Twitter for Teachers: an experiment in openness

So. Nine weeks of teaching Educational Technologies with a Bachelor of Education class. Out in the open. Quite an experience.

At the intersection of the Internet and education, ‘open’ seems to be the word on which directions hang. Openness is everywhere: in code, in the shift from scarcity to abundance, in OERs and MOOCs and all those Big Things that are going to change Everything. Um, somehow.

The issue is that ‘open’ is open to interpretation. As a signifier in the world of education and technologies, it’s a word that means different things to different people.

Most of those things – open education, open access, open content among them – have their own histories and interests. They intersect around sharing and re-use of resources, to an extent, but are not interchangeable.

Each of them has important contributions to make to education, particularly in relation to the rise of the venture capital xMOOCs and Khan Academy models, wherein ‘open’ increasingly looks like it’s being taken up as a precursor to the words ‘for business.’

But all these forms of ‘open’ tend to be tied in some way to the paths via which the Internet bypasses closed and traditionally-monetized systems.

There’s another form of ‘open’ that the internet makes possible.

Why Openness?
I think it may be the most important one, in terms of education’s potential. But it’s tied to a concept of value that doesn’t necessarily monetize well.

It’s ‘open’ in the personal sense, where the boundaries of privacy and professionalism blur. It’s still about sharing and re-use, but from an individual node-in-network perspective. Here is my stuff, it says. My learning, best as I can sum it up or package it right now. My efforts. Here is my work, my passion, my humour, my stumbling in the dark. Here are my people, my conversations, my ideas in raw form. Maybe you can do something with it. With any of it. Go.

It’s the kind of ‘open’ at the centre of Alan Levine’s longstanding True Stories of Openness project (recently re-branded from Amazing Stories of Openness thanks to closed copyright issues), which captures powerful stories of individual experiences of transformation and opportunity and travel (and more!) all stemming from sharing and re-use at the personal level.

It the kind of ‘open’ that takes traditionally-closed subject roles like ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ and forces everyone to navigate new ways of interacting, based less on the safety net of hierarchy and formality and more on plain old engagement with ideas.

Why Twitter?
I’ve been writing and working professionally in the open, in this sense, for years, blogging and sharing and Tweeting and somewhere along the way, building up an incredible network of people whom I talk to about education and writing and technologies and parenting and learning and…welll…just life. I’ve gotten great value from it all, and while much of it started for me with my blog, it’s been Twitter that’s really opened up and enriched my circles these past few years.

So this past term, when I had the chance to build Twitter into the Technologies in Education course my friend & colleague Daniel Lynds & I were developing and teaching, I leapt. I’ve introduced classes to Twitter before, and even had them utilize it for particular assignments, but I’ve never made it a central (and required) thinking and sharing space over the length of a term. And I’ve NEVER shared a class hashtag with two other sections (I taught one section of #ed474; Daniel taught two) of the same course, effectively making the Twitter space an open, cross-class forum for seventy-ish people, a good three-quarters of whom went in quite unenthused about the whole Twitter prospect.

It turns out it’s fun. And one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a teacher.

Here’s some of what I (and we) learned in the process.

The Plan: Participatory Education
The course was titled “Technologies in Education.” When Daniel & I were hired, we were asked to keep the syllabi fairly parallel, so we designed the course structure together, building in part from old course descriptions and timelines but creating an entirely new reading list, with new assignments.

One of these? Twitter. At least four tweets a week, for nine weeks. At least half these had to be conversational, directed at other classmates or authors of articles or us as instructors, or anybody else brave enough to take up the shared and public #ed474 hashtag. At least one tweet a week was supposed to share a link, with synopsis, related to our readings and the reflective assignments going on behind the scenes, in the Moodle LMS spaces assigned to each class.

The main goal of the great #ed474 Twitter experiment was basically to try to scaffold students into meaningful engagements with the real affordances of the Internet: openness, sharing, collaboration, networking beyond geographic limitations.

Yeh. Nothing ambitious. ;)

We wanted to model participation: Twitter tends not to make sense to anybody in the first few weeks they try it. It’s a participatory medium – sustained engagement is key.

We also wanted to model networking. There were twelve required readings in the course, plus a number of suggested videos and other resources. The majority of these were by people working actively and openly in the field of Technologies in Education. People on Twitter, people who students could engage with – maybe – if they tried. People whom students could make part of their own long-term, sustainable professional development networks. People whom students could, in effect, leave our classrooms and take with them. People like Will Richardson, who took half an hour to Skype with my class and talk about an article many of them had found inflammatory on first contact. That half hour – and that sense of connection, which both they and he continued on Twitter – may have been the factor that opened the door to what ‘open’ can be, for many of them.

