationalization of digital literacy as testable skills[G22] : photovisual literacy, reproduction literacy, branching literacy, information literacy, socioemotional literacy, and real-time thinking skills. Their series of studies (2004, 2009) featured a sample comprised of a diverse group of participants controlled for age, education and socioeconomic variables. They demonstrated the testing of digital literacy skills through verifiable and reliable tests over time, but with sufficiently complicated tasks. For instance, participants were challenged to use a word processor to modify the meaning of text by rearranging its parts. The work involved included an understanding of connotation, grammar, and composition as well as knowledge of the interface and comfort with hardware manipulation. In comparison to other simpler measures of digital literacy, such as knowing how to send an email,[10] the authors more effectively capture digital literacy in its context: while they might pay more attention to technical aptitudes and cognitive abilities with regards to certain variables, they acknowledge the complexity and embeddedness of technology use. Knowing how to send an email has as much to do with knowing what or how to write and grasping the cultural norms of the people using your domain of the internet as it does using a mouse or navigating Gmail.

What makes these examples powerful is their emphasis on surrounding context and application-oriented research. They are also in need of one another. Jenkins et al. don’t present metrics that work well with operationalized (hypothesis testing) research and evaluation and Eshet-Alkalai, Hamburger and Chajut remain constrained to cognitive models that don’t take enough of the wisdom of cultural literacy studies [G23] into account. Research on digital literacy more generally falls in with the same trap[G24] : how to balance giving sufficient attention to informing theory and at the same time establishing and testing comparable and valid models or measures.

Establishing the Terms: Critical and Creative Literacy

A valuable digital literacy framework lies in a combination of insights from the field of research reviewed above. Digital literacy is best understood as a fuzzily bounded [G25] and dynamic set of social practices that foster critical social awareness, as well as measurable knowledge of and command over relevant digital tools. This is what is meant by the qualified critical and creative digital literacy[G26] , and I think this combination, is the most likely to affect the arrangements and production of Cyberpower.

Critical social awareness [G27] is the component that keeps this model outcome-oriented[G28] . It is not unlike the objectives of critical pedagogy (Finn 1999): educators must work vigorously to decipher and dismantle the oppressive structure that has come to characterize modern stratified education and push for authentic dialogue between teachers and learners[G29] . This need for a critical mindset goes beyond teaching young students in schools, extending to people of many ages and cultures,[11] and also beyond the domain of skill acquisition—to aiding learners in becoming aware of their right (and capability) to transform reality (Freire 1998). In order to empower[G30] literacy should be an avenue for individuals to better understand how their identity and agency rely on and produce cultural forms. Contemporary introductory sociology classes refer to what is essentially the same concept when they teach students about C. Wright Mills’ (1959) Sociological Imagination: critical consciousness of the relationship(s) between experiences, of individuals and communities, to social structures and processes.

In other words, people become consummately digitally literate by approaching ICT tools critically,[12] and this process deals with a moving target. What has been liberating literacy in the past—simply knowing how to read—has become domesticating literacy—a requirement to be plugged in to the system, but not command power within it—now (Finn 1999), and there is no reason to think this trend will not continue. I would posit leveraging the web is the new facet of this issue. People ought to engage in making sense of information access, communication and production tools in terms of their relevant fundamentals:

· The ways they affect their capacity to assert identity

· Recognition of the limitations and opportunities afforded by the cultural context surrounding a given tool

· Its possibility for meaningful communal participation or collaboration

· And finally, reflection on this process of sense-making and evaluation [G31]

Robinson (2011) would likely stress that these fundamentals constitute exemplars of creativity as he refers to it, applied imagination, but in this case it is applied sociological imagination.

Critical consideration of ICTs informs and orients the agenda of building a base of knowledge about these tools. To accomplish the transformation of the world around us as Freire describes people require basic concepts and skills for ICT application in everyday life. This includes a dimension of augmented information literacy, which Martin and Grudziecki (2006:7) aptly describe as:

“The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize information resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others.”

Creative[G32] digital literacy, as I conceptualize it, hangs on the latter half of this definition, but with greater intensity. Contributing to the creation of the content and knowledge that flows between ICTs is a step towards empowerment, but this may leave out a key condition: the ability to generate, modify, repurpose, remix and otherwise assert control over the mediums these ICTs depend on and exist in. This requirement may be extreme, but can be cast as a long term goal, much as justice and equity might at first seem farfetched. If individuals can program, design, hack, and build software and hardware then they have[G33] greater control over the means of knowledge production. They can participate in liberating movements like Open Source (Chorpa and Dexter 2008), dismantle [G34] oppressive social structures knit into digital architectures[13] (Lessig 2006), help to maintain the innovative context that enabled the proliferation of the internet to develop in the first place (Zittrain 2008) and understand and advocate for their position in a permanently beta[14] (Neff and Stark 2004) ecology of the internet.

Indeed, what sets this apart from classic media, visual, and information literacy is that creative digital literacy is fundamentally about being an active player: the study of the influence of a hundred channels of information all produced by external authorities might be an act of raising awareness, but viewers in the contemporary[15] have little or no ability to shape what’s on the airwaves of radio or TV. They have limited access to the print-based publishing world and little say in the formalized rules of visual design. By contrast, the discourse, ideas and content that perpetuate throughout the internet and via ICTs is in large part authored by individuals and organizations of varying type and scope. Digital literacy is necessarily an involved and directed activity that is about interacting and producing; it must go beyond watching or reading[G35] as much as it might go beyond experience and comfort with computers.[16] Exposure to ICTs does not translate to competence, even when it concerns young learners, but research has begun to suggest that those who are indoctrinated into the active-producer norms of the internet will apply these skills and conceptual models to classic media like TV (Shirky 2010[G36] ). Writing code for your own software program or painting a picture with a mouse are not easily reducible to the application or interpretation of information. These tasks involve a dimension of craft and require attention to social context. The recent decade has produced and made accessible more information and communication [G37] opportunity than ever known before, but leveraging the quantity to produce quality is best as an active process.[G38]

I will return to this argument in a moment, to explain how it relates to Cyberpower, but first I should explain why I have abandoned the frame Cyberpower was previously associated with: the digital divide.

Differentiating and Deciphering the Digital Divide

I want to take a moment to distinguish digital literacy from the digital divide. A lot of work on the subject of power and information society examines people’s ability to participate in it meaningfully, be it as part of global conversations, local democracy, or broad social change movements. The frame this instinctually assumes is that participation boils down to a matter (requirement) of access, known commonly as the digital divide, or, stated succinctly, the power differences between people or communities tied to varying levels of computer and internet opportunity[G39] .

Establishing the digital divide as our enemy necessarily embarks us on a quest for digital solutions, but the lack of possession of material access to technology and the absence of skills, community support and perceptions to make effective use of it [G40] is often a symptom of deeper, prolonged issues. In some sense the digital divide is a moving target, the make-up of ICTs shifts as we look back over time. As stated earlier, we’ve been in something of an information revolution (or crisis) for over thirty years. First it was the onset of significant representation of computers in business and homes (the computer and information revolutions, Beniger 1986 and Jones 1982, cited by Williams 2001[G41] ), then it was the internet (DiMaggio and Hargittai 2001, Warschauer 2003) and more recently mobility (Johnson, Levine and Smith 2009, Horrigan 2009), broadband (Horrigan 2008) and Web2.0 (Scholz 2008[G42] ). It is worth taking a step back, disentangling oneself from the ever-changing constitution of ICTs, and interrogating the underlying assumptions and agendas of the digital divide and the credence for the proliferation of ICTs.

A fitting example might be Jan Pieterse (2005), who questions the motivation behind the digital divide in his critique of information communication technologies for development, or ICT4D. His argument takes place in the context of digital capitalism, a world in which networks of corporations drive and dominate cyberspace and subject the world to certain flavors of media and deepen forces like consumerism [G43] (Schiller 2000), which is not unlike the network society described by Castells. ICT4D implies the imposition of flawed (or loaded) developmental models, such as technological determinism or neo-liberalism (market forces are development[G44] ) that serve to mask the true intentions of insidious political and economic agendas: to make money off of poor people through selling more material goods and exploiting labor, to control markets with ideologies like intellectual property rights and to force developing countries to choose between dependence on NGO’s or corporate networks. Pieterse’s stance is accurate, if resoundingly pessimistic, and reminds us of the complex of baggage we drag with us when we deploy ICTs to ‘bridge the divide’ between peoples.

Many researchers have set out on task of revealing the digital divide and have found illustrious ways to describe dimensions related to unequal distribution and use of ICTs: from material access and skills (DiMaggio and Hargittai 2001, Banks 2006, Van Dijk and Hacker 2003) to mental access (interest in ICT) and usage opportunities (Van Dijk and Hacker 2003, Banks 2006) to perceptions of these variables (Porter and Donthu 2006) to the accumulate ability to openly critique technology tools (Banks 2006). Van Dijk and Hacker express the situation rather appropriately when they criticize the passing way most articles situate their findings:

…based on a rather static and superficial sociological analysis of the present situation. Constructing rather arbitrary background variables of individual resources at a single point in time does not make a theory that is able to relate to social and technological development, that is to say, the level of society and technology. (Van Dijk and Hacker 2003).

They instead link ICT policy to long-lasting and concrete positive outcomes, specifically social inclusion and equal distribution of resources or life chances, and suggest researchers place emphasis on variations of classic factors that strongly determine socioeconomic status, like education. Or, in my case, literacy.

The shift in focus from divide to literacy is desirable because the emphasis is placed on changing individuals, who then in turn affect social change in the aggregate, in the ground-up fashion described by Cyberpower. Literacy as I describe it necessitates that the learner play a strong role in orienting the agenda, not just external authorities like government, corporations or NGO’s. In this model access instead becomes a down payment[G45] for literacy, and consequently empowerment, but it doesn’t really amount to much without this end goal.

Digital Literacy as Cyberpower

One stated definition of Cyberpower is that it is a measure of to what extent individuals, groups or movements are able to wield power with benefit from ICTs. Considering this description, it could be apt to state that digital literacy is active Cyberpower. The study of new literacies teaches us transformative social practice can and should be part of digital literacy[G46] , and my chosen modifiers of critical and creative can be construed[G47] as social practices.

To clarify what I mean by this, and in order drive home the connection between critical and creative, as well as underscore a more eloquent presentation of Cyberpower, I would like to introduce the recent work of David Gauntlet (2011).

Gauntlet’s thesis, based largely on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, Karl Marx and Ivan Illich, is well-encapsulated by his book’s title: Making is Connecting. Fundamentally, he argues for the significance of creation, the generation of virtual and real things by everyday people. Like Robinson, Gauntlet attacks the idea that the world of thinking (theory) should be separated from the world of doing (application) in some kind of archaic industrialism-era fashion, and suggests that to have creativity and craft contained by formal intuitions and fields—like professional art, theater, dance, programming, writing and more—is to further the illusion that everyday people cannot be part of cultural production, when, in fact, they’re perhaps as responsible for it as any news media, educational or governmental force. The explosion of interest and sensation over the Web2.0 “brand” (Scholz 2008) represents a challenge to many traditions of cultural construction, and Gauntlet is careful to note some of the downsides, like the danger identified in Baym and Burnett (2009), that collaborative production may be unrewarded or exploited labor, of a kind.[17] Nevertheless he makes three points that I feel are worth noting:

1) In the case of creation, both on and offline, we need to think about more than just tools of craft, but instead platforms and communities. The ease of use and access for a given tool is certainly part of the picture, but Gauntlet’s book is teeming with examples of people connecting to people, by making in context. It is not, a case study of the technology of the moment.

