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.

Wrapping up CCK08; Assessment matters; focus on being knowledge-able rather than knowledgeable.

My issues were:
1. an annoying split between formally enrolled for credit and those not
2. the value of ANT (actor-network theory) informing connectivism
And to some extent both were addressed in the wrap up.
Future renditions of the course might spend a pre course time in developing skills working with the technologies involved. This acknowledges the influence of non human actors on the learning possibilities, a very ANT accepting alteration. And the issue of difference for those taking the course for credit, or not, evolved into a conversation on assessment matters:

Innovative assessment being a significant block to creativity in education.In higher ed at least, assessment drives learning and how might this be altered? Currently what someone thinks they know is matched to what they think the learning should be about, and this predefined view limits learning. "What if assessment no longer drives instruction, instead assessment could be a byproduct evaluating at set times eg an eportfolio."
I had always considered assessment as a sample of student work and it frustrates me when i see it considered as driving and therefore limiting, the learning that occurs.

To my mind, even if we were to shift to an eportfolio approach this is still likely to reflect the limits imposed by the start stop nature inherent in the University where what goes into the portfolio is still controlled by those who think they know what is needed setting the tasks that accrue in an eportfolio...

What was better about the CCK08 course was i set my own goals more or less around a particular theme. It wasn't a predefined learning curve. The timeline was controlled, more or less and for those enrolled for credit even more so, but for myself its an example of a more open learning style. It is an example where what i developed 'inside' of CCK08 is useful to me for other purposes, my Doctorate, my career as an academic...
A reminder from Stepehen, 'assessessment tends to be a proxy measure'. That is, assessment tends to be of knowledge about rather than knowledge for. Might we focus instead on measures of being knowledge-able rather than knowledgeable?

Appreciative and iterative change

Nancy White introduced these terms to the CCK08 course this week.
The history of change, as I have read it in introducing technology in the education sector has been anything but.
I have experienced evangelical impositions, directed mandates and technology taught as a separate subject.
In contrast, this approach suggests a thoughtfulness for what has been, and how this might be enhanced, taking small steps with ongoing reconsideration. This also is congruent with what a colleague of mine,Sue, introduced to me - agile software development.
The approach rolls in with a pragmatic style. What works; how this occurs inside of consideration and reconsideration, bringing together the social (people involved) and the material(technologies) concurrently. Seems an adaptive integration, and while Nancy White's understanding of change hasn't deliberately integrated actor-network theory, her approach identifies that the change involves social + technology, and fundamentally this changes how we can be together.
Her use of 'we' suggests she is referring to how this shapes the interactions of people, of teachers, students...
At the same time, this also fosters an approach of change being iterative allowing consideration for what is shaped and what is shaping where the actors are both human and otherwise.

Nancy White's slides:

Cck08 Individual, Community and Network

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cck08 networks)

Folding time CCK08

"For while the past has left ineradicable traces within you, the future is already present too. You try to juggle with the future....the logic ... does not unfold in time, it folds time."

While Annemarie Mol was talking of the logic of care, I suspect it is not only care that this is true of. I believe that this is also true of learning.
(And am repeatedly reminded that with health and education the separations are purely institutional, divided silos, but both are about helping people live to the best of their actual and or chosen abilities.)
In Lisa's post the spectre of networking dead people is raised, and I am aware in my study of 'networking' Marshal McLuhan. I am not sure if the medium is the message guru would take kindly to the medium innuendo in this case, however, the great man did have a sense of humour, so maybe.
And in attempting concept maps for CCK08, I was increasingly frustrated by the unidimensional, linear nature of these;

Mol points to this in the logic of choice, where time is linear... whereas in practice
with a logic of care, time twists and turns.
Practice is messy, attempting to make it neat and tidy in a concept map, just might be making a mess of it (refer to John Law, After method; Mess in social science research)
Targets move, when the unexpected occurs it is integrated, there is no logic of arrows. Time is not moment by moment.
And in the immortal words of David Bowie:

time may change me, but I can’t chase time.