In education, we talk a lot about student-centered learning and collaboration and real-life engagement. These are important, we tell pre-service teachers. But we don’t always do a great job of modelling them. We figured if we could make this experiment work, even a little, students would come out not only with skills in utilizing social media for professional and educational purposes, they *might* also come out with a far more 21st century sense of what it means to be an educator.

Mutiny in The Open?
Even aiming in this direction – for Daniel and I – meant changing our senses of our role and its entitlements, as well.

Academia tends to be one of those (literally) old-school closed structures. Education is about and has always been about systems of power. It’s also about learning and transformation and all those things, but the traditional classroom system privileges the teacher as authority. We’re trained from childhood to pay attention when the teacher raises her voice or flicks the lights. There’s no equivalent process in social media. When you open things up and get three classes of students actively sharing a hashtag, you change the power differential. Not entirely, but more than is comfortable, sometimes.

A few weeks into the course things got tense. Daniel & I hadn’t fully managed to get students onside, I don’t think, with the structure and intent of the course overall, and there was anxiety across all sections about an upcoming in-class assignment. The individual circumstances governing our classes differed, and Daniel ended up postponing that assignment for his two sections.

Ten minutes later, the first Tweet came across my screen: “can we get an extension too?”

One student asking quickly became three. In the open, indeed.

Our class didn’t actually have the same reasons for postponement: this was a participatory assignment and my instincts were that to build energy and buy-in, I needed to engage them, not postpone. But I also needed to address the request Right That Minute, in a public way, in a series of 140 character tweets that let them know I heard and respected their concerns.

Because if I’d walked away, by the time I came back, the requests would have built to a clamour. And by the time there’s a clamour, people have dug in.

I gulped. Then I put on my Very Best Self and listened and and tried to hear what was actually being asked for. It sounded like fairness was being asked for – they needed to know there were real reasons not to postpone our group given that the other group had been. Fair enough.

That’s the thing about working in the open. You can’t simply dim the lights and hush everyone. You’re part of something, and you may be guiding something, but you don’t control that thing. You’re in it with the network you’ve built. If that network includes your students, then they have public voices within it. If they mutiny, the mutiny will be active and loud and confusing unless you understand what’s going on. They’re not being insubordinate (usually). Networks are not hierarchies. And the medium encourages overt performance of discontent or questioning in a way that the classroom simply doesn’t, unless you’re in Dead Poets’ Society.

And however you all succeed or fail or muddle through, everybody’s watching. No pressure.

In truth, though, as someone who is both a teacher AND a student and has worn both hats simultaneously for years, this openness is a Good Thing. It begins to unpack the power structures around teaching. But your role won’t be the thing that backs your authority. It’s only you, and your fairness and accountability and willingness to both listen and lead.

The End Game
The jury’s still out on whether the course worked, particularly in its Twitter incarnation.

I think, for some, it did. Others went along but aren’t likely to leave enthusiasts of the platform. Daniel has a theory that there are Stages of Twitter, like Stages of Grief. People start with Reluctance (or Derision, even), and might stay there forever unless some form of necessity (like, say, a course) forced them into the environment. Once there, they flounder through Confusion, Awareness, Acceptance, and…if all goes smashingly well, into Engagement (even Enthusiasm!)

I think a few of our students made it to Enthusiasm. One – bless her – said, via a series of Tweets: “In our program so much of the theory speaks to collaboration but it wasn’t until #ed474 that I was was able to put this theory to practice through tweeting and moodle posts. Learned a lot & enjoyed #ed474 – look forward to keeping up these connections for my continuing professional development.”

A couple, out of the nearly seventy, stayed firmly if respectfully in Reluctance. Most made it to at least Awareness, if only because Confusion simply tends to fade after a few weeks of sustained usage, whether you like what you’re doing or no. A good number, I think, will keep their accounts.

(Those who do will notice I unfollowed them. NOT because I don’t want to be in their networks…I do. But forcing people on Twitter and then hoping they’ll stay but making them feel stuck with me feels…Big Brotherish. So I’m giving them the out. If they want me in their professional networks, they just need to say hi and I am THERE. Will follow again. But if they want to use Twitter henceforth to talk solely about…well…whatever…without me, they can. At least as much as one can on a public platform.)

