Is anything Really Private Anymore?

I am wondering if anyone has had experience with websites such as  www.spokeo.com?  While some of the information they have is inaccurate, it seems that the information that they do have (or potentially have) is pretty scary.  Is it really possible to have private information anymore?

Michael Wesch made a very convincing argument for the connectivity of YouTube and, more specifically, the potential value in broadcasting to a vast and unknown audience.  I have never used YouTube for more than sharing iMovied slideshows with family and friends.  I didn’t really dial into the social connectivity of the site until one of my slideshows (of a camping trip to Lett’s Lake) showed 302 hits and a video clip of my daughter’s indoor skydive showed 159 hits.  At first I felt fear.  I was involved in a nasty custody dispute over my daughter when she was an infant and was forced into terminating all contact with her biological father.  It is for that reason I’ve always been very cautious about what and how I post to the web.  Over time I came to realize that we were not being cyber-stalked, that people were simply doing searches for “Lett’s Lake” and “indoor skydive” and these videos came back in their searches.  Suddenly I realized that my “channel” didn’t exist in the isolation that I had once imagined.  I honestly believed that no one would be interested in my videos unless I had specifically sent them the link – or unless they were a psycho cyber-stalker.  So, while my experience was different than speaking to the glass dot, I became aware of just how many people lay beyond it.  This realization can be both frightening and empowering.

Social networking sites, such as facebook, can also be frightening and empowering.  Who, in our generation, doesn’t have a story of some blast from the past coming to haunt them on facebook?  Scary for anyone who would like for their past to remain, well, in the past.  But there is a fascinating psychology behind the way that people develop their profiles on such sites.  As danah boyd points out, these sites offer the “opportunity to craft a personal representation”, something that is not so easy to do in face-to-face situations which require more immediacy in response.

These sites offer a way of collecting people that sit like window dressings on any user’s friend list.  Some people will accept and solicit friends in an attempt to get their number up, while others will carefully select who may enter the sanctity of their fb domain.  boyd, in “Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life“, suggests that, “by looking at other’s profiles, teens get a sense of what types of presentations are socially appropriate,” but savvy teens can also make moves that others may not in order to generate more social interest by who they have on their friend list, and what types of postings appear on their wall.  Facebook can be incredibly clicky in that you can see in your news feed that certain people’s wall posts and status updates generate an obscene amount of comments while yours may sit, if not unnoticed, uncommented on, which can make you feel on any given day like a HUGE loser!

Scrolling through your friend list on fb is kind of like looking at a bug collection in a shoe box – you can open the lid (or click on the link) and admire all the critters you’ve picked up along the way.  The only difference (ok, besides species and the fact that hopefully most of your fb friends are still alive and crawling around) is that the collection helps to tell you something about yourself every time you look at it.  Are your friend choices authentic?  Are most of your friends nerdy or hot?  How many of these people interest you enough so that you visit their profile independently?

It is all so interesting how we can be little sociologists on our own playground.  For more danah boyd check out her dissertation.

Greased Pig: Nailing our role as FYC instructors

Just when I think I have a grasp on what the role of the composition instructor is supposed to be, a new comment, article, blog posting, book chapter acts as a beckoning finger, a mental hyperlink meant to lure me from the comfort and safety of my own home page of understanding.

Richardson suggests that it is our job to teach safety and accountability to our students as we shepherd them through making educational use of participatory media. Sure, why not? If our main focus as FYC instructors is on not only writing, but also on improving the overall literacy of our students then making students aware of the effects of their own participation as well as the participation of others is absolutely a part of that.  In some ways we are just being asked to modify or expand upon pre-existing lessons on topics such as plagiarism, audience, voice, etc.

Richardson oversimplifies the divide between the techno-savviness of educators and their students — certainly how much divide can there really be between a 23 year old and the 18 year old high school seniors she is teaching?  And there do exist seven year olds who have never set a finger on an iPod or visited a website.  We must be careful to avoid ageist generalizations on both ends and keep our focus on which literacies are most relevant and how we can obtain or maintain our own relevance as educators.

But truly, does reporting from a camera phone or to a blog equate news that is anymore “true” or educational than the news that used to come through the phone tree of the community busy body? Even in the days before computers people who were socially literate knew that information from a known gossip could not necessarily be counted on, but should be questioned and examined in light of the possible motives behind passing on the information. I do buy, at some level that amateur reporting is in many ways more truthful, and less tainted with motive, than conventional reporting but I’m not exactly sure that the critical muscle to examine such things is so vastly different than those which we have been using all along. Teaching the type of examination necessary to determine what sources are and are not reliable really falls under the critical thinking umbrella (which we are asked to touch on in our teaching as well).

If we are meant to teach FYC students to be socially literate critical thinkers as well as readers, writers, editors, collaborators, publishers, reporters, viewers, designers, activists and composers, then that drastically changes our identity as a discipline and the things we need to know in order to be effective composition instructors. For me the challenge is exciting, and I am always open to reinterpreting my role. My partner teaches seventh grade Spanish and, several years ago was having behavior issues with many of her students. At that time I asked her, “What is the most important thing you can teach them in your class?” It wasn’t much having to do with learning Spanish – they could pick that back up freshman year of high school and be right back on track – it was more having to do with being a respectful class member, figuring out what the boundaries were in a junior high environment, etc. Once she let go of the fantasy that she alone was going to imbue them with the music of the Spanish language, she was able to relax and understand that her class, much like FYC is about exposure, not mastery.