In the spirit of raising the past, 1973 brought us this.
Discordance, dissent and clashing of culture create new 'knowledge'.
It is the criss crossings and intersections that matter.(further reading see; Johansson, F. (2006). The Medici effect. What elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.)

netWORKING CCK08

This week has seen me doing less in the threads and more in the blogs. There's a depth in the blogs, a thoughtfulness that i am not experiencing in the threads (these feel like a tug of war played with spiders webs....)

The links made by Stephen in the daily, make for easy networking.
I am captured with provocative titles such as I need more blog friends. This gets to the heart of networking, if nodes dont connect, there is no net. And as one other person noted on Heli's blog, this is the actual work of networking, not just a theorising. I also tracked back in her bog a bit, and enjoyed the use of a photo gallery instead of the connector map concept formation which i have found too linear, too constraining- shape and sizes and lack of ability to put things in whether pdfs or pictures... Such a frustration. And am suddenly reminded of John Laws pinboard approach.
And this is what network connectivism learning is about, this fires off that synapse and a new thing happens that then fires into another synaptic space and where there are receptors again something else then happens...

The other blog of importance to me was Shelleys where there seemed an ah hah moment,
I had read through Krebs notes and wasnt in awe (went to his website and was much more impressed). The ppt didnt seem to mention work, it mentioned things like herds of cows and i was thinking rubbish. Takes work for it to be a network, its not the lego in a box, or if it is that's at a trivial level. There are maybe 2000 people in the course but its not a network unless they connect.
So its not connectivist learning unless they are connecting and learning...

The connecting may be quieter, doesnt have to be loud, or visible, but it does have to occur. Susan Leigh Star on invisible work would be a worthwhile tangent to explore on this...Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. (1999 ). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of
Visible and Invisible Work Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 9-30.

While this is interesting, I think actor-network theory has it covered. The only difference is the concepts are being drawn into education by another name. The social is seen more than the technological, but i think this too will come.

The politics of knowledge CCK08

I've been looking at knowledge and am beginning to think its just a (current and temporary) explanation. Its not fact or truth as commonly understood, all such are socially mediated.
And then i did some more thinking...what causes things to happen or change, what changes knowledge?
Its the aggregation of things that make something more or less supported, more or less real.
To think this causes that is a little too simple, or as expressed by Latour(1988)

The belief in causes and effect is always, in some sense, the admiration for a chain of command or the hatred of a mob looking for someone to stone.

Latour, 1988. From an essay on the politics of explanation.
Again, I find connectivism is no different from an ANT analysis on the construction of knowledge.
And with regard to explaining change, I am back to describing the detail of whats happening, whats aggregated, what shifts, what do the actors say of their own actions...

Providing an explanation is, in a nutshell, working at empire-building; the more powerful an explanation, the larger the empire and the stronger the material in which it is built. What we admire in powerful theories we should also admire in freeways, multinational corporations, satellite networks, weapon systems, international banking and data banks.

Its always an aggregation, nothing as simple as a change agent (implying an individual does it by themselves). There is power and acquiescence, give and take and a reshuffling or resettling of the elements involved whenever a 'new' construction occurs. And not all of this is intended.
Knowledge understood this way becomes a product of heterogenous, historical and contingent factors.
How might I strengthen the validity or truth of a claim? Not by changing its substance, but by increasing the number of its allies, the supports maintaining this, whether human or otherwise (eg reports written, artefacts held in concrete form such as texts, the ease with which links to such knowledge is accessed...).
How to steer a course between fact and fiction? To be able to recognise the supports in place and personally evaluate the strength of such support.
And how to present such ideas to others that they might truly consider the veracity of knowledge I might hold up as evidence of my own research? By making my own positioning clearer; being an articulate reflexive practitioner? To provide a way through being believed too little or too much...

reflexivity goes against this common belief in asking no privilege for the account at hand. When I portray scientific literature as in risk of not being believed and as bracing itself against such an outcome by mustering all possible allies at hand (Latour,1987), I do not require for this account any more than this very process: my own text is in your hands and lives or dies through what you will do to it. In my efforts to forestall certain outcomes and encourage others, I too muster all available allies, all linguistic possibilities (if only, God - or Mammon - willing, I could write in my own mother tongue!).

