Author: Rachel Scott

Okay okay, so it’s been awhile since I’ve checked out Google Maps. The last time I did anything resembling this kind of exploration was a few years ago when I did a cursory check of Google Earth and visited the usual hangouts. You know, like typing in “Titanic,” getting zoomed around, flying into the ocean, and seeing a few nice photos of the great sunken ship.

When I went back to check out Google Maps, I was shocked. First of all, the revolution of street view seems to have happened without my noticing. What is this strange new world? High-definition reality displayed for all to see. Who needs to travel? Now everything is revealed with an address and a click. Although one of my friends, a locations director for film, had shared with me that he uses street view for his work, I hadn’t understood the magnitude and depth of the technology.

I have entered a real world video game.

I immediately went back to view the houses I grew up in, my old schools, my old apartment in New York City, and my best friends newly bought home. All displayed in shockingly high definition.

And here, yet again the issue looms: privacy. Someone is caught on the camera. While their face may be ruefully smudged out, Google Maps exposes the question of our right to our own image.  Does it belong to us?  To the photographer? Although we’re taking in the sites from “street view” (and these views are therefore public), I felt like a peeping Tomasina. This is legal? Staring into people’s homes?  Although I couldn’t exactly walk down the driveway, I felt as if I had been given magic binoculars to peer into a secret life halfway around the world.

Having just checked out Second Life (a virtual online world created by users), I couldn’t help but be startled by the eerie similarity between my experiences. In both worlds my computer screen is a portal to a new world; one in which we can fly through space, go wherever we want, and explore the limits of a digitally enhanced virtual world. Although Second Life is programmed rather than captured by photographs, they both seem to be caught in a grey world between real and unreal.

What will be next, I wonder. Video enhancement? Real-time interaction with other people using Google Maps – or – god forbid – with the residents of the buildings we are perusing? Maybe checking in through google maps virtually will become our next way of paying house calls. Just walk in and click to ring the doorbell.

Photo: Screenshot of a capture of a street view of BC Place.

I tried Periscope this week. It’s a Twitter creation that streams live video to whoever happens to tune into the feed at the time.

“Let’s just try it,” I say to my boyfriend, while we’re eating breakfast at local restaurant.

“Periscope?” He raises an eyebrow.

“It does live video. Like a mini-broadcast, I suppose.” I open my newly downloaded Periscope app. “Here, I’ll broadcast you, eating.” I  hit the red button, and presto! Begin transmitting. He looks at the camera and shakes his head.

“I pity whoever is watching this,” he says dryly.

I roll my eyes, “Oh come on, who would actually watch this.” I stop suddenly in horror. Someone has joined the live feed. Then another person. “Oh my god.”

“Boring, boring, boring,” he is saying, poking at his eggs.

I fumble with my phone, trying to turn the camera off, “They’re actually watching! People are watching!”

I finally get the camera to turn off and start laughing. “Oh my god, that was insane. Look, look…”I point at my periscope update. “Five people tuned into watch.” I sit back, “Wow, that’s so weird! They didn’t even know what they were going to get.”

He is still shaking his head at me. “Worst broadcast ever.”

“You know what I should’ve done, I should’ve periscoped my class this morning.” I had taught a public class in Whistler outside. “Now that would have been thinking. What could this be good for?” I’m musing.

On my recent visit to Toronto, I stayed at an AirBnB of a hairstylist. Amongst our pleasantries and how-do-you-do’s, she had mentioned that she was planning on using periscope to transmit her live classes. Periscope could be useful in many learning situations, where an immediate live feed could provide visuals for psychomotor skills to the public. You could publicize it on twitter, similar to a Twitter chat. “Live Periscope Feed at 5 pm!” Or the like. The video could then be saved and perhaps more artfully curated for video distribution. The issue that could rise from impromptu video screenings: privacy, privacy, privacy.

“Huh.” I say. My boyfriend again raises his eyebrows and shakes his head.