Many may only use it now and then, from here on in, but from the feedback I received from my own class, at least, a fair proportion did genuinely take away some kind of real, hands-on understanding of participatory practices that I’m not sure we could have modelled for – and with – them without it.

And that’s really all I’d hoped for. I’m not a Twitter fan in any true *geek* sense of the word – I don’t find the platform elegant or appreciate the growing corporatization of the space, and I think for teachers working with younger students there are real alternatives that may still develop some of the communications affordances that Twitter does while NOT throwing everybody into the great wide open.

But out there, and only out there, in some kind of busy open network, can they get the sense of possibility that I think all the hype about “21st century technologies” in schools tends to miss entirely: these technologies are supposed to be connecting people in new ways for learning purposes, not just entertaining them.

At its best, Twitter does both. And #ed474 certainly gave me learning and connection opportunities that I’ve really never had with students before, this term…even just in laughing together on a dull Friday evening while we all stayed home writing papers.

And in the end, that felt like a kind of openness I could really get behind.

The World’s Biggest Small Town: or, Be the Twit you Want to See in the World

Over the weekend, I delivered my first-ever solo keynote at the always-fabulous Blissdom Canada conference in Toronto. I also got to be David Bowie for an evening, which was also a first. Plus Jian Ghomeshi told me – BEFORE I dressed up – that my hair has a Bowie thing going on. Heady times, people.

My keynote was an exploration of the ways digital media shape who we are and how we operate together in the brave new world of teh Internets. Building on my Digital Identities work for #change11 back in May, I outlined some of the key features – or affordances – of digital media and the selves that emerge when we connect in digital spaces. These selves are facets of who we are, just as the varying faces we wear when we hang out with our kids or our moms or our bosses or our friends are facets of who we are. And much like our various embodied selves, these digital selves are performative, networked, and quantified – but their performances and networks and metrics are shaped by the platforms they exist on. And thus, so are we.

I argued that these selves offer us potential like never before, and also make us vulnerable like never before. Our networks have the potential to be worldwide, and to scale far bigger than any face-to-face network really can. Our performances leave visible traces. The measurements and quantifications by which we tend to judge our effects on others are new and emergent: we’re still learning how the different currencies of attention work in social media.

But my message was this: the Internet – and the social web in particular – is a commons that we need to start actively treating like the world’s biggest small town.

Connections matter. As humans, we need them. And we are making and modelling them every time we talk to each other online. We are shaping the norms and etiquettes of these online environments with our own traces and approaches. And when we treat each other as if there are no bodies on the other side of the screen – as if what we say online doesn’t have real, human effects and consequences – we contribute to making our small town less.

Here’s the slide deck from the presentation: Blissdom Canada will make the video available in the long run, too.

The most interesting part of the conversation, though, really came after the presentation, during questions. I was asked about kids and social media, and I launched into a diatribe that I hadn’t been fully aware I was gestating.

We seem to have decided not to teach kids how to be citizens of the small town.

Stranger Danger!
We tend to try to keep them out as much as possible, tell them it’s full of creeps and strangers (it has some, admittedly), and then when they turn thirteen, drop them legally on Main Street with a whole bunch of panicky warnings about not doing anything dangerous or stupid. Maybe we walk with them awhile, if they’re lucky.

But do we introduce them to our friends? Model for them the positive things that we do in online spaces? Scaffold them into our networks in relatively safe, supported ways so that the picture they get of the social norms of this small town is one of creativity and sharing and humour and being there for each other?

Do we create networks of supportive adults around kids – adults who know them in their day-to-day lives, who know whole groups of friends and can help them navigate the power relations of growing up from a sympathetic supervisory position while modelling humane ways of engaging with each other?

Nope.

We are so terrified of the spectre of the cyberpredator – and of the possibility of being thought one – that we make it almost suspect for leaders and teachers and adult friends in kids’ lives to want to interact with them online.

I think it does the kids – and all of us – a terrible disservice.

We’ve Abandoned the Playground to the Kids
We’ve known for generations that – left to their own devices – kids and adolescents play with power on their way to learning to be civilized citizens (if they learn…some just consolidate that power. Ahem). But bullying – the extended mis-use of power over another to target and shame – is a part of what we try to mitigate among kids by teaching the Golden Rule in the classroom and attempting to supervise the free-for-all of the playground.