knowledge as a (gather)thing CCK08

There's a similarity between connectivism, rhizomatic learning and actor-network theory. Each places knowledge within a relational context or network.
The difference with actor network theory is that it
1. emphasises knowledge as a performance involving both human and non-human entities.
2. emphasises the work involved to gather together entities that make certain things more or less substantial.
The difference is the degree to which ANT is prepared to name non human influences as integral.
In doing this course, I needed a computer and/or a cell phone preferably with web access. I am enhanced when connected to my laptop= my reach is extended; my ability to hear and to share across the globe made possible with broadband access and the Internet. I am also able to trust to my outsourced memory contact with artefacts of seminal writings (Latour, Law, Mol, Haraway as well as those of Dave Cormiens, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson...). I am able to access more- the libraries of the world through other relationships i have, and I get to quickly find relevance by maintaining an endnote library reference system at my fingertips. In addition to these interactions which are substantially non human, I get to talk to others similarly connected with similar accoutrements.
And according to Latour, the more actors involved in such a gathering the more 'it' (knowledge or a particular practice) is stabilised. And becomes harder to ignore, or to go outside of, or to change.
Understanding the relational qualities of what is both shaped and shaping allows for insights into what is needed to make things otherwise...

(And hence my PhD on change with emergent technologies in a Youth counselling centre)

In taking this stance, I disagree with Stephen Downes that knowledge is nothing (elluminate talk), it is far too powerful a 'thing' to be discounted out of hand. But I take him to really be meaning that it is no(one)thing.
Knowledge is a shapeshifter.
And I am cyborg :)

Rethinking knowledge (epistemology); continuing a dialogue between connectivism and a proponent of ANT; CCK08

ruth has a small 't'.
Soren Kierkegaard
(letter T courtesy of Grewlike @ Flikr; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License)

Connectivism holds knowledge to be transient and a 'connected' act. Rather than treating knowledge as a given, it is produced and held in connection.
Knowledge isnt made, its not like a pot to look at, or to have a shared understanding or appreciation of its value or worth or possible uses. Its not that stable.
Knowledge, as object of fact or process, I suspect is therefore multiple; where this knowledge, transient though it is, is held to be understood as of that time, in a partial way. But more than being perspectives held, this is actually ontological politics at play, reality is held together in different ways and acted on in different ways by those involved. A very ANTy perspecive on learning is made possible with a connectivism approach.
And any so called knowledge only holds together in this way until the connections are changed...so knowledge grows, shifts, gets more or less, dependent on those involved in its shaping.
And to take this further, especially with regard to an ANT informed analysis, is also dependent on the glue holding it. Whether said glue is the degree of trust or faith ... between the peoples involved or the power wielded or not... or the non human actors such as the form of technologies binding the connections. Whether this were to involve slate or paper and pen, books, through to the internet. There are non human actors who help shape said connections and which may store artefacts of the connected knowledge or which help create said knowledge by making the movement of ideas more and less possible. The emphasis on shaping allows the impact of those involved (human and otherwise) to be considered and allows for greater conscious awareness of the transience of what has historically been referred to as knowledge (as object). This theory, connectivism, shifts the emphasis of knowledge as process.

if that;then this

Stephen Downes in half an hour posts on the difference between constructionist and other 'cognitive approaches' of learning in a comparison with connectivism. He uses an example of an expert chess player who does not know play by memorized moves but by discerning subtleties in a shifting pattern.
In the online chat on CKK08 for us terrestrially time bound southern hemisphereans, the constructionist approach was described by George Seimens as not being symbolic or syntax based, meaning is not made in symbolic ways, but is more fluid, distributed.

Maybe very fast or intuitive constructionism would be like this?
Or is this pixie dust?
I could sit with rapid cycling constructionism as a form of relational learning so am still not convinced that connectivism is different to constructionist theory informed by an ANT (actor-network theory) analysis demonstrating what occurs in a global networked learning environment.

