The body culture in Second Life is such that one’s avatar must look *just so*. Making sure your hair is perfectly adjusted to flit and fly and animate in synch with the head movements is a complicated business. I am simply blown away by the technical and scientific discourse in this post at Linden Lifestyles: Hair Editing 101. Those women are goddesses of style and intellect - they deserve honorary doctorates for their contributions to posthumanism!
Colin and I have been having this ongoing conversation about power and literacy with respect to Web 2.0 and new literacies. Colin is busy researching the power bloggers to explore one aspect of new literacies and I’m busy researching “the long tail” to explore another aspect. Colin and Michele’s first two chaters of New Literacies 2.0 are available here, and they deal with the issues of power and literacy by thinking through the varying mindsets and perspectives taken up by different groups and institutions.
Anyway Colin was thinking about our two perspectives when reading my new literacies research chapter (Thomas, A. (in press/2006). Culture, Community and Citizenship in Cyberspace. In: Lankshear, C., Knobel, M., Leu, D. and Cairo, J. (Eds.), The Handbook of New Literacies Research. Erlbaum.) and commented thus (and I quote him here with his permission):
…but what has got me smiling is the way in which we respectively represent the two perspectives you are juxtaposing in your very chapter.
There is you dealing with web 2.0 in the civic sense, bouncing off your sources like McManus and Davis and Kelly. going through wikipedia as a social community. There is me, in the new edition of new lits, bouncing off O’Reilly with the logic of leverage and with the emphasis on how web 2.0 is the greatest thing since sliced bread for incorporating people into a new economy. Ditto with specific examples like wikipedia. What excites me is the nose thumbing at copyright and the way wikis so neatly constitute a self-correcting system — given a bit of sysop oversight. You, by contrast, play the citizenship card.
It’s always been like this with our respective takes on blogging. I gravitate to the power bloggers cos they give me what I am looking for when i browse the small range of blogs i go to. You are right in there researching the long tail of the blog.
It’s a gorgeous wee microcosm of the Susan Herring analysis.
Mind you, i ain’t about to change!! There is a passage — well a few — in the new edition of NewLits where i confront this whole business about power in relation to ‘new’ and established literacies. It seems to me that the people who have mastered the high status conventional literacies are the ones who are triumphing in ‘power’ terms in the new spaces as well. No surprises there. At one point I actually write that I’m not about to give up my investments in those established literacies that have served us so well.
In the end, i guess, i read the whole thing as largely economic — in a broad sense of ‘economic’ that includes attention economics and what jpg would call markets in social goods. the new economy requires an ‘all in’ approach and that is what we have. but the patterns of rewards and satisfactions will be diverse and complex. I won’t live long enough to see how it plays out in terms of ‘hierarchies’ — i.e., whether values will shift so much that ‘participation’ triumphs over ‘power’ as we know it, such that the order of things we have known historically somehow gets inverted.
I’m sceptical. In that sense I guess i still reckon de certeau might stil have plenty to tell us.
And my response was this:
Well, when you consider my exploits on Second Life, its a bit easier to see the two perspectives living enmeshed together. I have just spent some of my research funds buying an oceanfront property in Second Life. I am planning to build an “alternative” type of online learning environment. There will be rock pools for students to float about in as they discuss the finer points of theory. There will be a TV to show my video clips, a radio channel to broadcast podcasts, and a screen to pop up my powerpoint slides. All in the beach cottage somebody else is making for me. The sounds of the ocean waves will blend with the sounds of me talking about new literacies, as we watch the sun setting colouring the sky a deep crimson.
Meanwhile, other people will get the benefit of all my hard work and uploading of knowledge. Second Life will be written about, documented and revered because of people doing just the sort of thing that I am doing. Oh yeah, web 2.0 for sure - all of us thousands of residents building, making, sharing, networking, giving.
And we’re paying a fortune for the privilege!!!!!!! Where else eould you have to pay for the privilege of working *grin*. Big business dollars are being spent every week in Second Life (it averages several million US dollars in turn around per month) because people like me want to create a brave new world.
OK so I get your point about power. But for now I am so much more interested in how and why people want to participate in this. What
hundreds of thousands of people are doing is so much more interesting to me personally than what the few power players are doing. And if those power players manage to get a few hundred dollars of my hard earnt cash in the process, well thats a compromise I have to live with
Laughing…. I am squirming a bit about how I have to engage in the power stuff WHEN I DON’T WANT TO, to do what I want to do!!
Anyway I guess its important to understand all perspectives to truly understand what New Literacies are and could potentially become. I would be fascinated to hear what others think on this.
Yesterday I bought some virtual land! It is an ocean front property. I will be using it to pratice building and learning how to upload streaming video, music, powerpoint slides and so on for teaching in. But my students will be sitting about in rockpools and sunbathing in the open and under the stars, listening to the sounds of the ocean (do you think I overdid how many waves I added in?) as we discuss the finer points of theory and new literacies. I will have a “house” soon, but (as I said to the Teachers College students who dropped in for a visit last night - and lovely to meet them it was indeed!) I am not going to replicate any type of traditional classroom. I am not entirely convinced that the Pro-Dean of Research in my faculty actually understands what I am doing… but he seems happy enough to support it, thank goodness!!! Here are some shots of me, the new land owner, in my ideal dream home setting!! (Meanwhile in my “first life” I rent a shabby basement in the heart of the city).
