objects we think with; I am therefore I think...revisited

I'd been cleaning out my parents unit and came across a wooden folding ruler and a wooden pyramid shaped 3d ruler and these reminded me of ways of thinking. I was reminded of maths classes where slide rules were the technology of the moment and log books...I couldn't use either now - I was going to say for love nor money. Love of such 'technology' and my Dads old tools could pique my curiosity.
And then in my google alerts there was a prompt to Sherry Turkle on Evocative objects; Things we think with. A student, gnaedigefrau, had a task to match a self taken photo and some poetry, and it got me thinking, again. My laptop has me thinking, the connectivity of the internet has me thinking...and I have to concede that things i think with include people, friends and strangers. I had been tagged to write of 25 things about myself in facebook, and it got me thinking...
I was 'mucking about' and fluttered into twitter, and there Colin Warren provoked some more thinking, an exercise in networking where a ball of wool was thrown around a lecture theatre symbolically concretising the networks.

There are multiple layers or realities involved in this provocation to thinking, the performance involves multiple realities of intimacy within a public space, and of being a thoughtful phd student while also being a lecturer...and I am reminded students will be blogging their learning too in the knowledge and enquiry paper, and how the tracing of thinking becomes possible with hypertext links making some of this more overt. A committment to what Wesch refers to as being knowledge able as oppossed to knowledgable.

I'm now seeing in Latour's writing when he writes of an ANT informed analysis as being a way to see, for instannce a cloth, folded, and refolded where what is illuminated is subject to change. And that this too is a performance, and the researchers own part in this is a further aspect to whats performed, whats seen and not seen. That reality is more than a perspective, its an engagement and it is not fixed, actors and artefacts are all shaped in combination. Mol talked of the ways different people engaged with arteriosclerosis, showing the multiplicity of this disease entity, but what of how the same actor engages differently at different times. Here's where there's an opening for investigating identity work.
I behave differently here than there, with these things rather than those things...My thinking is shaped by the tools i use, and is also presented differently because of the tools used.