Studying the blur; hunting for elusive objects

The more i look, the less distinct my research becomes, what hope then for any reader?

It is with joy that I discover, again, the writing of Casper Jensen who found it so hard to know his own object of study, the electronic patient record.

I take heart from this for I am studying emergent changes in counselling wrought with technology in a youth counselling centre. To explain to others that I am studying change, and my focus happens to be a youth counselling centre undergoing change as it alters its ways of relating because of technologies such as text and email and internet message board processes is also correct.
But then the problems start coming in thick and fast for when i voice this I am asked for a clear delineation of whether text counselling is good or bad or should even be called counselling. And that's where it gets trickier, because counselling is an indistinct entity also.
Pop on top of that the study of change and looking for what's there now but wasn't then, or what wasn't present then but is now, plus consideration for what was planned with what actually occurred, as well as the sequalae of a ripple effect ... a fractal object spread in textual artefacts occurring within a network of moving actors and of no clear geographical location ... and it feels like I'm studying a blur.
I am heartened that i am not alone for Casper Jensen also writes of conversations assuming involvement in the practical development of a specific technology. Alternatively the political processes relating to current events; and asked for evaluative judgments of good or bad. He says "Such understandings are rather far from the mark, however, offering a lucid exposition of just what and where that mark is has proven insistently elusive throughout my project."

At least i am not alone
:)
And thankyou Peter for introducing me to endnote groups as it was because i reopened Casper Jensen's article to decide what topics to place it under that this gem of insight fell out.

Ref
Jensen, C. B. (2004). Experimental devices. Studies in STS and electronic patient records. University of Aarhus, Aarhus.

Todays half glass is half empty and the spirulina is green slime.

I have confirmation today that peer review in academia is a fickle process.

A paper I wrote for Ascilite 09 is accepted.
(I'd say yay, except the celebrations are somewhat muted.)

It scored between three reviewers ranging 4.5-6.15 on a 7 point scale.
As was my experience last year, what some reviewers like others hate. The instruction then is to respond to the feedback.
Pity no-one checks to see if there is any consistency between the reviewers comments.

What is confirmed is that "you cant please all of the people all of the time."

mmmm

Reviewer 1 said nothing positive but accepts the paper.
Reviewer 2 comments on the melodramatic tone then continues,
"Despite the paper being written with excellent grammar and spelling, the writing is quite complex and requires re-reading to fully grasp the ideas
expressed in the paper."
Reviewer 3 says
"The paper is well expressed and presents a strong argument for the need to re-examine how text messaging is perceived in educational contexts. The argument put forward is logical and well supported by the literature cited."

I'm happy with the paper.
When I wrote it I felt there wasn't much new and there wasnt much to do with education.
And I wasnt sure i could write.

Rereading it, i know I can write.
There is newness in that content applications had not been addressed previously.
And I now have more space to make relevant links more formally to education.
Still its descriptive, but that's what actor-network theory does.
To me it feels lightweight, but with applications worth sharing.

Here is the abstract:

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

The concept of young people being negatively affected by the ubiquitous mobile phone, 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.

actors are not always human, a demonstration

Actors are not always human, in this example people are responding to a non-human actor ... previously people were choosing the convenience of speed and rest in using an escalator where the escalator could have been deemed a non-human actor also.
The alteration to the stairs brings in new actions, interestingly the new behaviour also involves in many instances an added delay. Enjoy!

'Love is watching someone die'

Sarah introduced me to "What Sarah Said"
where 'Love is watching someone die'
Mum has significant bruising to half her face having fallen on Friday and is increasingly fragile.
Today talking, sipping through a straw and breathing all seem too hard for her.

I are/we am

I remember an early school experience where i felt humiliated being made to stand and read aloud some of my writing while other children in the class were asked to point out the mistake made. I was about 6 and had written I are, and attempted to defend this grammatical error by saying but I am always more than one, my twin brother and I are always together... Didnt work, the plurality was not anticipated and got drummed out of me. It is a pleasure to be reading Latour on Tarde, and feel vindicated that while grammatically incorrect,
philosophocally i are very astute!


This article by Latour seems to be arguing that identity cant answer questions of behaviour because identity too is made in contexts

"...whenever you want to understand a network, go look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor go look through the net the work it has traced. In both cases, the point is to avoid the passage through the vague notion of society....
So far, all of philosophy has been founded on the verb To be, whose definition seemed to have been the Rosetta's stone to be discovered. One may say that, if only philosophy had been founded on the verb To have, many sterile discussions, many slowdown of the mind, would have been avoided. From this principle 'I am', it is impossible to deduce any other existence than mine, in spite of all the subtleties of the world. But affirm first this postulate : 'I have' as the basic fact, and then the had as well as the having are given at the same time as inseparable" (Latour citing Tarde)

And Latour expands further, saying
"Here goes Hamlet, as well as Descartes with his cogito, Heidegger with his Being qua Being, together with thousand of homelies about the superiority of what 'we are' above what 'we have'. Quite the opposite, Tarde instructs us. Nothing is more sterile than identity philosophy —not to mention identity politics— but possession philosophy —and may be possession politics ?— create solidarity and attachments that cannot be matched. "For thousands of years, people have catalogued the many ways of beings, the many kinds of beings, and no one ever had the idea of cataloguing the various kinds, the various degrees of possession. Yet, possession is the universal fact, and there is no better term than that of 'acquisition' to express the formation and the growth of any being'' p. 89. If essence is the way to define an entity within the 'To be' philosophy, for the 'To have' philosophy an entity is defined by its properties and also by its avidity� No way to escape from Tarde's logic: take any monad [individual, atom, unit of measure], if you look at what are its properties and its proprietors, you will be led to define the whole cosmos, which would be impossible if you had only tried to define the essence of an isolated identity."

Brings back a Latourian tenet I had earlier had difficulty with 'existence precedes essence'.
Here I seean application for identity does not precede what makes it.
Identity is made, it is plural...the body is multiple in more ways than that described by Annemarie Mol.
And then to take this a step (or several steps) further, and here's a new thought (for me) in the making:
If "The whole outside universe is composed of souls different from mine, but, in effect, similar to mine'' p.44 (Latour citing Tarde again).
And if we/you/I concede that in knowing something, I only know it in as much as I can fathom, recognise and/or project my beliefs about its being anything at all, then part of me is in everything I meet...
Then
"if you don't want to share avidity and belief with the things you have, then also stop to say what they are. The accusation is upturned and the burden of proof shifted to the accusators. Abstain from the ridiculous solution to say that things exist in themselves but that you cannot know them. Either you talk or you remain silent. But you cannot possibly speak and say that the things you speak about are not in some ways similar to you: they express through you a sort of difference that has you, the speaker, as one of their proprietors. What looks like an impossibility with the philosophy of identity, offers no difficulty with the philosophy of 'alteration'. Possession is another way of talking about translation.

To paraphrase Latour's discussion further: After this brief brief brief brief presentation of some of Tarde's and Latour's thinking on the metaphysics of social theory, you/we/i may now understand why so much of ANT appears difficult:
you/we/i don't want to be had.

What's new? and can I get some.

what's new media?
I tripped over this question on a couple of blogs this morning (Jenna McWilliams and Julie at new media power) and seems to me it's a subset of a question I address in the early parts of my thesis. An opportunity then for clarifying my own thoughts since my thesis is about new and emergent technologies in a Youth counselling centre as at some stage I am going to have to clean up that section...

In popular parlance, a new technology is anything invented after you were born.
I quite like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

E.M. Rogers pointed to the use of the word innovations and technology being used synonymously as many of the ideas analysed are technological innovations. He defined innovation to be an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new. So it's something in the eye of the beholder.

For Ursula Franklin, technology is 'the way things are done around here' so new means its new to the context. And i like how she expands on this in ways grounded in reality...Thats why i think it is better to examine limited settings where one puts technology in context, because context is what matters most. . one has to keep in mind how the practice of doing something defines the activity itself... precludes the emergence of other ways....it saves us from thinking of technology as part of the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself.

