thinking is the new black

I took some time out from writing last week to run a research workshop with the Brighton team at iCrossing UK and then attended and presented at Transforming Audiences 2.

It is great to see the commercial world taking their research standards so seriously and the experience for me was having the best, most engaged seminar group ever, who responded to questions and discussion really thoughtfully. It’s very refreshing and to their credit that the team want to take the time to get beyond the surface of notions such as culture, community, tribe etc. that get used in quite a casual way in the industry sometimes, but not with these guys. It gives me heart that they’re are genuinely interested in the intellectual origins of such ideas and to use the terms in an appropriate way. As a result we spent a bit of time discussing culture as something we do, material culture and the idea and limitations of subculture. Also taking time to consider the value of the work of people like Foucault and Bourdieu, discourse, taste, agency online and power with a big P. Kudos guys!

so, Transforming Audiences 2

The pre-conference day at Transforming Audiences 2 on the presentation of the self in digital life was perhaps the most stimulating bit for me. I left at the end of the day having met some lovely new peeps engaged in research from all over the world: China, Canada, Australia and with pages of notes plus my brain on overdrive full of thoughts and ideas, which is the sure sign of a good conference.

There’s an excellent over view of the conf here from Britta ( also fyi Mark, David, Caro & co there are nice clean definitions of ontology epistemology etc..in a earlier post.)

There were some cracking presentations and it is clear there is great research being done by Ranjana Das and Sonia Livingstone on facebook at L.S.E. In particular I really liked Mia Lovenhein’s from the University of Oslo talk on blogs self representation and gender.

I asked a question during the discussion on what it means to be ’social’ e.g is logging on and looking at a news feed the same as blogging? Well obviously not..and this troubles me that a lot of what is talked about as social media and participation is not what I would call social. The idea of needing to define ‘participation’ was also raised during the closing session and final panel by others.
For me the technology and the institutional dimension of digital needs to be addressed more explicitly by research. Not to go all techno-determinsim but in my view there needs to be more consideration of how the technology both enables and limits – one might say curates even? Also there was no mention of the spectre of Google and the idea that users only to varying degrees understand their networks, how search engine optimization and digital traces.

In the days when we all used film we knew to a certain extent who and where we presented representations of ourselves, in a picture frame in the home, in a photo album, in a corporate brochure, in a gallery etc So to a certain extent we knew who our audience was and if we were not in total control of the representation we had some comprehension of the institution that was and the power relations that involved. I could go on and on here, so many thoughts…