2) Imperfection[G48] is not only okay, but it makes us happy. Unfinished works, learning activities, rough remixing projects, all of these are potentially productive, what is most often important is the personal aspect of a work. Gauntlet finds plenty of ties in the literature on individual happiness to the process of freely-chosen, goal-oriented creation projects, including emotional support, communal recognition, helpful feedback, social approval, self-awareness and more.

3) Making leads to connecting, which in turn affects social capital. Though tracing the importance of social capital in issues like community health is difficult, Gauntlet suggests that this is how to best take a sociological viewpoint on aggregate wellbeing.

Gauntlet lands, finally, in a chapter on Ivan Illich’s work on deschooling[18] and the social roles of the tools of creation.[19] An education system based on creation would look radically different than our contemporary mass-production factory, and would involve more direct skill-sharing and exchange-based teaching, peer matching or mentorship and, quite applicable to my dissertation topic, public libraries full of all kinds of educational objects and attached programs. The vision behind this[G49] , which I think beautifully connects critical to creative in the context of Cyberpower, is stated best by Illich himself:

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision…a convivial society should be designed to allow all of its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others.”

Illich demonstrates the necessary connection between a critical perspective of self-awareness and active creation of Cyberpower through tools. When people become cognizant of their desired and imposed identities they are able to act with direction and conscience; they can envision the world as they wish it to be. Here we have a vision of society filled with empowered, self-directed people, who purposefully use tools largely of their own design or control. These participants connect with one another, not just in terms of communication or information sharing, but also through making and remaking[20] both content and the systems through which it flows. I see this as all three levels of Cyberpower, (1) they possess power, in the form of a repertoire of tools, skills, and creations, (2) they help to guide the investment of power in platforms and objects more actively and critically, and (3) they are power itself in an ideological sense because they are a greater stakeholder in the network of abstract forces that structure society. I think Robinson and Gauntlet would both agree with me in saying that they are also more likely to be happy and positively contribute to the social capital of communities.

I am not suggesting that in order to be digitally literate, a person must know how to create YouTube, in full. I am suggesting, however, that the more they learn about the inner-workings of YouTube as a black box, the better able they will be to use it effectively. For instance, understanding that video preview thumbnails are based on stills generated by an automatic parsing system which splits a clip into quarters allows a video creator to determine their own video advertisement images with precision. Knowing how to code a flash (web element) container that can play any kind of video gives a person more insight on a key efficiency of YouTube’s design. Understanding how the multiple streams for content of varying quality are downloaded to your local client, and how to save them permanently enables users to acquire the assets for remixing projects without having the original source. All of these undertakings become easier when you make your own black box. As Zittrain (2008) has pointed out, while the internet was constructed by people who all could help to generate its inner-workings, its mass adoption has led to a vast majority of increasingly ignorant users. The ‘ease’ of access is the dark side of a consumer model based on ignorance. Companies like Apple would prefer their users only be able to consume content on their terms, on their devices, and not be able to create it unless it goes through their own restricting information-control-overkill development and rights management (DRM) models. Apple’s worst nightmare is probably a body of users willing to critically interrogate their ethics and business model, as well as its foundational pro-marketization reproduction of information as a controlled commodity.[21] In fact, their nightmare does exist in a budding form, as the Linux and FOSS community.

I think this combination provides the beginning of an answer to Lessig’s fourth constraint: architecture. While Lessig talks mostly about the architecture of code as a structuring force, a sociological imagination-fueled creation ethic could probably battle oppressive ideologies knit into physical world objects as well. In sum, I think critical and creative digital literacy is constructive of Cyberpower that can play a role [G50] in (1) shaping the space of flows (Castells 1997), (2) reinvigorating the library in the public sphere (Buschman 2003), and (3) assisting the ailing public education system (Robinson 2011).

The question remains, how does this composition of theory roll into a research project?

From Theory to Research[G51]

As will be explained, I intend to approach this topic with targeted qualitative interviews and a limited series of case studies. Simply stated, I think this theoretical framework equips me to do this research well in two primary ways:

1) It alters and justifies the frame in which I ask questions about what is going on in libraries in ways that most previous studies have not: investigating programs, people, and policies, in addition to infrastructure like devices.

2) It supplies the scaffolding for my analysis of the data. In inspecting the relationships between all of these factors as they relate to digital literacy I will remain obligated to discerning social impacts in terms of Cyberpower.

Epistemological assumptions my scholarship depends on can be found in Appendix D[G52] .

[1] Compute as in basic mathematics, not computing or computer operations.

[2] For a brief history and example of emotional literacy analysis in action see Liau, Liau, Teoh, Liau 2003. As Burman (2009) point out, however, the term is still somewhat contested in its use and needs to be considered and employed with caution.

[3] An ever-increasing amount of research on digital literacy education and associated practices is taking place in countries outside of the US, including Ireland (DLIPS 2009), Greece (Koutsogiannis 2007, Mitsikopoulou 2007), Israel (Eshet-Alkali & Amichai-Hamburger 2004, Eshet-Alkalai & Chajut 2009), Spain (Meneses and Mominó 2010), Australia (Walsh 2010, Bulfin 2007), Brazil (Braga 2007), South Africa (Jacobs 2004, Walton 2007), Botswana (Mutula and Mutula 2007), Rwanda (Mukama & Anderson 2008), and Hong Kong (Lee 2002). Together these comprise a rich array of ideas and perspectives.

[4] It is widely acknowledged that digital technologies significantly impact literacy developments in K-12 education (Walsh 2010, Carrington and Robinson 2009, Jones 2007, and more), and this has been given special concern with young children (Hisrich and Blanchard 2009, Burnette et al 2006, Russo et al. 2009 ). The popularized ‘digital natives’ concept (Prensky 2001, Palfrey and Gasser 2008) may be responsible for this heightened interest and concern, but could also be a reflection of the current iteration of moral panic that is reoccurring in education (Bennet and Maton 2008).

[5] This might be stated more specifically as any “ways of making meaning with diverse semiotic resources” (Warschauer 2010:124) that could enable in the discovery of ‘invisible literacies.’ (Baynham 1995 in Warschauer 2010), which is too broad of an approach to be useful here.

[6] A budding typology that included several aspects: assembling knowledge, evaluating information, searching and navigating in non-linear routes

[7] And in fact, Lankshear and Knobel (2008) advocate that an expansive frame of ‘digital literacies’ (plural) more honestly accounts for the diversity of research on the topic, and ties well into previous research on literacies.

[8] Though they make reference to this in the introduction, examples can be found throughout their whole book by a range of authors: David Bawden, Genevieve Marie Johnson, Maggie Fieldhouse, David Nicholas, David Buckingham, and Ola Erstad.

[9] One such example can be seen in Williams’ 2003 assessment of the National Research Council’s 1999 report Being fluent with information technology. While the report effectively captured fluency with IT in terms of technical skills, concepts and history, it failed to articulate many of the ways literacy connects to social structures related to power, democracy, and cultural hegemony.

[10] As seen in Meneses and Mominó 2010 , for instance.

[11] As explained by Braga (2007), Resistance Theory (Giroux 1983, 1988) compels us to move past issues of ‘social reproduction’ to rescue notions of agency and resistance, as motivated by the work of Gramsci (1971). It is therefore important to engage all social groups in the process of social critique to forge alliances that promote progressive political actions.

[12] Banks (2006) refers to this as critical access: “Members of a particular community must also develop understandings of the benefits of the problems of technology well enough to be able to critique, resist and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary” (42). To frame critical analysis of ICTs as access is a cumbersome appropriation of the digital divide rhetoric. It is probably more accurate to describe it as literacy, even if the critical qualifier may be redundant.

[13] To reiterate, Lawrence Lessig argues that the internet heeds four constraints: social norms, the flows of markets, law, and the way its systems, interfaces and channels are constructed; their architecture.

[14] Permanently beta, in this context, refers to regular state of instability of digital products. Take Google: it never has a final released version, but is instead an interface with a continually changing and wildly complex set of databases behind it. What’s more is that the consumers, the users of Google, have a strong role in influencing the way the system develops. The internet is made up largely of these kinds of feedback and innovation systems.

[15] When radio and TV first debuted they had considerable entrepreneur uptake and were not dominated by a limited set of corporate powers (Zittrain 2008). This fell away over the years to reach our current state of media company conglomerations.

[16] Readers will notice I have not made much effort to distinguish computer literacy here. I don’t really think it’s a relevant term anymore, because of its implied restriction: computers. We use much more than those to access information these days. and more often than not the term just refers to knowing how to do things like operate a mouse and show some understanding of the conceptual models taken up by operating systems.

[17] In their study Baym and Burnett noted that often respondents didn’t see things this way. Not all activity must be rewarded in a monetary form. In fact sometimes the best rewards are not possible to quantify in that way. Scholz gives an argument similar to what Castells or Buschman might say: the discourse and ideological framing around Web2.0 as a zone controlled by the everyday person is a tool of those who control the space of flows, the technocratic pro-marketization elite. Substantively, ability to contribute content and establish connections does little to disassemble structural oppression like racism, sexism and the like. The alternative demographics of the web (which has in part led to the digital natives scare) and the existence of powerful counteractive forces like international hacker communities do make for some social change, but not the egalitarian liberation it was once dreamed (or purported) to be.

[18] In Deschooling Society (1971), Illich effectively the crisis of education as presented by Robinson earlier on, only, as would be reasonably expected, without emphasis on information society. He proposes a more radical reformation of education, too.

[19] Titled formally, Tools for Conviviality (1973), the book is largely about having the power to shape one’s own world, the dangers of organizing human interests into systems and institutions, and the way that tools could apply to both of these issues.

[20] An alternative phrasing of this might be subverting. Finding and making “hack-arounds” to systems of content sharing is a way of remaking and exerting control on them.

[21] Apple is not alone in doing this, they’re just particularly notorious for finding a way to put a proprietary price tag on everything. They, like many other tech companies, convince users to give up liberties so that they can be ‘safe’ from viruses and not have to be responsible for thinking much about their consumption. In the case of Apple users can instead choose to relish the sex appeal of devices that showcase their membership in a higher or “better” social class.

[G1]Word choice fights – motivates, undergirds, lies beneath, etc…

[G2]I might also go on to say that it illustrates connections to cyberpower and lirbaries in information society, but I should probably push those at the end.

