Woo hoo I won!!

Excitement all round as I won ten Popolos in the Popolo Photography group!!!
This photo is my latest success:



But before this, I won with this one:




The group was set up by Zombizi Prime, a contact of mine. He was sick of the mean things people were saying to each other on the deleteme uncensored group and wanted something a bit more light-hearted.

Need more explaining?

OK. The site content of Flickr is not only supplied exclusively by users of the site, but it is organised by them too. Flickrites can set up groups and invite others to join. So there is for example, a 'girls eating sandwiches ' group, which is something quite fun. Then there are those which might interest Michele at the moment, which are quite arty, such as photographic impressionism, or 'photograph like painting'. I like the 'Martin Parr we (heart) you group. Then there are those who are in what I think of as 'look again mode', which directs people's gaze to things they might otherwise ignore, such as the mundane details group. Some are keen on looking at how to do stuff so there is a masterclass group here.

If you set up a group you are called an administrator. You can select others to be admin too. Some people take such roles VERY seriously and will kick out photos that do not fit properly. For example, an image of a girl eating chips is likely to get kicked out of the girls eating sandwiches group. As an admin of 'photovoyeurism', I have occaisonally not only kicked out porno pictures, but blocked those posting such pictures again to the group!!
So there are interesting power dimensions in Flickr; and I intend to write about them probably using ideas about cultural and social capital but also maybe Bernstein's stuff on vertical and horizontal discourses to think about different types of learning and value systems.

There are quite a few groups on Flickr, which invite people to add their photos to a pool in order to receive practical criticism. They often comment about framing, light, photoshop techniques etc etc. People say they use them in order to learn and get better. But as you can imagine, some folks are REALLY brutal and victims get upset. Moreover, the pool remains small as commenters vote either 'delete me' or 'keep me', or in another group 'kill' or 'keep'. Ten delete mess and you're out. The admin kick off your photo. See an example here of the kinds of comments you can get. Or see how one of my friends get her picture of her daughter criticised.
I e mailed Kelsana while her photo was in that group and she told me she was upset; and I think you can see that coming through in her responses. Yet she remains really active on Flickr and overall is loving learning about photography.

I would not post one of my pix in a mean group because I would get upset by that kind of 'play'.

Hence Popolo. With Popolo, someone else selects your picture to put in the group. They tag your photo 'ybp' and write a comment 'You've been popoloed by the Popolo photography group'. Then people vote even ' Popolo' or Unpopolo' or ' don't give a popolo'. Pictures with 10 popolo votes will be eligible for Pop Fabulous. Pictures with 10 unpopolo tags and comments will go to a far more interesting place, in some opinions Unpop Fabulous for that thing called posterity palaver. If you get 10 dontgiveapopolos - quite an achievement, really, - you can go here.

So there you have it.

Some very interesting cultural games going on over in Flickr.
And I am writing about it more more more.
There will be at least one more article on Flickr from me.

Four things meme

OK I got tagged by Anya for this meme and you can see what she has done here:


4 Places I Have Lived
BorehamWood, Hertfordshire
Redbourn, Hertfordshire;
Ripon , North Yorkshire;
Sheffield, South Yorkshire.


4 Jobs I’ve Had
Babysitter
Waitress
Cleaner
Teacher

4 Favourite Movies

Short Cuts
Ghostworld
Taxi Driver
Sophie's Choice

4 Favourite TV Shows

Lost
What Not to Wear
Buffy
Malcolm in the Middle

4 Favourite CDs
Not the tremblin kind - Laura Cantrell
Hold on Little Tomato - Pink Martini
Essence - Lucinda Williams
Time (The Revelator) - Gillian Welch

4 Places I Have Been on Holiday

Plas Menai, Wales
New York
Venice
Berlin


4 Things I Love to Do

Take Photos
Surf the net
Shopping
Go to the cinema

4 Favourite Books

Bilgewater
The Diary of Bridget Jones
The Taxi Driver's Daughter
The Wolves in the Walls

4 Websites I Visit Daily

Flickr
DrKate's Artyfacts
E bay
DrJoolz snapshotz on Life

4 Bloggers to Tag with this Meme

DrKate

Citybitch

Guy

MaryPlain

So there you have it .... will they take the challenge?