Taking those involved and the context then as a primary consideration, an actor-network analysis is helpful as looking at what makes things more and less real provides greater depth to understanding hoow some new things 'take off' and some fizzle. Bruno latour's take on what makes something real is that, “...anything can become more or less real, depending on the continuous chains of translation. It’s essential to continue to generate interest, to seduce, to translate interests. You can’t ever stop becoming more real.” (Latour, 1996: 85)

A new take on the story of the velveteen rabbit- Being played with makes it real.

Seems to me it is the process of becoming involved with something that makes for better questions in new innovations, technologies or media. In what ways are we both shaped and shaping when we negotiate our involvement; play, work or tinker with such things? And I really like how Chris Bigum and Leonie Rowan sum this up in saying:
"The key issue here is that innovation... is not determined by scope or scale, but by direction and effect."

Expanding this further, how then are we pushed and pulled, knowingly and unknowingly, as we work, play and tinker with new technologies and as new technologies work, play and tinker with us? For as Sproull and Kiesler have identified, it's not just the changes that we anticipate that may be important. And in areas where the changes are about communication, such effects become hugely important because, as identified by Sherry Turkle, '“The tools we use to think, change the ways in which we think.” (2004, p.1).And Clay Shirkey takes this further,"When we change the way we communicate we change society."

There are a lot of new ideas out there just fighting for survival, and in a Darwinian survival of the species mode, if they can get copied they will...using you and me as their propagation, copying machinery...we are the meme machines as eloquently expressed by Susan Blackmore on memes). What's new may be less important than how might we use it, and how might it use us?

References
Franklin, U. (1999). The real world of technology (Revised ed.). Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis: Or the love of technology (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5 ed.). New York: Free Press.
Rowan, L., & Bigum, C. (2005). Innovation chains; possibilities and constraints for critical perspectives on computers, difference and educational Innovation. Paper presented at the OQL Seminar, Deakin University, Melbourne.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes every-body. London: Allen Lane.
Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1991). Connections. New ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Its a bit like doing health promotion in a war zone

The one laptop perchild programme (OLPC) is apparently 'not working'.
Providing deworming tablets at hugely lower costs can also be shown to have significant effects on school attendance and potentially also on income earning potentials in a population.
Not quite as sexy as a colourful laptop though.

An actor-network analysis might point to the laptop as suffering from faith in its technical determinism and forgetting that it needed to enroll human actors to also make it work. Not least of which is the telecos, internet charges were/are crippling. The laptop aimed to be provided as a one off charge US$100 per child and an initial charge in the first year of $1 for internet access....but then that vanishes and the costs come in, leading to more, rather than less, indebtedness.

For the OLPC project to succeed, it needs to accept that it's selling a $100 laptop with an $872 support plan, and find countries that can afford it as such.

says Jon Camfield

IT's all a bit sad really.
Pity the blogger condemning the OLPC campaign wasn't savvy enough to point to what needs to be done differently, 'cause things can always be different when the networks understood.

The problem of scale

Clay Shirky describes the problems of scale; when you have 20 emails a day, its no problem, quadruple this and its getting difficult, ten fold and there's a serious problem because bigger is not just about more, it's different.
Think about it; a two km walk every day is pleasant, a two km walk faster, to fit in 10 two km walks a day isn't.

Youthline (NZ) has had a 1280 percent increase in its text messaging in the last year.
Rapid learning curve; its not the same when it's faster.

Shirky cites Merlin Mann regarding the foibles of email, and I think the similarities here carry a portend of doom;
"Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one tiny thing. "What pile? It's just a pebble!"

The ability to create conversational opportunity seemingly effortlessly seemingly creates its own capacity for failure as a means of conversing; it works up until the point that it cannot, that it becomes pointless.

The limiting effects of scale; the limits of human cognition will mean that scale alone will kill conversation.
Need to create a way of managing the scale; how to hold the conversations?

writing on the inside, performing a Phd

wordlebubble, originally uploaded by ai1sa.

If I wrote on the inner aspect of a glass sphere,
it couldnt be more difficult;
positioning me would be less important;
positioning you, wouldn't be my concern.

Getting in or out of the glass sphere
now there's a problem for another day :)

meat in the sandwich; and which relish would you like with that?

William Doll's approach to curriculum is very much one of relating, something neither he nor I see a lot of in a functional approach of outcome based ideas married to assessment processes; easily audited but loses the plot.
To instead take Dewey's vision of integrating education, schooling, curriculum and community into a seamless whole, would require conversation. A willingness to engage with those involved, with authenticity.
Taking Daniel Pink's suggestions in arguing the economical transition needed, for conceptual rather than knowledge workers similarly emphasises the relational also.
But that would take some fundamental shifts that valued communication skills; listening and empathy. Such skills seem to my mind to be in diminishing supply in the university that is increasingly focused on technologies mediating its purpose. Such devices as ppt and content management systems can be useful, but its worth looking at how such shaping impacts on teaching and learning...not just at a technological application level but a level that looks at the sociotechnical relationships that evolve. Jan Nespor does a fine job of this bringing together an analysis including the wider picture of how come there was a readiness for this evolution in current teaching and learning practices in the university. I'm enjoying his writing style with personable quips such as "how had my work ended up as meat on somebody's lunch line?" A sentiment I can relate to.

Flipping thoughts

Two days of not writing, and a mini sized crisis of confidence...
And then some thinking that came in on a tangent :)

I'd been reading Tatnall, A., & Davey, B. (2003). An actor network approach to informing clients through portals. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 771-779.
Their very clear description of a network described from the perspective, primarily, of those creating the change, who happen to be service providers, had me do a flip on my thinking.
I was spot on way back when i thought the mobile was an obligatory passage point (in ANT speak). I just was unable to make it fit because i was coming at it from the wrong direction. AND was unable to hold that point of tension because of the multiple OPPs involved, which could all be explained in a pre and after Ant way.
ANT has been criticised for its management centred approach and i was blind to the bias as it resided within me. I knew the options for counselling made it far from obligatory...until today.
Turning this on its head I get this:
From the users perspective; the text format on the mobile is an OPP as its "use this or we dont talk."
Its the users who are binding the other actors into place.
Text counselling wasnt the first choice of counsellors, the organisation or its techy people.
Here's an example of an organisation that prides itself on its responsiveness to its target group...and inside of this is an example where the target gp even tho it never meets and has no 'leader' , and only has artefacts, or one-on-one conversations, is driving a change. Even where there is voice given to their concern, its created by users... This is a pretty unique experience in change theory. Unique in actor-network worlds also by putting the focus on the users in the network. It is relational and the change might be seen as initiated more by the ebb than the flow.
Worth following up a bit more Clay Shirkey in Here comes everybody, of how social media used in this way is shaping those it connects.

Working with a primarily volunteer / not for profit organisation, and with a service claiming to be responsive to its consumer group, challenges the conventional thinking on how change occurs.

Seems so obvious in hindsight...

Deskilling humanity or cyborg enhancement?

Ivan Illich wrote of the effects of school as more than a dependent variable within society; but as the reproductive organ of a consumer society. If I take the institution of schools as being nothing but a tool that leads to another end, the education of people, I miss so much of what does and doesnt go on. He argued for a radical change to how teaching and learning might therefore be envisaged, namely by deschooling society.

His 'deskilling' argument leads me to wonder about more recent innovations with the ways we might to do things,and to wonder if the outsourcing of so much of people's abilities to their mobile phones is a deskilling of their humanity or just sour grapes on my part.
See, I dont have one, iwant one, an iphone that is.

This mornings rant is following a nice little column on smartphones by Richard Fisher that helps that author find a cab, a cafe, is a note taker and records interviews, times his teeth brushing, maps and times his cycle rides, and even finds itself through a synch option with a computer. Fortunately he drew the line at only musing about the vibrator option (I know, don't go there).
The cyborg connection is made, there's enhancement of abilities. And there are questions of what does this do to how we function as people.