1) [G3]Here’s what literacy is generally

2) It’s an extension of the human rights to education

3) There are many types of literacy, but digital literacy is appropriate here because of my focus

4) Nobody seems to agree what digital literacy is, so I’m making my own functional definition that builds on my research questions, method and site

“ [G4]Education should cultivate individual talents, cultural understanding, good citizenship and economic development. Everything depends on the quality of teaching and on personalized learning.”

[G5]I previously used the term unit of analysis, which I still kind of like

[G6]There is considerable debate between fields of study that include literacy. Many attempts to propose a single master set have been made, but I don’t want to go about colleting those.

[G7]Assumed that the reader will know what these are, they have no single easily traceable history, as far as I can tell

[G8]Is distinguished

[G9]And measurable

[G10]This would be a dissertation itself, actually

[G11]Formalist alarm, use of first-person!

[G12]I don’t know if this is the best reference – my goal is to say that some people just see digital literacy as information literacy. Lanham writes that his book’s concepts were applied in many contexts…

[G13]or ICTs – does the distinction between medium and mode matter here?

[G14]And probably more I don’t know about – these are recent/influential people I know of.

[G15]topography

[G16]1) Texts are becoming intensely multimodal, that is, image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and, in many domains of communication, displacing writing where it had previously been dominant.

2) Screens (of the digital media) are replacing the page and the book as the dominant media.

3) Social structures and social relations are undergoing fundamental changes, as far as writing is concerned, predominantly in changes of structures of authority, and in the effects of changing gender formations.

4) Constellations of mode and medium are being transformed. The medium of the book and the mode of writing had formed a centuries-long symbiotic constellation; this is being displaced by a new constellation of medium of the screen and mode of image. The consequences of this shift are profound.

[G17]Situated Practice, which draws on the experience of meaning-making in everyday life, the public realm and workplaces;

Overt Instruction, through which students develop an explicit metalanguage of design;

Critical Framing, which interprets the social context and purpose of Designs of meaning; and

Transformed Practice, in which students, as

meaning -makers, become designers of social

futures.

[G18]Identity movements…

[G19]Control of production

[G20]The PEW reports, for instance

[G21]More active voice alternatives:

It wouldn’t be very productive to overview the hundreds of examples of these types of studies, so instead I’ll give examples from just two.

As one might guess, there are many studies based on these kinds of measures. For the sake of space, two exemplars follow:

See this is my natural voice, but I’m told it’s too informal, despite being much more concise and clear!

[G22]Example of skills-based measurement

[G23]The social construction of literacy – as a set of political and moral behaviors, etc…

[G24]plight

[G25]This is a math-related phrase that’s managed to sneak into my vocabulary. I should probably replace it. The idea is to indicate flexible boundaries that are unstable

[G26]Redundant?

[G27]Integrate?

the term multiliteracies highlights two related aspects of the increasing complexity of texts: (a) the proliferation of multimodal ways of making meaning where the written word is increasingly part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns; (b) the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity characterized by local diversity and global connectedness

[G28]Cyberpower goal oriented

[G29]Most cultures approach learning as process that includes a delivery of content, be it via a text, teacher, or computer, but a crucial component of learning lies in inquiry. Bruce and Bishop (2002) emphasize a complementary model known as inquiry based learning: the practice of asking questions, investigating sources of answers, creating solutions, discussing outcomes and application, and consistently and deeply reflecting on procedure. Thus inquiry-based learning moves pedagogy from transmission-oriented tasks to the open and relevant discovery and sharing of ideas and perspectives, which can certainly take place outside of a classroom or online (Bishop and Bruce 2002).

[G30]“In the face of the growing pessimism associated with the inequities of the global digital technological shift, it seems more important than ever… to recover and support new discourses informed by notions of hope, possibility and resistance”

[G31]Rather long: but this – right - critical reflection on the nature of information itself its technical infrastructure and its social, cultural, and philosophical context and impact

[G32]Alternative version of this:

…to cultivate productive aptitudes, such as the ability to program, design, draft and implement text, images and video in meaningful ways, and otherwise manipulate information technology devices and software to craft something for functional use. In broader definitions of literacy this component is simply thought of as the ability to communicate over multiple mediums, but in my version of digital literacy the necessary skills expand to include creation or remixing of both systems and content.

[G33]The capacity for

[G34]Or alter

[G35]Might be stepping on the toes of reading people here – some suggest reading is a more active experience than it is often given credit

[G36]But now, for the first time in the history of television, some cohorts of young people are watching TV less than their elders. Several population studies—of high school students, broadband users, YouTube users—have noticed the change, and their basic observation is always the same: young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption. Even when they watch video online, seemingly a pure analog to TV, they have opportunities to comment on the material, to share it with their friends, to label, rate, or rank it, and of course, to discuss it with other viewers around the world. As Dan Hill noted in a much-cited online essay, “Why Lost Is Genuinely New Media,” the viewers of that show weren’t just viewers—they collaboratively created a compendium of material related to that show called (what else?) Lostpedia. Even when they are engaged in watching TV, in other words, many members of the networked population are engaged with one another, and this engagement correlates with behaviors other than passive consumption.

[G37]sheer data

[G38]Digital literacy involves critically engaging with technology and developing a social awareness of how a number of factors including commercial agendas and cultural understandings can shape the ways in which technology is used to convey information and meaning.

It means being able to communicate and represent knowledge in different contexts and to different audiences (for example, in visual, audio or textual modes). This involves finding and selecting relevant information, critically evaluating and re-contextualising knowledge and is underpinned by an understanding of the cultural and social contexts in which this takes place.

Digital literacy gives young people the ability to take advantage of the wealth of new and emerging opportunities associated with digital technologies whilst also remaining alert to the various challenges technology can present.

In short, digital literacy is the ‘savvyness’ that allows young people to participate meaningfully and safely as digital technology becomes ever more pervasive in society.

Indeed, if formal education seeks to prepare young people to make sense of the world and to thrive socially, intellectually and economically, then it cannot afford to ignore the social and cultural practices of digital literacy that enable people to make the most of their multiple interactions with digital technology and media. Yet the notion of digital literacy and how it may translate to teaching and learning is not always well understood. This handbook therefore aims to support teachers to begin to think about how to address digital literacy in their everyday practice. It explores the importance of digital literacy and sets out some pedagogical techniques for fostering it in the classroom from within subject teaching.

[G39]Okay, so this isn’t all that succinct, but does it make sense???

[G40]Remove? This is really what I wish to get at beyond access…

[G41]Which is in Cyberorganziing, Alkalimat (2004)

[G42]Pretty vicious he is

[G43]God that was abridged as all hell, I hope Dan’s okay with it :o

It’s a little adapted from Castells, too, but this is like, WAY outside the territory of this paper as it is.

[G44]Probably deserves a greater introduction, but I don’t know all that much about it!

[G45]requirement

[G46]At its core literacy is a construct that we abstract from experience and communication, it is not really an entity itself, but a way of describing individuals who can engage in a (literate) way with their own emancipation through ICTs. It can best (only) be understood as it is manifested by individuals or their aggregate.

[G47]interpreted, understood? I repeat words SO MUCH

[G48]In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, states that craftsmanship leads to self-esteem and wellbeing – imperfections reveal our individuality and presence.

[G49]Alternative quote:

People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation and impotence…

[G50]“Society requires literacy because in the power-knowledge relationship of the modern world, literacy defines who controls the means of production, that is the means to produce wealth (industry) and the means to produce knowledge (education).” Taylor 1993, covering Freire

[G51]Worth expanding this some, probably

[G52]Linda felt this did not belong in the main text, but knowing how much resistance there is to CI and public scholarship there is in the academy I felt I should include it somewhere.

Reconciling My Inner-BUT man

2011-02-03T02:37:00.000-08:00

Contemplating average people: amicability, happiness, prejudice, concentric circles of concern, and a challenge.

So I’m in the midst of reading Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals, one of his most influential books . In the opening chapter he characterizes what he calls Mr. BUT in his answer to the quintessential question: What do most people say when you ask them if they like other people? Alinsky’s claim is that most people will reply “Sure, I like most other people, with a few exceptions” which I think is a fair prediction. He goes on to say, however, that when you start talking to this example “typical” person their list of people they don’t like will by far outnumber those they do. And he’s not even talking about “like” in the sense of who you might call friends, but really just general people. It is here where he unveils the grand straw man Mr. BUT, who would say something like “Oh of course I really love black people, BUT you know whenever there’s someone loud and obnoxious on the subway, it seems like they’re always black.” And this got me to thinking.

I don’t agree with him that the average person dislikes more people than they like, but I have a feeling this is my own optimistic projection operating again. I remember my roommate back in college once claimed that he thought the average person was unhappy (that is, most people are unhappy), and I was taken aback. Really? I thought. And as I started talking to people asking them this question, I began to realize that their answer really just mirrored if they, on average, were a happy person.

Anyway what Alinsky is really getting at here, is something worth turning on myself: prejudice. All of us “good-natured” privileged and educated liberals have a helping of Mr. BUT in us. I thought I’d take an opportunity to draw mine out, because I think it’s surprising. Alinsky’s Mr. BUT had resentment and dislikes for people of different religions, races, ethnicities, and more. I think my inner-BUT-man (yes, I know all of you people with a 14-year-old boy in you are laughing now, the language is unfortunate) has some really overt expressions and some subtle ones. Okay here we go.

1) Most anyone who really knows me has heard me complain up and down the wall about passive and apathetic people (or in times past, “the librarians”), but in recent years as I’ve existed in a department dominated by introverts I’ve realized that sometimes this is just tantamount to hating on the shy person, which isn’t very constructive. Sure, I’ve been hurt by my fair share of passive-aggressive people, probably in worse ways than most, but insulting or chastising these people and actions hasn’t really brought an end to them. In fact it’s encouraged the worst of them, and it has sometimes hurt the less intense people that I care deeply for.

2) The academic world is rife with rivalries. I’ve done a lot of saying things like “those cultural studies postmodernist people” or “those data-head people” in a dismissive fashion, often unfairly. The first group I often dislike more because they’re fixated on negativity, but really why make fun of people who are probably comprehensively unhappy? The second gang may at times seem cold, calculating and disconnected, but their lack of empathy or interest in social issues is probably a symptom of their own fear or ignorance, one that likely they haven’t come into in a malicious kind of way.

3) And then there’s the Christians. I just refer to them like that, as if the religion isn’t one of the most wildly diverse and complex ecologies out there. It’s downright stupid for me to transform some small extremist group into full-on representation and ignore all of the good Christians have turned loose in the world.

4) And I’m sure there are more. I’d ask readers to call me out, but that would be asking you to subscribe to my method of positive confrontational discourse (when you challenge me because we’re on the same side, building a better tomorrow), which many do not appreciate. My last prejudice I want to talk about next, because I’m not sure what to do about it.