A Flickry day today

as I went out with some of the Sheffield Flickr group and took a few photos around the city.
A lot of intensive re-development has been going on in Sheffield city centre over the last ten years, with many of the industrialised bits being taken down and used for new appartments, (old breweries and warehouses being used for this quite often) and for new office blocks and shops etc. Sometimes the facades are retained while the insides are gutted.
Strange how we like the industrial past to be romanticised; we sit and drink or eat in newly formed pubs that were once the factories which exploited people for their labour.

This opne made me laugh really ... an old silver cutlery factory, directing callers to where the offices are located (opposite.)



But in fact the offices are not there as these have all been knocked down for re-development.

The old water works is now a pub:



(some would say that beer is better to drink than water).

I have only been to this area a few times - at crisis oints in my life. This is where the briefs hang out - in Paradise Square.



It was obviously once associated with different activities than Law, as the name of the square and this plaque suggests:



That's it for today.

Whilst in Belfast

I was able to pick up a few tips such as this:



Frankly I was very impressed that in 1907 they were able to predict how much time I would be wasting on Flickr and on my blog.

I was at The Belfast Institute talking about their online English course.
The building was pretty amazing actually:



I wish I had taken my wide-angled lens as this was not the only magnifcent place I could not squeeze into frame.

The Central Hall was very easy to find owing to the helpful signage:



But my guide and mentor also helped me find the way. I was really well looked after and was told so much about the EGO course and how it has helped students gain access to opportunities they would not have had without it.

I got a great Irish culture lesson there too. The people were so friendly and I want to go back.

Even if it is just to have a drink in the oldest pub



and another look inside the oldest library.




I stayed in the most bombed hotel in Europe. But it was OK. Don't you worry about me.

I was just fine.

Mr. and Mrs. Jennings Kenyon

Mr. and Mrs. Jennings Kenyon
Originally uploaded by kelsana.

Interesting how on Flickr people sometimes share photographs in quite a traditional way. Showing the image and then telling something of the history of the family.
There is a sense of this photgraph being an important artefact, even though it is here shown only digitally.
If you click on this image and go to Flickr, you can see how others comment and sometimes share their stories too.

I think this is an example of the way Flickr is utilised by many to make contact and friendships comparable to those in their off line worlds.

Just so you know...

the state of my sanity, this is the e mail I just sent to Guy.

(There are swear words.... )

Hello darlng
No need to blush at all. I am up shit creek as well so I know how you feel. F***ing nightmare actually. (This is like that e mail in some article of yours ... Yes, I read it.)
God it is so hard keeping up sometimes. I am on study leave soon and to be frank think it will remain just as bad. You did not sound bossy.

And yes, how do we do the blogs??

I am sitting feeling relieved for two mins though as I have just now averted a disaster. ....

I was sitting doing my effing e mails when my computer
made loads of beeps and crashed.

(Actually at first I thought the beeps were the smoke alarm. That is how alert I am.)

the screen went dead, the buzzy hum of the cooler thing (fan?) stopped. It was as if the slave's master stopped hitting him with whips and the slave looked up and said - 'but what do I do when the whipping stops??!'

After looking at leads and checking they were joined, all was still dead.

Got out the manual.
No luck there.
Checked leads again.
One was unplugged.
FFS
have not lost all work since 1966 after all.

Back to the whipping.

Phew.
DrJxxx

I now feel a bit ashamed as my study leave will cause my colleagues work and I am very grateful and will work hard and will enjoy it really. I am just a bit scared i won't manage it that's all. (Stress stress stess.)

Stepping Out

in midtown Miami





taking a sneaky peek at the shops.

Why not

have a little play with these games?

This one

then this

then this.

I think it is weird how much time you can spend on the net having fun andit is free.

Also interesting is the way in which the instructions are hard to find .... the assumption is that you will probably not read them but just experiment.

