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A common theme emerged from my week at HighEdWeb10. That is, institutions don't get it. The 'it' I'm referring to is social media and by institutions I'm referring to the administrative and governing bodies. The not getting it refers to how social media is used to interact, particularly interactions that travel from institutional channels channels to the population they serve, which is primarily students but, it's not exclusive.

I was part of the criticism myself in my presentation, "Why Do You Tweet?" though my point was geared more toward instructors and the way they use social media for teaching. Recent studies, and they are very recent due to the newness of the phenomenon, indicate that the primary reason we humans use social media is to, well, socialize.

The overwhelming amount of volume on Twitter is chit-chat, mostly in the form of status updates. I don't have the data on Facebook use but, by my own use, I'd bet it's the same. Think of it as a conversation over coffee with friends where it's not so much what you're talking about but whom with you're talking. Do I care that my friend Jim and his wife watched a movie last night? At face value, not really. But I do care about Jim and what this tells me about how things are going for him at the moment. A quiet evening at home in the dark watching movies with the person in the world Jim most wants to spend time with tells me things are going alright for Jim.

Know what social media is least used for? News. Basic factual get it from standard sources news. Yet, that seems to be how we in education approach social media. Whether it's at the classroom level sending out course information or at the institutional level sending out weather updates we are trying to connect using the least desirable option. And we wonder why the majority of our forays are met with reaction ranging from apathy, to bemusement, to anger, to outright hostility?

Even when we hold up the positive examples of social media use in education we tend to highlight the exceptions that don't necessarily support the rule. For example, using Twitter to illuminate back channel conversations taking place during a lecture or a conference presentation is an excellent thing to do because it allows more voices to be heard and therefore deepens the conversation. But when the social media apologists hold these up as exemplars shouting "Aha! See there really is value in this!" to the naysayers they are really falling into a trap of their own making and not supporting their argument at all.

You see, if that's what social media is really good for then it's not really good for much.

For the allure of social media lies is the human connection. Believe it or not the power of Twitter and Facebook is in the mundane. The meaningless. The chatter. Because, quite frankly, that's where the majority of us live our lives.

So the first question any entity must ask itself before joining in is if they do indeed have a place here. Should an instructor interact with students this way or are other means more appropriate? Should the public relations office tweet formal university messages, such as campus weather updates or are their better ways of reaching its constituents? For that matter, should an office be tweeting at all? If social media is about the human connection shouldn't a person and not an office be tweeting me?

I'm not saying there is not a place here but I am saying it's an arbitrary thing and had better be personal. If you're going to tweet as an entity and all you going to share is factual information, the same information I get from your web page and in my RSS reader, then don't complain you only have 60 followers. I'm more likely to mark these as read without really reading them anyway so why do I want the same information in another place? Now if Jenny from public relations tweets about a bootleg Clash CD she found when cleaning out her garage...then we're onto something. So when she puts a heads up on Twitter about something official I'm more likely to take action. But, it's got to be real. We humans can spot insincerity not matter what medium it's thrown at at us.

So, my advice is, if it's not you don't do it. I do not want the Office of Public Relations as my friend on Facebook. I want Jenny to be my friend. And if Jenny sets up a PR information group on Facebook I may join, as long as it's Jenny conversing me with me. I don't want to read copy here I want to connect.

Also, if connecting this way is not Jenny's thing, she shouldn't do it. Or she should get someone to help her. Or, even better, she should let that someone run with it. I'm more apt to care about your organization if I connect with someone who happens to work there. This means stepping away and releasing control. It means allowing an uncrafted authentic voice out in the world on its own. A voice that yu will be definition not always be comfortable with. A voice that will make mistakes and say things you wish it wouldn't. But it also may make some kid interested in your school. And it won't be for the institution. It will be for the person. And you have to be willing to accept that in the medium of social media this is okay.

Lately, the subject of identity has been a recurring theme wherever I go. It was prevalent in both spoken and unspoken ways at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, ICLS, last week in Chicago. It saturated the atmosphere of the YOUmedia center of the Chicago Public Library and it's all over the work of Sam Richards and Laurie Mulvey, two dynamic people who I'm fortunate enough to work with during their faculty fellowship this summer.