All of this reminded me of theory I talk about from time to time, that’s not very unique or insightful, and yet has gotten me into a great deal of trouble. Here, a picture:

I sometimes call it concentric circles of concern, which apparently is a book on Amazon, and the name of the same idea as it appears on a Church website or two, according to our local expert Google. Anyway, the pitch is that most people care about the inner-most layer strongly. My roommate is this way, he’s good-natured, funny, and quite empathic at times, but quite introverted; he exhausts his social interaction needs quota at about 5 people. I think most people also expand out into the next two circles, which change composition as their life goes on, which of course makes sense. Some people don’t really have best friends (truthfully I sometimes think this is me), and many people (on a bad day I might claim introverts) don’t really care much for people in the acquaintance zone. And then there’s the last outer circle, which is what interests me. People who care, enough to act, about strangers they’ve never met. This might be environmentalists, for a counter-intuitive example, but also people like my sister, who worked with refugees for a year, or Tom Fairbank, who casually gets to know random homeless people and gives them his time and money in a compassionate way. I think there are also people who give their entire lives to random people they barely know, immersing themselves in places like the Peacecorps without really having anything in the inner-circles to fall back on.

In any event I have this tendency to really spill the haterade (prejudice) on people who don’t expand out to the outer layers. I don’t want to do this, the negativity is unhelpful. And yet at the same time I have no good way to push them out of their inner circle, other than by demonstrating my beliefs with my lifestyle. And this method, if it even is one, is certainly not satisfying or at all effective. I can’t even get past the opening questions sometimes, as asking a person “so why is it you litter?” or “why does voting not matter to you?” or “what turns you off to feminism?” often puts them on the offensive. And rightly so, I’m not just asking to know most of the time (the true dialogic), I’m asking to understand so I can negotiate a better solution. And this, of course, is one of the many reasons people don’t like me, which is mildly unhelpful when I try to act in a leadership or teaching capacity. But I’m unable to turn my back on the tremendous desire and duty to do my part in constructing a better world.

Am I looking for answers? Maybe brainstorms instead. Tom would of course tell me that the world is perfect and I should just appreciate what good we have, which would be warm and fuzzy for a second and then promptly make my life not worth living. With blissful inaction ruled out, what other strategies remain?

--Followup: It seems this diagram can be found all over the place in varied form. My favorite version is when they turn 'strangers' into markets.

Rattling the Empowerment Saber

2010-12-27T04:46:00.000-08:00

This is the sort of thing that’s really fueling my dissertation, but I’m not allowed to put it in unless it can be puppeteered by some series of academic studies or fantastic/eternal philosophical or sociological writings, which I find disappointing. If academic research doesn’t have this kind of purpose, why would people do it? If my dissertation can’t be linked directly to outcomes that matter—to me and the world—then why spend an enormous amount of time and energy on it? I don’t want to be chained to subdued and convoluted text because it’s more academic or ‘rigorous’ – the true measure of rigor is just what I propose here, why this work matters. Really.

Defining Empowerment

Let’s start with a general goal that most Americans can agree on: a desire for a world where more people are more frequently able to have access to opportunities. Now let’s focus the example with some feminist consideration: a world where all people of all genders have an increased right and prospect of being who they want to be. When a little boy or girl grows up I want them to be able to think they are capable of doing all kinds of amazing things, like being an astronaut, a good parent or person who inspires positive change in the world. I don’t want gender roles to push us into being one way or another if they isolate us from other ways of being. I wouldn’t measure a society by its support of people who fit the traditions, but by how they regard the people who are deviant. I would worry if all women grew up in a given culture and only ever wanted to be housewives and homemakers (or business owners or warriors or any other singe ‘profession’). Likewise I would worry if most of the professions that were female-dominated in a given culture were the ones that were less respected or powerful. This won’t sound surprising to many, it’s just the mantra of equal-opportunity, diversity and freedom. The bottom line to all of this is that I want people to be confident, know that they are powerful, inspired to act, but also be thoroughly grounded in self-awareness. I have no interest in ignoring the social structures that shape our experiences in day to day life. On the contrary, I want everyone to be not only aware of them but to also see themselves as agents who can and will shape them. This is what I mean by empowered. I think on some level we are obligated to actively and purposefully influencing the world and the lives of the people around us.

Arguments against this go something like…

Why tell people they can do anything when they can’t? People are unequal.

While I am interested in deciphering and even sometimes disassembling the structural barriers that push us into place - racism, biology, language, etc… I don’t want to dwell on them too much. If we see ourselves as doomed or people as too limited we start out defeated. Better to recognize the constraints and work where we do have flexibility and propensity for change.

If everyone is assertive, or an active agent like you suggest, no real productive work will get done. People will all try to dominate one another or be hopelessly caught up talking.

This statement gets at two challenges: the question of if dialectic (or argument) brings about constructive social change, and if dialogue (discussion with the objective of just understanding the other participants) can translate into change. I think we should be concerned about these things but know the outcomes are not certain. Law is, on the whole, good example of dialectic-fueled exchange that results in what I think is mostly positive change. The sharing of perspectives ultimately motivates the most important kind of learning, which I think makes for the foundation of action, so dialogue too, has potential, though I wish I had a good institutional example of it. Truthfully I fall somewhere in between. I’m out to understand other people because their perspectives matter and I care about them, but I also want to work with them to solve problems.

Why do you think this will work? It hasn’t already… Look at how unhappy people in ‘free’ societies are.

If the aggregate level of agency in a society is increased I don’t know that everyone will be happier relative to each other. I don’t know that the disenfranchised will automatically be anymore better off, the qualifications for what it is to be disempowered may simply change. I do sincerely think, though, that if on the whole everyone is more engaged with understanding the world, their place in it (communities), and the perspectives of others we will have grown in a positive way. I do think a key to finding happiness is having (and understanding) the means to change your conditions (be they relationships, activities, environment, self-image) for the better. I think this change must come about by action, be it communication, creation, or something else.

In some sense this is essentially the debate of structure vs. agency. To explain this, I’d like to draw upon Lawrence Lessig’s depiction of constraints, because I think it’s handy. While he speaks about them in the context of the internet, they map well to the world in general. They are: law, social norms, the market, and architecture. Most people know the debate of the first three well, so I won’t do much to characterize them, other than to say that I think that all of these are essentially functions of (or permutations of) social norms. Architecture is interesting though, it gets at the structure beneath things. Lessig refers to it as the way the internet is coded or the design of an interface, and how this shapes out ability to act within this system. It could be more broadly interpreted as the physical bounds, like biology or physics, that in part define our context. I do, most certainly believe these exist (though their definitions may not always be expressible in static ways, like numbers), and that they are not merely fabricated. I just don’t think we should let them matter too much. Social norms are the site of change I’m fascinated by, but it feels like postmodernist cultural studies people and the like get lost in them, without really having a clear-cut plan to change them. Well, here we have it – we can make for policy (law) that makes people be one way or another (the libertarians groan), we can make choices more or less costly, appealing to rationale (the emotional thinkers balk), or we can mess with the stuff that we use to operate daily (make the system have some set of ways of being, or work to negotiate it: remix language, rewrite code, which is hard and only some are in a position to do it), or finally we can sell one another on ideas (create norms), be this via evangelism or living the change you wish to be.

This struggle for empowerment is what motivates my dissertation and much of my life. I can only hope I’ve made it clear enough here for those who find it to be so puzzling.

Timeless Time. Or timeless BS??

2010-04-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

So I'm trampling my field examination right now and answering the question: To what extent do social divides in the physical world map directly onto those in the virtual world?

Which is great (if vague) and all, but part of my answer includes reference to this guy Castells, who I suggest sees it the other way around: the Space of Flows (will explain in a second) actually runs the show for the physical world - that is that it maps the divides. Here's a partial explanation:

...It is at this point he advances to his connection between these physical world divides and what, in his composition, includes the virtual world. Castells explains that the dominant logic of the network society is timeless time, the employment of ICT’s “in a relentless effort to annihilate time… to eliminate sequencing of time” (Castells 1997:12). Time is fundamentally connected to space, a tool or relational framework that enables us to understand place and act accordingly. As David Harvey, an informer to Castells’ work, says in regards to globalization, “the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space" (Harvey 1990:147). The compression and desequencing of time facilitates social practices whose material organization is referred to as the Space of Flows: a unified but decentralized assemblage of (1) technological infrastructure and information systems (including the internet), telecommunications, and transportation lines, (2) nodes and hubs tied to physical places, (3) points of gathering for social actors that operate the networks, and (4) electronic spaces (cyberspace) (Castells 1999:364).

Okay, so check it, Space of Flows, totally fine, I like the concept. Timeless time, in my opinion, is a VERY flawed concept. He calls upon David Harvey (apparently the end-all, be-all of postmodernist thoughts, likes words and terms like deconstructionism and the project of neoliberalism) and the old philosopher Leibniz (circa ~1700), who I ended up investigating to validate my criticism. Leibniz suggests that time is denoted by its sequencing – in all incarnations, biological (pre-industrialization, based on ancestry), measured, and even relative (events may seem to take more or less time than one another but we still have cause and effect). This checks out. Castells consistently says that time in the Network Society is a circuit (circular) because spaces have been remapped. The idea is that ICT’s speed things up so much and make space so irrelevant that time becomes eliminated, arbitrary or desequenced.

I CANNOT buy this. Things may work faster, social practices may be rearranged by the speed at which process happen but this doesn’t undermine or dismiss cause and effect. In fact much of our discussion about technology is about dealing with time. We don’t forget or lose history in the Network Society any more than we do as a result of other operational discourses assuming control and wiping out other narratives that make meaning of the human experience (say modernity/rationalism knocking the religious era off the pulpit). David Harvey actually characterizes circular time in a way that would admonish Castells’ argument: “Past, present and future projected into each other accentuating continuity within change; diminution of contingency” practiced by “astrology-followers; archaic societies in which mythological, mystical and magical beliefs prevail.” (Harvey 1990:224)

His examples are bollocks too: we try to make modern wars quick and ignore long ones (okay, true, time still operates here), people can have kids after they’re dead with the saving of embryos (still, cause and effect and sequence here, no kid before the parent), and life expectancy is increasing so we’re becoming more eternal (really? seriously?). Timeless time doesn’t characterize the dominant groups, unless somebody has invented time travel and I don’t know about it. Or is always traveling at light speed and still somehow able to impact events here on earth. Is God behind the space of flows?

What’s interesting is that I can’t find critiques of this. People knock Castells for not doing proper analysis of the role of information, production, and of the relationship between informational labor and capitalism, or maybe for being sorta blatantly obvious in his painting of the information era outcomes, but not for his downright invalid reappropriation of time.

I mean really, I buy pretty much everything else the guy says, but not that time is desequenced or eliminated. Just compressed or altered. Sorry bud.

Intentionally Empathic

2009-10-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

I get it. I'm a social scientist. I think about everything.

I'm finding more and more this identity is overwhelming, in that the sociological imagination is not only permanently switched on my mind, but I'm not sure how to (or if I want to or could) switch it off. The same way in which I see myself situated within the world as a powerful actor who can influence the people and issues around him: I'm presented with a problem - a complaint, a question, a curious circumstance - and I look to understand it, and usually, solve it or make things better. I feel it's downright unethical to not to at least want to. So in the same way I obsess over social experience and individual actors and actions - I like to think a lot about what it means when I or someone else does or says something. I don't always realize the full ramifications of a statement or action, like all of us humans, but I'm usually actively thinking about some sizable portion of those occurring around me. I do this instead of reading for school.