I love the way the games make so much use of the affordances of the web;

even the one that looks like little fridge magnets uses technology cleverly .

I wonder if games use the multimodal affordances and gizmos more than any other genre on the web....

The games I have linked to here are relatively static though compared to the shoot em ups, adventure games and so on which you could choose to get involved in .... free of charge too.

And there is really only one way of playing them.

Anya is playing Second Life at the moment and is having a whale of a time in a massive mutiplayer game environment.

There are so many mre choices she could make and so many more skills she could develop. In these huge 'cyber world' games there are all sorts of avenues you can take.

So many kids are on Second Life (adults too of course) and similar games like this. It is no wonder they can often get a bit fed up at school. They have so many sophisticated things to learn at home and get access to narrative they can control ... it is so cool.

The digital age is a cool age.

Flea Market Doll and Arm

Flea Market Doll and Arm
Originally uploaded by HapaKorean.

Another one in the great tradition of lost soul dolls.

What a digital world!!

Went to a gig here last night. It is the back of Sheffield city Hall. This photo was taken by TT - see here.

I saw Dar Williams,



(This is Dar..)

I also saw Lynn Miles.
And Alana Levandoski
All at Sheffield City Hal. See details here.
DrKate would have loved it with her taste in music.

The strange thing was, that at the same concert was Merrony’s Moll. It was lovely to see her.

MM is a member of the Sheffield Flickr group .
We have aready had two meetings and are about to have a third.
Here are some of us.
We met at The Showroom and even went on a joint photo excursion. That is how I recognised MM. She is lovely and we would never have met without Flickr and certainly not without the Internet.

Without the Internet we would never have been to the gig that night either.
How’s that?
Because TT had downloaded some music from a website which told him that if he liked that music (Lucinda Williams) then he would also like ‘Dar Williams’. He bought that CD too and liked it. Then he saw that she was on at the City Hall abd booked tickets (online.)

At the gig, I bought two CDs which I have now put onto my MP3 player.

So digital.

Hanging out

in London last week, I saw these other chicks down Portobello Road:



I had a very nice time and saw this, this and this.
There was also a Russian thing going on in Trafalgar Square.













We stayed here.

Which is nice.

T'internet

AOL have set up a debate about the pros and cons of the Internet .
Guy's list making idea has inspired me. Maybe we could make a list of pros here ... I'll start off :

1. There is often a feel of the 'supportive creative commons'.
2. You can make new friends.
3. You can keep in contact with existing friends.
4. You can learn from others in informal groupings e.g. via discussion boards, blogs etc.
5. You can do formal online courses and get qualifications - without leaving home.
6. You can work as part of a group and teach others.
7. If you are unable to go shopping or are disinclined to do so, you have purchasing power, can do online banking, etc.
8. Many businesses have been successful in cutting costs - on all kinds of product. It is easier for a customer to compare prices on the net.
9. Many books are cheaper online through companies like Amazon; people are buying more books.
10. Obscure items - CDs, books, strange things are easier to find on the Internet than in local shops.
11. People are into recycling through companies like e bay. T;internet can therefore help the planet.
12. You can publish something without going through another person or company. Individuals can therefore take control over what is published.
13. Because of point 12 above, busineses and big corporations no longer have complete monopoloy.
14. Individuals and online groups can get their voices heard and even manipulate situations.
15. You have access to a massive amount of information and can find out new angles which are not widely reported.
16. You can gain official and unofficial viewpoints, including 'other culture' views from all over the world.
17. Publication and feedback can be immediate.
18. The publishing process is simpler.
19. There is a range of modalities through which you can communicate, so that people can choose whether to use words, images, sound etc.
20. Professional, slick looking results are easier to achieve than without technology.
21. You can communicate in 'real time' - synchronous possibilities.
22. There can be time lapses in communication - asynchronous possibilities.
23. One to many communication;many to many; many to one.
24. Interactivity is easy to achieve.
25. On-line and off-line media can link up, for example you can have a photograph on your camera, fiddle around with how it looks and then put it on line.
26. Mobile media can link - e.g. podcasting; mobile phones.
27. In times of disaster, support networks and information lines have quickly and effectively been set up.

