Question on the edge

How has the internet changed the way you think? A question from the Edge, posed to some of the deep thinkers of our times, so thought I'd answer it too...nothing wrong with my sense of self importance today...

I have voice, I'm engaged, involved...there's a democratising capacity. I can engage with conversations that have temporal currency with some of the best minds in the world. And sometimes these other great people even engage with Me :)
Arguably, I live at the bottom of the world (unless you want to spin the globe a bit) a beautiful little laid back place New Zealand yet because of the internet I get to play with others i would never have had the opportunity to otherwise, the terrestrial constraints of geography and finances to span this just wouldnt make it likely otherwise.

I read more... everyday...and its no longer just for escapist fun...well...actually it is that too. I have a timely inquisitiveness at my fingertips. In the past i might have had a thought, a question to wonder, so fleeting that it would not wait for the next person I talk with to mutually ponder over, or to find a book or a library to extend the thinking... The internet extends my reach and I can follow such trains of thoughts, here, now... So today, I woke early, I cleared an email or 10, I followed a google alert to Sherry Turkle, it took me back to the edge question via @silverstream, I noticed the 'meme' person Susan Blackmore was there, and Taleb and Shirky and Rheingold too, and a whole lot of reading potential for a rainy day or several hundred such days...and fleetingly regretted my phd topic was not to follow such a great question with some of the (named) great minds of the 21st century (so far). But I'll stick with my phd of the very small (mobile) screen...but wouldnt be surprised if there's some commonality here and there...

So back to where I was...there's more reading, and its linked in a timely way to my interests.
And it's a lot like Alice down the rabbit hole, I could get lost in (t)here a long time...note to self...follow up on intentionality from yesterdays ponderings...when I read a thesis...it cited J Foder (1989) Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Preface, p.ix
"Oh, mice have died and worms have eaten them: but no rock, and no spiral nebula - and no worm, for that matter - has ever chased a mouse, let alone caught one. (Mousetraps catch mice, of course; but that manifests our intelligence, not theirs.)
But I would never have got to such ponderings without the internet...
Nor such fears...
My thinking is altered, how I approach questions altered, how I approach answers similarly altered. But maybe I'm also older/wiser ;)

As a PhD student i wonder about being well enough read, there is always more...and my markers, will always have read more and differently. How to stay on top of it all? At some stage I have to concede I cant. But there's more information to be on top of than ever there was in a terrestrial plane. The ante has been upped. Will supervisors understand this? Like the wonders of domesticity at the beginnings of the last century, with so much more domestic machinery, the demands for whiteness and brightness became an enslaving domesticity for women, rather than a freeing of time, it just raised the bar...

So the internet creates for me some anxiety also.

Yesterday I altered my face book privacy settings, which had defaulted to public. Am I happy with family photos being strewn in public places? A younger life spent reading books (James a Michener, Leon Uris, C K Steads Smith's Dream....even the Matrix...)and it leave me with some distrust, some caution, in a world in which hiding would be difficult.

My life is altered. I am altered. I think I'm more thoughtful than I would have been otherwise...certainly, I think, I have more informed thoughts. Which brings up another aspect, I'm changed in what information I try to hold on to and what information I know I can search for, and perhaps, possibly more importantly, have learned skills rather than facts, how to search for, and how to evaluate what I find. I have a more tenuous relationship with ideas, a willingness to try for size rather than a permanent attachment to facts. And here its hard to know if this an internet thing or not, but I would not have developed such a way of seeing all 'facts' as networked without being introduced to actor-network theory, and again the internet made readings on this accessible.

And my relationships are altered. I'm connected, there's comfort in knowing people I want to be in hands reach of, can be...well at least can be present with me in voice or picture, or video. I dont accept Sherry Turkle's tethered analogy, what I feel I have is extended trust. I have a school aged child living in another country with people I have never met, where I dont speak the language, and who my parents generation had fought against...

so...whats in my head, whats in my heart, how i relate to others...all altered.

And back to Alice, Ive already had several impossible thoughts and its not even breakfast time yet :)

I'm a bit more fractional than I ever used to be...Being here there everywhere...and holding ideas more loosely...and connecting ideas more frequently... concurrently, I am networked, connected, and embedded more, rather than less,, in my/our world.

And now Im headed back to what those other clever people had to say...
here's my favourite, so far
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/sweetcron/items/view/4660/the-2-billion-eyed-intermedia

How can the wind be borrowed? Finding oneself (and losing oneself) in a new (old) aesthetic

How can the wind be borrowed? How can it be made to have a bearing on corn and bread? How can its force be translated so that, whatever it does or does not do, the corn is reliably ground? Yes, may use the words translation and interest as well, because it is no more and no less difficult to interest a group in the fabrication of vaccine than to interest the wind in the fabrication of bread. Complicated negotiations have to go on continuously in both cases so that the provisional alliances do not break off.
(Latour, 1987, Science in action)

And so it is also for fund raising for a charity, will the sun shine on Christmas in the park, will the donations suffice for another year of service...