I'm contrasted by my friends who suggest that this is 'over-analysis' or wonder why I always have to 'go so deep into everything all of the time.' They'd rather float about life, making statements about the weather or complain about things without any intention of envisioning a better world. They don't ask questions or wonder all that much about what others are thinking - it simply isn't important to them.

In research we talk about discerning intent - how we measure it, what cues we can examine to find it, or even the possibility or importance of capturing it. We can ask someone what their intention is, but it may be futile - they cannot possibly know everything that motivates their decisions, and the structured provisional truth they present us in explanation is built to its audience, mode of communication and the person's current feeling. Beyond that, regardless of how reflexive we might be - our intent is constricted to a realm of discourse - the way we talk about it in certain ways (social norms, language) and in some sense, people may only have free will to a certain degree within the bounds of how they make sense of reality.

So what struck me today was the way intention and empathy intersect. I've often wondered what fosters empathy. Intent implies purpose, an active action to desire and see to an outcome (that may or may not come to fruition). I'm so utterly concerned with investigating intent not because I think it will uncover some hidden truth (it may tell us a better story, though), but because I think by being concerned with the intentions of others we facilitate the construction of empathy (a reflection of concern for others, the ability to identify with their experience).

This rests on a value, a sort of social good. What would happen if everyone were a little more empathic? In some sense this is no different from seeking to understand the perspectives of others, but it's mitigated or encapsulated by action. That is discovering intent involves a communicative process - people making efforts to engage one another - starting with speculation, leading to questions and observation and ending, in, what may be something close to a spiritual belief for me, understanding similarities. I do think, at root, we have a lot in common with one another, when we take the time to find it, at least. We all have the ability to be empathic and seek this - and really this process is how we forge emotional maturity, I think.

And it's multifaceted. Some of this is explaining our own intentions and actions, putting them out there for others to relate to, inquiring about the intent of others, and, potentially, figuring out what they all mean together in the world we live in.

So I know this is a variation on a theme for me, championing the compassionate and assertive individuals of the world, but I'd like to entertain many ways of being that produce social good. So I'll ask all of you - how might someone develop empathy without taking action to understand one another's experience? Could it be done as well with just listening and observing, but not actively starting conversations and asking questions? Might we divulge empathy from texts and not live people>? What more can we find?

Musings with Tom Fairbank

2009-05-10T22:39:00.001-07:00

I recently asked one of my best friends where he gets his drive from - his unrelenting passion to work for himself and others.

He replied that he focuses a great deal on those who have done more than him - role models, both in history and in the contemporary, which leads him to set high expectations and found inspiration. He's managed to get into the habit of asking himself what he could do better, which makes it a cycle.

Doesn't seem too outstanding if you just read it like that, but if you knew him, you'd know why I asked. The guy sleeps for a mere two hours a night, works in a downtrodden school full of kids getting screwed over by our education/class/governmental system and will not hesitate to care intensely about anyone at any moment, homeless person or family member, if they ask. And even sometimes if they don't. I have never met a more compassionate and driven human being.

In contrast, I find that I'm I'm some blend of my own expectations and those that others hold for me, which are necessarily intertwined. Further, most of my role models and would-be mentors don't have any time... for me or anyone else, which is probably a bad sign :)

My friend pointed out that it may not matter if what you know about them is real or an exact 'truth,' the perception of it can sometimes be motivating enough. That is if I create a hero out of someone that might still be viable inspiration, even if I barely know them. And I do this often. Unfortunately I have the bad habit of getting to know them and then watching my hope and positivity be brutally murdered in front of me. If you read about someone in a book though, this is at least less likely to happen.

Anyway what this led me to a really neat question. If we asked all of the outrageously driven people we know what makes them go - what commonalities would we find?

This also led to a question of drive and progress towards what. As Tom said:

"I don't know if we should look for that perfect job, perfect person, or perfect day. What if instead we choose to see the perfection in what is already in front of us?"

I of course replied that we have to do both - recognize what's great in the present (and past) and also work towards a better future. Often one will make us appreciate the other - trying the new greener grass makes us appreciate the old and recognizing current opportunities leads us to striving for more, it's almost modesty vs. aspirations. And then it came - that classic statement, that we need balance. To which Tom replied:

"...because lets be honest the idea of balance is a boring, an easy answer that says almost nothing."

WHAM. But yeah, he's right. Just saying we need balance and shutting down an issue with it doesn't really churn the dialectic. The question of balance, that's where the action is at!

I kind of want to say we're probably better off as a society by looking for more (or better or progress) by default, and that recognizing what we have is secondarily at best. We can find all kinds of explanations for that (Calvinism, capitalism, evolution, economics, spirituality), but it raises the question of what we mean when we say better. In some sense it's probably the age-old eastern vs. western thing with an accent. What would the world look like if we were all, by default, more prone to appreciate what we have instead of striving for more? Would we be more or less passionate? Would we be less assertive? Would change happen is easily?

In the middle of this, I burst out:

"See this is freaking scholarly exchange! not reading a book! You can't talk about stuff like this in academic research and bringing it up in the classroom only makes you the annoying one - but it's stuff that really matter and determines what we do with our lives!!"

And also later a fun exchange:

"Tom: Again, that's where we differ. In practice we are very close, we both do things to 'improve the world' but I would rather see beauty in the now and you would rather create it in the future. The problem with your belief is that the future is always the future. My plan allows for perfection in the present.

Jeff: I guess I don't accept perfection, present or future."

What we came to, ultimately, though, was this. If we try to imagine a person who's all about appreciating the awesome things in their life, as well as striving to find and make new awesome things, we think of a really intense and driven person. Well there we go: Appreciation is the fuel and striving for improvement is the direction.

A Plan for Mentoring in CI - Cohorts

2009-03-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

I couple of Thursdays ago I attended a program called "Mentoring Inside/Out" that took place in the Illini Union as a sort of conference in the form of theatrical performances and workshops. It was put on by the graduate college and a group called the CRLT Players, a cadre of researchers who investigate some of the issues and difficulties of mentoring in several forms and break open the discourse with acting, role playing and dialogue.

I actually initially entered the event thinking I could walk away with a few ideas about how I might better connect to and advise Masters students, but rapidly realized it was mostly focused on PhD students... and in turn started to relate my own confused experience caught between Sociology and GSLIS. Several key distinctions were made clear over the course of the program, which evolved between sequences of acting and audience response sessions.

One of these was that there is a definitive difference between an adviser and a mentor; often the two are not the same and arguments are to be had as to if they should be. Some feel that they cannot appropriately advise students without really knowing them, whereas others feel like this may be too much commitment or taint decisions and honest feedback. But if our advisers are not our mentors, who are they?

In my own experience I've actually found more guidance from others: teachers who take an interest in what I do, older students who can offer wisdom, work advisers with give me a long leash and the like. This in part has much to do with what happened to me in Sociology, but also perhaps the biggest obstacle to fostering good mentoring relationships: time. Professors aren't given much in reward for spending time and caring about students and while many of them find arrive at a sort of 'feel good' (or worse guilt or defacto obligation inspired) motivation it's far from sufficient.

A lot of the problems also arise from miscommunication and misinformation. Professors often aren’t aware of what students know, need to know, and most importantly, what they’re thinking and feeling. And vice versa. Students don’t know that they should ask a professor in advance to meet with them instead of just ambushing them in the office, and sometimes they don’t know what to prepare for a session, or even what questions they should be asking. With changing rules and class offerings professors don’t always know what they should be telling their students to do. Many of them are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with informal relationships with their advisees or can't relate to them. Some have trouble telling a student they don’t have time for them.

Other factors find their way into the mix, like assistance for junior faculty, support and identification for students of color or other minority status (such as women in engineering), and people with split appointments or affiliations.

I couldn’t help but relate all of this to GSLIS. In certain areas we have very strong connections between PhD students and professors. Other areas don’t. In general we have very little going on between MLS and PhD students, largely because of the professional nature of the program, though this shouldn’t be the case as many of our PhD’s were previously in library science. Many of the gaps have to do with time, priority and stage in life– who wants to hang out with 20-somethings when you have a kid at home or a spouse to see? Much of the work the PhD's do has nothing to do with libraries or practice. There are other symptoms of issues, too. If I walk down the halls of GSLIS I see only a few doors open for random visitors. This may be a reflection of personalities, but also of the environment. Only some professors offer regular office hours for anyone to come visit, and of those only a few post them publicly online. We have a couple of staff members who are formally tasked with taking care of advising and mentoring Masters students formally, but this leaves the PhD’s on their own. The PhD's make some effort to bring students together with a Friday symposium but this is typically pretty small and doesn't involve many Masters students or most of the social science related faculty (they are of course invited).

These challenges suspended, the benefits of mentoring are incredible. Most people who’ve found their way to where they are owe much of it to the time and investment in them by others. The informal networks, the people who dare to care deeply about one another, the conversations had over a cup of coffee (or beer?), all of these play an underrated role in fueling inquiry and learning. In some sense it’s our duty, but how can we institutionalize this so it’s not such a drag on people who have culturally and temporally staged inhibitions?

One answer, I think, is what I know as cohorts. I’ve seen them in a few places around this University, and hear they operate well elsewhere. The general idea is to take a given area of research and structure people around this. The effort might span multiple departments and could involve varying funding, mostly dependent on fit and convenience. You might have one or two guiding professors, a few PhD students (who would be their advisees) and possibly a number of Masters students. Together they would form multiple layers of work distribution, guidance and productivity. The professors would provide the overall foresight to the operation, working with PhD’s to invent projects and publish papers on common interests (topics initiated by either, not just professors), which gives the collaboration strength. It’s worth a professor’s time to publish and the new perspectives and related areas of interest brought in by PhD students could help them to widen their range of influence and connection. The PhD students in turn would receive vital experience leading research projects, establish their first published works, and really actively participate to learn what it’s like to be an academic. They could also help to manage and advise masters students, who could spread the load of large-scale projects by conducting research work and providing additional feedback. The entire group would be connected informally as well, sometimes sharing the same projects and papers, sometimes not, engaging in social and personal interests together, attending reading groups, speakers, discussions, conferences and more. This kind of collaboration could be unrelated to funding sources, potentially, as participants could fulfill these needs with other jobs, such as positions teaching, administration or working at jobs outside (such as in the libraries at U of I).

I’m not the first to have this idea. Martin Wolske wants to establish a studio class that would call in graduates from many departments to work together on independent study research and provide feedback to one another. This is a good start, but also only a partial answer—there’s no professor advisers to mentor the students and it doesn’t have any teeth because it doesn’t result in published papers, the hard currency of academia. Martin would like to include grant writing as part of the class, though, and it does, however, engage most of the practice and informal learning opportunities mentioned in the scenario above.

I’d like to see something like this happen in Community Informatics. I know there will be buy-in from Masters students (it can be an activity of the club, essentially), and several of the PhD’s have expressed some interest to me. The missing link, right now, is the professor leadership. Martin’s class may end up filling the hole, but ultimately I think we need faculty support for something like this to be successful and sustainable.