Can you think of anymore?

Crying

Crying
Originally uploaded by WayneMethod.

Sweet, huh?

Lots of people on Flckr think it is great to post pictures of their babies and children on Flickr.

Like here, here and here. These are all very cute babies and I like to look at them. I have quite a few contacts who show baby pictures and I love to see their children grow through the photos. Even though I have never met these people in REAL life I feel lucky and priveleged to have this tiny share in their world.

The links to Flickr pictures I put in this post (above) were simply found by selecting 'baby' from the tag cloud here. The fact that the word 'baby' appears in the cloud shows that 'baby' is one of the most common tags.

So, it seems that people are unafraid of showing images of their babies, their treasured family. The fact that they have chosen to tag the photo so that it will be found in this way reflects a desire for the picture to be seen by people beyond a known group. Beyond friends and family. Beyond 'contacts'. It invites a wider audience to look.

So there are some people who have lost their fear, or who never had a fear, of showing images on the web.

I learn here that there is at least one family nervous of sharing baby images. And there are plenty of people to tell us that paedophiles are interested in such images.

Quite a number of people at my workspace have recently asked to have their photographs removed from the University website, because of worries about others misusing these images in some way.

As Guy identifies there are many reasons why people fear the Internet. As time goes on we may become MORE or LESS worried about putting our images on the net. When I first had a blog I did not have my photo on it; now I do. I have loads of pix of me on my Flickr stream and Trois Tetes has put lots of them on his Flickr stream (some of which are HATEFUL.)

I feel like the more that pictures of individuals are uploaded to the Internet, the less potent it is; if you go down a dark alley on your own it is dangerous. If you go in a crowd, it is less so.

Thinking about a different kind of technology, when telephone directories were first published, they were huge fat books and every telephone user was listed. At that time, one had to pay to go 'ex-directory'. Gradually oit has become the norm not to be listed and we do not have to pay to be excluded from the accessible list. This was a process where people took control and denied access to their telephone numbers. Reasons were many, such as to avoid the intruisive nature of 'cold calling'; or to escape the way some kids used to make 'joke calls'; or to deny access to weirdoes who made sex calls or threatening calls etc.

Maybe we will see a similar kind of withdrawal of access to identifying factors on the Internet. We will have to watch and see.

Mmmm Delicious!!

Obviously this kind of snack does not appeal to everyone, with its chewy centre, but if you are interested you can buy one from the Queen's own grocer's Fortnum and Mason's. (I always suspected she had a penchant for worms.)

Actually the Delicious I was really thinking about was this one here which is in fact 'del.icio.us'.
I have not really bothered with it before, but have decided to open an account and use it. And although I only have five sites marked on it sofar, I have already had fun.

This is how it works:

You can create your own 'Delicious' page and save all your favourite sites on it. You can tag the sites and add notes to remind you what is what. You can then click on your tags and see all the sites you have tagged in that way. For example you can tag several sites 'museum' and then you will be able to click on that tag and draw up all your museum sites. Or you can tag 'artefact', or 'online learning' or 'identity' or 'literacy' etc etc. (Or 'fetish'). This is useful as when you favourite sites through your web browser, they often get squashed up and out of order. And with Delicious you have your helpful notes too.

BUT. You can also look at all the sites which other Delicious people have on their favourites, e.g. ones that they may have tagged as 'artefact' or 'Museum'. This is a very good tool as users of the web are doing the classifying as they use sites. Web site writers obviously also put in key words, but these may not be the same ones that occur to a site user. The Delicious site is like a HUGE database of people's bookmarked and categorised sites. So your bookmarks are public; but you can view everyone else's too. (It is like being in an academic nudist camp!! (But less embarrassing.) Hurrah!!)

This is yet another way in which the web is interactive; a way in which readers can become active and use their reading of a text to influence other people's readings of a text.