With social media, though, we’ve banned it from schools entirely. The privacy implications – particularly the two-way friending of Facebook, I think, suggesting that the privacy we’re interested in may not be that of the kids – freak us out. So the majority of kids in this society are turning 13, getting a Facebook account (if they don’t have one long before) and wading into the most unsupervised social interaction space they’ve EVER been allowed in, societally, with the capacity for faceless networked mob behaviours and permanent traces of mistakes thrown in for good measure.

On the Internet, You’re Still Not a Dog
This collective blindness, I think, grew out of the once-common belief that there was a divide between the virtual and the so-called real. Early digital scholarship in the 90s investigated primarily closed or at least gated communities whose social interactions online were largely text-based and forum-bound. The tenor of most of the narratives that came out of that era can be summed up in the famous phrase “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

There are still a lot of people who treat – and think about – the Internet that way. Grown adults spew crap online as if there were no consequences of their ‘free speech:’ people comment on the subjects of online news stories as if they were vermin of the earth rather than human beings.

The truth is the digital is part of our lives, embedded as one context among many. Sure, it affords different kinds of traces and connections and interactions, as I discuss in the video, but these don’t make it separate.

I want to teach my kids how to navigate this world that’s embedded in the larger structure of all of our lives, and support them as they do.

What We’re Trying, Until We Figure Out a Better Plan
My six-year-old has a blog, and a locked Twitter account. He shares his creative stuff, and says hi to a friend in England, and last spring when I was away at a conference, his Dad helped him send me a picture of his missing front tooth. He left his first blog comment on an adult’s blog tonight, because Annie – whom he had ice cream with when she visited PEI last summer – wrote about this same issue today in reference to my talk.

Our rules for managing this aren’t firm: as we did with our own learning curve when we first went online, we’re making this up as we go along.

But we’re making it up with a fair amount of knowledge under our belts. Dave and I both have strong, longstanding and intersecting networks. We’ve met many of our online contacts. There’s trust.

We have networks, then, that we can gradually scaffold our kids into, in limited but slowly expanding ways. We’ve learned the lessons of boundaries and context collapse; of how to manage the attention that sometimes comes with being online. Hopefully we can pass some of those along in fairly painless teachable moments before the stakes get high, and before the kids migrate to networks populated primarily by peers. While I’m still the person they look to first, I want to teach them.

There are things I don’t like about digital media and what they bring to the fore. I don’t want my son to have to deal with being quantified just yet – though there are ways in which grading at school is already training him towards that, in the offline sense – or with brand or monetization. At the same time, if I can teach him early that part of his brand needs to be “I am kind,” that’s a win. I don’t want him bombarded with the advertising that comes part and parcel with a platform like Facebook, at least yet, though again I’d rather teach him early to unpack and resist the consumer identity his culture will foist on him.

I want to teach my kids to be good citizens, both of Charlottetown PEI and of this world’s biggest small town that is the Internet. I want to model and share with them, gradually and in age-appropriate ways, what it means to be a self online.

Will his presence on Twitter constrain me and my own performance of self? Maybe, though I teach on Twitter now and long ago stopped dropping eff-bombs. If his presence affects me at all it may be to encourage me to be kinder, less catty, all those good things. Not everything I post or share is aimed at him, or even appropriate for him. But even as he grows older and uses the site more frequently, I don’t mind talking about those gaps; about how my communications, like his, sometimes have different audiences.

His presence encourages me to be the Twitterer I want to see in the world. Or perhaps it makes me a twit. But it makes me a twit trying to give my child tools I know he’ll need, online and off.

And I’m okay with that, so far. :)

(Tune in next week when you’ll hear Nurse Janet clutch her pearls and say OMG now you’re talking about Facebook and teens and SCHOOLS?!?! Yeh. That.)

nasty, brutish, and short

Lately, when I think about the internet, I keep circling around to the idea of the social contract.

I dallied with it in a quick video I made for MOOCMOOC back in August, where I talked about how MOOCS – especially distributed, connectivist-style MOOCS where you participate as you want – are disorienting in part because they challenge the implicit social contract we’re all schooled in. I’ll take that idea further, soon, as part of the xEdbook.com thinking aloud process.

But more and more, I’m thinking the idea of the social contract has value way beyond shedding light on MOOCs and higher ed. I think it’s a framework that may be useful for talking about some of the things we most desperately need to talk about as a culture right now.