And for a phd student...
How to bend the wind...how to represent that which takes shape in one context, squeeze it through pages and have any evocation of what one sort to represent.

Tyler, cited by Strathern (1991) on what ethnography does:
"the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation"...Ethnography works by evoking in the reader responses that cannot be commensurate with the writer's
- there is no 'object' that they both grasp....rather s/he provides a reader with a connection to it. Ethnography makes available what can be conceived but not presented."

The image loses its power the moment it becomes a subject of discussion as a shift to rhetoric alters the form.
A juxtoposition then of image following image where sediments of previous evocation might connect the one with the other in the reader's mind.

Mediation effects

A New Zealand take

Technical mediation

In what ways do the media we shape, shape us in return?

The concept of young people being negatively affected by the ubiquitous mobile telephone (“mobile”), has taken firm hold in the public consciousness. Unfortunately, an instrument blaming perspective fails to consider the relational issues involved. Questions of how we are both shaped by and shape our technologies are neglected when questions collapse to binaries of good or bad. This paper draws on the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour as a means to understanding the discourse positioning the mobile as an object of harm, and for strategies considering how the mobile might be positioned otherwise. In an attempt to redress the negative evaluative imbalance associated with mobile phones, an example taken from research in progress involving Youthline’s text messaging for counselling is explored. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested, including strategies for text messaging and for positioning the mobile as an adjunctive instrument supporting students through their studies.

Haxell, A. (2009). In what ways do the media we shape, shape us in return? In Same
places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/haxell.pdf

Slideshow

Ascilite09 Ailsa Haxell

View more presentations from ailsa.

Playing with time

"Playing with other people , you must keep the time they keep."
In writing a thesis summary i am told some general guidelines:
Context (present/past tense)
The problem (past tense)
Data collection (past tense)
Data analysis (past tense)
The findings (past tense)
Conclusions (present tense)
Implications for further research (future tense)

I think there is room for movement.
Time, and chronologies, are punctuated differently for different actors in a network, Once upon a time marks beginnings, and they all lived happily ever after an end...but for whom, surely different realities will contest this.

There is no God-like view, accounts are partial; fractional and biased. One's present implicates past and future. Whats important to me today, may be blown out of the water with the important things that happen just a little further on. And any chronology of events with which I mark times passing are going to be very different to that of others.

As Etienne Van Heerden said, there are so many pasts, and "it" never looks the same.

In my thesis,
The past is with us, it creates the conditions of possibility (current tense)
The problem, continually evolves (current tense)
Data collected, is partial, reflects a time and place, or several times and places
Data analysis, is done here and now at a particular time and place,but is also read in the here and now of a different time and place
The findings, and conclusions are speculative.

And then there is the weirdness of language, in English there is a way of talking of the past but which does this with currency, a continuous past.
She was saying...
Of writing a thesis summary, is it of an object (study past) or is it more like a painting, its always here? Not the artist showed...but shows...
Is it not possible the tool (a thesis) may be more like an engine, not a camera enacting a future, rather than capturing a past?

Performativity in social science research; what a haiku knows

Photo by Michael Flick, cc license, original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/17773534@N03/3078450238/

Void in form

When, just as they are,
White dewdrops gather,
On scarlet maple leaves,
Regard the scarlet beads!

Such poetry brings a reflexive stance to my understanding of what material semiotics and performativity can bring to my doctoral research. This Japanes poem by Ikkyu (translated by Stryk and Ikemoto,1981) stops me in my tracks.
In wonder I can think about what makes things so, what assemblages are required, how does the performance hold me as well as its assembly of actors and of spaces.

In iterating toward openness by David Wiley, I too wonder about what's needed to turn my educational institution into a place where I want to sit within and wonder at, rather than wonder why.

The frustrations of working in the academy where change happens either in incredibly small increments or tearing people distressed into a future they are scared by, are the issues that prompted my own studies into change and the use of emergent technologies.

Taking an actor-network approach is what helping me in making meaning of my world, as well as the worlds of others. I have come to appreciate that there are alternate realities. Sometimes these clash, sometimes they coexist.

Developing a network sensibility provides a fuller knowledge of the contingencies that hold certain actors in place.
This sensibility also provides for understanding that the social and the technical, that people and their technologies, are well enmeshed, that each actor is also a network.

Having this sensibility doesn't leave me stuck in despair though, for knowing the intimate details of how things are aggregated also provides insight that things can be done differently. Its a practical and pragmatic knowledge. There are potentials for adding to, taking away; working around; aligning alongside; or splicing into.

Trying to work change through lineal change theory approaches will clearly cause unexpected frustration.
Trying to use a rationale chooser approach similarly doesn't work. Logic and the wonders of an innovation do not of themselves create the conditions for a different way of being.

