flaneuse.org

That wasn’t meant to be cocky, but my presentation went better than I expected and in presenting my thoughts, I started to see connections across I had not seen before. I have a lot to think through, particularly in terms of how I am collecting and analyzing my data — which I think happens when you study yourself and you have to make sure that you are being both systematic and sensical.

Sadly, I forgot in the rush of presenting to record my talk. I wish I had, because I think it would make an excellent podcast for the new literacies class, and it would help me to revisit my own thinking. There’s a good example of affordances in that — before podcasting, I could certainly tape myself, but I couldn’t make that recording easily available not just to my students but to peers and others, potentially all over the world (I’m thinking of colleagues in the field in England and Australia specifically, not just a non-specific global audience).

What I am coming to understand is that my presence and practices on MySpace and facebook are more and more important, for a variety of reasons. First, learning to be a part of social networking sites helps me to know how they work and what kinds of things happen between people on them — and that’s an important position of being informed from which I can contradict or agree with media portrayals of these sites as dangerous. Second, “being” online in social networks calls into question how or who I am, and the traditional sense of a synthesized self. Is identity becoming more divergent, yet no less coherent for being so? Can and are my representations both independent of one another (my MySpace page as different from my facebook page as different from my blog) and interdependent pieces of who I am? Why is that an important thing for me to understand as a teacher, as well as a researcher and scholar?

Deep thoughts.

February 25th, 2007 | Category: Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL