Explaining these concepts with a single example (that is, all the concepts using the very same example for all of them) is not always easy, so you end up using different examples with each category or concept. Today I just found that single example that can be used to explain all of them.
This tweet seems coded by the Enigma encryption machine. Decoding it definitely requires much more than what the usual definition of digital literacy implies, but a complex set of skills or competences as the one described above:
Technological literacy: Easy at it may seem at first sight, many people just do not get how twitter works. It is as simple to operate (“just a 140 car. message”) as complex to understand how it works as a whole. Add to this that you have to be following either @brlamb or any of the hashtags to be able to notice the new tweet. And that you can follow them in several different ways, including different technologies, platforms and devices. Definitely, not that easy.
Informational literacy: There are three kinds of links in Brian Lamb’s tweet. At least two of them feature “strange” signs (@ and #) and the other one looks (or maybe does not) like your usual link, but lacking the http:// part (not to speak about the www.). Informational literacy is about telling the difference from those different links, what do they mean and where do they head towards if one clicks onto them. Informational literacy is about being able to find out that @grantpotter and @cogdog are two people (that’s more or less obvious once you’ve clicked on the respective links), that #ds016radio is the free streaming station used for the Digital Storytelling MOOC course, and that #etug refers to the Educational Technology Users Group Spring 2011 Workshop. Easy to find out for the experienced user, those last two do require an effort for the unexperienced one.
Media Literacy: The tweet is accompanied by an image. Its meaning is absolutely related to the information gathered in the tweet (as one would expect) and so it completes the message. Nevertheless, media literacy is not about the image, but about the crossmedia and crossplatform factors implied by that tweet. The actual message is that for you to get the whole piece of information you have to browse at least 4 websites (Twitter, with information about the profiles and the hashtag timelines; the course, the radio station and the event website) and then you have to tune in yet another device to listen to the actual radio. Indeed, the word “simulcast” already warns you that it will be much more complex than opening a book, sitting and reading. Add to this that you can add your soundcraft to #ds106 radio, by using DROPitTOme, a way to operate Dropbox. Oh, and yes, the image was uploaded to a companion service to Twitter, yfrog. Let us acknowledge that this cloud computing thing is a complex one to say the least.
Digital presence: It is very different identifying who the author or who the people mentioned in of the tweet are, from knowing what is their relationship and what is the meaning of them being together doing what is told in the message. But, more important than that, is what will imply for you being related with them. Answering or retweeting Brian Lamb’s message will tell everyone that you are interested in instructional technology. Following Brian would reinforce that message, and being followed back by him and/or other people from his closest professional network can end up implying the fact that you indeed agree with the ideas that this network more or less share: educational resources should be open, learning should strongly be based on building (constructivism) and remixing and working with your peers (connectivism), education has a way out of institutions (edupunk), and so [by the way, my apologies for the simplifications]. There are many messages whose information is about who you are rather than a transmission of rough data.
e-awareness: Taken at a systemic level, Brian Lamb’s tweet talks about very important things. We have just mentioned connectivism or edupunk. But implicit in the message’s 126 characters is the understanding of what is a massive open online course (MOOC) or how an amplified event works. Full understanding of the tweet requires awareness on how information and communication technologies are (or are potentially) changing the landscape of education, how the educational system and educational institutions are being threatened on their very same core and foundations, how the roles of teachers are (or should be) shifting from lecturers to mentors, etc. E-Awareness is about knowing the systemic and strategic implications of living in a knowledge society; and, implicitly, that tweet is talking just about that.
Now, those are 126 characters charged with meaning. If a single simple tweet requires so much digital competence, what is needed for living your daily live at full throttle? What for the exercise of democracy and citizen participation? What for health? What for education? What for love and friendship?
On 31 May 2011 I am presenting at the I Encuentro CIDER (I Conference on Digital Citizenship and Human Rights). My speech, The Network Society: rights, policies and the exercise of democracy has three parts:
First of all, it goes back to the neolithic revolution and then to the industrial revolution to reflect on how things used to be before the digital revolution. Then, it briefly aims at showing how the exercise of democracy has been (potentially) turned upside down as democratic institutions see their roles totally transformed. This is essentially the same discourse (though adapted to governments and democracies) I explained in From teaching institutions to learning people, the reason being that I believe there is a common approach when dealing about education, governments or even businesses (e.g. the recording industry) that focus on institutions, their role, their added value, and how digital technologies help citizens to circumvent them.
After the potential benefits of “democracy 2.0”, the second part focuses on the barriers and, even more important, the threats, especially those related with (ironically) forgetting about “democracy 1.0”. In this sense, I will stress the point that democracy is time-consuming activity and that those with time and training (and technological mastership) can benefit and even corrupt democratic institutions (even unwillinglly). This is the point I brought in The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.
Last, I am using the “power = governance + empowerment” model also developed in the previous article to analyse the Egypt and Spanish revolts during the spring of 2011.
For 300 years we have lived in an Industrial Society and ended up with an Industrial(ized) Education. While this has serious drawbacks, it has also democratized education and provided (in western countries) highest adult literacy rates, higher welfare and higher income for everyone (including the poorest ones). When we speak negatively about Education, we have to keep in mind to throw dirty waters away while keeping the child in.
The Digital Revolution and the upcoming of the Information Society have changed, radically and forever, the landscape as we knew it, due to drastic reductions of transaction costs and the end of scarcity of knowledge based goods. Amongst other things, we necessarily need to redefine concepts such as efficiency and efficacy, upon which we have built our education systems. And, thus, rethink the design of those education systems.