With wisdom shared by Seth Godin (2009), If you want to change what your boss ([or other people you work with] believes, or the strategy your company is following, the first step is to figure out how to be the best informed person in the room. To put this into actor-network terms, is to state the obvious, to reveal is to critique

Reference
Doolin, B., & Lowe, A. (2002). To reveal is to critique: actor-network theory and performativity in critical information systems research. Journal of Information Technology, 17(2), 69-78.

What if the price of mobiles connecting with mobiles for counselling purposes is that people don't

Frank Schirrmacher is interested in George Dyson's comment

"What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?" He is looking at how the modification of our cognitive structures is a process that eventually blends machines and humans in a deeper way, more than any human-computer interface could possibly achieve. He's also fascinated in an idea presented a decade ago by Danny Hillis: "In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds."

Is this what George Seimens and Stephen Downes have been getting at with connectivism cck09?

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.

And this is what led me into looking at how changes are both shaped and shaping with the integration of mobile phone technologies into texting for counselling.
To rephrase the question:
What if the price of mobiles connecting with mobiles for counselling purposes is that people don't?

And the questions provoked keep coming:
If you were asked, where do you keep whats important of your life, is the answer facebook?
I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just aware that I have not only outsourced parts of my memory (i never memorize phone numbers anymore, and i leave editing and spelling to autochecks), but now i also consider that i have an external repository of my photos, and my highlights and lowlights of my life, and the bits inbetween floating on a'cloud' of blogging, twitter, facebook , texts and emails, del.icio.us, librarything
Need i fear like chicken licken having the sky fall on my head?

I think twice about what i post, here and there, I think twice about whats accessible into perpetuity by whoever whenever...
If I am exposed to an attention overload, how do i select the attention deficits to filter this? How do the tools i use select what they will attend to?

I spent an hour 20 yesterday trying to convince my mobile phone to talk with me let alone anyone else. Part of my life I cannot have back...
I told myself again and again that my mobile was to make my life easier... i had an inkling that i had been suckered into thinking this thing that was meant to improve my life and had decided i was not worthy of it. So much for my reach being extended, my voice being carried, or my hearing being able to cross the Tasman. For a cyborg I wasnt doing very well. Seemed something as supposedly worldwide as global roaming, visa top ups and the international company of vodafone could not make good on promises. Be with your bestmate anywhere anytime...yeah right.
I fell into a dark hole for a small time.

I begin to wonder who and what is determining my reality.

Schirrmacker provoked in me some angst for my very human condition, I suspect i need a psychotherapist to help me with this one:
but with the possibilities unfolding

the question of predictive search and others, of determinism, becomes much more interesting. The question of free will, which always was a kind of theoretical question — even very advanced people said, well, we declare there is no such thing as free will, but we admit that people, during their chidhood, will have been culturally programmed so they believe in free will.

i had loved Pandora, our detachment was a forced one. Should i now be grateful that my 'choices' are no longer contrived by the machine?
I love amazon.com, should i be worried that my choices could be traced?
On my blog, my readers are more likely to be looking at just one posting than any other (it mentions panties) ...(whoops I've done it again).

That i am not so fully in control of how i might be perceived, or judged that I might not be so much predicting my own life, but having it predicted by others, through the cloud, through the ways i am linked to the Internet, are matters of import. Not so much that i should retreat from such involvements but that I should be more interested and invested with where such creations take me.

Reading Latour(2008), he talks me through the sin with Shelly's Frankenstein - was not in the making but in the abandonment. To withdraw from technology is not an answer, it is not possible, i am already inside of the machine and it in me.

How then to proceed? What is important, what is not important is something Schirrmacker describes as being linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad....

And I suspect it needs time because in the chaos of now, things are always unclear, it is with hindsight that a trajectory can be plotted.
Meantime I live withe the 'wealth of information' available, and the means with which to access it . I wonder to myself about the wonders of this- do thesis now have more references than 10 years ago... Are the expectations on PhD students to be well read more demanding now that there is so much more that can and therefore should be accessed? In my 100,000 word thesis, is 20,000 in referencing something that reshapes academia...and thereby me? being in this information cascade how to cope with information bittiness?

Nick Bilton, reassures me saying

We'll create and consume whatever information makes us happy, fulfills us, and leave the rest by the wayside. Maybe. Or maybe we'll school like fish in the Web's algorithmic currents, little Nemos, each of us convinced we're going our own way because, well, we never stop talking, never stop sharing the minutiae of our lives and thoughts. Look at me!

The informavore in me just hopes i dont get swallowed by sharks while I'm finding Nemo.


References
Latour, B. (2008). “It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization In J. Proctor (Ed.), Postenvironmentalism: MIT Press.
Shirrmacker, F. (2009) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html#sp