For Sam and Laurie their work is all about fostering conversations, uncomfortable conversations. Laurie beautifully described what they do when she said they look to foster these "moments of grace" where through dialogue individuals come to realize something about themselves by talking to another who, on the surface seems to be their complete opposite. For instance, in their project on race, the Race Relations Project, where they bring together individuals from different cultural and ancestral groups to...talk. To each other. An Arab and a Jew? Let's bring them together. A white boy from the country and an urban black kid? Let's sit them down with each other.

The point being that through the process of talking they get to know each other. This leads to something even more uncomfortable, they get to know themselves. By seeing the other they discover something about themselves and, hopefully, their sense of who they are is fundamentally changed.

The really interesting thing is that the kids seem to love this. Their sociology class on race is always overbooked. They frequently end up with students from the class working on the project long after the class is over. Why? Why would these kids voluntarily put themselves in the very socially awkward position we're conditioned to avoid? I think it's because at the base of it all, learning is really the process of self discovery.

The same was true at the better presentations I attended at ICLS. Whether the subject matter was gaming, science, math, English, or the arts the common denominator was they all were about enabling the students to try on different identities to see how they felt. Some of the more poignant quotes were, "I wanted them to think like a scientist," or "think like someone who knows they can solve a problem, or, "act like someone who knows they are creative." What was striking to me was that, in each situation, the act of thinking of oneself in that way was the precursor to learning. In other words, you were a scientist from the first day of class. The teacher told you so. Again and again. It wasn't the grade at the end that determined your fate. It was the fact that you were there participating. 

The act of participation is the heart of what the YOUmedia center is all about. Their stated goal is to create an atmosphere where kids feel comfortable trying on new persona's. To see themselves beyond consumers to creators. While their focus is on the creative arts the life lessons are universal. It takes a lot of courage for a high school kid to stand in the middle of a room and perform a free-style rap.  

Thinking about it, the best teachers I ever had impacted me at this level. The subject matter was different, and certainly the methods were not the same but, what all the experiences had in common was their ability to have me challenge myself. To question who I am and why I am this way. Maybe that's what it's all about.

I'll leave you with a couple of links JoVie, from the YOUmedia center, shared with me. Each beautiful in their own right showcasing kids at different stages of their evolving identity.

Ankare "I Believe"
Miss Chevious EmCee


 

One of the most profound changes to humanity brought on by the ubiquitous web is the changing notion of the self. As individuals we are used to crafting our identity to meet the expectations of a given group or circumstance.  To quote William James:

"...we may practically say that he [an individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups."

This isn't about being phony. It's about presenting the appropriate representation of who you are to meet the moment. For example, we surely don't talk to our boss the way we do our children. Nor our significant others like our co-workers. With each circumstance comes an expectation of behavior. There are norms and customs that, we trust, can guide us safely through any interaction. We also take great pains to keep these different groups, and, by proxy our different selves, separate. Or at least we used to.

In the not to distant past we were all expected to adhere to certain roles with more rigidity than met the eye. For me, there was work Jeff, husband Jeff, son & brother Jeff, friend Jeff, etc. It was a time when the inter-mingling of, say, old friends and people from the office had the makings of high comedy.  It's what Erving Goffman referred to as audience segregation--the individual ensures that those before whom he plays one of his parts will not be the same individuals before whom he plays a different part in another setting. But the ubiquitous Web is changing all that.

I do not know if it was our desire to connect that gave rise to the ubiquitous web or if it was the web that led us down this path but, either way a new dimension has opened up that, depending on your perspective, is either causing great discomfort as social worlds collide or feelings of liberation because we feel no longer bound by these norms and can be closer to our 'authentic' self. Odds are you've felt both ways at one time or another.

This is because the ubiquitous web 'produces multiple orderings of time and space which cross the online-offline boundary' (Hine). It allows us to 'connect observations from different times & spaces not accessible simply from within a physical space' (Fields and Kafir). In other words, there is part of us out there in public all the time, whether we're present or not.

Twitter provides a great example of what I'm talking about because it combines the immediacy of a chat room with the long-term capability of a discussion forum. And, for the most part, it's done out in the great wide open. All your followers are in on it regardless of whether the conversation is directed, or of interest, to them making it difficult to impossible to segregate our audience. Work people see friend Jeff and so on. This in turns causes a dilemma as to which part of the self, and how much, we're to reveal.

