More Post Symposium Chatter

Rachel has another one about why numbers (quantity) versus who/what (quality) is probably a better measure of authority. Once upon a time one person said the sun was the centre of the solar system. Once upon a time one person said there was a general theory of relativity. Once upon a time many people said Jews, gypsies and homosexuals could be executed on an industrial scale. Extreme examples sure, but in each case if you looked around to see what everyone else was saying, you would have been wrong. Louisa with a tale about vitality and news, which is also why lots of people saying the same thing doesn’t equal it’s true. Mia with another story of how it is not hard to trick people if you address them the right way (and it isn’t). Evan on common sense (it goes a surprisingly long way, and is also so easily dissolved), and finally Kelsey has an excellent list of things to pay attention to.

Après Symposium

George on validity of things. For me this is ‘validity of things’ and not ‘validity of things online’. The rules we use off line apply online too. Laura makes the well made point that literacies are a continuum, and Natalie wonders is we really need worry too much and is the internet quite, well I guess have the impact we’re saying. My own view is obvious, that horse has bolted. Not just the internet, most of the apps on your phone rely on the internet (for example). Just make a list of what you do, each day, that involves the internet, and be surprised. (And some of these things don’t involve you.) Alexandra found the discussion of validity interesting, I don’t think popularity is a good judge at all, but will talk about that next week (as Kony2012 demonstrates well, thank you Sophie). Amy also picks up the quantity mode of validity, I’m going to need to have some things about this next week I see. Louis thinks the metaphor of book versus code is broken. It isn’t a metaphor though, it is literally the case. You can write a book, with simple basic ingredients (pen, paper), I work with people who build entire complex websites and databases with dynamic scripts with a text editor, that’s it. Luke on wikipedia and validity, some good points.

(Note to me and readers. This is one of those moments where the blogs are interesting. Personally, as someone who has been very online since about 1992 – before visual Web browser if you can imagine such a time – the validity of online stuff is just, for me, a no brainer. Trivial. So the number of posts where you have said that was really interesting and valuable and useful just leaves me sort of gobsmacked. I just assumed this was a trivial question and problem for people who pretty much have only known a world with an internet. How wrong I was. And even more worried about what the heck you get taught in high school. This is why I’m not a fan on gatekeeping so much, you can’t learn how to test validity if the only things you’re ever allowed to see have already been vetted. It really matters, simply because the world does now run online.)

It’s And all the Way Down

We rarely say what we mean (it’s a condition of language). So a quick riff post symposium.

Print and network and digital literacy, not rivals, not anything. It is not this literacy or that one but and, and, and, and. They are not rivals in themselves but they are if we make them. So English teachers might struggle with networks replacing books, or grammarians might struggle with LOL, and people in science, who publish a lot of research, will never (ever) write a book, and don’t care if what they do write is on paper or not. Start thinking not in terms of this or that but and this, and this, and this, and this. Not because of the network, but this is probably more like the way you are in the world (I’m a husband and a brother and a son and a father and a student and a teacher and an employee and an employer and a cyclist and a person interested in birds and a blogger and…)

Life and Stories

Rachel realises she can’t write down what she wants to happen for her life, as she could for a story. Personally I don’t think that’s diddly squat about network media (I’m not criticising Rachel, I’m the one who did bring it up), but it is a good thing to learn in general, and I’m very interested in learning things that make differences. To any and every thing. Brady thinks perhaps the internet is a story, but I think here what is actually described is history, and there is plenty of what is known as historiography which demonstrates that while history has traditionally been a narrative, cause and effect linear discipline, this isn’t how things really work (Hayden White is the person who has shown the history is actually story, not ‘truth’, while something like Manuel de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History shows how history isn’t, well, linear and sequential. Anyway, I think Brady is describing history, not a particular story, so it confuses the general with the individual. Karlee gets the role of materiality (what is known as the linguistic turn in theory in the 1960s and 70s is partly to blame here, language become the house of everything) which is a good thing to begin to grapple with. Amy tries hard to make her use of the internet a story (I’m always intrigued at the lengths we go to try and force a square peg into a triangular hole when it comes to stories). Just because things end and begin they are not a story. A highway, desk, cup of coffee, line on a piece of paper – all have a beginning and an end, none are stories in themselves. We can tell stories about them, but that is a very different thing to saying they are stories.

Stories and Materiality

Sarah wonders if children tell stories differently to how we ‘learn’ to what they are supposed to be, which relates to Seonaid too who picks up the key thing. It isn’t that books are wrong (they’re great) but surely this is not the only way we can tell stories? George thinks things probably do have ends, using the blog post as an example. I think a great question is “where does my blog begin, where does it end?”. Samuel has a really interesting conversation with himself about books, ebooks, sound and movies, some of us do fetishise the book, which isn’ a bad thing, but it is good to recognise it. Alexandra is realising that she might not fall in love just the way she hoped, world travel, foreign partner (no, network media is not taking the rap for that!).

Symposium 04 Questions

The questions of the week:

  1. How can you judge the validity of things on the internet?
  2. What are the limitations of network literacy? How does it differ to print literacy?
    • What limitations do both literacies share?
    • What strengths help compensate for each other?
    • Can they work together?
    • Are they destined to be rivals?
  3. Should network literacy be focused on in earlier education?
    • Can it be taught formally?
    • Is there a formula for blogging? Like how essays have one?
    • What do you think the solution is? Should we let kids teach themselves through doing?

Symposium 04 Followup

Something that we didn’t get to today (the discussion about patents was probably too marginal, patent law isn’t something we need to worry about) was that when you’re writing critically you are allowed to quote material. This is, technically, a breach of copyright but there is a thing called fair dealing where you can quote something for the purposes of criticism. This does not mean you can also use quotes or extracts outside of criticism, fair dealing only lets us do this for the purposes of criticism.

Symposium 03

The questions raised are:

  1. How much freedom do we have when writing critically of others or others’ work before we become liable for defamation or copyright infringement?
  2. Copyright protects published content, however this protection does not extend to the ideas or concepts that this content was based on. At what point does content or “fact” become an idea? And vice versa? For example, if someone were to publish the ‘secret’ or methods to creating content (for example someone were to reveal a magician’s trick, or the recipe to the big mac secret sauce) does that constitute copyright infringement?
  3. How are copyright laws policed, and who is responsible for policing them? *in a culture of remix, re-blog and re-post…

Brady’s post is useful too.

Second Symposium Media Trails

So, call outs to various comments, posts, from the second symposium (aka a lecture pretending not to be).

Rachel does an interesting job of joining the material quality of the book (and film for that matter) to how it has a beginning and end, so it makes sense that we emphasise narrative forms that suit this media (i.e. insist on stories with ends). Niamh has a really good summary and picks up the problem of colonialism. Tilly has an example of what is known as a mise-en-abyme structure of a novel about a novel about finding the end. Angus takes away the idea that technology is material and matters, and that if the internet is a different sort of technology, then what differences to stories (and knowledge) might that make? Kiralee wonders about accidents, stories, and the real world and Laura picks up some things about books having endings so encouraging stories like this. Yes, such stories exist on the web, but should they?

More from Kiralee noting the question about Greek myth. Perhaps in a culture that treats these stories not as myth but more like ‘news’ it might not be that they are ‘finished’ stories, and they certainly aren’t stories in the fictional sense. We also know that in oral cultures each telling is different, which doesn’t mean they don’t have endings, but that their purpose keeps changing, and the idea of stories changing with each telling is also something that print culture has sort of eroded for us.