“Okay,” I say, “I’m almost done with the phone.” The eggs look great.  And I’m going to eat them – right after I instagram them for posterity.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Baby’s first Twitter chat!

132 tweets, 12 participants.

I think we can safely say that it wasn’t a rousing affair (especially as it began with 20 minutes of meditation and breathing), but it was geographically remarkable in that the chat influencers were from Idaho and California. Mostly the chat consisted of the hosts posting inspirational quotes and everyone commiserating about how busy our minds are. The irony of meditating while on Twitter did not escape us.

Chat participation

Chatting on twitter is a little like group texting. People have time to compose their thoughts (as quickly or as slowly as they like), ideas and links can easily be shared, and people can participate as much or as little as they like. Although 12 people (a low number, I grant you) participated in this chat, only 3-4 people really voiced opinions. The rest preferred to observe.

I can see why people like Twitter chats. They are a great way to have a collaborative Q&A, sideline private conversations, meet experts, and share resources. I didn’t find this chat particularly useful, beyond an interest in seeing who participated and from where. Well, and to note that “computer brain” and “meditation brain” are on opposite ends of the spectrum. The more I engage in social media, the harder it becomes for me to switch into a meditative mind state.

Finding your Chat

I stumbled onto this chat quite by accident  – and only because the chat time and hashtag were listed in this user’s twitter profile. Finding a chat seems a little right now like finding the “in” club through an unmarked door. They’re out there, but hard to find unless you know someone who knows someone. I did find a few online resources that list upcoming Twitter chats, although I feel like they are not comprehensive. Gnosis Arts lists them via a wiki, and someone (who?) has created a Google Sheet.

For my next chatting adventure, I’d like to engage in an established chat that has more than 12 people involved in order to see what kind of information maelstrom ensues. Let the chatting continue!

PS: Interesting privacy/ ownership issue. If I take a screenshot, is it “mine?” Photo courtesy of my Mac and my screenshot.

There’s a problem with data.

No, not Data from Star Trek, with his emotion chip. But data. User data. Your data. My data.

The trail we leave behind us as we fritter along our merry away on the web, facebooking, linking, posting, lurking, and tweeting.

Have you ever noticed how those ads that crop up next to your google searches are uncannily similar to sites or products that you’ve looked for before? “Customized for you!” Google or Amazon may boast, as if mining our data is for our own convenience. Here’s the quandary that Jessica Reyman explores in “User data on the social web: authorship, agency, an appropriation” (2013): we have user content and user data.

While owners may have some tenuous right to their content (the blogs we create, photos we post), ownership is by no means cut and dried (check out this article where an artist modifies and sells other people’s Instagram posts). Sure, we have privacy settings which seem to restrict how our content may appear to the world, but most of us fail to understand these settings fully or use them appropriately. However, beyond our user content (the obvious stuff), we participate and help create another layer of information. And the ownership of this user data (the information trail we generate through our clicks and web interaction) has been appropriated and used by corporations without so much as a how-do-you-do.

“Although users are aware of the content that they are generating online…many are unaware of the additional, hidden act of contributions of data made with each participation.” – Reyman (2013)

Corporations may argue that this data is simply a by-product of user interaction (and why shouldn’t they have the right to it? After all, they created the platform upon which its being created). However, Reyman argues that this “social web” is a “dynamic, discursive narrative” that is impossible to create without the users themselves. Therefore, users should have some say in how it is managed.

Also, the use of this data by corporations and governments can have real-life consequences for users. Big Brother is indeed watching. While the information may be used for something seemingly innocuous (like suggesting books on Amazon), it can also have grievous consequences for individuals who live in societies where they may suffer persecution for their interests (think politics in more restrictive countries). Arguments have been made that user data could be used to track criminals, which is unnerving in terms of its privacy and legal implications.