In light of my PhD study: I continue to consider the questions of what it means to be mediated by a mobile phone in our relationships with others, specifically with regard to counselling relationships mediated by text. And I continue to wonder about the assemblages that create changes in the ways we relate; how such changes occur and what the anticipated and unanticipated results might be.
I am prompted, again, to wonder of how we are shaping the mediums we use, and how they might be shaping us, for no other technology is so close, so much of the time.
What impact does this have on our relationships and on us?

As expressed by one of the young people interviewed for my study, "I had every technology possible, but it was my mobile i reached for." Texting was her first choice for a conversation she anticipated as likely to be distressing, not because it denied the emotions involved, but because it allowed her to express these.

And the reskilling that then occurs seems to more than compensate; have a look at this article on the positive associations texting has for literacy in August Wired magazine.

The secret life of text

I've been looking at the intimate relations of writers and their text to investigate how the written medium might carry the message.

On screen writing is easier on the eye, apparently, when it uses a sans serif font(one without the extra edging on each letter).
On paper, serif with its extra flourishes are, apparently, easier on the eye.
The default for mobile phone texts appears to be sans serif.

Apparently for higher academic grades, go with Georgia, at least according to a curious but lively little blog on The Secret Lives of Fonts posted by Phil Renaud on March 12th, 2006.
... or at least that's what was seen as preferable, back then, or more authoritative, or matches what newspapers (such as The New Yorker).

But my searching didn't answer my own question which is about showing multiple voices in a thesis and so am still curious of ways to do this.

Bruno Latour's, Aramis or the love of technoology divides the sections of different voice with inserted lines and changing fonts: using Times New Roman font for the main text to one sans serif for documents, and different again for interviews (where his own prompts to the conversation are italicised), different again for a senate hearing of multiple people that is all italicised but reads like a play, and also seems to change font between what is current time investigation to that which is written in the third person posturing a more theoretical voice, and then an italicised font for Aramis' voice.
It does get a little hard to follow.

John Law, in Aircraft stories, puts in the advertising voice as an inserted exhibit with sans serif. He also puts in pertinent conceptual discussions as a boxed text.
To my mind, it could have done with more voice.

I will continue this search for a text life
:)
Happy to hear your views, or any reference to other texts that speak in multiple voice.
Its for a thesis, so I may have to draw the line on use of coloured font.

Designing a PhD thesis in a conceptual age

It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? Bruno Latour

How might the academy change? Taking a more personal concern, how might a PhD thesis be designed? If we take a whole new mind to information and to concepts as suggested by Daniel Pink in moving from an Information age to a Conceptual one, what might be the implications for the Univeristy and for PhD writing if such a shift were taken seriously? How might this inform a thesis undertaking?

Information age:
Function
Argument
Focus
Logic
Seriousness
Knowledge accumulation

Conceptual age:
Design
Story
Symphony
Empathy
Play
Meaning

The thesis of the knowledge era suggests functionality: get accredited by following the rules: the thesis presents the coherent argument, is logical, focused, serious and contributes to the knowledge base of the world. In doing so, new approaches to learning are not being transferred, the institution that is the academy is lagging behind.

In a a thesis crafted in design, the very foundations of purpose are shaken.
According to Pink, design is utility enhanced by significance (p.70).
Design is more than titivation, it's about value added portrayal.
Latour's speech at design Cornwall argues design as a drawing of things together.
My undertaking as drawing things together involves a work of alchemy; combining myself, a supportive professor with a bent toward actor-network theory, and a voluntary organisation thirsty for establishing an evidence base for newer practices. The next challenge is in drawing in the academy to credential my doctoral work - to positively entice, bind and glue such readers to the undertaking.

In telling the story of change, I plan for intersecting slices of stories of practice. In story telling,a provocation is made where the reader is not a passive spectator but enters into the story. Stories encapsulate the knowledge, the context and the emotion into a compact package. In an argument, the information sledgehammers a point, and the outcomes are constrained, agree or disagree, yet such binaries no longer serve so well, if they ever did. I am not arguing against an analytical position but that such knowledge might be shared with a means that creates contextual relevance. As Pink describes it, "what stories can provide - context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters." In such a conceptual orientation the outcome is not telling others what to think or do; instead there is space for making local, contextual, even personal, meaning at a given point in time. An approach more akin to projecting light on certain aspects while recognising such practice also creates shadows. Given an orientation that suggests all knowledge as mediated, truths have a small 't' and have have limited portabiltity.

My study lends itself to a symphony approach, the knowledge gained, illuminated, presented and (re)presented require involvement. I am involved, and in that involvement, there's a negotiation between myself and others, myself and the material, myself and the reader.Such a thesis could not be seen as a one way viewing window, nor a sport for spectators. (And I am really not sure that the academy is ready for this radical provocation in their marking criterias.)

Being empathetic involves having the ability to see an issue from many different perspectives. There are politics then in choosing to be empathic, to consider others and to consider the issues of what is made visible or invisible. A dispassionate approach is one that I cannot accept as valid; people's lives can be made more and less tenable through such acts. Performing a thesis is therefore a political, ethical and moral act. What is studied and how this is portrayed and to what purpose are all critical questions.

Taking a serious stance often leads to total risk aversion. There needs to be space for error, for exploration, in this sense seriousness needs to be revisited. A more playful orientation can allow for ideas to be explored more fully. To toy with one's ideas, to bounce them around are not such unusual concepts to thinking peoples. Taking play seriously though will also need to accept imaginative possibilities. Imagining such change inside of well established 'tried and true' processes may have shattering implication. Will such explorative 'play' be accepted?

Making meaning to my mind, is the ongoing act of this alchemy, for meaning gets created in contexts, locally. The craft is in opening up possibilities, for as an actor network approach would have it, things can always be otherwise.

A final word on designing from Bruno Latour on design:

"To design is never to create ex nihilo. It is amusing that creationists in America use the word “intelligent design” as a rough substitute for “God the Creator”. They don’t seem to realize the tremendous abyss that exists between creating and designing. The most intelligent designers never start from a tabula rosa. God the designer is really a redesigner of something else that was already there —and this is even truer for His Son as well as for the Spirit, who both are sent to redeem what has been botched in the first place... If humanity “has been made (or should I have said designed?) as the image of God”, then they too should learn that things are never created but rather carefully and modestly redesigned. It is in that sense that I take the spread of the word design as a clear substitute for revolution and modernization. I do so furthermore, because there is always something slightly superficial in design, something clearly and explicitly transitory, something linked to fashion and thus to shifts in fashions, something tied to tastes and therefore somewhat relative."

A link to the pdf file of the speech is available here-
www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf

How to win friends and influence people; an Ant rant.

If you want to change what your boss 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(Seth Godin, 2009).

Seth Godin's approach on being willfully ignorant or aggressively skeptical is useful up to a point; being well informed helps, but of itself its not enough. What would take this a bit further is a consideration for the type of knowledge needed.

The type of knowledge is important. Actor-network provides a structured approach, as do many other theories, but central to this approach is a focus on relational knowledge; what it is that maintains what is, and in knowing this, there is scope for knowing that things might always be otherwise.

In looking at change, what's not so helpful, and could be considered offensive even, is an approach that is trivial, and neglects the multiplicity involved.
An informed, multilevel analysis broadens the options; being the best informed person in the room means understanding the network at play.

moral panic & children's use of mobile phones

Daleks are training the children, seducing them with mobiles phones and texting, it is a world wide threat, and resistance is futile. Here's the empirical evidence:
Todays headline catastrophises mobile phone use and texting comes from the Sydney Morning Herald, a Melbourne University study says

Text-addict kids 'make more mistakes'

The spin maintained pathologises the behaviours as addiction and as impulsive and associated with error.
Basically its bad.
And its the cell phone that's training them?