My hope is to create a community informatics research group. We already have a few instances of things happening that are somewhat like this, but I think we could do better. As we walk into next year we’ll have several PhD students pretty strongly associated with our area of research, and I suspect the timing could be right, even if we face some challenges.

Time will tell! I'm starting by talking to a few people about the idea...

Meandering Thoughts

2009-02-15T22:51:00.000-08:00

I'm supposed to read this horridly dry book on social research methods tonight. Thus I'm blogging. It seems like the further I get into grad school the less I like reading... A simple 10 page paper full of new ideas or problems can get me thinking and scribbling for hours, stomaching hundreds of pages becomes an exercise in rejection, skim reading or other futile actions. I find my mind spends at least as much time thinking about the various people and social circumstances in my life as it does on research, classes and work combined. I wonder if I should have been a social worker.

Anyway I was thinking about my community informatics concepts class from last semester. I played a rather strong - no overbearing - role in it. It felt like I was in a room full of terrified mutes but looking back on it and knowing what I do now, I think it's largely that people didn't like me. I think I may have actively ruined participation with my intensity. Anyway, it's this reason I need to be in PhD classes, but besides this I was thinking about this and feeling bad. I want to apologize to all of the shy and quiet people and those who might have felt squelched because of my all too often open mouth. But what would I be apologizing for? To make myself feel better. And that's rather shatty. So my current theory is a new metric of apology. Generally, one should only apologize when they will make the other person feel better at least as much as themselves.

This clearly leaves apologizing to (forgiving?) oneself off the docket, but still.

As my studies go, I've come upon another revelation: Facebook was easy.

I mean seriously! I was an insider in to the community (or at least one of them) and could find all kinds of different social and psychological theories that would apply to the way people behave online. Data-collecting techniques were clearcut - find a theory and a bunch of questions, and observe, interview or survey. Done.

Now I'm essentially enacting as a nonprofit consultant for social service institutions. I'm pretty inexperienced and bad when it comes to figuring out their needs - and all of my leadership experience has been with people pretty similar to me (rich students). Suddenly I have to figure out how these places work, design programs for them involving technology training (pretty much on my own, I have 2 other students to help me), and while that, to me, seems like a worthwhile 'project' or challenge, it's considered elementary. Never mind that establishing relationships and workable programming is scary, I'm supposed to evaluate all of this and keep it housed in scholarly questions and theory. My advisor warns me to stay away from being 'too practical' and I increasingly worry that I'm going to turn tale and run back to Internet studies for my dissertation.

Sounds like I need to have a conversation with Ann Bishop, but then she sometimes struggles to find acceptance in academe, and she's a tenured professor.

Once in a while I think about radically changing my trajectory, nabbing an MLS and running off to the nonprofit/saving people world. And then I remember that this economy is (supposedly?) disastrous and I'm wildly privileged. I just don't feel like there's a lot of academic guidance or support for me right now, I guess. Which worked well when I was studying Facebook, the thing I understood and no one else (around me at the time) did, but not so well when I'm trying to study something that's new and uncomfortable to me.

The good news, though, is that my social life has managed to stabilize a bit post-Mandy.

Time to go back to reading...

Connectors, revisited

2009-02-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

Some of you may be familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's famous set of archetypes that are the key to social epidemics (social movements that sweep very quickly over a nation or group of people). He outlines salesmen (people who can convince you to do anything) and mavens (people who know a lot and like to share knowledge) and connectors (people who know a lot of people and bridge different types of people/groups together). The notion has gotten a lot of attention and spurred a lot of argument. Regardless of the usefulness of the typology or classification we can generally agree that there are traits in people that might make them connectors (relative) in almost any group.

I was giving this some thought tonight. I've always considered myself a connector - particularly because I'm an extrovert and leader and I know (and like!) a lot (different) of people. I tend to make invitations and initate contact and start groups. But I've often struggled with getting groups to be cohesive once the basic connections between individuals have been formed. It makes me wonder what a connector does, exactly. Like in some sense an alternative measure of a connector is the type of person who would be interested (not just willing and able) to go to an event or break into a new group alone. I'm sure we can think of many people we know that refuse to go to a given event, especially when it's recreational, unless they know someone there. Moreover some go so far as to need certain people there.

And this spurred me to thinking about who those people are. I think there may be another class (if you will) of connectors who don't initiate (usually anyway) or may not be the most outgoing or outspoken. They are instead the ones who still know a lot of people, but know how to make them feel comfortable. I'd like to think I can do this but the reality of my personality is that I'm intense, I'm often overwhelming, and if I really would like a person to be a real friend I expect a lot of them. And this is too much to face up to for some people. I'm often action-oriented and while I like to talk about feelings or 'just hang out' I'm usually more interested in creating something or discussing a topic towards some greater benefit. I'm overtly passionate, and especially interested in people, which is a little freaky sometimes to those who aren't.

Anyway thinking over my friends I can point out several who've been sort of complementary connectors to me. I bring people in and make the initial group/event formation (whatever it is, club, social, class group, etc...) and they end up making that person feel extra comfortable and bringing out the best in them. My X played this role in my life for the past year or so, which ispart of why I'm sort of floundering now trying to figure out what to do with my social life.

So where do I go from here? I suppose I could try to work on making people feel more comfortable, but honestly my personality is what it is, the fragile, picky or undependable ones are always going to be a problem. I think maybe a better direction is to show more appreciation for the connectors I know who make it their job (overtly or covertly) to create a welcoming rapport with others. Meanwhile I can continue to keep a positive hat on.

I won't make any specific shout-outs to people at GSLIS, but there are several of you who I think really fill this role. Thank you.

Bloglets

2009-01-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

So I keep accumulating little snippets of items and issues I want to blog about, writing them down, and then putting them off forever. So to help deal with this I've decided to write little blurps in series, much like I did in "Shotgun Blast" a while back. Okay here we go:

Babies in the Doc Study
As many of you know I'm a baby when it comes to comparison to other doctoral students, both in sociology and library science. In fact one of my friends in GSLIS has a daughter my age. Weird, huh? Yeah well nearly all of them are married and several have kids, which isn't a big deal, except one of the students has now made it a habit of bringing her small child with her to work. He's little, probably less than a year, and is typically pretty happy and well behaved. My issue is not with the baby, but what he does to what I would normally consider to be a place of scholars and quiet study. Every doc student but myself (and perhaps the detached foreign students) lord over the little baby and fuss about him for hours. I can't possible work with it... I find it downright annoying. I got to thinking about it, though, and the feminist inside of me says I should shut up and deal with it. Why? Because women are often tasked with taking care of kids, and to exclude them from access to advanced degrees on account of it is something of a form of discrimination. So as much as the herd of fussing old PhD students and somber baby might annoy me, I should probably appreciate her right to bring him along, it makes our school a friendly place to young mothers. I think what perhaps bothers me more is the contrast it brings out between myself and the older mass of graduates. I'm so very different than most of them.

Urban Prairie Archeology
I had the chance to sweep down to East St. Louis last November and work with the Katherine Dunham Archival society. I dubbed the experience "Urban Prairie Archeology" because it was such a strange endeavor. East St. Louis has areas that are sometimes referred to as Urban Prairie, which is when buildings and empty lots are overgrown with prairie grass because of neglect and environmental factors. Archeology comes into the mix in a unique form - we were rescuing documents and artifacts from storage houses that contained many items belonging to the venerable Katherine Dunham, a female black scholar and anthropologist who traveled the world and expressed what she learned in the form of dance. She ran a dance company and retrieved a number of pieces of art from countries around the world - Haiti, China, etc... Unfortunately much of this material hasn't been preserved or sorted and instead packed into small run-down houses that are infested with animals and invaded by the elements. Our job was to venture into these houses and search through a mass of junk for valuable items dating back to the early 1900's. The experience was invigorating, we were able to save some community history, a worthwhile cause.

My Digital Literacy
Occasionally I think back to my education and wonder how I came to be so technical. I didn't really learn much of what I know in school. Or did I? Certainly none of my classes ever taught me how to use programs or work on digital art but many of them provided me with absurdly good inquiry-based and self-led learning opportunities. I was able to make videos and websites and required to integrate them into the traditional learning objectives present in most of my classes. It wasn't perfect and none of the instructors ever really understood half of what I did but in some ways it was the best possible way I could have learned much of what I did. I also came to remember a teacher - the only one who ever really successfully integrated computers into the classroom - from my junior high. He let me read a Star Wars book for a book report, something no English teacher or my mother would have ever considered worthwhile learning. It wasn't about the book's quality or difficulty - it just wasn't considered valuable from institutional eyes. I was supposed to read Shakespeare to To Kill a Mocking Bird. Anyway, Mr. Block was all about encouraging students to explore what they found interesting and engage them on their own level with relevant topics. He brought Legos into science class and we were encourage to play games on the computers and also use them for science and exploration. I never found another teacher to so seamlessly and effectively blend computers into class like that. Not until grad school. I should find out what he's up to now!

That said, school really didn't influence my digital literacy all that much. Our Packard Bell 1995 computer provide me with art/animation sequencing programs that I made strategy games and FPS narrative robot stories out of, architecture and landscape design software that resulted in mansions and gardens, and I even used MS paint to create Battlemech blueprints, pixel by pixel.

Oh and that whole Web2.0 thing? Pictures, message communities, blog-like editorials, travel journalism? Yeah I was doing all of that on www.jag85.com long before Facebook, Flickr and Blogger. Sad that I was made fun of so vehemently for it, these days it's ordinary.

I lived in virtual communities online, practicing writing skills and playing characters while imagining and creating universes in my mind. I modified game systems and shared my innovations - character sheets, programs, and new rule systems - with people from all over the world.

And all the while this was at odds with my mother, who saw everything that I did as treacherous and unhealthy. She thought that the exposure to violence would drive me to hurt others and that the time spent on computers would prevent me from acquiring people skills. And here I stand, one of the most extroverted people I know (online and off!) looking to help other people for a living.

I have to give her credit, actually. Without her to oppose (and prove that I wasn't a bad person or mistake of a child like she made me think I was) I wouldn't have come to where I am now.

And for the record my mom now feels horrible about how she treated us as kids. She was a mixed up and insecure person stuck in a world of rich housewives all concerned with appearing upper class. She had a poor relationship with her mother growing up and has struggled over her views of equality, gender roles, and common good. A lot of what she did was because she didn't have confidence, and had even less control.

So where did my digital literacy come from? In terms of people - school, my mother, and, well, the internet. In terms of the abstract (in parallel) - drive, defiance, and curiosity.

You Are Missed...

2008-11-27T01:39:00.000-08:00

Be assured my mission is not to elicit guilt or play pogo stick atop your already immense and growing burden... but I miss you.

Strangest of times and circumstances I know. Happy Thanksgiving, I'm sure your family is a much welcomed solace and sanctuary. I still watch from afar, with at least as much as proverbial internet-born books of faces can afford me.

