Reflections on my first weeks of the course

8 September 2009

Reflections on my first weeks of the course

I am not one of those who was inspired by the first throes of the internet. Which is a shame, as I was certainly well placed to see it emerge. My father worked for a small computer consultancy firm in Soho, London, called Logica. Big players now. As a child, I saw mainframe computers, recognised the fun my Dad was having with a wild team of mathematicians, philosophers, engineers, and (his term) dollybird secretaries. (The secretaries, apparently, got older and less attractive and more efficient as the company grew!) I had a go on the electronic typewriters the secretaries used. I had a go on a prototype ‘painting’ software programme in the 70s. Similarly, when I left school I worked for a company, chartered accountants Touche Ross, that was early to use pcs for its management reports – we used to skip around in the BASIC programming to tweak the reports and get round the clumsiness of the user-structure. I had been promoted from the department that prepared the accounting data for the company’s mainframe. Talk about two extremes! I then worked for a Venture Capitalist that was amongst the consortium of early UK investors in Microsoft. I was unimpressed by an early version (2 or 3) of the desktop. I probably met Gates. I remember meeting Sinclair. I had already conceived a dislike of offices and a picture of a desk was not groovy. I considered a job with the company of the guy who came in to troubleshoot our computers. I went to university to read Shakespeare instead.

So, I in fact spent the 80s getting drunk and the 90s playing the flute and crying.

And that’s great, because it means that the history element and the what-you-don’t-see behind the user interface of facebook is all new territory to me.

Including finding my way around new websites like that of Open Universities Australia and Curtin University’s Oasis. Thankfully, as I use the net at Northcliffe Telecentre, all those niggly problems of working out how to download a lecture or use a new type of email platform… There’s been the wonderful Graham to help with suggestions or a second pair of eyes.

My opinion on computers is that I just fiddle around – or ask someone – until I get it to do what I want. So not knowing how to do something is never a problem for long.

I intend to go for the internet journalism options later. As a career option. And mostly, having dropped out of degree courses twice, I just want to get a degree.

9 September 2009

Oasis and FLECS blackboard

I find the discussion board thread system confusing. So I’m glad I asked some questions which I thought were stupid. Reading so many emails from so many people was extremely tasking. And loads of people have so much more experience than I do so I was pretty excited about what I’m going to learn from them, let alone the tutors, Tama, Cynthia and Sky.

Otherwise the FLECS blackboard is very straightforward and easy to zip around from lectures to reading material to assignment details.

www.namechk.com

What a fantastic site. I wish I’d known about that before. How does it work? Must check who owns it.

The names I am creating for me are pennyplum, tamarillopeach and squidblossom. Attempting to open new accounts in gmail and etsy under an internet nom de plume have been foiled so far. Why? The error messages I’ve been getting have had to do with security errors…

11 September 2009

www.plentyoffish.com & web presence

I managed to sign up for this dating site whilst researching for the course. (True, ye scoffers!) It was in the US so I thought – what the hell? Maybe I’ll get to email some pleasant American men… And sure enuff, it’s been a lot of fun. However, what is fascinating, is, the feedback as to my web presence… Which fish are biting and for how long…

1. How important the photo is. I have a crap photo. One of the problems though about being single is I am usual the person taking the photos… There hasn’t been a nice photo of me taken for over a year. (Possible business – discrete nice photos for internet dating sites?)

2. I haven’t made it important to say just what I want. So I’m getting blokes who are not educated enough.  How do I discreetly say I don’t want that.

3. My name ‘tamarillopeach’ has been brilliant for meeting men from South West Western Australia – because they KNOW what a tamarillo is! (Peach part probably a mistake – sounds too inviting.’

Changes I will make:

Specifics on the man I want to meet.

My ideal partner is well educated, reads widely, enjoys laughing about the things he reads, enjoys discussing plays and books and ideas, art and music. He follows the news and is sincere about wanting the world to be a better place – he donates to charity (as I do) and probably writes letters, for instance, for the political prisoners Amnesty International is concerned for. My ideal partner is probably more diplomatic than I am and probably thinks I am wonderful because I can be impulsive, affectionate and creative and full of ideas. My ideal partner is going to have to be generous with money, because, whilst I own my own home and am very good with my money, being a sole parent TWICE has taken its toll on my career and finances. I intend to make my fortune and be a success – even now at 45 – and I just don’t know how… yet. It would be handy if you could put up with fishing and/or boats as I loathe fishing and my 6 year old has some sort of congenital obsession with it… I wasn’t very good at it and yet I loved sailing and would love to do some more… It would be really great if you had a mother or sister or children who adored my hilarious, frustrating handful of a six year old. I have a babysitting problem… I also love flying in helicopters and would like to ride in a hot air balloon. How about you?