The idea of the social contract originates with political philosophy. Philosophy’s finer points aren’t exactly experiencing what you’d call a cultural heyday, at the moment, but suffice to say the idea’s a relic of the Enlightenment, with earlier origins in the Biblical covenant and in Greece and Rome. It connotes the relationship we all have to the structures of power and order in our societies.

The social contract, at its simplest, is about what we expect from others and ourselves: the deal we believe we’re in regarding the give and take of rights, freedoms, and responsibilities. Most forms of the social contract, historically, argue for the giving over of certain freedoms – though what these are and how they are expressed can vary – in exchange for protections of the state or the civilizing influence of society.

We used to, in short, make those deals with some kind of monolithic power – a God or a state or what have you. That was the old school social contract. At some level, most of us are still kind of inclined or trained in this direction, and the divide between God and state – or least interpretations of what ‘state’ means and what rights and freedoms are involved – may serve to explain the increasing partisanship and vitriol in contemporary postmodern politics. Red states and blue states aren’t necessarily in the same social contract.

But it’s even more complex than that. We now live in some crazy kind of incarnation of McLuhan’s global village: the world’s biggest small town. Most of us are wired into some kind of relationship with our capitalist, consumerist, media society, by our bank cards and our status as citizens of postmodern globalized nation states. Our society operates – as do an increasing number of us at the individual level – more on network logic than on the one-to-many logic of hierarchical monoliths like religion and the state.

So we are, in our day to day interactions as humans in the 21st century, constantly trying to establish and operate within the terms of unspoken and often hugely divergent social contracts. We are no longer just entering into an implicit deal with the powers-that-be. We are each others’ powers-that-be.

And we need to learn to navigate those negotiations openly and explicitly; to own the power we have and not wait for the big and mighty to make it all better for us.

Two stories all over the news this week brought that home to me with a couple of unsettling parallels.

One is the story of Amanda Todd, the BC teen who committed suicide. It keeps being tagged as a cyberbullying story, but that seems to have more to do with the fact that she was young and Facebook was an instrument in her torment and we are, culturally, in the habit of making the equation of teen + FB + suicide = cyberbullying!!! than because we’ve actually heard and digested the lessons of her story.

Make no mistake, Amanda Todd was cyber-bullied. Her network of peers appear to have contributed to her shaming via Facebook. But if a kid were stalked by a pimp on a school playground and the pimp then manipulated the playground gang into participating in the abuse, we wouldn’t frame the story as a bullying story, first and foremost.

This is a story about abuse of the power of the internet, first and foremost. It’s about the ways in which anonymity enables people to prey on the vulnerable, and about the ways in which our social contract has not yet worked out the lines between the right to free speech and the ways in which anonymous speech *can* bring out the absolute worst in those who want to exercise more power than their embodied lives necessarily afford them.

Amanda Todd’s stalker took advantage not just of Amanda, and of teens’ willingness to ‘pile on’ to someone singled out for shaming, but also of our culture of spectacle and bystander silence; of our willingness to blame people for stepping outside the boundaries of our social contracts.

We have been told for generations in small-town cultures that people must bear the consequences of stepping outside the approved social contract of behaviour and decorum. This is one of the few places in society where ‘people’ has traditionally mostly meant young women and the marginalized. Exploitation followed by slut-shaming preserves power.

But when you translate this old patriarchal model of the social contract to a network society, it gets really messy.

The second story works the same. It’s the story of ViolentAcrez, the Reddit moderator and notorious troll who was outed by Gawker as a middle-aged white man. Violentacrez spent vast swaths of his life creating and managing subreddits full of upskirt shots of young girls, sexually exploitative stuff about women more generally, and inflammatory and defamatory crap about other marginalized people. That kind of baiting was his brand. He functioned as a bastion of that old-school patriarchal model of power and social contract exposed at its most base by its anonymity in the network: his small-town was the whole world and he didn’t even have to wear the public face of upstanding citizen.

His exploitation and slut-shaming – “you shouldn’t wear a bikini in public if you don’t want your picture taken,” went the logic – went hand in hand with his embedded role in the structure of Reddit: he was acknowledged openly as a troll and a baiter, but also embraced as an insider. He was a keeper of the keys, and his insider status overtly legitimized misogyny and exploitation and general dehumanizing behaviour as a part – not the whole, but a real and accepted part – of the culture of Reddit.

