Where's the love and pass the goat cheese

Dear Blog readers,

I have tried to craft this blog as a venture in investigative journalism, and let it take me into the worlds of gangsta rap, of political blogs, and of expressive poetry. This has brought me a long way from Iphone anecdotes I reported and tried to play off as blogs, or so I hope. But I still feel a sense that something is missing, something incomplete, and unwhole during these visits into the vast world of social media. This sense of absence was brutally present for me while foraying into this week’s blog report – fan fiction, coupled with a whole fan fictional web chat between yours truly, the untwitterable, and other memorable characters such as diSessa_fieSta, Reas_the_Beast, and Resnick_Mud. Upon encountering a spam bot in the online chat, these scholars boasted about who’s program of literacy – be it Rea’s processing, diSessa’s computational literacy, Smith’s flexibility, or Mitchell’s magnum opus 269 page detailed approach to literacy. Despite their best attempts the spam bot is still fond of repeating phrases such as “Free goat cheese at www.utorrent.scam.com.” In the end I decided not to post the fan fiction web chat transcript.

Mainly because it was incomplete – I found it hard to (a) link this week’s readings into a coherent whole; they all had their takes on what literacy should be (or rather what the possibilities of literacy should be) but none of these views really gelled (neither in substance or style) unless one brought them under a vague umbrella term like ‘creativity,’ and I found it hard to (b) tease out the nuanced views of the author’s into distinct meaningful units perhaps because these readings were not so much studies, or analyses, or the establishment of theories and methods (as in previous weeks), but were mainly proclamations of what literacy is, technology’s promise for literacy, and literacy’s promise for creativity. So all the fan fiction characters ended up sounding the same. Sometimes they even sounded identical to spam bot: “photos, vidoes, creativity, fluency, and flexibile literacy at Smith.com” or “Become computationally literate in 7 days or less@diSessaCh2.com.” It should be noted that just because I couldn't synthesize the readings into a bad fan fic piece doesn't negate the good qualities of these readings such as Resnick's computers as malleable and craftable vision and diSessa's identified social, cultural, institutional, and historical factors of literacy.

Worse than being incomplete and relatively incoherent, it wasn’t very funny. Poking jokes at the NRC isn’t very rewarding for some reason. Further yet, and most significantly of all, I didn’t post the fan fic because it was voiceless. Allow me to muse: this is what I believe has been the nagging sense of something lost, something missing, something gone in this investigative ventures – my voice. Going into the far reaches of the web into fan fic communities, or political blogging communities and reporting what I find is more of an act of exhibitionism or voyeuristic sensationalism than anything having to do with cultivating my voice or receiving the voices of others. I say this not because I think this kind of reporting isn’t fun, or isn’t informative, but rather because it isn’t fulfilling. I’m just sort of playing to my audience, without an actual voice to share, I’m just going out into the online world to find other people’s voices and to poke fun at them or replicate them. I said in my very first blog that this exercise in blogging would not be about me, mainly because I was scared to put myself up on the internet and ‘out there,’ but about the social media trends I happened upon. I am starting to think this is the wrong approach; that people who use their blog to cultivate their voice, engage in issues that interest them, and openly (if critically) receive the other’s voice are the one’s who walk away fulfilled.

I think I tried to remain distant from blogging (taking up a name like the Untwitterable – both as a symbol of anonymity and as a symbol of anti-lifesharing) because I had many negative associations attached to it. Mainly I had images of what MIT scholars Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson (1996) called cyberbalkanization: “Just as separation in physical space, or basic balkanization, can divide geographic groups, we find that separation in virtual space, or ‘cyberbalkanization,’ can divide special interest groups.” That these groups can come to be polarized and intolerant of other groups as I found in my venture into political blogs, and as Mooney and Kirschenbaum (2009) found in anti-science and anti-religion blogs. This does not mean that I am going to fully embrace blogs, or beautifully come to actualize my voice over the blog (this is a life-long endeavor, not something that happens overnight), but I am going to appreciate blogs more and drop some of my stereotypes of virtual ‘tourists’ or ‘inhabitants’.

Of course, writing bad fan fiction did not induce this revelation all by itself (if it did I would write bad fan fiction far more frequently), but an assignment for another class on students’ social media usage has got me thinking (not about the creative and computational possibilities of literacy but rather the therapeutic and voice-cultivating and –listening actualities of social networking.

One blogger writes: “It’s fun and gets your thoughts down and out of your head.”

pretty simple and mostly mundane, but pretty far-reaching in significance for the therapuetic act of getting your thoughts outside of yourself so that you can relate to them on another level...as well as watch how your voice develops into a public entity by which your thoughts implicate you at-large.

And one author relates, “Learning theorist David Geoffrey Smith defines literacy as including not only reading and writing but also speaking and listening, requiring not only skill but the sensibilities of attunement and attention. When it succeeds, students share their thoughts and nurture what is essentially a gift economy of shared knowledge creation.

Love this image of a gift, that we are giving ourselves over, and recieving the gifts of others, rather than simply taking or shielding our opinions from others or worse, aggressively asserting them on others.

This leads me to wonder if the mainstream alarmist critiques of the internet (as causing depression, as causing social isolation, as causing deviant behavior, etc) are mostly attributed to those who don’t cultivate their voice on the internet but rather subsume a polarized hate group (last week I heard of a Latino highschool student joining a white supremacist group to alleviate loneliness) or just go on to blast out their own opinions louder than anyone else’s , or who voyeuristically lurk without ever joining or building a community, or who retreat passively into escapism (as if youtube and the web were TV 2.0) are the segment of the population of the internet who ends up depressed and further isolated after using the internet, while those who join and contribute to communities while developing their own voice are the ones who feel rewarded and fulfilled. Perhaps this thought will lead to my final proposal – casting voice-cultivation and attentive listening to others as a mediating variable that helps explain why people’s internet experiences are so varied. How to turn voice-cultivation and attentive listening into a measurable construct may be my next big puzzle to think through.

Where’s the goat cheese and pass the love,
The Untwitterable