Specifics on the ideal first date. Then the real first date.

My ideal first date would be something aesthetic and gruelling – trekking the himilayas or developing a huge public sculpture or doing Vipassana (a 10 day silent meditation retreat) or –  this is fantasy land! – recording a CD with Brian Eno! A real, actual date with me would probably involve either going to a restaurant in Subi when my Mum could babysit and me getting a bit tipsy because I don’t drink very much very often and me having a red-wine moustache or meeting for a ramble with dogs and kids in a park or on a dog-friendly beach or eating a fish and chips dinner on the beach at Binningup (with kids and dogs). If you’re the man I think you are, you probably know or can imagine what it’s like – I love running around in the rain during a thunderstorm or swimming at dusk in a winter sea and those kinds of things are hopeless with small children.

My ideal partner would also want to accompany me to UK to see my eldest son graduate in Cambridge in 2011!!!

Specifics about me.

I am finally recovered from a big love mistake I made nearly 20 years ago. I didn’t know I was recovering from this because it took me a really long time to work out what I felt – it was genuinely complicated and were I less resilient I might have had counselling and worked it all out sooner. Instead, I just had lots of boyfriends and I got heaps better at having relationships and had a lot of fun. I resisted commitment – running away from really lovely men. Anyway, being in a small town and having time to reflect and seeing things from new perspectives… I am finally ready and willing to find a lovely man and think the world of him.  I absolutely adore and treasure love letters. And although I am now not so young and not so pretty and not so thin, I would still love to be adored and to adore someone.

Oh, and so it’s not a shock, I should tell you that I have dual nationality and cannot sing any national anthem – I am blood-wise entirely Anglo Irish Australian and was brought up in London. My accent is English. I am neither Australian nor English. I am no country. My (self-chosen) home town is Brighton in England. I also suffer from having been traipsed around the world as a child. I am still travelling. I am often ashamed of being Australian, yet, having that colonial perspective, I can’t help but see the limitations of being a child of the British Empire – most English people don’t have a certain something either. If you are my ideal partner, you may not understand what I mean, and yet, I suspect, you will be interested in questions of identity.

I paint and sew and cook and mooch about in my wild garden. I’ve just heard about gothic gardens and I would love to create a gothic garden. I write love poems. I have Jupiter in Taurus and am very simple in matters of love. And not everyone would think that the men I have loved were handsome, and I always do. I like hands and shoulders and freshly washed hair and that wonderful feeling of skin on skin.

I love travel – experiencing new cultures and people and eating street food and learning languages – and intend to be an intrepid old lady. Meanwhile, I listen to as much ABC radio as I can fit around a busy life. I prefer radio to telly. I can’t stand ads on telly – I tend to waunder off – so I watch more English telly than any other. I’ve not had telly for long stretches and don’t miss it.

I’ve just started a degree in Internet Communications and it’s entirely over the net.

I am not attached to where I live although the things that are wonderful about it are truly wonderful. Northcliffe has been and is the biggest challenge of my life and I think sometimes part of the challenge is how to get out again. I’m working on my house so that it’s fit to rent out and it’s looking like it’ll take years.

AHHH! That’s better. I’ll have to swap this for the wimpy stuff I wrote before. This is much more accurate and surely will sort out the diamonds from the grit!!! Or scare all of them!!!!!

Oh, yes, the course. Hmm. Better do my MYOB homework.

12 September 2009

Crowdsourcing. Guilty!

November thoughts

Doing this course, I realise, I’m having organisational problems in general… Life is full of new tasks, like clearing out my text messages on my mobile. Do I embrace this? Or run screaming? Specifically for the course,  I just have to get  signed up for the net at home… 3 days a week at the Telecentre (like a resource centre) is not enough.

I need to be able to listen to lectures and read the readings early in the week.  And how to file things electronically? This semester I tried filing by ‘Assignments’, ‘Lectures’, ‘Notes’, etc. Next semester I will  experiment with ‘Week 1′, ‘Week 2′, and so on.

How important is it to stop myself from waundering off when I go to something like YouTube? (I always manage to.) (It’s irresistible.)