The fallout in the two cases is illustrative. In Amanda Todd’s case, memorial sites to the teen were deluged with nastiness blaming her for the topless pictures she took as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old that enabled her cyber-stalker to continue to blackmail and shame her. In ViolentAcrez’case, Reddit – the self-styled ‘front page of the Internet’ – exploded with outrage about the outing, and (initially) banned all Gawker links from the site in protest.

That’s the old-school social contract in operation.

Then the networks – or the vigilantes, or the community, all depending on how you look at it – got involved. And the effects – which were of course already very real for Amanda Todd and her family – began to filter offline and point out the ways in which both these stories depend on the false idea that somehow the online world is separate from the offline, and governed by a different social contract.

ViolentAcrez lost his real life job, and with it his health insurance. One of the more vicious commenters shaming Amanda Todd after her death was tracked down by a Calgary mom and lost his job after the mom sent his boss an email detailing his commentary. Amanda Todd’s reported cyberstalker was tracked down and outed by Anonymous, and death threats and sites have ensued.

I don’t find any of those people particularly sympathetic, and yet I do wonder about them today…how they feel, suddenly exposed as real and vulnerable themselves.

In truth, we are all bodies somewhere. When we utilize the internet anonymously as if it will never touch our so-called real life, we’re making a terrible mistake. And we’re threatening the social contract of both the old school and our networked society.

Because in a real small town, people don’t get to forget that there are always limits to what they can get away with. Depending on whether they’re powerful or vulnerable, those limits may be very different, but they exist.

They exist online, too. We are traceable, as Anonymous reminds us. But we are also accountable – or we can be, if the majority of us networked into each others’ worlds hold each other to that social contract. In the fifteen or twenty years since we began discovering ways to be together online, we’ve allowed internet anonymity to operate as if it were simply free speech incarnate, beyond the boundaries of any kind of social contract. And in doing so we’ve given power to the worst angels of our natures.

Will this be a tipping point for us as a culture? Will Amanda Todd’s death help us realize that, online, there really are no innocent bystanders when something goes wrong?

Thomas Hobbes said, a long time ago, that without the social contract our lives would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” In a world where our contracts are in part to each other, we need to step up and speak against cruelty and bullying and exploitation where we see it: no deus ex machina is going to step in and stop it for us.

This giant small town is where we all live. Let’s make it liveable.

what produsage is and why it matters

One of the things we’ll be talking about in my upcoming Building a Culture for Reading in a Digital Age course is, of course, not just reading but the whole digital age itself.

What is the culture of this so-called digital age? What distinguishes it from the era in which most of us grew up?

One of the major markers, I’d argue, is in the participatory capacity of digital media: the ways in which the distinction between producers of media and consumers of media begins to collapse.

We become digital, goes the argument, as we become part of the cycle and networks by which media is produced.

Facets of our identities become embedded in digital interactions and networks and practices.

I began blogging a little over six years ago, just before my elder child was born. I didn’t set out to have the experience create a shift in my identity. I didn’t even set out to become a blogger per se: I didn’t actually read blogs much, at the time.

But something changed for me in the first year after I began blogging. Other people found me, found my writing, and began to leave comments. Their comments generally linked back to blogs of their own. I started to read. Conversations developed. Relationships developed…even friendships. Some of those friendships became fleshed out by face-to-face meetings. Shared histories evolved, preserved in the amber of our blog archives. I became a consumer of the medium, as well as a producer.

Now, most people read blogs before they write one, or look at Instagram or Flickr before they begin sharing photos of their own. But it doesn’t matter which way one goes about it: once you start contributing and sharing and connecting with the work of those who connect with yours, you’re engaging in something called produsage. You’re in the network.

That capacity to join in strikes me as one of the most important distinguishing aspects – or at least potentialities – of digital media. When I watched TV as a kid, it was a one-way medium, a broadcast medium. Sure, I once wrote a fan letter to Mr. Dressup, and got a stamped reply in a CBC envelope, but the relationship between myself and the TV shows I loved was a one-to-many exchange. Mr. Dressup was the one, and I was – as far as the medium enabled our relationship – part of the many, one of a hundred thousand other largely indistinguishable kids who grew up with Casey and Finnegan.

Produsage is not broadcast.

The digital innovation and connectedness that mark social media practices like blogging, Tweeting, photo-sharing, etc, occur in what Axel Bruns (2007) calls a produsage economy, one in which creation and consumption are combined. Also referred to as prosumer exchange (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2012), this phenomenon is one of the key factors shaping social media’s relational, interdependent environment. In social media, basically, the faceless mass of the broadcast audience becomes a network of individuals.