A study of 317 Melbourne high school students found frequent mobile phone users were faster to respond in a series of tests but also made more errors.

A bit more balance might have said, "when you do things faster, the error rate increases, risk and speed are not associated with accuracy".

Those who made 15 to 20 calls or texts per week were more likely to respond quickly before they knew the correct answer.

Does that equate with people who like to communicate in quick ways, with little concern for accuracy are likely to respond in quick ways with little degree of accuracy?

The research, headed by Monash University epidemiologist Professor Michael Abramson, found predictive texting, in particular, was changing the way children's brains worked by teaching them to act before thinking through a response.

Now hang on a minute, there's a behaviour being commented on and suddenly the ways children's brains work is being altered? I'd suggest no pathologist is able to confirm this.
Furthermore, there is nothing presented here that any such alteration is in a cause and effect relationship, its a correlation.

Radiation associated with mobile phones, a long-held health fear, did not appear to be to blame for the higher rates of inaccuracy in frequent phone users.
Monash University researcher Geza Benke said children who were heavy texters, and were exposed to low levels of radiation, had similar test results as those who made a lot of phone calls and were in closer contact with handsets.

Bit more catastrophising, a long held fear, plus there's the radiation threat...

"There's a couple of hypotheses you can generate from this - one is that it's possible that the use of mobile phones is training kids to do this," Dr Benke said.

"Another possibility is that it just so happens that kids who are fast and don't worry too much about the errors they make tend to be the ones who also are using the phone technology more because that suits them.

Ah yes, but that wouldnt be a headline lead would it?

"I think there are already so many other things out there that affects kids' brains that I wouldn't worry about the mobiles," he said.
"I think there's nothing here that would show great concern from a public health point of view."

So what is it with the headline?
Some reading to inform the current moral panic:
Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new. Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century New York: Oxford University Press.

nomo phobia

Anyone noticed that the number of zombies increased with the uptake of cell phones?
Personally I havent met any greater numbers of young walking dead than elderly or middle aged walking dead, and i do not accept that this is due to an absence of my observation skills. I've taken a great interest in mobile phone use, particularly texting and cant say that it has increased the zombie population.
I do appreciate that there are people young and otherwise who are seriously attached to their cell phones. According to Chipman, a cell phone is the third most likely thing to be picked up on leaving the house (after a wallet and keys).
But I think that pathologising the attachement would be a bit like saying those who lock there houses (something my mum and dad did not do) are paranoid. I dont see that there is really a psychological problem here.
The projection that because others (read young people) act differently in terms of their connectability, is pathological has gained currency with the media. Research by Sherry Turkle gets reported so often I am tempted to turn off my google alerts on her name following the May, New York Times interview. At least she had suggested, tentatively, that it 'may' cause a shift in the way they develop. Well yes, it may. The same article cited another psychologist saying it also has potential for benefit. This doesnt get repeated. Nor does it get repeated where it said its too early to tell.

Seems demonising sells papers, but its not possible to trace 'the research' behind the suppositions. There are articles oft repeated in papers, and there are interviews with people with an interest in such things such as Sherry Turkle. But the evidence is more anecdotal and tentative than gets repeated in the media. In Sherry Turkle's publications at the MIT website, there is no research evidence demonstrating increased cases of developmental delay. What is present is speculation on possibilities, on how people are shaping their interactions and being shpaed inside of those interactions.

That others act differently does not indicate a change in physiology. There is no new form of psychiatric illness, there is no cell phone induced developmental delay. There is no measurable alteration in electrical wiring nor in chemistry.

The capacity to be connected by cell phone provides an avenue to do what has always been done, differently, and differently creates differences. But the differences worth studying may well be the other things happening concurrently ; We might want to look at other factors impacting on young people in terms of how tethered they might be to their parents...increasing debt secondary to the costs of study also significantly impacts on independence.

We are facing change, and it is worth looking at. Should we reject Turkle’s work and refuse to accept the suggestions of emotional developmental delay completely? Perversely, I say no. Latour quoting Kant says “It is not enough to show that something is an illusion we also need to understand why the illusion is necessary.”
There's something in this that suggests change is newsworthy, but is extra newsworthy when its frightening or provocative. In emphasising supposed difference, and in making technology the source of difference, anxieties are provoked that can help the 'rest of us' feel comfortable. What might occur if we were to take away this excuse for our anxieties? We might have to start accepting the needs young people have for feeling connected, we might stop blaming them and look at ourselves.

The tipping point; stickiness; and scale

Malcolm Gladwell's analysis on how small things can be responsible for substantive changes is an enticing read, and there are some similarities to an actor network intent; there is a mystery to unravel. However, Galdwell seems a bit too keen to attribute causative features down to the few things, rather than the many.
He describes ho (some) changes occur with a contagion like effect. If I look at the stats for Youthline's mobile phone text counselling service, there's been the exponential growth, it started small, grew in smallish increments, then starts doubling. All this with advertising that in no way is synchronised with such growth; first when it was launched- and even here the adverts could have been confused with the greening of a philanthropic company, the new free texting phone number has barely been advertised- once in tearaway magazine.
When I talked with 2 users of the service, neither had been consciously influenced by the advertising. One had known of it through extended family and one by associations with happier times, a presence at yoth events. This is something that is worth recognising in the committment of this community organisation to 'building the brick mother'.

Gladwell defines the tipping point as the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.... a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." There are growth curves that happen exponentially, but being actor network theory inclined, I disagree with the unstoppable. I accept the exponential nature of viral contagion, but he doesn't talk of what happens next, because such fads as he mentions also stop, such viruses do outgrow their nurturing environments and grow beyond sustainability. The conditions that made for the event, can also alter- because of that event or for other reasons. Things can always configure differently. If I pour boiling water on an agar plate the doubling stops...if the conditions that make for cheap texting stop, so too could the demand for Youthline's texting service.

In the liklihood of such changes moving socially, Gladwell also talks of stickiness. This is a concept that is also discussed by community of practice writers such as Wenger. The point of difference actor network theory might bring to these accounts is that stickiness can be held because of the nonhuman actor:
When Em texted Youthline, she could keep the responses on her phone, a cell phone's memory is 'sticky', unless actively deleted its a reminder. She kept them "because they felt good". The messages provided ongoing affirmation. The other thing she did was push a message saying "Youthline does txt counselling 4 free, # 234 and sent it to 6 people and she had sure knowledge that one of these people sent it to another 12. The forwarding function provides an ease of conveying the message; this message too is 'sticky'. Unlike the game called either 'Chinese whispers' or 'broken telephone', accuracy stays intact.

In actor network theory terms, its also about the cellphone as a non human actor having attributes that create the conditions that make something more likely to occur.
At the same time, it takes a network, not an individual. Gladwell's argument is based on the 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Milgram distributed letters to 160 students in Nebraska, with instructions that they be sent to a stockbroker in Boston (not personally known to them) by passing the letters to anyone else that they believed to be socially closer to the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully. This gave rise to Gladwell's theory that certain types of people are key to the dissemination of information.
In 2003, Duncan Watts, a network-theory sociologist at Columbia University, repeated the Milgram study by using a web site to recruit 61,000 people to send messages to 18 targets worldwide. He successfully reproduced Milgram's results (the average length of the chain was approximately six links). However, when he examined the pathways taken, he found that "hubs" (highly connected people) were not crucial. Only 5% of the e-mail messages had passed through one of the hubs. (Wikipedia re Gladwell's Tipping point)

What remains essential is the work required. Rather than multiconnected individuals, that might make the physical movement of a letter easier, the electronic actor has no such limitation.The absence of an intimate relationship makes it very easy to ask to have a message passed on. Who these days would willingly cross countries or states.
The electronic medium creates an easy option, cheap cost wise and effort wise. Clay Shirkey in Here comes everbody explains this in terms of cheap transaction costs. Lowering transaction costs provide a platform for communities of practice. The potential only evolves though, only picks up speed because of the ubiquity of the message carrier, the tool allows for increasingingly rapid communication.