Where do corporations stand on this issue? Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg argues that “privacy is dead,” a convenient position for one of world’s largest holders of user data around. You see, this user data that we create is very valuable because aggregates information across populations and can be sold and used for marketing and sales. (Which is why I see “yoga retreats” crop up on my google searches.) Creepy?  Well, a bit. But we must also acknowledge that corporate interests are the engine of innovation in a capitalistic society. Would the web have been created so quickly without the incentive of cash reward?

Historically, the money grab comes first, and the regulation and protection comes after. Think of the industrial revolution and the rise of labour laws. Working conditions and hours were horrific until capitalism was curtailed by government regulation. Well, now we are essentially in the wild west of the internet, just beginning to wonder if we need some sheriffs. Entering into a conversation about user data is part of a larger emerging discussion that has emerged about privacy, ownership, and usage. As can be seen in Obama’s “net neutral” stance, the role of government in regulating the web and its information is just beginning to emerge.

Perhaps we will decide ultimate that Zuckerberg is right and privacy is simply the cost of doing business. However, to make this decision, we must first wake up to our participation and start to contribute to the discussion. In other words, we have to recognize that we are meaningfully contributing to a huge network of information generation every time we click the mouse.

“We should seek more fair and ethical practices that make data collection transparent and that openly recognize the value of users’ data contributions to the co-creation of digital culture.” – Reyman (2013)

References:

Reyman, Jessica (2013). User data on the social web: authorship, agency, an appropriation. The National Council of Teachers of English.  

Photo courtesy of Creative Commons.

I am a transparent blogger. I use my real name, reveal personal details, and don’t separate my personal and professional identity. In my posts, I have discussed everything from flatulence to love to education, and readers who visit my blog will likely gain multi-dimensional view of who I am.

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Art and reality 

“Never let them catch you at it.” – Spencer Tracy (on acting)

My comfort with a high level of transparency stems in part from my artistic background, where personal revelation is essential for meaningful performance. As an actor, I have repurposed my most sacred, internal and vulnerable experiences for public consumption. However, the public doesn’t usually register that they are seeing “me” because this identity is filtered through “character.” Our online identity is similar: we present a character that is considered, edited, and revised. In other words, there’s always an art to it. Blogging – no matter how revelatory – is curated.

Curating Identity

This curating of our identity is far from disingenuous, although it’s more obvious when we literally edit material for publication. However, every relationship we have, even with our most intimate loved ones, is edited to some extent. It’s why different aspects of ourselves become revealed with different friends, and why we learn to think before we speak our every thought. We are constantly evaluating and monitoring our self-expression. Full integration is  possible only from our own singular viewpoint.

From this perspective, our unease with online identify conflation is similar to the panic we feel when we are hanging with a friend from our wild days and then bump into our new boss. The crossing of the worlds forces us to recognize our own internal fragmentation, our willingness to be one thing to one person and something else in another context. Perhaps crafting our online identity is an unexpected opportunity to unite our fragmented selves, or to at least work towards become comfortable with our human inconsistency.

Entertainment

The line between truth and fiction has always been blurry, and social media is pushing us further into meta-awareness of its subjectivity. After all, when the medium is the same and the content sounds similar, distinguishing between reality, entertainment, and education becomes increasingly subjective. It is a similar conundrum to the quandary of defining porn:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” – Supreme Court Justice Stewart, on pornography

The most public purveyor of this blurriness (um, between truth and fiction, not porn and art) can be seen in President Obama, who has embraced non-traditional entertainment venues such as Saturday Night Live to meet the public. When a trusted figure like the President shows up on television in a show, reading scripted lines, the artificiality and limitations of both worlds are exposed. It’s a new uncanny valley, where the consistency of the artistic medium is fractured and the artificiality of the news is exposed. Truth is increasingly in the eye of the beholder, and the onus is now on the recipient – rather than the progenitor – to construct a personal version of reality.