Produsage relies on networks to collapse notions of production and consumption. The exchange is, on the surface, simple. I write posts, you read them, and vice versa. You make a YouTube video, I click the link on Twitter and leave a comment. You announce your start-up venture, consolidating information I think might be useful, and I share that with 1400 followers. Or twelve. Or 63,000. So long as we are networked via some platform and I happen to be present and catch what you share, the opportunity for that exchange exists.

The size of individuals’ networks matters less than their interconnectedness, their capacity to intersect and create reciprocal audiences…at least until a user’s popularity reaches a scale where one-to-one communications become impossible, timewise. But still, the capacity to interact with large-scale produsers or prosumers on social media platforms is there: if you engage with someone in a sustained manner and offer them value, chances are good that a relationship may develop. Figuring out what individual users consider value and will respond to, and building a profile and network from which to engage, are part of the art of social media.

Produsage matters because it offers people the opportunity to be part of the media they consume. For me personally, it’s been valuable to my development as a writer and as a student: my networks have expanded my horizons and my contacts and my opportunities on both fronts. It’s also been valuable simply to me as a person, in terms of the relationships and friendships I’ve built.

Over the past few years, however, I’ve noticed that the enthusiasm over produsage that marked the early days of social media seems to have been subsumed in the pursuit of ever-bigger audiences. Blogging – and most other social media platforms – have become increasingly monetized, populated with people and corporations interested in reaching broad audiences for business reasons. This ends up prioritizing old broadcast media-style practices, and small produsers with small voices can end up feeling drowned out by the large ones.

I see the promise of produsage being watered-down by this turn of events, and I wonder what it means for those of us interested in having a voice, even in small networks? For the uses of digital media within education? For encouraging kids to become produsers as part of reading in a digital age?

And I wonder, too, what happens to the culture of digital media if – like most media before it, printing press and radio and TV included – it ends up in the hands of a few powerful interests? Produsage offers the possibility of many-to-many communications, but the serious reconfiguration of cultural practices and power relations involved makes navigating the path to becoming a producer as well as a consumer an increasingly challenging one.

What do you think? What do you think are the barriers to produsage? The costs and benefits? Has the capacity to participate and produce as well as consume media had any resonance or impact on your life, personally or professionally?

Where do you see the roadsigns pointing us, as a culture?

out damned spot: a post-mortem

Out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow’r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?
– MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 1

It’s the dead technologies and media that fascinate me most.

The header of my blog – my old blog, my now-closed blog – was a manual typewriter, the kind with the glossy round black keys that clacked and sometimes crossed swords under clunky fingers, bringing the whole writing process to a halt. When sweetsalty Kate generously and boldly convened a personal intervention for my long-neglected outta-the-2005-box theme and asked what I wanted as a header, it was the only answer.

I learned to type on one of those old typewriters…the very last year before my high school bought computers. My grandmother’s 1923ish model now decorates the sideboard in my living room. I remember her showing me how to peck out my name when I was barely high enough to reach the keys: typewriters are one of the few technologies I’ve always had an intimate relationship with.

I like their aesthetics, their faint whiff of old-school literary pretensions, their status as communications technologies overtly and utterly left behind in the ever-rabid one-upsmanship of communications technologies.

I’d never use one to write, though.

My blog was, at its core, an identity blog: the typewriter was my avatar. In a sea of momblogs and narrative blogs visually defined by wry martini glasses and bright colours, Kate gave me a header that felt like…me.

If you study digital identities, killing your own first – and best-known – digital identity is a bizarrely meta kind of experience.
***

Last Friday afternoon, I took a deep breath and hit publish on the very last cribchronicles post. Until I did so, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d go through with it.

Then I did, and it was done.

A performative utterance: thus this ends. Curtain.

To speak it – and have it taken up, received – is to make it so. Perhaps exponentially so on social media. The medium rewards spectacle with attention: the post resulted in my biggest day of blog hits EVER. Would that you could kill a blog every day. Ahem.

Minutes after I tweeted my blogicide, I saw a Twitter link scroll by to Sarah Wanenchak’s cyborgology post on abandoned digital spaces. What’s interesting about digital technologies is they don’t become ruins, it said. They just stop having a future.

And I nodded, because that’s it, exactly.

Dead technologies are much easier than dead people. They don’t disappear; their traces remain. You simply relate to them differently.

They become bakelite and metal artefacts, like the typewriter. Or time capsules that look the same as they did when alive, like my blog. Except that the counter on the sidebar that marked six+ years of steady building and telling, month by month? It goes still.

When I caught sight of it and realized that I just ended that, just declared it dead, I sat on my couch with tears streaming down my face.

It sounds funny. Silly, maybe.

When I read about blogs for my research I always have to brush off the hackles that rise and give me porcupine shoulders, all prickles and chips. I know too well that the blogosphere – if it can be said to exist and many say it can’t and whether there is unity or no, there, I don’t actually care, entirely – is full of crap. I know that too many blogs are simplistic and commercial or navel-gazing and indulgent or pick your slander of the month, really…you name it and somebody, somewhere, has blogged it and likely been pretty successful at it, too, quality or no.

But the books I keep stumbling about blogging are clearly by people whose experience of blogging has been utterly different to my own.

If you blog, and you use your blog to actually connect with people…things happen. Maybe you make money, or maybe you don’t – I didn’t, though that is not the point – but the voice(s) you develop in that space become networked, tied, embedded. Bigger than you.

Now, I can critique that swelling narrative from a thousand different positions, and in my dissertation, I probably will. But I haven’t yet seen an academic book about blogging that understands it. That reflects it and honours it, even while analyzing why and how.

I wrote that blog for 38 months.

I published 525 posts, in 18 categories.

The categories emerged as I wrote, and were as un-thought-through as the title of the blog, which I lit on casually the night before I wrote the first post. If you had told me I’d have even half the run I did at that blog, I’d have spent more than three minutes naming it.

But so it goes. And it is fitting, because I closed it as I opened it: without being sure where I was going. I started the post Friday morning because the siren of the silent blog always rings loudly in my head and gets louder the longer the thing lies fallow: I’m here! I’m waiting! Speak through me!

I started and wondered if I had anything left to say. And then I realized what I wanted to say was fin.

(A play on words, of course: the space had begun in part so I had a place to say Finn. The blog let me write him into my life; was a performative space where I could be, however invisibly, his mother. All my work on digital identities is centered around the concept of performativity: that we enact versions of ourselves into being by our digital practices, by citing or “doing” things that are understood and taken up by others as who we are. In the performative space of my blog, I wrote myself into my own strange version of motherhood: to living and dead, Oscar and Finn, then to Josephine. I wrote myself into my identity as a writer. Now I have other things to write about; other things to figure out.)

But I did not write alone. On my blog, there have been 14, 298 comments. They are as much a part of that living archive as my words. They fed my words, received my words, made the experience of writing my words a relational one, an exchange.

A few more comments may creep in: unless I actively close the blog to commenters, the space will always be permeable, interactive in that sense. But the flow will dwindle and dry up. That it does not have a future is maybe the saddest thing of all, for me…comments, that diminishing resource, have always been my favourite thing about blogging.

I was late cottoning on to the practice of actually encouraging and hosting conversation in the comments space….but probably a good few hundred are still from me.

The rest are from perhaps two or three hundred people, maybe a few more, who have created intersecting networks of connection around me, ebbing and flowing over six years, leaking out into other spaces, both digital and physical.

You were kind, in the comments. I have been silent. My feelings exceed me, exceed anything I can say. Or maybe I just, for once, don’t want the last word. But I thank you. I thank you for noticing. For marking the end with me.

That comments section would make a damn good Irish wake.

Though many of you said, there or elsewhere…”killed is the wrong word.” And in a sense, you are right. My blog is not dead: it will not rot. Futureless, perhaps, it will nonetheless remain indefinitely, a more or less finished body of work. I hear you. I am proud of it.

But the voice?

The voice in which I wrote that blog was a living thing. And, last Friday, with one performative utterance and a MacBeth allusion, I put it to sleep.

Yes, I could turn back around and revive it at any time: that is one of the privileges and prerogatives of a digital identity. But I will not.

Its traces remain, in the networks, the opportunities, the friendships. It is enough. It has to be enough.

There is a thesis to write. My energy needs to go there, to breathe life into that voice, not the voice that wrote cribchronicles.

And now I get to relate to the blog differently. Now, with my bloody Lady MacBeth hands, I get to examine it as something completed, finite: now, it becomes a typewriter, a piece of dead media.

I have killed few things in my life. I have also brought few things to life that made as much of a difference to me as the blog did. And thus even in its death, I stare at it, fascinated.