Last glimpse you were swimming, in at least a couple of ways. Think I can join some time?

I'm also bringing back a hefty helping of my childhood in a car full of Legos...

If I don't hear from you I might churn up something more drastically creative and figure a way [someone] could help me plop it on your door step.

Find me. You know how.

...

:)

(unrelated: coming for whenever/winter break - babies and doctors, urban prairie archeology, more...)

Shotgun Blast

2008-11-08T11:33:00.001-08:00

I decided to break open my blog piggy bank and see what was inside:

I often talk about how much I value assertiveness and outgoing people, provided that they're honest and not too negative. I've been wondering if maybe what I'm talking about is how much I value other driven leaders. There are plenty of outgoing friendly people who go out and party but don't really care about others or the world.
My roommate watches A LOT of TV. For him it's great, he can sit and code on his laptop for hours on end in front of the tube. TV bugs the crap out of me (especially mindless negativity [Southpark] and death news), so I usually go back into my room and close the door. It got me to thinking - I usually identify myself as part of the multi-tasking generation who likes copious multimedia feeds and yet I can't deal with TV. I pay attention to it too much and it has commercials that interrupt the story (if there is one) all of the time. I greatly enjoy watching TV episodes that I choose to download that come without interruptions, just like I listen to MP3's on random instead of radio. In total it's more about sustained narrative, not jumpy disconnected bits of information. Maybe I'm more old-hat than I thought.
This was further emphasized the other night when I was talking to several people online who could have all hung out together. At the time I knew of 5 people in different spots who were being social (online) but didn't want to be social in person. Granted group hang out is different but back before ICT's these people would have had to hang out in person and I think I would have preferred that situation. I know technology enables us to be social in ways that we might not have been able to otherwise but I think it's also, on the whole, been more of a way to allow people to be passive and introvert and that bugs me. Maybe I'm less young and technology-minded than I thought, at least when it comes to people.
I've decided my value in creation should be better described as value in creative, fun and passionate creation, not obsessive productivity. I like people who are driven in joyous ways, not super efficient cogs.
The election reminded me - there's no information about local judges up on the internet. In fact I think they have identity management or protection going on, you can barely even find them on Google. I can Google my neighbor and find out more. Places like Judgapedia have tried to cover this but are far from filled out. I know we probably shouldn't categorize them by Republican or Democrat or Green but I would definitely like to see a decision history and their stance on issues. If citizens are expected to vote yes or no for them we have to know something about them and one of the biggest places young people get information is the internet. DUH. A battle for another day.

Excitment Refresh (Facebook has ruined romance)

2008-10-27T01:11:00.000-07:00

So I had the chance to go visit an amazing childhood friend tonight and we hung out talking... he's probably one of only 3 or 4 people in the Universe that I can do that with - sit down without food or activity at hand and talk with endlessly, it's a comfort I've learned to cherish. Anyway as we were talking the topic came to his excited interest in a girl he's met in the Quaker group he belongs to who sounds unreasonably cool (she wrote a book! and has a had a really interesting and deviant life). He was thinking about telling her that he'd like to see her outside of a Quaker meeting sometime, etc... effectively ask her out. As we were talking I brought up the possibility that she could be seeing someone already, and Tom had thought about it but didn't know. But what I remember most is just how joyful he was about the excited possibility of a person he likes - an opportunity, a connection, a thrill, the prospect of so much happiness!

I didn't know this sort of thing still happened these days. First off, I really, really (and I mean really) miss the days when I could actually ask a girl out. Not that I'm afraid to or unable to (well okay I'm seeing someone so it'd be downright unethical, but that's not the point here), it's that I've learned to get better at it. I liked the days when it would be the moment where you felt as if you had just jumped off the high dive (or off the 40 ft ledge canyoning) and didn't know what was going to happen. Pure concentrate excitement, anxiety, thrill, joy, all mixed together.

Now-a-days the procedure is different. First off, directly asking a girl out is against the rules. I know not literally but there does seem to be a social norm established, it's creepy to be that up front with someone, unless you're some dashing lad who plays basketball or sings acappella. I've had individual women argue that this is different for them but my observation is that on the whole it's not cool by most women's standards. Most girls will shit a brick and desperately find an excuse to dodge you, quite visibly so if you do it in person. So what do we do? Trickery, step-by-step:

1) Find the person on Facebook, see if they're single. No mystery in this regard anymore, and in fact I miss it so because it gives a false sense of permanency. People are no longer a questionable option - if you see they're dating on Facebook then you're ethically obligated to stay the fuck away.
2) Invite them to an event with mutual friends or a large scale public activity that's little 1-on-1 face time or pressure. Talk to them a little more than might be out of the ordinary at this event but without really revealing your interest, for if you do they will shit a brick and you'll be back to square one.
3) Find them on AIM (or Facebook or Gchat or whatever) and start talking to them about a common subject (question about class, their opinion on something non-political, etc...) and eventually evolve the conversation into something more meaningful.
4) Ask them out to a non-threatening activity, most common is lunch or coffee, but more creative versions in my past have been skating around with Inline Insomniacs or going to build a puzzle together at the library.
5) Rince and repeat the above until you're fairly brick-proof and then you might think about actually asking them out on a real date. Maybe.

And honestly, I think this system flat-out sucks. I used to say fuck it and was bold and asked girls out and tried not to be dodgy. But it resulted in an endless stream of rejections and let-downs and a lot of depression. So after a while of that I tried various remixes of the misdirection bullshit game above and had a lot of success. My current relationship is actually as a result of this sort of thing, and I'm not particularly proud of it.

As happy as I am for Tom to have found a girl mystery and a new source of hope, I'm still sick and tired of a world where only guys ask out girls and being forward and honest with one another is considered creepy, not compassionate.

I really do like Facebook - on the whole - I like that it presents us a whole new level of information. But really I think it's inadvertently helped to perpetuate this potentially sexist norm and a lot of passive or indirect type behavior. The thrill of discovering someone through asking them out on a date is immediately diminished from the get-go simply because you already start off knowing if they're available. Sure you avoid the embarrassment of asking someone out that is in a relationship, but you also avoid the flattery, the excitement and dammit I fucking like getting reamed once a while it helps me remember I'm alive. It makes the times that it does work out all the more worth it and I've learned to respect the people who can look you in the eye and actually say no. We don't feel comfortable asking a person out until we check them out on this twisted social ecology. Girls use it as a defensive mechanism to keep guys away from them, in fact - mark their relationship status and suddenly they can feel safe. I mean hell we even somehow declare a relationship real when it's hetero and on Facebook (nevermind the LGBT discrimination here, or the age-plurality complex).

So a lot of complaining about passive women and gender roles, I know, my usual, right? This might be my best unsung argument for denouncing Facebook yet, is that it helped to keep dating dishonest, indirect and introvert.

Maybe someday we'll see a gender-equality universe where women are just as likely to ask out men as vice versa and Facebook won't be the biggest cock-block in town... I'll hedge my bets with the LGBT rights movement.

Signing out for the night, positivity will return later, I swear.

Facebook Friends, False Connections and Social Norms

2008-10-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

I noticed a friend 'defriended' me the other day on Facebook, which normally wouldn't be a hugely new or life-shattering event... except that this person happened to be someone who I really like and used to be really close to. It's not uncommon to lose weak contacts like people I knew in classes or back in high school (with a friends list as big as mine I've actually noticed if I make small changes to my profile like politics or relationship status I can lose friends), but this one was different. We had some falling out somewhere over the digital medium in semi-recent history and it got me all upset and thinking about how the act of severing a connection on Facebook could really be a strong statement, especially when they're far away and FB might be the only viable connection you have to them anymore.

I mean we talk about stalking and whatnot on Facebook but I've noticed that many people have a small group of people that they like to watch from afar on Facebook. Maybe that person doesn't really know them very well or they're afraid of being confrontational or they don't even like them that much but they're interesting - it's nice to follow their life without having to become directly involved in it. It's a fake connection though, created by the technology and not by the actual relationship you have with the person.

Anyway a friend of mine noticed and empathized with me because she had been recently defriended too - but by someone she sees occasionally in person. She had no idea why but was worried if there was some sort of problem she didn't know about. It's an awfully passive-aggressive way to indicate to someone that you don't like them. We got to talking about the messages such an action might send and I concluded that hers wasn't a legitimate concern because the person who defriended her was older (think 40's) and not a 'Facebook native' and therefore couldn't possibly understand what message he sent her with such an action. My friend, however, I felt definitely knew what kind of damage she would do.

But as I later came to understand, that may not actually be all that accurate. As more people from different countries, generations, and life experiences join Facebook they bring with them new ways of understanding it as a social environment and communication tool. And that includes the meaning of 'defriending' - just like society at large Facebook is probably developing a plurality of social norms. Some people take it more seriously and find it more meaningful than others and there may be some variance in immerse (everyday cognizant) use. I still do think that this correlates with age closely but much like the notion of digital natives it's probably much more of a population than a generation.

The bigger question is what to do about the people who don't agree to the social contracts and norms established by the youth population who made Facebook huge. How do we get everyone on the same page?

My friend, by the way, did eventually talk to the person who defriended her and figured out it was more done on accident and not intended as an aggressive move. I probably won't ever hear from the person who dropped me again...

Shaking Up the Blog

2008-10-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

So in the past this blog has been intended to serve as a dynamic introduction for my personal-professional website, JAG-wire.net. I've tried to make large posts periodically, written in a verbose and clever (if not mildly nonsequetor) style, illustrating my 'faffing about' in Graduate school. Unfortunately I write these sorts of entertaining blurbs best when I have enough time to really consider them and they're most often a sort of report-in newsletter kind of format with a few questions here or there. After going several months without really hunkering down to chisel out a post I decided it was time to retool the format. As a preamble I've been writing down little snippets of ideas that come by and flirt with me throughout the day. They're all things I'd like to write about but wouldn't exactly fit in a personal-professional blog that's meant to showcase my development in academe.

But let's face it, nobody reads something so stagnant and it doesn't do me much good to write it. So from now on I'm going to start posting up fragments, humor, curiosities, and drama that intersect with my mind. It'll be notably more personal, more offensive, and probably a lot more interesting. So long as the wrong professors don't find their way to it I should be okay... and if they do, oh well, I'm not really interested in hiding who I am.

We'll see how long I can keep it up but I think it'll be considerably easier to do! I'll start it off with my accumulated list.

In a cage match between a library, website, and Facebook... who would win?

2008-05-25T00:02:00.001-07:00

So it would seem summer ambushed me. No, no, it's not that I didn't see him coming. In fact I was anticipating his arrival with jubilance. What I didn't expect is just how close to bubble-gum in my hair summer would be in relation to research and writing. That is, if papers, databases, and interviews were a haircut. Despite the fact that I've begun to comb-over my metaphors, as it stands the Grea-Council of Masters paper readers have given me their final requirements for the final draft. So maybe three days worth of trudging through my paper and some new sources stand between me and that degree. I've been putting it off like most people do taxes. Instead my life has been a whole lot of websites and web work (after I got the rancid left-over grading aftertaste out of my mouth), volleyball and skating, recording (sounds and sights!), games (electronic and board), and friends, lots of them. I've got to call a hoard of libraries and ask them about their computer resources next week for another in-process paper, to boot. Come Summer Session II (in a week or so) I'll begin work formally transcribing interviews and collecting multimedia for a community informatics project. In theory I ought to be worried about getting all of the work done in time... but it's summer man!