Cascading knowledge of a service also results in increased scale for the service to meet demand. A challenge then for how to get counsellors up to speed with providing the service...but perhaps more importantly just as more is different, faster is different. How to manage multi conversations occurring simultaneously?

a thesis as slices of stories

Daniel Pink's book, A whole new mind, lists the aptitudes for success in a conceptual era. These include
Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.
I'm wondering if the academy can embrace the shift from the knowledge age with its logics and linear approach and instead value Pink's conceptual concerns of engagement.

Since i am writing a thesis informed by actor-network theory, how might Pink's attributes be demonstrated?
Design would encompass what 'makes things up' not as fantasy but very much as an empirical analysis of what is pulled together. For the thesis, design is also about form with function, design not being an act of titivation. I can use art work, poetry, allegory ... but not as a gimmick, it has to progress the story. And because the academy may not be attuned to work in a conceptual rather than knowledge era, such use needs arguing.

The 'story' tells of how other actors are seduced into such design. How we enrol others and peel them off from prior, or distracting, concerns. In addition, an ANT thesis presents the research story as partial, and or fractal and or overlapping. The multivocal voice need to consider all actors, human and otherwise, so voice is uncovered for such actors; what is the influence of the environment, or of the tools of the trade.
In Aramis Latour demonstrates the use of story to convey multiple stories of a mystery in Who killed Aramis, a nascent form of transportation. In the Body multiple, Mol demonstrates through the telling of empirical stories the multiple performances of practice demonstrating arteriosclerosis as a multiple entity.
Stories are not lineal in the making, they are made lineal retrospectively.To simplify this ignores the messiness that is part of the social (dis)order, and as Law suggests, to make such complexity simple may be to make a mess of it.
The storytelling is not to imply that fiction or facts are necessarily separate entities. In ANT all research is also partial, it does not stand in isolation from those who create it....all facts are creations. In addition, to tell of 'facts' may not suffice, our ability to access knowledge has never been greater, but of itself this does not result in changed behaviour. We probably all know of smokers who are well informed on the facts. Pink tells us "What begins to matter more [than mere data] is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact."

In symphony there is a pulling together, how might it be done with more deliberate intent, if one were wanting a particular shape what could be pushed, pulled, left alone. Here its worth the time spent with Itay on youtube for there is an art to great composition and to leading.

This symphony also takes into account the custodial role of telling the story, for the storyteller too has impact. The story chosen and the way it is shaped, and to whome it is told...all these are alo political acts of researcher involvement.
"The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice," Pink says. And this too is the major part of an actor network informed analysis.

Empathy- having a critical imagination is to consider how unknown or unexperienced lives might also be shaped within a network. To not pretend a God like view from nowhere but to appreciate the person's own experience as that which is experienced. To have voice, to make voice. And to know when to make things more and less heard, to have empathy includes considering if whats invisible should be made visible, or not. Susan leigh Star writes on this in her ant approaches to research analysis. It is also a consideration expressed by Latour in saying always consider putting yourself at the peak of enthusiasm that has actors act the ways they do, do not play the sly one advantaged by hindsight.

Play; suggests that there are serendipitous acts that will not be fully known in advance, that there needs to be space for the unknown. To be playful is also about leaving space for being creative, to consider that new learnings may be told in new ways. And also that what is planned for doesnt usually consider failure and risk.

Meaning, and finally to make meaning is also to know that things might also be performed differently, there is therefore scope that things might also be performed differently.

Seems to me that a conceptual approach is congruent with Actor- network theory.

a meme fashion victim

Visiting David Weinbergers joho blog, and followed a tail to memetracker,

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs. We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.

My mind is just boggling as to what this one refers to
"I've got this thing and its expletive golden"
a relationship?
an investment tip?
the holy grail?
Just about covers anything.
My mum used to have a picture of the golden hand of Buddha above the doorway to the kitchen, could be that :)
Blessed all who entered her space.

The memetracker is a great idea, useful for looking at where stories evolve, and get repeated. I was surprised, for a little while, to see how highly rated www.odt.co.nz and www.stuff.co.nz were rated when it comes to an analysis of where breaking stories are reported...but then again, anything that happens overnight gets reported earliest by those whose time clocks are advantaged.

getting smarter with your mobile

Back in the 1960's this is what a mobile phone looked like.
Obviously its got a dial phone, for the obvious reasons that if you stepped on uneven surfaces, or chewing gum, you wouldn't want to be accidentally phoning people or running up costly toll bills.
These were also emergent days for feminism. The problem was that while it was really hard on socks, it was an impractical device for women. Agent 99 had far too much to do in her working life to risk getting holes in her tights, in these olden days, getting holes, or runs, meant darning.
An additional problem, was that walking around with one shoe off was worse for women, the heel difference made this an impractical lopsided choice. Furthermore, the innovation developed at a time when stilettos were the fashion choice for female fashion victims, this made accidental tympanoplasty and self imbedded grommets a frightening surgical risk, especially without anaesthesia.
Then there was the social stigma attached, these were not very enlightened times regarding mental health issues, talking into ones shoe, in public, could have got you certified.
Amazing really that it ever caught on. Who would have thought That Get Smart a spy spoof would lead to the ubiquitous use of mobile phones that we have today.

Amazing also is that the phone is more memorable than the dialogue, this was 1965, there was a cold war (the war that you have when your not having a war) and remember this predated the pre-emptive strikes on weapons of mass destruction occurring 40 years later...

The dialogue between Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 in the episode titled Appointment in Sahara. Behind the two characters is an image of a mushroom cloud:

99: Oh, Max what a terrible weapon of destruction.
Smart: Yes. You know, China, Russia, and France should outlaw all nuclear weapons. We should insist upon it.
99: What if they don't, Max?
Smart: Then we may have to blast them. That's the only way to keep peace in the world.

A lol approach to thesis writing

A pleasant wet Saturday afternoon at Borders, nice comfy chairs, read the book...buy the book, seduction. I have been reading and lol(ing)the latest Janet Evanovich, finger lickn fifteen. In Borders was the How to write a book by said author, so here's some wisdoms that I take on board for the thesis.

Show up for work every day.
Write.
Dont try for perfection in the first instance, rewriting comes later.
(This is my third worst fault, my first two are not taking the first two pieces of advice seriously enough)

Don't fall into the trap of rewriting chapter one until it's perfect. And don't discard everything you write halfway through because you're sure it sucks. Writing stuff that sucks is part of the learning process!

Show dont tell, the impact in first person is stronger than it is when describing.

Instead of stating a situation flat out, you want to let the reader discover what you're trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue. Showing brings your characters to life.

(If I take this piece of wisdom, i escape my trap of having an inarticulate research participant, I just need to describe the scenario, it is its own story)
And some nuts and bolts advice on structure;
Map the story; tell it with small arcs, there should be ups and downs, there should be mini moments of suspense; use a storyboard so everything keeps progressing the plot.

Teaching naked

Students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. Why bore them with what they already have.
The purpose of presence is engagement; talk with them, discuss, debate, provoke. Construct lnowlegde together rather than throwing it at them.

Reported by Jeffrey Young, A dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, challenges colleagues to "teach naked"—by which he means, sans machines.

The article cites a survey consisting of 211 students conducted at the University of Central Lancashire and published in April in the British Educational Research Journal.
59% of students reported at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities.
"The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions."
To summarise, tech-free classrooms are more engaging.

Despite millions of dollars in investment in hightech; teaching and learning is about engagement. Bells and whistles might gain attention, but they are not a substitute for teaching.
So stop using the slide-display program of power-point as a crutch rather than as a creative tool.