Privacy and the Privy

So where does that leave us? Has trying to separate our personal and professional identities simply antiquated? Companies frequently (if unofficially) peruse Facebook profiles of potential employees where they can information that is considered illegal to obtain during the interviewing process, such as one’s age, kids, marital status, and sexual orientation. We feel that if it’s out there, we have a “right to know.” Similarly, it’s common to “face-stalk” someone after meeting them to get the goods. Our attempts to separate our personas into discrete data packages is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Engaging in social media is like having a huge party and inviting everyone you know to come with all their friends. Trying to control our personas is a little like trying to keep your parents from talking to your good times college roommate Spanky.

When I took a rafting trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, we used an outdoor portable privy and washed in the river. “Privacy,” declared our guide, “is not looking.” In other words, privacy was in the hands of the observer, not the progenitor. If you want to be respectful, don’t look. Perhaps this will become the hallmark of social media, where the onus is on the observer, not the observed, to exercise restraint.

Or perhaps we’ll stop worrying so much about what will happen when Mom and Spanky meet, and instead just start enjoying the party.

References

Dennen, Vanessa (2009). Constructing academic alter-egos: identity issues in a blog-based community. Identity Journal Limited. doi: http://www.dx.doi.10.1007/sl/12394-009-0020-8

Photo credit.

This week I dove in and drowned. I got too excited about incorporating the tools from last week immediately and entirely into my  life. As a result, Twitter, Feed.ly, Facebook, and the blog took up a lot of my time, and I didn’t spend enough time exploring the new tools on the agenda.

Diigo

Diigo looks amazing, but felt completely counter-intuitive to me. I have used it fumblingly to annotate before, but never really explored how this can be useful or shared. Just sort of highlighted something and thought, “Oh, cool! Now…what?” As I dove in for another go, I found myself lost in “lists” and “outliners” and having a hard time figuring how to track entries or move them easily. I am excited about Diigo and see its value; I hope to create more time this week to explore it at a less frantic pace.

Pinterest

Pinterest is one that I’ve encountered before but never really explored and used. A visual scrapbook for images and video, Pinterest is – as a marketing friend of mine says – “girly.” I haven’t gone much into this world before, but again dipped my toes back in. The amount of social sharing that’s possible is incredible, although Pinterest is not reciprocal. That is, you don’t have to both “like” each other to pin stuff and see someone else’s board. I am interested in considering how these different tools work differently socially. For example, Facebook is mutual like (reciprocal), while Twitter and Pinterest are non-reciprocal. Like Tinder versus Plenty of Fish. Again, I’ve only just dipped my toes in here, but I’ll continue to play with it and see what happens.

To summarize, I got my butt kicked a bit this week. The combination of finishing teaching our 200-hour yoga teacher training with the fractal and ever-inward-spiralling obsession with our first week’s tools is encouraging me to take a breath and not go too far too fast.  Hard to resist the freeway, but I need to take the back roads and keep the speed limit for awhile longer. Until my internal tech is upgraded to a Porsche. Bad metaphor complete.

Photo credit.

What a relief.

“Start where you are.”

The advice came at the perfect time. “You can feel overwhelmed.”

Ain’t that the truth. This week I dove headlong into Twitter, which led me into rabbit holes of web content, unfollowers, hashtags, links, and lists.  Enthusiastic plans exploded in my brain. “I will build a learning empire,” some Roman-like voice intoned in my head, looking skyward to possibilities. “And it will be magnificent!”

Many of us have these aspirations, and I can see how we may enthusiastically plan to create a learning community  – only to find that we’re exhausted by the upkeep after two weeks.

Personal Learning Networks require reciprocity. Until recently, I was a one-way street of information. Everything was about output rather than communication. Although I hope that I generated some useful output, I did not interact with members of my community – or even really know who they were. But the worldwideweb is a teeming sea of information, and now I see that the tides need to move both ways. We need to have dialogues, not monologues.