After pointing out some aspects of the current education system that are being critically challenged by the digital revolution, I suggested one path and one goal to be able to do the transition from an industrial education to a digital one. The path could be based on appropriation of the technology, its adoption/transposition to our actual system, improvement of current practices, and total transformation of instructional designs. On the goals side, I go macro and think of empowering people with the ability to design their own learning strategies, powered by personal learning environments.
Assemblages of hope. An anthropological analysis of passionate blogging.Adolfo Estalella
In 2006 takes place the first Evento Blog in Seville, Spain, to debate about the practice of blogging and its impacts in society, especially in changing the world by now having a voice of one’s own, independent from parties and media.
This research aims at providing an answer to questions like what expectations do authors put on their blogs, what are the relationships between their expectations and their hopes, or what are those hopes? And all this in a context of post-modernism, pessimist about a future with no hope.
But some authors do point at the fact that most people have hopes about their lives, about the future, about their endeavours. And hope and expectations are powerful drivers of change or, at least, of action.
In the dynamics between facts and expectations, bloggers link the later to the former, and base their expectations on making facts happen.
They see hope as an assemblage (in the sense of Deleuze). Hope is a self-orientation towards the future.
And the framework is the actor-network theory.
The target of the analysis are 18 passionate bloggers that usually post daily, performing a reflexive practice on their daily lives and blogging itself. They attend events as a commitment in building a ‘blogosphere’.
Most bloggers have a twofold close relationship with their blogs. On the one hand, a technology-biased one, with a passion (love?) for the tool they are using to speak out; on the other hand, a future-biased one, that makes them reflect about the responsibility of blogging, of reaching out, of being paving a path towards change, social change. Bloggers are convinced that they can change society by blogging, they can change the future. But it is not a remote future, designed by others, but a real one, designed in the closest environment.
This relationship is deeply determined by the sense of timeliness of blogs, where the more recent, the fresher news and content are on top, are the most visible.
This sense of always up-to-date is reinforced by the feedback that website analytics provide. The author is fully aware, in real-time, of the impact of their posts, whether they are read and how much, whether they are commented, how many time do readers spend on the site, etc.
Bloggers are, thus, informed people, that deeply know their environment, their social context, and build their discourses and hopes around it. If they have hope is not becauses they are uninformed utopians, but just the contrary: they know where they live, they are savvy about the potential of technology and they put their hopes on it. And it’s constantly depicting the society they live in that positively feedbacks their knowledge about it.
What is not true is that the blogosphere is an open, horizontal, flat space. Bloggers differ amongst themselves and the A-list has a clear profile: highly educated, male, on their thirties, with liberal jobs. Only those who have the appropriate possibilities can actually reflect thoroughly when they post periodically. The A-list of bloggers is indeed an A-list of people too.
Discussion
Some questions from the committee:
Francesc Núñez Mosteo: isn’t it blogging a sort of self-fulfilled expectations?
Francesc Núñez Mosteo: is it possible to describe the blogggers’ practices without a critique to their intentions?
Anna Trias: why is not there a deeper reflection on the anthropology of emotions? Why not exploring other sociological imaginations?
Anna Trias: what do bloggers do to overcome hoplessness?
Francisco J. Tirado: why not analyzing more thoroughly the blogger-related events?
Francisco J. Tirado: why not analyzing in more detail the extreme self-referencing of blogging?
Francisco J. Tirado: is it possible to analyze blogs without analyzing the blogosphere (or the contrary)?
Some comments to the questions:
Some bloggers have become so relevant in their blogging practice that they have ended up being spokesman of or to traditional collectives (e.g. political parties). Thus, sure a critique on their aspirations would definitely had been in place.
There are indeed two different blogospheres: a vertical one, hierarchical and that replicates the hierarchies of society; and a horizontal one, plural, of anonymous individuals. And in these two blogospheres surely hope has very different roles and achievements.
There is a difficult trade-off between ethnography and analysis, and reaching the appropriate equilibrium is complicated. And actually a matter of debate within the discipline of anthropology.
Though it is true that some expectations can be self-fulfilled, it is also true that bloggers’ expectations are adapted on the run as the future becomes present. Thus, it is not the (future) reality that is fulfilled because of expectations, but also that expectations are altered because of the reality.
Within the framework of the workshop Participation and new technologies: challenges and opportunities organized by the Diputació de Barcelona, I have imparted the two first sessions (29 april and 5 may 2011):
Introduction to the Web 2.0, a really elementary approach to what is the Web 2.0, including a small choice of tools that are more commonly used in e-Participation;
The Web 2.0 in the public agora, which includes a categorization of Web 2.0 tools and applications and a long showcase of these tools and applications in practice.
The materials are in Catalan (though they are, I guess, easy to follow without much understanding of the language) and, as I said, they are really introductory to the topics. Here they are:
I am taking part in a round table on “Active Citizenship” the 11 May 2011 at 17:45 with Susan Moeller (University of Maryland), Manuel Pinto (Universidade do Minho), Vladimir Gai (UNESCO) and chaired by Laura Cervi.
My presentation will heavily rely on my recently published work The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy and will showcase the revolutions in Tunisia and, especially, Egypt, were (in my opinion) a small elite of goverati successfully managed to (1) leverage the power of social networking sites to coordinate and mobilize their peers and (2) used social media to reach mainstream international mass media to speak out with images and video what was happening on the streets, thus also reaching international decision-takers, like the US Secretary of State.