Personally, I happen to like ppt...and dont want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or teach naked...
I dont have control over resources and do have the constraints of large class sizes, (usually well in excess of 150 at a time) and this does impact on debates and discussions. There are a few things that the large class size does better, the mexican wave comes to mind. And there are some advantages to a hightech environment, it just needs using better.
Think big screen, big environment, but also think engagement...

Here's resources I recommend if you are going to use ppt and the tech available, and want to do it better:
Animoto. (2009) The end of slideshows. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://animoto.com/
Brown, G., and Godin, S. (2009). Seth Godin’s Presentation hierachy. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://www.slideshare.net/GeoffBrown3231/seth-godins-presentation-hierarchy
Kaptarev, A. (2006). Death by bullet point and how to avoid it. Retrieved 17 May 2009 from http://lifehacker.com/software/presentations/stop-death-by-powerpoint-323554.php
Kawasaki, G. (2006). The art of the start. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html
Palmer, Parker J. (2007). The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Reynold, G (n.d). PresentationZen blog

(Thats the nuts and bolts, philosophizing on ed is another issue for another day)

Assessment matters

Delightful prompt from today's higher ed on how studying the humanities contribute and how such contribution might be measured.
Are we there yet?

I have had the joy for many years of being involved with students in teaching them less about content and more about processes; how to communicate, what's involved in thinking critically, what is knowledge... However, I note somewhat wryly that come assessment time, I lose their attention somewhat to the courses that seem heavy in knowledge acquisition; ones full of minutiae specific details of right or wrong answers.
And am also reminded of a non-joyous moment of almost getting a years paid leave to study a subject dear to my heart, text counselling, but failed to win over a panel member because his paradigm was entrenched in better or worse, right or wrong rather than in how it is shaped and being used or shaping and using those involved.

Here's the problem, as put forward by Michael Bérubé; How to measure the unmeasurable.
What does this research do, what footprint will it leave?

My own study is really about greater awareness doesn't have the pulling and pushing power that even an ethics committee would respect. They want to know that what is undertaken will change the world in anticipated, good, ways. But whose idea of good is not examined.

Michael Bérubé describes my angst of being involved in uncovering pluralist ways of being; how to develop and maintain pluralist societies that include people who are not pluralists.
He doesn't have an answer though., being a pluralist has its own ways of being :)
So, instead, a commitment to lifelong learning and suppleness of mind.

I cant see that one getting through a Board of studies as a written objective.
And as he says, we do not know how to measure such things.
Maybe that's also why I lost students at assessment times?

We cannot prove it, we cannot show it...
We humanists suffer from the conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living.

And there is the conundrum, how to assess it.

This reminds me also of Annmarie's excellent article on the gold standard in health of the double-blind placebo. While the argument espoused wasn't enough to win me that specific study grant it was still enough to persuade me that rather than proving, research can be about improving...tinkering with adaptability ... knowing things better.

Mol, A. (2006). Proving or improving: On health care research as a form of self-reflection. Qual Health Research, 16, 405-414.

risk aversion and mobile phones

New technology - the threat to our information

View more presentations from normanlamont.

Funny little slideshare from Norman Lamont on the inherent risks of mobile phones to business, worth of a lol
http://www.slideshare.net/normanlamont/new-technology-the-threat-to-our-information

whose in your pocket; whats on your mobile phone?

Vodafone adverts have had us folding our lovers into tight little packages to fit in our pockets...
telecom similarly, had us with our best friends everywhere, together...

Stefana Broadbent studying SMS describes this medium as the intimate channel.
A sphere in which our attachments to friends and family are managed through 'Grooming' messages - thank you, endearments... - that keep relationships alive.
Her (2006) research shows over 50% of grooming communications happen through SMS.
In her (2009) tedtalk, she describes it as a medium for democratising intimacy.

However has ubiquity altered use? My bank now reminds me of visa accounts due, my uni library lets me know when books are available...might the range of services coming through your SMS have broadened, but is it still predominantly intimate? What do you keep?

Whats kept or deleted involves choices.
I need more memory for such things :)
I look at mine, it's full of the trivial details of everyday life: I'm free for coffee, I'm 5 mins away, Doing O'K?, yes the majority of messages sustain relationships.
And then i look at what i save: well wishes, love u's, reminders I'm cared for.

A pocket full of affirmations.

Truth and transparency; Knowledge construction in a hyperlinked world

Truth and transparency in a knowledge era is well illustrated by David Weinberger in a presentation at the Personal democracy forum 2009, here he demonstrates an ecology of knowledge, where Knowledge is produced in links and has an opening commodity rather than as Facts where the binary of solid indisputable information as a discussion closer, its this or that.

Weinberger presents a coherent argument challenging the common but wrong question of trying to dispute if the internet adds or detracts. A question also thrown at value of wikipedia and google searches as students (and others) find information to substantiate claims made. And I take from this the same faultiness in similar questions posed of other social networking devices including the cell phone and texting; the wrong questions asked in: 'Is it good or bad?' What the balance? Does it open us up or close us down? Who is right or wrong? Weinberger categorically states that such questions are not important, no matter if it opens us up a little or alot, it doesnt matter...what we need is a space that works with diversity, with difference rather than one that works with individual truths. We have to work to make a space for constructive difference.
Its a clear argument, for difference is always with us. How then do we manage the awareness and relevance of this difference. I suspect it is poorly, for we tend to get enmeshed in the binary again of is it good or bad as if universal truth was where we were at. But the world has moved.

Knowledge and facts are as Weinberger names them "loose edged and messy" and we become increasingly conscious of this as we manage information in the making, not just the information that's decided as being valid, peer reviewed etc. Now our knowledge is available to us with links, we have the diverse views but I suggest we now need the tools with which to make our own minds up. I suspect we might need to reconstruct knowledge- just as Weinberger is doing, and move out of our positioning of binaries of good or bad. My next concern is about how might we learn more about the importance of difference, of context, of social justice.
Weinberger presents well that in the whole of human history, knowledge and facts remain disputed, that our ability to settle on anything comes with a history of contention and so we might as well get used to it. He likens this to triangulating and more, a multisubjectivity; where transparency is the new objectivity. He has more on this written on his Joho the blog blogsite, transparency is the new objectivity.
To paraphrase David Weinberger:

Knowledge in a hyperlinked world then becomes something to unsettle, something to consider in context...something to discuss in conversation, to debate, to exist in chaos, and unsettled argument is a better approximation of reality than a paper based world could ever give us.

But I'm still left unsettled, when and where do we learn of respect, of valuing context and the differences in others such that wisdom is not an imposition on others.

This has broadened my appreciation for connectivism and connective knowledge approaches to teaching and learning (ref Siemens and Downes), there is need to understand not only how knowledge is constructed, but also in the connections; beyond the capacity of current communication technologies that make such linking and awareness of divergent views possible, there is also a need to consider how valuing and respect for difference are managed.
Following this prompt to my thinking, i might just sign up for CCK09, but the current phd is going to restrict this to being a participant observer.

new media democratizing intimacy

Interesting concept from TEDGlobal speaker Stefana Broadbent http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/session_3_runni_1.php
I havent yet heard her, I guess it will be up in a few days, so these comments are just in response to the running notes.

these new methods of communication are helping us break out of old institutions and bringing us closer together than ever before. She's speaking with a backdrop of constantly refreshing, beautiful black and white portraits, always of two people seated together. She explains that in each picture is someone she interviewed and the person the communicate with most in the world, whether it be their significant other, parent, grandparent or sibling, along with the communication tools they use -- by and large, these are cell phones.
She says that although we may have many people on our Facebook friend lists (120 on average) and in our cell phone directories, we typically use these technologies to interact with a small core group of people. The typical cell phone user makes 80 percent of their calls to just four people, and the average Facebook user exchanges most of their messages with only five or six friends. So these technologies are not networking us with more people, but reinforcing our communication with our inner circle.

