For the fifth time over the last year, I left my Macbook charger at work. Work meaning school, meaning not open again til Monday. No problem, I thought, pulling out the heavy Dell. I turned it on and frowned--the screen was all skittery and crazy. I panicked--I did not know if I could make it three days without internet. How would I know what's going on? Talk to people? Read random things? Write? Check things? Find new things? Then Roommate #1 told me to give it a little slap on the side, and sure enough, things straightened out. You know, like how you slap someone freaking out to calm them down. This anecdote serves to illustrate Thomas and friends' points about the ubiquity of digital literacies.
Angela Thomas takes on a lot of cool topics like cyborgs, cyberpunk, myspace, sexual identities, and Freud in her article, Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl. I've always been fascinated with the body/soul connection, and it was interesting to see how that plays out in cyberspace and in identity-construction. I was reminded of a 60 Minutes or Dateline or some such melodramatic program about the overwhelming popularity of Myspace and its effects on teens, some with tragic endings. I remembered this girl, who was kind of a loser at her school and very lonely, had a penchant for edgy clothes, hair, and makeup and picture-taking talent became an almost overnight cyberlebrity (I made up that word), with hundreds of complete strangers adoring, friending, and commenting on her Myspace page. It was edgy, but not over the line skanky like some profiles you'll run across. However school officials and parents were notified, undies were bundled, and the girl's parents made her delete her profile and her pictures. A tear slid down her face as she remembered how they stood behind and made her erase herself. In real life, she was the weird girl who wasn't skinny or mainstream enough to be liked, but online she was a queen.
Thomas uses some Freud (which you don't see much) to discuss our obsession with the visual, using the term "scopophilia," meaning pleasure in looking, to describe one of the most important of our human drives. This could explain why Martino's study found that young males like porn. And see here is where writing may or may not show the note of sarcasm in my voice right now. Thomas studies the choice of avatar used in girls' profile, and although I see what she's saying, I think she went to far in her interpretation and classification of her subjects' choices. That seemed a little too subjective. I think the influence of the Barbie and Bratz dolls lining our shelves and our Disney princesses and our adoration of cinema waif-ers should be included in any discussion of beauty and its interpretation.
Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto is now on my to-read list: "The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Returning to the ideas of the bodyembodiment, and reality, I am reminded of Dwight's Second Life from The Office:
Incidentally, I watched my friend Dana play Sims Bustin Loose over the weekend, as she made and lost friends, slept, forgot to go to work, and sat in a hottub--all of which she does in real life as well.
I noticed while reading the Lanshear and Knobel piece that I can't read linearly online. My eyes jump around, I click on links, I skip sentences, but eventually it all gets read. I totally love Adbusters. I love that the authors used two of my favorite words--gonzo and karma. Lankshear and Knobel spend the second half of the article thoughtfully discussing research approaches to new literacies after wowing readers with the possibilities they hold.
Culture jamming should be a national past time. It should be a required course, a degree program, a profession, an Olympic sport. We need to be asking questions, people. Getting to the bottom of things. Or at least making fun of them. An earlier post of mine features an Onion video of Bush giving a press conference on the threat of zombie attacks (check the tag 'zombies' to your right). I checked out Plastic and I like it. "Plasticians tend to be self-styled members of an erudite, ironic and humorous ‘plugged in’ crowd, interested in quirky takes on anything newsworthy—particularly anything connected with popular culture—as well as in serious and informed discussion of current events." That's me, ironic. I like blogs for making it easy to zoom around and link these things, to check sources, to organize the mountains of content, for incorporating visual, text, and video. And I'm very critical of blogs too--if I had a dollar for every proud mother's blog consisting of 5-10 daily pictures of her bliss-bundle and inane commentary on surbuban domestic whathaveyou, I could probably buy one of those babies. You can see for yourself, just click "next blog" up in the top left (after reading mine, of course) and blogger will take you to a random blog. There's actually a game where you do that and see how many blogs you can click through before stumbling upon a porn blog. I think the record is 10). From what I've seen, there is a big handful of intelligent blogs that concern themselves with provoking thought, asking questions, encouraging discussion. And there's a big old bucket full of, well, crappy blogs. I just hope that more attention is pulled towards the relevant stuff of life, and less toward celebrity gossip and silly wastes of time. As long as the blog serves its author's purpose, people can do whatever they want with it. In regards to their ability to cross-reference quickly, incorporate media, and allow for collaboration, blogs are rad.
The Hawisher and Selfe article was very long, because their point (I think) is the complexity of how one comes to digital or new literacies. Obviously inspired by Brandt's sponsors of literacy book, these authors draw some important conclusions about conditions of access to technology, literacies' life spans, personal agency, the role of school and family as gatekeepers, and generational transfer of digital know-how. As in many studies, the authors call for improved teacher training so that we may fully use technology to its most beneficial. Resource inequities are a tragic problem for underfunded, under-served schools, and really puts those schools' kids at a serious disadvantage as reliance on technology in the workplace only grows and grows and higher education becomes more and more expensive. Although, as the authors say, the schools are not necessarily the biggest or most important sponsor of literacy. I'm often reminded of the 8th grade student who gleefully confided in me about his ability to get around the firewalls set in place by AISD servers, thus accessing his precious Myspace account. That's real problem solving. Too bad there are no TAKS questions on that.
The rich keep getting richer, the poor continue to get poorer. But that's another post.
The end.