By using the tag 'artefact' I came across this site on 'Making the Modern World' . I have now added this to my 'Delicious' page.

I really enjoyed looking around on that site and especially enjoyed people's narratives on objects that mean a lot to them, like this . (Guy will like this skating one.) It is really nice to hear the stories spoken via a sound file as the voices add particular nuances which I enjoy.

Anyway more info about Delicious is here if you want to do it. I think I have got it right but I may not have it all in my head yet as I just started to use it. I did not read how to do it or what it was, I just 'kind of fiddled'. This is how I learn digital stuf f these days.
Like Maryplain I am a child of the digital age. Talking of which, check this article out for a shock ... written in 1996 it is SO out of date.

'Top-tips in Travel packs

I am Queen of the Mini Break

DrKate has declared her position on minimalism, but when it comes to carting bags about, maybe she'll agree with me? That minimalism is a good thing as far as travel is concerned.

I claim the right to offer advice on packing for the mini break as I am married to someone who is ADDICTED to dragging me off all over the place (whether I want to or not. - Luckily I do want to.) Over the years I have developed the art of travelling for a mini-break and pride myself on keeping the rule that if you take it, you HAVE to use it, or chuck it out. (Scary.)

I went away this weekend just down to London over two nights. I took a small bag with me as I hate to carry loads of luggage. I usually take the least I can get away with because:

1. If you pack something and don't wear it, it will still need washing as it goes all nasty on the journey. (Don't know why).
2. If you take too much it ALL gets creased; if you take a few things, they don't get as squashed.
3. If you decide you really need something that you have not brought ... BUY A NEW ONE. (This is an excellent rationale).
4. Even if you can fit everything in a bag, you may not be able to carry it all comfortably.
5. I PLAN what I will wear each day and make sure that I can get away with wearing the same boots or shoes will everything.
   I make sure that everything you take matches everything else. (If you are colour blind, a heterosexual male, or a woman with no style, this rule is easy to skipover but is important.)
6. I usually wear bulky, warm items - e.g. when I went down to London I wore boots, skirt, camisole, light cardigan, coat and large scarf - gloves in my pocket, hat. You can always unkit yourself on the train or plane.
7. I usually wear a skirt to travel in as trousers get too uncomfortable after a few hours - and skirts are warmer I think. I take three camisole tops and two light cardigans (plus underwear etc. but underwear is far too personal to discuss.)
8. I take plenty of accessories - a chic scarf is lighter than an extra layer of clothing and can still be as warm and worn in many ways. Too many jumpers are bulky to carry. Different jewellery can be worn each day, and this is very light to carry but can really MAKE the outfit.
9. I sometimes might take an extra skirt too if it is of light material - such as silk or cotton.
10. I do NOT take a bag with wheels - this would tempt me to break all the rules and I would have to carry the bag up steps (hard) and drag it over bumps. (One is allowed bags with wheels for trips of more than five days or if it is work related and laptops and/or papers and/or books are involved.) It is not cool to have partners carry bags for you; besides they need to save their energy.
11. I take my Sony MP3 player, all charged up of course, my phone (fully charged), a camera and two lenses. Also one book - no hardbacks, a notebook and pen. A packet of mints. Buy water at the station or airport.

Obviously I am intending you use me as a role model. I strongly advise that you DO NOT use hotel shampoo, conditioner, or shower gel. It is vile beyond reason. Take your own in small bottles and certainly DO NOT take any of the horrible stuff back home as you will never use it. If you do use it, you need more help than I have time to give you.

The ONLY things worth snatching from your hotel room are the plastic shower caps, as you can use these while you are waiting for your hairdye to develop. This way you can walk round the house in that boring twenty minutes before you rinse. And it is also worth sniping cotton buds in little packets. Meaner establishments don't always give you these but they are very handy in your handbag and keep clean in the little packets.

Exhibits

The excellent toilet bag:

(This was in fact a gift from a lovely person.)

The contents of the swag bag:

Please click on the image to see (in Flickr) further edifying notes.