Does constructionist learning have to be as concrete as George and Stephen make it appear?
I am beginning to wonder if i am thick or in over my head.

But i contend google is my friend :) she is not to account for making me stupid.
(ref Nicholas Carr)
I am as stupid now as when i would flick through journal articles skimming for relevance. My surfing through blogs or online articles is no different. I read whats important to me. If what i read is contributing to my/or others stupidity, I would content it has more to do with PBRF pressure on academics that foster quantity over quality of research outputs. Trivial but easy to measure, and multiple reinventions of the same content thinly disguised as different pieces of research...

What connectivism and ANT may have in common (CCK08)

OK some rudiments of understanding first, and these are based on a limited reading of what George Siemens and Stephen Downes have put out there.
Connectivism is a theory of learning.
One that values highly the means of the learning.
Seems that knowledge is created and constructed in connection with others.
(Constuctivism methinks, so what makes connectivism different???)

"learning is a network phenomenon, influenced (aided) by socialization and technology"
“To 'know' something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To 'learn' is to acquire certain patterns” (Downes, 2005, Section O, ¶ 2).

Still not clearer.
So I am going to guess: Knowledge and learning are not static, there is continual learning/unlearning/reshaping at play. This occurs in connection with others and through channels that are deeply important. Here's where I think this is ANT. The others are not only human, the nonhuman others include technologies such as computers, IPS servers...the Internet. The local situated context of learning of the past has moved on.

To return to George, where learning is about making meaning, then this needs to take into account the means used and the context, because the context is now global.

This seems less a theory for understanding causality, but one for illuminating process. That connectivity via Internet has profound impact, yet to be recognised.

Knowledge not individually located but distributed; ok, still resides in indivisduals or in books, artefacts...but is not produced 'locally' the context is radically expanded, but is still produced in connection. Ok
But like communications what's written or saved as audio or blogged, wiki'd etc etc is not anything until it is shared in connection.

Still seems to be learning using a constructivist understanding that acknowledges an ANT mode in the practice.

If so whats important?
That non human actors have influence. That this influence is important, and not necessarily neutral. That inscribed in non human actors are ways of working that make certain things more and less likely. That in the making of new ways of working, we tend to surf on what has gone before and maybe this needs to be altered. That the grooves that form now or in the near past tend to make it harder to shift out of whats always been and maybe we need to.

Is it a theory?
Depends.
Could actor-network theory have explored this as a means to understanding new changes in education? I think so, but it doesn't sound quite so sexy as connectivism.

Tools change people. We adapt based on new affordances.

I agree, but this still would encompass a constructivist theory made relevant when informed by an ANT analysis.
Whats new; an emphasis on how knowledge, in practice, changes.
To this end, I would encourage further exploration in understanding change differently. I'd encourage looking at Bruno Latour and John Law as the work of actors(human and otherwise) create performances. Or Annmarie Mol as she describes ontologies of practice.

Bemused

Its so grounding when I see the people i hold way up there (person iconization?) having technological difficulties, they have to seduce the technology to do whats required, just like me. Its all in the way i hold my tongue or prayers to the alter of the godesses of loose connections or to the gremlins in the machine...
Anyway, i was happy to see a resend on the daily newsletter, proves the human connection.
I havent managed to make it into a moodle discussion though, i can watch but not post. Seems i am in a rebus strip of fill in the details and confirm it on the email but the email doesnt arrive and no confirmation gets made, so i start again.... but four times is enough already. I'll take my ball and play here.

Seems i could get blown away in a discussion of is connectivism a theory or not. Not the point.
I agree with George Siemens on the

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.

But then I also agree with Marshal McLuhan who said the medium is the message.
If its a theory then there's baggage that is often associated with such labels, such as its capacity to predict. However, a theory can also be useful in as much as it illuminates...

“Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life experiences, render them more significant, more luminous to us, or make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering experiences more opaque than they were before?” John Dewey

For the moment, I will accept it as a path to enlightenment :)

I agree with a sentiment that the subject matter would lend itself to a conversation which wasnt, and the critique of the critique is fairly defended- the past being a foreign country, it is unfair to lodge criticism out of context.

