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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘It’s Complicated’ (boyd 2014)

Following our Hangouts tutorial yesterday, and our discussions about the ethical issues surrounding our micro-ethnographies on ‘open’ spaces, Jeremy mentioned that danah boyd had written on this issue (comparing/contrasting a public park with these ‘open’ areas online). This inspired me to dig out boyd’s book It’s Complicated (2014), and particularly the relevant quote below – thanks Jeremy!

Excerpt

‘Teens’ desire for privacy does not undermine their eagerness to participate in public. There’s a big difference between being in public and being public. Teens want to gather in public environments to socialize, but they don’t necessarily want every vocalized expression to be publicized. Yet, because being in a networked public—unlike gathering with friends in a public park—often makes interactions more visible to adults, mere participation in social media can blur these two dynamics. At first blush, the desire to be in public and have privacy seems like a contradiction. But understanding how teens conceptualize privacy and navigate social media is key to understanding what privacy means in a networked world, a world in which negotiating fuzzy boundaries is par for the course. Instead of signaling the end of privacy as we know it, teens’ engagement with social media highlights the complex interplay between privacy and publicity in the networked world we all live in now.’ (boyd 2014: 57)

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘Lines: A Brief History’ (Ingold 2007)

Excerpt

What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common?

The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line.

Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present.

Setting out from a puzzle about the relation between speech and song, Ingold considers how two kinds of line – threads and traces – can turn into one another as surfaces form or dissolve. He reveals how our perception of lines has changed over time, with modernity converting to point-to-point connectors before becoming straight, only to be ruptured and fragmented by the postmodern world.

Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it.

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Michael is listening to ‘Tim Ingold on The crisis of ethnography, the problem with embodiment, human becomings and exploding cellos’ on Spotify

Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen, talks to Ben Spatz about the difference between anthropology and ethnography, the importance of collaboration, skilled practice and playing the cello, why he finds the idea of the body problematic, and why he thinks of people as human becomings rather than beings.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘Anthropology: Why it Matters’ (Ingold 2018)

Excerpt

From: Polity Books

Humanity is at a crossroads. We face mounting inequality, escalating political violence, warring fundamentalisms and an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. How can we fashion a world that has room for everyone, for generations to come? What are the possibilities, in such a world, of collective human life? These are urgent questions, and no discipline is better placed to address them than anthropology. It does so by bringing to bear the wisdom and experience of people everywhere, whatever their backgrounds and walks of life.

In this passionately argued book, Tim Ingold relates how a field of study once committed to ideals of progress collapsed amidst the ruins of war and colonialism, only to be reborn as a discipline of hope, destined to take centre stage in debating the most pressing intellectual, ethical and political issues of our time. He shows why anthropology matters to us all.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and The Pursuit of Radical Possibility’ (West-Puckett et al. 2018)

Abstract

To better understand the impacts of participatory design in English language arts teacher education, this critical case study focuses on the National Writing Project’s Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) that engaged educators in playing with the connected learning framework. The authors draw from 5 years of interaction data to question “open” as a fixed point of reference in the design of participatory, online learning communities. Through three rounds of remix inquiry, the authors argue that open as a design ideology is necessary but not sufficient in providing conditions for transformative professional learning. The analysis reveals a subtle shift from facilitative practices such as inviting for diversified participation and affirming for reciprocal engagement intended to elicit fuller open participation to those such as coaching toward imperfection and curating relational infrastructures that are grounded in an infrastructuring strategy that is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete. The findings illustrate facilitative practices that engage educators in dynamic connection – making in online professional learning, and prompt the field to critically consider the fallacies of open learning design.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘Structures of Participation in Digital Culture’ (ed. Joe Karaganis)

Description

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textual and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday’

Excerpt

The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another. Online and offline are interwoven in everyday experience. Using the internet has become accepted as a way of being present in the world, rather than a means of accessing some discrete virtual domain. Ethnographers of these contemporary Internet-infused societies consequently find themselves facing serious methodological dilemmas: where should they go, what should they do there and how can they acquire robust knowledge about what people do in, through and with the internet?

This book presents an overview of the challenges faced by ethnographers who wish to understand activities that involve the internet. Suitable for both new and experienced ethnographers, it explores both methodological principles and practical strategies for coming to terms with the definition of field sites, the connections between online and offline and the changing nature of embodied experience. Examples are drawn from a wide range of settings, including ethnographies of scientific institutions, television, social media and locally based gift-giving networks.

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘A response to Christine Hine’ (boyd 2009)

Excerpt

‘Having grown up with the internet, I’ve always had a paradoxical relationship to it. Rather than seeing the internet simply as either a “cultural artifact” or as a place “where culture is formed and reformed” (Hine, 2000, p. 9), I’ve always accepted both naturally. The internet is increasingly entwined in people’s lives; it is both an imagined space and an architected place. Things happen on it, through it, because of it.’ (boyd 2009: 26)

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Michael saved in Pocket: ‘A Response to Christine Hine’ (Boyd 2008)

Excerpt

Having grown up with the internet, I’ve always had a paradoxical relationship to it. Rather than seeing the internet simply as either a “cultural artifact” or as a place “where culture is formed and reformed” (Hine, 2000, p. 9), I’ve always accepted both naturally. The internet is increasingly entwined in people’s lives; it is both an imagined space and an architected place. Things happen on it, through it, because of it. While all cultures change over time, what makes the internet so con-founding for research is that the fundamental architecture (Lessig, 1999) also changes rapidly. Innovations have always radically altered the world—could you imagine society without light or gas? While tangible innovations have restructured society immensely, the pace of innovation and dissemination today is unparalleled. This, of course, complicates internet research.

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