I appreciated the advice to cultivate the depth and breadth of network that works for me. Such sweet freedom! Skimming is okay. Missing twitter responses is okay. Taking a day of rest is okay. Remembering that “personal ” is the first word in “personal learning network” gives us permission to work at our own pace and within our own scope. Personal Learning Networks start from our own needs. It’s important to ask: what am I hoping to gain, give, achieve by embarking on this project?

Tool Distraction

Tools are sexy. They’re exciting. They have fun little icons. Twitter, Diigo, Pinterest, Facebook…each provides the opportunity to connect with billions of people in slightly different ways. But remember:

“The tools are not the journey.”

Tools can help you get there, but they’re they are the vehicle, not the destination. For example, in my Twitter-gorge this week, I became slightly obsessed by it as a medium. Stepping back, it’s important for me to remember why I’m using it in the first place. According to Florida State University professor Vanessa Dennen (the leader of my current course), these tools serve four functions:

• networking
• communicating
• curation
• presentation and sharing content

Also, using these tools socially has a different feeling from using them for learning. Although the identity overlap of these worlds is now commonplace (social me and learning me communicate via the same fora). Some tools we can use:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• VoiceThread
• Storify
• Slideshare
• Diigo
• you name it.

But whoa there, fella. Don’t go signing up for all these at once. Instead, pause, take a deep breath. Consider, with whom do I want to connect? Where are my people most likely to be? Becoming clear about the goals for our PLN will help us to streamline our resources (our time and energy) by selecting the tools that really serve us and connect us to our greater community in the wide, online world.

The teacher trainers are clustered in a corner.

“I’m thinking,” says Ashley (yin teacher, vibrant, killer hair, nerdy in the best way), “that we should hold a potluck, a dinner, to bring everyone together. You know, talk about these issues that are coming up in their teaching as a group.  Collaborate and share experiences. I’m getting so many requests for individual coffee chats. I want to be a resource, but it’s hard meeting individually.”

Lisa (soulful, wicked smart, luminous eyes) puts her hand on Ashley’s arm gently and interrupts,  “I know where you’re going here. I had such a similar vision when I started.” She shakes her head, somewhat sadly, “We think, it’ll be so great, we’ll get everyone together, it’ll be this massive community.” She sighs, “I tried it. It just doesn’t work. It’s way too hard to get everyone together physically. They just fall away. That’s why online is such a potent forum.”

I pipe in, “Oh my god, I was just reading about this last night.”

The ladies look at me, “What?”

I plunge in, “Reading about social networks…see, community has changed.” I lean in, getting excited, “Rather than social networks being situated around groups and communities, now social networks are personal. The individual is at the centre. So I connect to you,” I point at Ashley,” and then I connect to you,” I point at Lisa, “and maybe it’s a comment on a blog, tag you on Twitter, whatever, but the communities we create are like overlapping webs. We’re not on the same web anymore.”

Ashley laughs, “I’m so old-school. I want the old group, the same people.”

“Right!” I nod. “The locus has changed. Our groups are so different.”

“Diffuse,” Lisa nods slowly.

“Yes,” I say.

“So,” Ashley tilts her head, “In the old days, we’d sit down…have a face to face and a hug, and now I comment on a blog post and that’s the same thing?”

I shake my head, “Not exactly. These authors posit that people who socially network actually have more face to face meetings. It’s just that now we have other layers of connections too. It doesn’t replace the face to face, but it adds to it. We have different webs now.”

Lisa is now nodding. “Yes, yes. I have professional colleagues and we admire each other from afar and online – we know what the other is doing – but then we also connect and say, ‘oh, we have to have coffee, I want to hear about that thing you were doing.’  That kind of thing.”

“Exactly.” I grin.

And then I turn away, because I want to finish writing my Twitter post.

Photo credit.