Becoming a Master... still

2008-03-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

So my Masters paper, or at least a solid draft of it, was completed sometime last semester. Why then, you ask, have I not posted it all over the web in some sort of glory-kidnapping extravaganza? Have I become a little more modest in my old age? Heavens no! Am I perhaps realizing that most professional academics don't study something considered as non-serious as Facebook? No, actually it in fact makes a superb recipe for interesting conversation. No, I've come to a bit of a crossroads. Over time the paper grew forth from a number of sources and managed to expand its borders to take over all kinds of areas and interests, some more effectively than others. I've come to a point where I have to split apart the front section, which is largely theory-rich and reads much like an area exam, from the back half, which is data and statistics derived from the two year study of usage and privacy. Now the task is to do this gracefully and with any luck the survivors (or at least one of them) will earn me a degree.

Shift Happens

2007-11-04T18:27:00.001-08:00

After realizing just how long it had been since I had updated JAG-wire I read over my previous post and had a good laugh with myself. In the beginning of the year I had this idea of not only doing an MA paper, but doing three big papers - including data from surveys, interviews, and content analysis all while reading tomes in the kitchen sink. It would seem my youth is showing - I didn't realize just how much work it is to research, write, teach, begin a PhD and try maintain a happy life. Beyond this it turns out I had more than enough material in my multi-year Facebook data set to push out a paper, even if it's not a study as good as all of the ones I keep trying to find time to read. So here's the thing: I'm losing track of my dream of an adventure in altruistic academe and really need to get it back.

All of this Facebook hubub is wonderful - I mean I even got to meet my quasi-heroes danah boyd and Fred Stutzman at the ASIS&T conference the other week (oh and turns out my STS theory might not be a load of crock!) - but what happened to my dream of getting a PhD in helping people? The first shock was finding out that Sociology here has little to do with anything domestic outreach related, the second was waking up and wondering how the crap I got so engrossed in my studies that I forgot about the basics of what I wish to do with my life. Sure I get the blessed comedic effect of saying I did my Masters on Facebook, but what I really want to do is tackle something tangible I can touch.

Studying campus climate, teaching students and helping to run the Positive Event Chain is not enough.

I can reconcile all of this with myself if I think of the Masters Paper as just a pit stop to what I intend to do with my PhD but I'm entrenched! Almost all of the connections I've made and material I've read - any small shred of expertise I've gained beyond Sociology isn't having to do with the digital divide or technology-based community outreach, it's all wrapped around social networking technologies and identity theory. In short I couldn't be happy making a career or PhD out of studying Facebook but if I continue down my current path (starting interviews, doing increasingly intricate and informed specialized studies, teaching classes on the technologies of Social Informatics) that's precisely what I'll end up doing!

It's not over yet, however. I'm going to make time to meet with Abdul Alkalimat this week (or next week if we have to) and just spill it. What he did at the University of Toledo with technology and community outreach needs to be done here. The wealth disparity in this town is greater than it is in Chicago and the amount the University is involved is atrocious. The best Library and Information Science school in the country has an amazing array of resources and talented people - my plan is to jump into that mess, set sights for the local community and see how much difference I can make. Time to get back to doing what I do.

Becoming a Master of Arts

2007-08-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

I know my professional blog has been quiet for a couple of months now - I spent much of the summer working on my porfolio and reading. I've suddenly been thrusted head over heels into my second year of graduate school. I'm teaching two new classes - an introduction to Sociology (soc 100) and Social Perspectives on the Family (soc 273) - but these feel like a natural part of life now, while I'm still in love with teaching I have plenty of confidence I can do it well. No, what scares me more is this whole independent study Masters paper thing. Most of the normal Sociology PhD's here just write a paper that counts for their masters somewhere along their track to the higher degree but because of my transfer I need to finish it ASAP to begin my work in LIS. So I lined up an independent study and flushed out an outline to finish one paper, start two others, read oodles of sources, collect interview and focus group data, contact everyone around campus who has anything to do with what I do, and otherwise lose my mind. It's terrifying.

At this point I have no idea if I've bit off more than I can chew. Being busy out of my mind is a normal state of affairs for me but this time the pressure is ten fold as high because I'm doing something I'm not so sure about and am very new to. I still don't even know who all of my readers are because there are a whole two people directly related to what I do in Sociology.

In many ways I'm excited and enthusiastic - I have faith in my own abilities and motivation and have no fears about my interest in the subject. I know plenty of people who could help me out and have a plethora of resources among students and programs in the University. But at the end of the semester I'm going to be handing a paper to three individuals who've been trained for years in academe to be intensely critical and who have only a few minor connections to my area of study. It's already a battle explaining to older professors the relevance of Facebook, it's going to be an even bigger battle explaining it to professors who aren't interested in technology.

But that's okay. This is what I signed on for when I chose to go to grad school, and dealing with criticism, like it or not, is essential in an academe infiltrated by argument disguised as dialectic. I'm here to learn, I'm as smart and capable as I am, and only know what my experiences have taught me. Here goes nothing...

Real Research, Silly Statistics, and an Enabler

2007-05-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

So I suppose it’s a sign that I’ve managed to get myself knee deep in graduate school: I’m starting to do my own research. It’s funny, despite the fact I teach a class on research methods I’m quickly finding out how little I really know about real research process. Two methods courses and a statistics class notwithstanding none of my experience has been literal real world graduate caliber research. I learn so much by application – I wish I could see how professors do their own research. So as it stands I’m doing a lot of mimicking what books tell me and what I can discern are proper methods. In less classier words, fake it until you [hope to] make it. Thank God I found some help in an unexpected place: Survey Methods instructor Jane Burris.

I’ve begun to gather my own data for the Facebook project, with a formal DMI 1100 student random sampling and IRB’s blessing and all that jazz, and like any good researcher I of course find a couple hundred million questions I want to ask after my survey is released into the wild. I made an ultimate newbie mistake too – turns out the ambiguous category on the form builder labeled “number of responses allowed” doesn’t pertain to individual respondents but how many people can respond to your survey period. Cleared that one up this past week, I’m praying it doesn’t mar my response rate too badly. The UIUC form builder is insufficient to perform real survey functions – it doesn’t support skip logic, use of visual aids, or partial response records. In order to perform research at UIUC we have to use it, though. The 20$ subscription to Survey Monkey for my convenience sample my senior year was leagues better, you’d think the university could afford something superior. I know, I know, it’s probably like one LAS social science IT guy who gets tasked with that and 1800 other things. So make it an assignment in a CS class, problem solved.

Here’s the interesting part to me, though. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this research if I didn’t happen to take a flexible methods course this semester with an amazingly helpful instructor: Jane Burris. Not only is Jane not officially in sociology, but she doesn’t have any formal professorship standing – and she’s the best methods instructor I’ve had to date. Why? She guides the advanced students through whatever research they wish to do. No contrived artificial projects on far away unrelated countries or pretend ethnographies on environments we all know too well – I was told to design my own survey, collect my own data, and work to analyze it for an eventual publication! No other class in Sociology (that I know of) offers that kind of opportunity. Thanks to Jane I’ve been able to not only start the Facebook Project, but start it with a little confidence about my methods.

There are drawbacks though. I never really learned statistics. I mean sure, I can tell you about how to use and interpret a few statistical significance tests or even a little bit about linear or logarithmic regression. But I have absolutely no idea how to employ which statistical tests to my own data. In class we were taught the mechanics of a test, how to interpret the results – but not how and when to use it! I’ve picked up some basics from the crosstabs and Pearon’s Chi-square material I teach in 380, but I want to know when I should isolate specific variables to determine a causal factor. If I’m studying social capital and have all of these substantively defined concepts and conceptualized variables to represent this, how then do I take a statistics test and say something about them? I’m not just talking oh look the median number of friends on Facebook – I’m talking about controlling for race and year in school to identify if gender alone significantly impacts the ways Facebook is used as a supplement to social capital! We’re talking many variables that all intersect that I don’t know how to relate to one another with statistics in meaningful ways. So enough complaining, I just wanted to give examples. I’m hoping I can find a class or an individual who can tell me that Cronbach’s alpha would best illustrate the connections between my matrix of Facebook usage variables to say, perceptions on digital privacy. So that is, designing a plan of analysis for my data. I can coax a computer into doing the thuckethead statistics for me and check with a book to see what the results mean in technical terms.

A happy conclusion? Jane has offered to help me sort through my data this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing what results!

A Salutation to Teaching

2007-03-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

The coming of the Spring semester has brought with it not only an array of opportunities for new studies and research but also an experience of an entirely different kind - teaching. I now teach a section for Sociology 380, research methods, and facilitate an intergroup dialogue session on race and ethnicity. I'm quickly finding that I'm really not as new to this instruction thing than I thought I would be - my students are essentially my peers and really teaching seems to be akin to organization leadership, my old friend. And herein lies a bit of a philosophy I'm discovering. Once you cover the basics of skills and motivation teaching seems to be more about communication, collaboration and most importantly, inspiration. Having taken the classes I'm teaching I find myself in the mind of the students - but with an additional perspective - that of graduate school. Realizing just how important concepts like dialogue and comprehensive knowledge of research methods are has been an integral part of my experience with the graduate school transformation.

So my optimistic tangential mind naturally aspires to introduce positive change into the mesh of academia. As a strong believer in technology as a learning tool I've already introduced web sites into both of my courses. Students seem to love the agenda and resource linking on the 380 site, and we've still yet had only one session for intergroup. Improvement in the realm of technology is just an easy first step. Working with the fabric of the courses is what I'm increasingly interested in. After attending the annual Latino-Latino Studies Program conference a few weekends ago I started sifting through ideas on how to integrate another crucial component of academia that all too often gets overlooked - activism. My methods course specifically presents a spectacular opportunity for students to volunteer around town for their ethnography project. I'd like to collect a list of some of the better places students might volunteer and observe at the same time in the CU area. At the same time if I can manage to figure it out I'd love to let students talk about their community organizations and involvement in a brainstorm session somewhere during the course - I'm sure they have ideas I don't. And if nothing else I'd love for them to apply their critical sociology skills in new ways during their ethnographies - be it in a social group oriented categorical fashion (race, gender, ability, etc...) or from a standpoint of evaluating with theory models (Marxist, Weberian, structural functionalism, etc...). I'm not just concerned with the students learning the mechanics of the methods, but also the thinking that goes behind them. We'll see where this goes, I'm relatively new to the teaching thing and have to first prove my worth. In the words of the great Mario, "Here we go!"

Pheonix Rising

2007-03-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

JAG-wire has been reborn. This blog will now serve as the home to my latest pondering for JAG-wire.net, the professional ensemble of JAG85.