“The tools we use to think, change the ways in which we think.” (Turkle,2004, p.1)

Seems to me this is similar to

“To 'know' something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To 'learn' is to acquire certain patterns”

(Downes, 2005, Section O, ¶ 2).
But with Stephen Downes, this takes it a bit further as it touches on patterns formed, or as Chris Bigum and Leonie Rowan argue,

As patterns are laid down, grooves formed, a kind of template is created which also limits, proscribes, what can come next.

(Bigum & Rowan, 2004, p.223) In this there is a political ontology that can be considered, for the tools are not value neutral and what is done with them creates grooves, patterns of thinking, patterns of doing. And computers in schools become a subject to be taken rather than a tool to connect, expand...

And then George Siemens where he says;

Too many educators fail to understand how technology is changing society. While hype words of web 2.0, blogs, wikis, and podcasts are easy to ignore, the change agents driving these tools are not.

The notion of change agent is problematic for me, change theory just does not do it,a networked understanding would do it better. People act in relationships, such relationships are with other people and with things. The things are change agents also. (And hence i am studying change using networked understandings...)
And he comes to this with reference to the printing press. But what of seeing these non human actors as part of the network rather than as a channel networking others?

George Siemens concludes

that educators are reflecting on how learning has changed and the accompanying implications to how we design the spaces and structures of learning today.

What i would suggest is that form and function should follow. The analysis of it being theory or not, is less relevant for me than what purpose might it serve. Does it illuminate to look at learning differently- YES.
And I would argue further, to study what is networked, would be best served by an approach that focuses on the actors in said network (actor-network theory) and the work (or performances) involved.

A different connectivity; not better not worse. CCK08

Am glad I am doing this open access course,I had been worried it might be a distraction to the phd but actually there is overlap.
I am studying change and innovation with emergent technologies in what was a young people's telephone counselling agency (but which is now much more than that, with advent of txt messaging, bebo, facebook, Internet message board postings...).
Learnings:
1. Learning requires trust.
Not wanting to re-experience public humiliation (memories of getting it wrong at school) my own clutziness, and that described by others, in using something new and so big and so open...makes me aware that public learning requires trust :)
Thousands can see me as i stuff up a gmap etc
2. Learning requires engagement. Might feel alone, but my sense of others is expanded with gmap and with a sudden increase in my blog traffic on feedjit. While such visitors havent said hi (yet), i'm sure they will :)
3. My own engagement via the readings:
The first reading by Barry Wellman titled Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism. This one readily links to my earlier understandings of community when i did a Masters thesis on community care. Gemeinschaft refers to a community whose members are bound together by common values and intimate relationships.And here the metaphor of the little boxes seems to sit well. I can connect it to prior knowledge and expand it a bit. Networked learning that is not localised but glocalised.

We are now experiencing another transition, from place-to-place to person-to-person connectivity.

I like the way he writes this, the shared values are still relevant but they are network linked rather than geographically bound. This is also relevant to my phd studies...
4. Relevance to my current studies follows:
4a. coming from actor-network theory (ANT), the work of actors (human and non human such as my mac, the Internet...) can be considered for connected learning. While the conversation doesn't tend to go there- an ANT informed understanding requires consideration for the pixels, the platforms, the broadband access...And this CCK08 endeavour could not occur without it.
4b. The community counselling agency I work with for my studies is undergoing radical reform as it comes to terms with movement from place2place to person2person. Change that challenge ways of doing counselling. While landline to landline was its history, it is increasingly from mobile phones and the mediums used span verbal ph and txt or Internet message board, and is now also expanding into bebo, facebook, msn...
4c. High speed place-to-place communication replaced with high speed person-to-person
communication supports

dispersal and role-fragmentation of workgroups

with a shift to a personalized, wireless world affording networked individualism, with people switching between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Individuals switch rapidly between their social networks. Each person separately operates his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders, support, sociability, and a sense of belonging.