And I totally agree with her, but there's a rub...creating more or less intimacy...and then she takes it into more risky space with examples of cell phone use adding to intimacy particularly with regard to people who are at risk in terms of social justice, being time and / or resource poor. The examples of workers having to use phones to maintain family connections.
My own research is of a further example, the use of texting for accessing counselling as provided by Youthline, NZ. This provides a service by youth, for youth, in the medium young people select as their preferred choice. Reasons for that choice can be speculated upon- costs, privacy, ego protection, anonymity...its available, accessible, affordable... wherever and whenever (almost), one could say almost free, and easy.
The examples Stefana provides of workplaces are difficult to accept as there are concerns of safety, eg the busdriver with a cell phone maintaining contact- generally not going to win the argument when there is the issue of driving and safety. The broader argument of cellphone use being able to lift some of the alienation otherwise experienced by those who are socially disadvantaged by poverty, working shifts, two jobs etc, I can accept. But there is an implication that democracy at work is a right,however given that one's time is sold/bought/paid for, democracy doesnt feature largely in that kind of power dynamic or structured relationship.
So although it may provide greater access to one's loved ones, there are still times where this is going to be deemed inappropriate. And its (technology aided communications) still a bit of a bandaid on what i suspect may be hemorrhaging issues. The worklife balance isnt solved by being told heh whats the problem, you can ring, or text silently without employer knowing, your family or kids. And the issues of kids might be better addressed without the need to hide angst. meantime in the current world, its a better option than not having the ability to gain contact when and wherever.
Relating matters, and I'm glad to see the arguments broadened and some real discussion happening beyond the good or the bad of communication and computer mediated technologies. In what other ways do these shape us, how are we altered, whose interests are served, what's involved...bring on more discussion :)
(thanks to Frances Bell for bringing this tedtalk to my attention)

How long does a text message (sms message) last in NZ

This is the response to my question from Telecom:
Thank you for contacting Telecom.
We do not actually hold onto SMS messages once they have been delivered to the intended recipients. The only exception would be if there was an agreement put in place before hand at the request of the appropriate authorities.
No front line staff member has the ability to read of intercept text messages. Authorities such as the police have their own means and channels to use, when contacting Telecom with such enquiries. This is through a high level engagement with our call investigation centre.
If you have any further questions regarding Telecom products and services please visit our web site at http://www.telecom.co.nz

This is the response back from Vodafone:
Thank you for your website enquiry.
To view all the information that we currently have available, please visit http://www.vodafone.co.nz/about/company-information/ . Please note that if the information you require is not listed, it is likely that it is sensitive information which we are not able to supply to the public.
Kind regards
x
Customer Service Representative | Vodafone NZ | www.vodafone.co.nz/help

Not very helpful vodafone, I had already checked your site, I went back over it with a fine tooth comb, you never say, and I do not accept that this is sensitive information. This is material people have a right to know.

On the vodafone forum, after cut and pasting the not too helpful email, this is what I'm told:
SMS content is kept for 4 days or until delivered (if under 4 days)
If you want to keep content of SMS back them up with software
If providers in America wish to keep the content for 2 weeks that is there choice
John (forum administrator)

And then, a later addition:
after the content is gone vodafone only keep what is required for the IRD for tax purposes
John (forum administrator)

Thankyou John, I knew there had to be an answer to that somewhere, I'm not sure why IRD is is top of your reasons for keeping a message. I can understand that vodafone provide a service and if they wish to keep a record of said service, i can appreciate thats within their right. having said that, if they are supoened to hand over such by police for a criminal investigation i can understand that also.

Its nice to know.
I like knowing what's involved when part of my work involves sensitive material being texted.
Thankyou for your answers
:)

Writing in slices; telling stories

The thesis I am undertaking on change is multivocal and I experience as writer an unusual sense of chronology. Those involved are not often aware of the small or large things that have large or small import, and their recalled experience of the history involved seems to be one of associations rather than of any clear chronological path where this led to that.
My storytelling of change is therefore be told in slices.

Today I discovered Penguin books, We tell stories at http://wetellstories.co.uk/
John Buchan's 39 steps is retold with apologies, as 21 steps by C Cummings using google maps, the Haunted dolls house is converted to a series of stories told through blogs and social networking sites as Slice.

Even taking these steps, I'm aware of my own path from there to here,spanning a mere 90 mins that it is hard to trace....I'm pretty sure I was checking my emails and opened OlDaily by Stephen Downes, tripped over a link to quangos to help visualise complex data where within graphs on reality and there in the comments in one small section was a link to we tell stories. Change happens in happenstance ways...

happenstance |ˈhapənˌstans|
noun
coincidence : it was just happenstance that I happened to be there | an untoward happenstance for Trudy.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: blend of happen and circumstance .

A wounded storyteller

Serendipitously, I had been reading Arthur Frank, the wounded storyteller and then experienced a whole weekend of storytellers recalling the journey that had led them to become volunteers at Youthline. In Marae style for holding a space open, a place to stand and to have voice, lead to heartfelt sharing about paths and trajectories, creation stories, restitution stories and chaos stories. Stories of healing and stories where scabs were lifted. These were not 'just so' stories, and they were not fairy stories. They were not technoscience political stories either. They were heartfelt.

I am feeling somewhat in awe.

awe |ô|
noun
a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.

And while I recall Latour(2005) saying 'sociology begins in wonder" p.21
I am having very ansty feelings with ANT right now.

The coming together of fortuitous events makes it seem like it was meant to be, but ANT is not going to wear a bar of it for me to say it feels fated or that the thesis has its own trajectory and I am but a conduit, channeling.
Instead I am left with the nuts and the bolts and the very ordinary, identifying every actor along the path from woe to go. I would like to hold on to the mystery and the mystical, to sense the higher purpose, but with ANT I am left with a serendipitous coming together, intersections that are timely. I feel this sort of blows the magic away...and I'm not sure I like the magic gone from this part of my world.

text work as identity work; txt worx as identtt worx

Texting as a marker of identity?
Risks in saying young people are like this, do this... it negates the variations.
However, this didnt stop the latest Pew report from doing an analysis of online behaviours based on age. Generations online challenges some common assumptions, while creating others.
Look at this:
95% of teens communicate face to face (no idea what the other 5% do)
88% of teens use landline
67% talk to friends on cell phones
58% send text messages to friends
Please note these are USA stats, but so to is Sherry Turkle's research suggesting how damaging texting is for teenagers, and suggesting how detrimental this is to their emotional development.
Taking a Pew quiz on use of communication technologies had me typecast as a digital collaborator. Ok. I enjoy working with what affords me a means to communicate quickly, in a timely way, with whats at hand, for what it is good for. Doesn't mean its a fixed trait.Doesn't mean I have lost my ability to discern what its more or less good for. I'm actually now more concerned about what it means for me to be seen as a collaborator...didnt they get shot during WW2?

BTW there is an excellent article by Barbara Kramer and Pat Thompson on doctoral writing as text work and identity work. A sampler:
where the novice researcher enters what we call occupied territory – with all the immanent danger and quiet dread that this metaphor implies – including possible ambushes, barbed wire fences, unknown academics who patrol the boundaries of already occupied territories. It is difficult to write confidently in dangerous territory.

My own writing as identity work is evolving, the conventions of the academy restrict the creativity, you might say fortunately.
I'm not brave enough to write the first txt spk thesis
mmmmm
If it didnt have a word limit imposed i might have considered a bilingual one.
:)

change happens

When things change the results are sometimes unanticipated, sometimes expected.
Here's a humorous take on an actor-network

When you mix water and flour together you get glue?
...you add eggs and sugar...
...a particular context involving heat...
and you get cake.

Where did the glue go?

It's what makes the cake
stick to you
:)

writing 'slices of practice'

John Law's Aircraft Stories attempts a text 'writing in slices'.
The cover says it 'works to upset the binary of modernism where knowledge, subjects and objects as having centred and concrete essences and the postmodern notion that all is fragmented and centreless.' His writing in slices aims for 'fractional coherence'.