Tama is our lecturer. His dulcet tones guided us through ‘Your Digital Shadow’, his thoughts and researches concerning

Privacy, Visibility, and Presence in  cyberspace…

What follows is (shamelessly) disjointed notes on the lecture – a special attempt to see if making notes public pushes me to organise them better… Aaargh. I don’t reckon anyone’s reading… So let’s go…

‘How do we create and read identity and presence online?’ asks Tama. My mind skips to paedophiles pretending to be kids to contact kids online and police pretending to be kids to contact paedophiles online. Hmm..,

‘What is self?’ asks Tama, introducing the age-old  debate. ‘I think therefore I am,’ was the conclusion of Descartes – the thought  philosophy courses often begin with.

I text therefore I am. I spam therefore I am.

‘Self’ is a construction anyway, at least, my social self. (Enneagram studies lead me to believe there’s an essence of self somewhere in there… connected to universe.) Tama mentions Erving Goffman’s theory of how we convey a sense of self always via a performance of a self and Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’.

Purposeful construction of self…. Even offline lives are, of course, constructed socially, culturally…

‘The moment where you have to ask who are you, where are you (of another internet user) – in that moment, what do we want to convey?’ asks Tama.  Shurely, Tama, you mean, are we getting what  the internet user wishes to convey? Or not…

Ie all our understandings are cultural and culture tells us what they mean.

Technologised & mediated selves are particular to contemporary popular culture, although there have of course been many famously mediated  personalities -  Jesus, for one, springs to mind – what is the Bible other than a mediation of its characters?

Fascinating stuff is… the book  ‘Alter Ego’ by Robbie Cooper, a book of photographs of real people and their online avatars. Tama has picked Jason Rowe and his avatar Rurouni Kenshin.

Tama mentions that seeing the real person we would have a different take on him than the avatar – Jason’s is strangely different and also the same – they are both wearing masks. However he doesn’t mention how, for me anyway, I would have a vastly different experience of this small disabled boy in a mechanical wheelchair knowing that he happily assumes the character of a powerful heavily armoured robot in a virtual life. Respect!!!

Also fascinating, Choi Seang Ruk and his avatar, Uroo Ahsi. A real-life professor and an on-line girl warrior…

‘Do we wear an avatar or control an avatar?’ asks Tama.

I want one!!! The playfulness of the Web sometimes…

Sims 2 and 3 – Tama calls it somewhere between playing God and Barbie dolls. Sims 2 and 3 have characters with life cycles.

Sim torture – put a character in a room without a toilet and see what happens… No, I couldn’t do it. Could you? I understand the relevant part of our brain sparks off (say for scratching my head) just watching someone else do it (scratch their head).

Films current in 2009, says Tama, reflecting our cultural fascination with mediated selfs.

Surrogates – where people send out robotic avatars to live their lives, the people never leaving home. Boundary between self and externalized idea of self. What is it like to play another person. Gamer – people rent out their bodies and their lives. Real life killing games – a deathrow prisoner gets a chance to win 30 and be freed…

Dove’s evolution commercial – have to check that out on the net as it didn’t translate…

King Arthur promotional poster & Keira Knightley’s breast enlargement for version 2…

Self and/as Social Media

ASL? People would ask each other on the net. Age, sex, location. Text information is not enough – hence the drive for graphics. Visual markers needed. Mode, intention, humour – need to see body language, face.  Or, Tama, hear the timbre of the voice.

I’m Read Therefore I Am. I definitely engage with facebook friends that I don’t see… That I wasn’t particularly friends with in ‘real life’. Some of them I would now like to know better. I’ve dropped one friend as a result of facebook info.

Data mining…. The MIT ‘Personas’ experiment, Metropath(ologies).

Tama Leaver is lucky to have a possibly unique name. I think I better try putting in ‘squidblossom’. Penny Wood is no good.

Is Social Media a Fad? Yes, if you mean, currently fashionable – sad old farts like me trying to catch up… Whilst others have been happily making a living out of  blogs and things for yonks…

I love that – World of Mouth…

Peer recommendations for products are more powerful than ads, and only in circles where people talk about such things. I very rarely talk about what I buy. Am very rarely asked.

Socialnomics.

Identity works like a brand.

Look up creative commons licensing, Pen. Stupid not to understand what that’s about.

Beware – study blog!!!

This blog is an essential ingredient of my work in progress for Net 11 – Internet Communications, a first unit of an on-line degree course with Open Universities Australia (OUA).