There can be concurrent 'cycling' through different windows of social connections with concurrent conversations occurring.
So a different connectivity is generated, and staying with ANT, I'm struggling not to criticize this, it simply is done and done because on some level/s it works.
Partial involvements do or dont serve counselling well? More a matter of understanding what occurs better. Work relations do become more dispersed. Not just the work between people, but between people and their work. Counselors are no longer located by time and place, but the process of counselling can be taken up by anyone with IT access in the building; and is encouraged with a colour alert countdown on the response time to txt messages.
Participants in virtual organizations (such as this one we are in now, or the one of a telephone counselling agency) are described in the article as linking people in temporary networks to deal with tasks. Participants inherently have multiple loyalties and partial commitments. (But this is true of life also, just the spatial and temporal alterations make it more obvious in a networked or virtual world.)

Often, the sociophysical context is ignored, as when people talk loudly on their mobile phones in public. They are not being anti-social: the very fact of their conversation means they are socially connected. Rather, people’s awareness and behavior are in private cyberspace even though their bodies are in public space.

And its also true that the sociophysical is oftentimes assumed private, the txt artefacts I study frequently presume privacy which a respondent reasonably often says is not available to them. Not wanting to be heard is a frequent response to being invited to call and chat in 'real' time. The assumed privacy of a digital medium (txt) concerns me, both in the ethics of what i study and in terms of the naivity of those using the service.

Shifting from face-to-face contact to disembodied email contact is a possible means of obtaining autonomy: Isolation is achieved without effort.

I think this is said a little too glibly. It does take effort, perhaps not consciously, but choice occurs and there are different ways of acting in the interaction. To have anonymity is a form of work important to the callers of the telephone counselling agency I work with. Autonomy is also important here, in txting the rate of response or even responding at all, allows a maintenance of self- of being able to 'say' what might not otherwise feel possible.

Will networked individualism deconstruct holistic individual identities? A
person would become the sum of her roles, and need to present multiple personas to the world. This compartmentalization of personal life—within the household, at work, and in communities — may create insecure milieus where people do not fully know each other.

There seems a negative undercurrent in the statement, but we have always had compartmentalised lives, I am not the same person at work as at home, or even at work amongst friends vs others... the life I live is multiple.
Annmarie Mol talks of the body multiple where arteriosclerosis is performed differently and in dispersed ways. I think virtual lives lived are no different. Sherry Turkle talks of the cycling through windows on life on the screen. Practice generates multiplicity. The real world is messier than commonly assumed, (refer to John Law, After method, mess in social science research). This is usually denied in euro-western traditions of understanding. Political ontology is at play where certain realities are given more and less credence.

A decade of research has dispelled fears that computer-mediated communication would destroy community and hinder work.

But it still gets aired frequently. Not everyone's at the same level or on the same page.

Are online relationships as good as face-to-face relationships where people can see, hear, smell and touch someone, usually in a social context? Probably not, but the question has an utopian assumption that if people were not online, they would be engaged in stimulating community, household, or personal activities. In reality, online relationships often fill empty spots in people’s lives

And in terms of counselling, the same arguments were put forth about telephone counselling in the 1970s...

Does the Internet increase, decrease or supplement other forms of
interaction? The evidence is mixed. At work, those who use email a lot also see each
other a lot.

For counselling, seems willingness to txt in is providing a doorway to counselling f2f

The comparison with face-to-face relationships is always a rigged game in which online relationships can never be quite equal? Or would it be wiser to ask if online interaction is developing its own strengths and creating its own norms and dynamics?

Yup seems the 'gold std.' But there are strengths in online, theres extended reach, anywhere, anytime, there's anonymity (wouldnt occur otherwise), and there's the positive affirmation in the pocket stuff (just as cell phones could be used for bullying, they can also be repositories of affirmations)

So there's stuff here aplenty. The PhD is not being neglected, there's connections to be made.

If your dropping in, say hi, helps me know I'm not alone in this :)
Let me know your blogsite and I'll reciprocate in kind :)