My roommate shuns Facebook. “Ugh, I’m never on that,” she sighs, “Sure, I have a profile, but I never post. Facebook is all about ego. All that posturing. Bleh.” She makes a face. She is definitive. And she’s not alone. A 2013 study implies Facebook use may increase unhappiness.

I’m a yoga teacher.  I often have thought like her and felt slightly guilty and self-serving when I post online. I fret about being a narcissist and posting to just hear myself talk. To attempt to gain a foothold or earn some kind of relevance in the world. From this point of view, the proliferation of  superficial, branded, smiley-faced status updates is not only a shadow of human connection, but one of the cheapest kinds.

“Facebook has saved my ass.” My other good friend Sarah lives in Pennsylvania, with a new family and no kin or friends in sight. Sure, her mom travels often to assist her (they’re quite close), but no one lives within 100 miles. “I have one friend here. One.” She sighs. “Facebook, I never thought I’d say it, but thank God. It keeps me really connected. People are out there, online. If my mother doesn’t answer the phone, if you’re not around and I need a friendly ear. I can jump on. Someone is there and willing to connect. I’m now in touch with people I haven’t seen in years. It’s a good resource.”

So which is it? All about ego, or all about connection?

While the Networked chapter is a bit of a “the lady doth protest too much,” Raine & Wellman (Networked, 2012) make a great case for the use of social media as an extension (not replacement) of social identity. They argue that ICT’s (information and communication technologies) enhance and create opportunity for social connection and that “people who use ICT’s have larger and more diverse networks than others.” Rather than being determined by localized groups, social connection is now spun from individualized and personalized networks. The individual is at the center of the spider’s web, creating their own unique design out of the strands of their own global connections.

“It is the individual – and not the household, kinship group, or work group – that is the primary unit of connectivity.”

Of course, this means that the burden of creation falls squarely on the individual. We can’t (ahem) “phone it in” without our social connections losing potency and vibrancy. Community takes effort, particularly when we are the hub.

What about those claims that increased ICT usage will kill our person-person contact?  Oh, not so, say Rainey & Wellman, “the evidence shows the opposite: the more internet contact, the more in-person and phone contact.” In other words, we’re using our technology to create face to face encounters. But old habits die hard. Despite Skype and other video conferencing technologies, my mother still hugs me fiercely when we see each other. Being there in person is still different.

One of my personal fascinations is the conflation of identity (one of the reasons I’m writing this educational blog on my yoga site..after all, I am me across all mediums, despite the fragmented branding that we may try to impose). Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg writes:

“You have one identity…The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity….The level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.”

As I’ve dipped my toes into the Twitter infested waters this week, I’ve been overwhelmed, excited, obsessed, and then exhausted by the voluminous exchanges and possibilities. It’s thrilling and tiring all at once.

And sure, like my roommate, you may choose to sit this wave out. But the tide is inexorable, and there’s a teeming hive world waiting to be explored. I’ll leave you with this nugget:

“The Pope also tweets occasionally as PopeBenedictXVI.”

All quotes from Networked, The New Social Operating System (2012), Rainie & Wellman.

Photo credit.

Well, a few days into the course and I am down the rabbit hole.

One tweet leads to instagram, which leads to website, which leads to an article, which leads to a different article, to a twitter feed, to a new post, to a new twitter feed, to a new article, to a new picture..and on it goes. Unfollowers, follow back, ping back (?) what is this new language of social media? Direct message, retweet, favorite…what exactly are the protocols here of engagement? If sometime favorites my tweet, do I need to write back? If they comment on Facebook, do I always like their reply?

Social media is a complex world that mutters like a mad woman in my ear. Rapid jumps and leaps between topics are like the synapses of a giant brain, attention racing from one snappish neuron to the next, uniting us all in a vast web of information technology.

Our task: purify the junk. Streamline the lines. Control the inputs.

As my prof says, “It’s not an all you can eat buffet. It’s all you care to eat.”

My dears, at this moment, I am positively stuffed.