I am entertaining this as a thesis writing style.
Law has a tendency to write using metaphor (and to my mind a few too many at a time).
He refers to a mirror, shattered. But i dont think this 'reflects' the idea fully enough.
Putting it back together creates a fractured reflection of a reality, as if there were but one. Leaving it in shards doesn't work either.
He has chosen to present the object-aircraft by writing a text in slices. For me it invokes a 3D image, slicing through planes, where intersectional slices impact one on another, and where the topology is never fully understood from any one plane, nor from the surface.


The risk is writing in slices might just come across as a series of essays on a theme.
...pictures at an exhibition...or a succession of fairy tales in a chapter book.
What I am wanting to create is instead techno-social-political stories of both fact and fiction, where performances intersect...
Using the text as Donna Haraway suggests as a heuristic or topos for generating and then illustrating points. In this instance pointing to changes in a network being contingent and precarious, planned as well as unplanned, shaped and shaping, that performances in the network require coordination to establish any semblance of stability, and that at least in part each node is subject to an incredible choreography of making and shaping. And if i can pull it off, to demonstrate that performances as well as objects and subjects, are multiple.

Feels ambitious.

iwant one; latest, greatest, fastest, betterest

Here's apples latest advert to smooch its way through my emails, seems like now I can even find myself, its got a compass... but wait there's more- right there in the middle...

Introducing the iPhone that lets you do more than ever. And do it faster.*
Launch and switch between applications quickly. Render web pages in a fraction of the time. Shoot, edit and share video right on your phone. Make a call or play a song using just your voice. And discover many more features that make iPhone 3GS the best iPhone yet.
More new features
Landscape Keyboard
Rotate iPhone to use a larger keyboard in Mail, Messages, Notes and Safari.
Cut, Copy & Paste
Cut, copy and paste words and photos, even between applications.
Spotlight Search
Find what you're looking for across your iPhone, all from one place.
Compass
Find out what direction you're facing with a new digital compass.

- did you see it?
You can even make calls using just your voice.
ROFL

Multiple realities; Philosophising with Deleuze and Latour

Deleuze (1993) suggests origami as a model for the sciences of matter.

"Microperceptions or representatives of the world are those little folds that unravel in every direction, folds in folds, over folds, following folds… and these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions. " (p.86).

A humbling perceptual (re)alteration to my thinking occurs; Sherry Turkle's current views of texting are not so much wrong, as caught in a fold, and I in a different one. I might as well be in a different universe, our realities being worlds apart, our worlds being folded differently.

Subjectivity might then be understood as a topology of the folds.

Deleuze's concept of the fold not only allows me to think creatively about the production of subjectivity, but also about the possibilities for, and production of, ‘non-human’ forms of ‘subjectivity’.

An approach also seen within Latour's actor-network theory. In the ANT literature this is also to be taken as more than a perceptual consideration, it is the reality acted upon, and realities are multiple.

The mobile phone, the young person using it, myself as researcher, the counsellors providing a texting service, the ips providers... all facets of the same cloth, variable seen, variably made visible, variably acted on.

Ref
Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Liebniz and the baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

An exercise in world making; ontological politics at play :)

bleeding txt

I'd been 'interviewing my texts' (txt messages) as you do when the research involves actor-network theory and it was as if it had bled itself all over the floor while i was absorbed in my textual analysis.
I had an inkling something was not quite right. I sense in myself a clinical detachment, where i could find interesting results but perhaps these were irrelevant to the participating txt.
See, what i missed, in giving voice, was the error of being a ventriloquist. It was still me doing the talking.
So what happens when you make it possible for teenage angst to speak?

I found this while avoiding the next wrong turn in data analysis, and while it's meant as a humorous take on ant, I think its more meaningful than than where i had been going. Here there is voice that matches discontent.


Thankyou to paulathekoala, for posting this on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i25aGGrTJK8&feature=related
Developed as part of the Lancaster Summer Conference Morning Show sketch comedy routine, a spoof of Actor Network Theory, a predominant sociological approach in our department. Here is an interview with a pen.

I can now get back to focusing on the bleeding txt rather than the constituents of the blood...

An ANT like tweet

Historical tweets worth repeating, this one of Gutenberg following 'his' invention of the printing press reflecting some actor-network like black humour :)

feeding off uncertainties...lies, damn lies and statistics in a PhD

In this PhD the controversies continue to bubble up, ethical dilemma or research process? ANT considers it to be research process, something to feed off.
My data says one thing, the press release say another....guess its all about how to win friends and influence people, plausible promise meets 'tell me lies.'
I am telling myself not to play the sly one, to accept as latour exhorts:

"Always assume that people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you’re studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point where the thing is irresistible…never say it’s stupid. Say : If I were in their shoes, I’d have done the same thing."

(Latour, 1996, p. 36)
Meantime, I am all but doing pirouettes as a point is stretched.

Entice me with lies.

The capacity to consider change during, rather than before and after, is a challenge.
To compare before with after is, in contrast easy.
I've taken on a PhD researching change as it progresses, and sometimes it doesn't (the change that is). Sometimes things change and I barely notice as the small shifts have unrecognised impact.

Reading Clay Shirkey's blog on newspapers and thinking the unthinkable suggests some very ANT like insights on change. (I find it useful to see ant like analysis everwhere, it helps me convince myself I'm progressing my PhD)

It's never one thing that makes it all happen. The printing press did not of itself, change the world. An enormous amount of other work was also going on.
Shirky refers to Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. An analysis informed by ANT would suit her approach: “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
A similar question to my own- in using emergent technologies in a telephone counselling agency, how are those involved shaped and shaping?
Taking Callon's 1998 approach with ant, the printing press revolution can be identified by stages identified as Translation:
1. Problematizing: if reading is good, then being able to do this without needing to wait for others to read it to you must be better; how then to make this a possibility? Make the making of printed matter smaller, faster ...
2. Interessment: others need locking in to make this happen, there's a need for push and pull, a negotiation with others, and not just of human actors but also of technology.
3. Enrolment involves actors accepting positions to make such change occur
4. Mobilisation; an assemblage of the social that works; oil based ink, compatable with paper rather than parchment, and with the movable print molds from metal alloys rather than carved in wood or stone... People also need mobilising, there would be no value in a press without a growing literacy in the middle classes...

At this point it is really necessary to restate that neither Guttenberg- credited with the invention, nor the invention itself happened in isolation, there's a network at play within which they were situated. Further work was required to maintain the change, the expectations do not rise in and of themselves. What sustained the change was sometimes small; literally. The ability to make a book small enough to carry...

And here's where modern day change similarly could learn from a past.
In telephone counselling, the landline is no longer a prime means of communicating. Young people are using mobiles, cell phones. And in this there are other actors at play; the cost of a call is significantly higher than the cost of text. Having limited income, the young person then develops a way of relating that is text based, they get used to it, it becomes the first option and the preferred option. This is sustained even when the receiver pays the cost of the communication transaction.
At this point it gets really interesting, because the small changes, being mobile with a phone, having cheaper text than calls, create a revolutionary moment for the 'old' system; how to meet young people where they are at in the medium they they are choosing to use. And what does this do in terms of reshaping those involved?

The argument that Shirkey makes is that when old stuff gets broken down faster than new stuff can be put in its place lends itself to experimentation, and more than this, experimentation based on plausible promises if one reads Here comes everbody. However in this blogpost, he instead refers to the demand for lies. Its as if we know that we dont know where this is going, so promise me that its going to be good; entice me with lies as i know you also don't know where this might lead. However, agreements with stakeholders need to be firmed up...'this is a change in name only', 'its the same but different', 'its only a tool', if we dont like it we can go back to what was'....such lies minimize the anxieties involved, and allow for movement forward. Its as if they create a keel for plowing through uncharted waters. Dont rock my boat ...keep things on an even keel...
From Clay Shirky:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

A last lie; here's Frodo helping ailsa write a thesis :)