I hope this has been helpful. If you need further advice please make requests in the comment box.

Thank you.

Not much time ...

so why I am still stopping to post something?

Just to say I had a GREAT day today .. congregation for the students on the MA Literacy and Language course. It was so good to see them now they have finished ...

Took loads of photos .. but no permission to blog them (yet). In the meantime here's a strange perspective on the Arts Tower. I did my teacher training in this building - well some of it anyway.

Jackanory, Jackanory

When I was a kid I used to sometimes watch Jackanory on television. It was a bit boring I used to think, as the programme was just some woman or some man reading a story out of a book. Personally I found the readers a bit posh and preferred to read my own choice of stuff. Also I thought that the telly was best at cartoons and programmes like Crackerjack and possibly Blue Peter.
The music for the opening credits for Jackanory was quite boring too, but if anyone at school was ever thought to be lying or 'telling a porky' (pork pies = lies) then we would quietly sing the Jackanory theme tune as the person spoke. The idea was, that fiction is lies; a made up story; something that is not factual, is a lie. Later when I was at university I discovered that Plato thought this too, whilst Aristotle was all in favour saying that fiction or 'Art' offers us central truths.

Anyway obviously in the post modern world the idea of an essential truth is one we find difficult to accept. We talk about narratives and versions and points of view. This blog offers a perspective on me and my life but it is difficult to say that it offers a story of the real me.

Kate has been thinking about narrative too and I loved her link to these visual naratives in the post the day before. This site has a link to the author's Flickr stream here and when I went to the Flickr place I felt I was seeing behind the scenes. That was a strange thing; I thought I was seeing into the prep room or studio, before the photos were selected for the posher narrative site.

I have referred in this post today, to Kate's site, and to the narrative site and to the associated Flickr stream. Kate today referred to Guy's site.

We all made proper hypertext links, so the fabric of out narrative is DIGITALLY ENABLED. We are weaving together our texts which make another larger text together. It makes the reading experience feel dynamic. And you can ignore the links if you want and just try to get meaning from the 'surface text'. So there may be multiple levels of narrative going on.

I am very interested in the idea of how we tell a story together we all hold the different threads of the narrative across our sites. We could see it merely as discursive and intertextual; I think it is more than this. I see it as a distributed narrative as Jill Walker explains.

This is a wonderfully written article and even draws on the old stuff of English Literature and the three unities and all that jazz. It is beautifuly crafted, very well theorised stuff.

I think that on the web I am part of a number of narrative threads across various blogs and in the Flickr community. These narratives cross the boundares of cyberspace and 'real space' into what Mitra calls 'cybernetic space'. I mentioned it here today too.

These patternings and narratives and different types of crossings form affinities which I think are significant socially and make different meanings in different ways. Sometimes these are to do with the sharing of words and phrases across a group of people as here. See the comments here too. Sometimes it is developing ideas together and here I am clearly helped by Kate's posts earlier in the week.
Finally thinking back to Jackanory, narratives seem less static than in book/paper based texts, more interactive somehow. They are shared across time and space in asynchronous ways and cross borders of formal/informal private/public in what feels like a more dynamic experience.

But this is still not unique, as there have been intertextual references, stories told across time and shared in different spaces since Aristotle's time. We still tell his story now. The ways in which we share in the narrative, the distributive nature of text feels unique... but is it? IF so how can we decsribe that new essence?

Thumb Culture

(Thanks to Jon on flickr)

For quite some time now we have known that there have been worries that kids will (and do) suffer from enlarged thumbs if they text too much.


These ideas are suitably and scornfully presented here by Coyote in his blog 'Howl at the Moon'.
Indeed the BBC has reported on the phenomenon known as 'Blackberry thumb.'

Prensky talks about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in a well cited article that is worth bookmarking if you don't already know it. Digital Natives are those who are comfortable with technologies, who use them as part of their everyday lives. Immigrants are those who must make the effort to learn the stuff and who have to be inducted into the culture. I am keen to say though , that Digital Natives got that way partly through their own curiosity, their own volition. Prensky himself points out:

They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

I feel a bit weary of hearing the young discussed as if they instinctively, almost in spite of themselves just 'know' about operating and using digital technology. Rather, they were probably inspired to find out by its intrinsic interestingness. And as Prensky points out, they have invested TIME in LEARNING.