Ethanol, Swine Flu and The New Literacies

Our culture has taught us to be inherently skeptical. Whether it has been killer bees, the electric car, Avian Flu, H1N1 or the promises of ethanol, we are trained that big issues come and go. We watch things cycle in and out of public consciousness (what is the top news story for several weeks straight might not get even a mention in a month’s time) and are trained to jump on the bandwagon of what promises to be the next big thing only to find out later that the hype was nothing more than misplaced optimism and over-speculation as to the future trajectory of whatever phenomenon we were chasing. How is hype over New Literacies be any different? Particularly when placed in direct comparison (or even opposition to) the conventional written essay? If our culture has taught us anything it should be that we should step into the “new” cautiously. You would think that part of our identity as Americans would be that of savvy hype critics. Instead it seems, as Buckingham Points out in Introducing Identity, that what we consider to be advancements in our culture “are contributing to a sense of fragmentation and uncertainty, in which the traditional resources for identity formation are no longer straightforward or so easily available.” In a sense we are becoming fence-sitters and fickle as who we are depends on the context of where we are – whether it is in a face to face social environment or “hanging out” on facebook. This fragmentation, it seems, is taking away from our ability to see things clearly. If we jump on the New Literacy bandwagon and completely refocus composition classrooms in favor of teaching visual compositions might that, decades from now, seem as quaint and ridiculous as Hall’s 1906 suggestion of a cold bath as a remedy for being horny?

Memes and New Literacy Education

While reading about memes in the context of “cultural production” I realized I first needed to wrap my head around what actually constitutes a proper meme.  I had only encountered the word once before when a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video called “The Google Verb Meme Thing” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcKk_HK-FP4).  She sent the link with a message that said, “You will love this, it totally made me think of you” but, while I was watching, I couldn’t understand what I was watching and why.  I didn’t know what a meme was, let alone what The Google Verb Meme Thing was, and by the end of the one minute and forty-seven second video I felt as though I must be a complete cultural illiterate.  After reading chapter 9 in the New Literacies Sampler, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” I feel a little bit better.  In the formal discourse of memetics, The Google Verb Meme Thing is nothing more than a mildly infectious phenomenon, as it doesn’t meet the criteria necessary to be classified as a bona-fide meme.

Knobel and Lankshear view memes as “recognizable, bounded phenomena that have material effects in the world and that can be scrutinized.”  Examples of memes, outside of web-spread instances of pop-cultural reference are things such as viral marketing campaigns, fashion trends, catch-phrases, specific production methodology, universally recognizable melodies, etc.  Richard Dawkins (1976) suggested that a meme, in order to be successful needed to meet three basic criteria: fidelity (the characteristics of the meme allow it to be passed along more or less in its original form), fecundity (how widely and quickly spread a meme may be) and longevity (self-explanitory)  Knoble and Lankshear point out that it is more important for a meme to be memorable than it is for it to be important or useful.  How then can a simple, and seemingly unimportant cultural phenomenon benefit literacy education?

Knoble and Lankshear use Freire and Street’s definition of Literacy, with a “big L” as “making meaning in ways that are tied directly to life and to being in the world.”  Memes, as cultural commentary, social activism, and even as a overstated and humorous celebration of the mundanity of daily life, tie very much into the social, meaning-making aspects of New Literacy.

Teaching students to identify and analyze online memes engages them in critical thinking skills that will allow them to identify phenomena that are influencing not only our culture and the world, but also the memes that are pervasive in their own minds.  Equipped with both a micro and macro capacity for recognizing and understanding the function of memes, students may have a better understanding of how small actions can translate into great ones.

Writing as a Social Act

Writing is a social act.  Once a writer sets their thoughts to any medium, whether paper, blog, status update, there is the potential for audience interaction.  Andrea Lunsford has found that this potential for audience, or even the knowledge of a predetermined audience, helps students engage more with their writing.  She has also found that, contrary to what many English instructors fear, text speak (at least at Stanford) does not make its way into students’ academic writing — this indicates that students today are far more aware of audience than students of previous generations.  Much of our lives are now taking place in writing.

The role of the academic institution is changing in that instructors now have to rush to catch up to the students that they are teaching.  The way that an 18 year old in 2010 views content, form and audience is vastly different from how an 18 year old just ten years earlier might have.  For some the new web and technologies are exciting, for others they are terrifying.  Both the CCCC Position Statement and the Chickering/Eherman article emphasize the need for regular student/faculty interaction.  The C/E article says, “Communication technologies that increase access to faculty members, help them share useful resources, and provide for joint problem solving and shared learning can usefully augment face-to-face contact in and outside of class meetings.”  Lots of student/faculty interaction (whether during class time, office hours, or via e-mail) can only help instructors and students learn from each other as they work toward the same goals of helping the student become a better writer.

Even in my attempt to craft this blog entry I find that the technology is getting in the way of expressing my thoughts and ideas in writing.  I spent so much time setting up my account, learning how to navigate this site, and trying to wrap my head around “where I was” in cyberspace, that it paralyzed my writing.  So, while all of the exciting possibilities of new technologies are there, it will take a lot of time for all of us to get on the same “page”.