It's about time that schools were able to provide such inspiration without being held back by the strait-jacket of twentieth century curicular. Thery need time to learn themselves and they need time to think about developing suitable pedagogies to fit the new climate/culture. Blah blah blah.

Below are two immigrants I spotted in Miami - Digital Immigrants that is; helping each other to get to grips with texting.




Earlier this week I checked out this book on 'Thumb Culture' having read a review by Jennie Bristow on SPIKED. She praises this 25 chapter edited collection (even though it is written by academics) saying for example:

Overall, Thumb Culture is a positive appraisal of the increasingly complex role played by mobile phones in our society. Chapters examine the speed at which this
technology has developed already and its potential for the future, and there is a clear sense throughout the book that mobile phones have indeed come to mean a great deal for society, and that understanding this relationship is critical for
understanding how we view current social attitudes towards progress, communication and co-operation.

Well I would go along with a book that looks at this kind of stuff and with 25 chapters it seems it is jam-packed. Bristow quotes from a chapter about teenagers' use of mobiles/cellphones:

Teenagers' moblog contributions - with pictures illustrating their breakfast, their journey to school, their last party, or their pets and siblings - might seem trite, but so is life,

I agree with this to an extent and would want to add, as I explained in my chapter in this book, (edited by Marsh and Millard), that teenagers like to keep in contact with each other, partly just to show they are sharing the same life rhythms. Their text messages to each other, (on MSN or on text) are not necessarily intended to report news at all,but to just 'hang out' online or via their cellphones/mobiles. They like to just eport in themundane. But a cture is never JUST a picture and as I argued in my paper, (awaiting review), about the photo-sharing website Flickr, people's fascination with digital cameras is giving them a chance to take different types of picture (detailed close ups) and to see the world around them in new ways.




Anyway I do want to get a copy of Thumb Culture, but at the moment Amazon will keep you waiting 4 - 6 weeks with an additional charge for getting hold of it. And even on the other side of the pond at .com. they are asking you to wait a similar amount of time. So I'll have to keep a look out.

In the meantime if you have not got hold of Ito's Personal, Portable Pedestrian, then you should do so. It is of course very readable and excellent. However, if you are strapped for cash, (or even if you are not), go and download this article by Cynthia Lewis and Betina Fabos. This time it is about Instant messsaging, but is along similar lines as textng through phones and thumbs. You'll love it.

Just two more things. A report on how the Iraquis give the thumbs up to US soldiers and what it means here.
And finally:
Our music machines are getting smaller these days too and so instead of precariously balancing a needle into the groove of a vinyl single, or LP, (as I used to do in the seventies), my husband can fumble with his thumbs to hear a crystal clear rendering of the horrible Clash's horrible song 'London's Burning'.

Fashion statement?

Fashion statement?
Originally uploaded by Roger B..

It's becoming a trend apparently.

So hard

to get back in the swing of work after a little break, isn't it?
I have been swopping from one job to the next, not quite finishing anything. It's like wading through treacle and I am just in a MESS.


Nice to know that others feel the same and thanks to Seb for sending me this little number. It turns out that I am doing the right thing after all and am involved in a useful process called 'structured procrastiation'. Also, as it turns out, NOTHING is urgent. (Sorry Lucinda if you are reading this, but the deadline for updating that unit is apparently quite fluid.)

Maybe before I go I'll share this little soap opera:



OOOOPS. No not that.

It was this smooth operator here at worl in Nice. She is King of the Cats:








Quite a little Drama really, huh? Wish I knew what was going on, but I think I know who won!

No time

to blog but have to keep in touch.
Here is a picture of me in Nice old town market.




Thoughts come later ... I have been thinking about photos, flickr, memories, identity, spaces and playing.
Nothing new, huh?