For some this is a bigger issue than for others. The great discomfort is manifested with reactions like, "Why would anyone want to know I'm at the grocery store?" Or, "I think that work doesn't appreciate him posting his run times over lunch."  But the underlying issue lies in the discomfort over the revealing of things that are not normally revealed to a given audience. This may be the reason behind why a lot of people labeled 'laggards' resist as much as they do. You may not think twice about telling a friend you shop at a certain discount store but, do you want your boss and colleagues to know?  

I say all this as someone who has decided, after much angst, to be out there as much as I comfortably can, which is pretty open by many standards. By nature, I tend to see progress as an unfolding of the inevitable and generally speaking I like to explore the possibilities and make of things what I can. But it doesn't mean I don't empathize with those who resist, regardless of whether or not I think the decision is the best or most prudent one.  

However, the rub for us all is that its becoming more difficult not to be a full participating member of your community(ies) if you're not out there. Now much of the human connection and conversation that is hardwired into who we are occurs in this hybrid format, in the cloud and on Terra firma, in the moment and over time. The blending of online and offline space and time necessitates a very necessary and very human shift in our understanding of who we are and how we're to act in a given circumstance.  

 

In a previous post I talked about the interplay between the characters in the stories that make up our lives. But there is much more that goes into the crafting of our stories and the shaping of our quality of life. There is the environment is which our narrative takes place. Like the other actors in our story the environment is also constantly changing, both in the physical sense as we move about the world and also in the perceptive sense. For example, the neighborhoods were we grew up most certainly appear changed when we return to them as adults. Neighbors pass on or move away. A neighborhood's fortunes may rise or fall depending on circumstance. Things are not how we remember them to be. There is a disconnect on how are memories tell us things should be and how they actually are in the present.

I differentiate between the environment and technology, which I will write about next, in this way: I see the environment as the space we occupy at a given point in time while technologies are the devices we use to manipulate and extend that space. These distinctions are not absolute. There are times where part of the environment can serve as a technology and vice-versa. I am referring to their dominant, or natural state, for the purpose of this discussion.

The environments where we reside serve as the stage for us to create our stories. Just as the other actors whose paths we cross are not neutral in shaping events, neither is our environment. While they change over time there are several environments that play a key role in our story.

An example from myself would be my childhood bedroom. For many of us this is the first experience of having a place that we consciously think of as our own. It serves as a haven; the stage where we are the primary owner and player. My bedroom was the attic of our house in Northeast Philadelphia. I don't know that I've ever felt more comfortable in any other space. I kept everything of meaning there. There I invented worlds of my own and explored the world outside through library books. My bedroom was where I first developed the character that I'd try out on the rest of the world, in the neighborhood and school yard. And it was there I'd regroup from the experience.

Our environment makes things possible by its limitations. The physical space sets the boundaries from which we play off. The shape and size of a room, where the windows are located, how the light enters throughout the day are just a few of hundreds of environmental factors that shape our perception, mood, and outlook. I knew the house I wanted to live in the moment I walked through the door because of how I instantly felt being in that space. I've spoken with many others who say the same thing.  

We in turn alter and enhance our environment through props. Most commonly it how we decorate a given space. The things we choose from paint color, to curtains, rugs, art work, and furniture are all a play off of the environment in an attempt to enhance the feeling the space evokes in us. Sometimes we completely tear down a room, altering its physical structure, in order to make it something more in line with us. That's why aesthetics are so critical in the weaving of our narrative. Without saying a word, aesthetics create the mood, set the expectations and the possibilities by how they make us feel about ourselves and what they say about us to others when they enter our space. 

The life we live is the story we tell.

 We play many roles when on stage. We are children, sons and daughters, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles, adults, professionals at work, serious at play, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. We grow. We age. We move on. To often blind to things until it's to late.

Storytelling is essential to our humanness yet, we often take for granted that the act of living is the weaving of our own narrative. Our very quality of life is largely dependent on the character we play and much goes into the making of that character. For we are not only actors but we're also the writers, directors, producers, stage hands, props and wardrobe personnel behind the scenes and we're the marketing and promotion department marching in front of it all.

We trying to control as much as we can in a space where we our influence is limited. You see our story is only a bit part in a world of interweaving stories. People close to us and people we'll never know are impacting our story simply by writing their own. Sometimes the influence is deliberate oftentimes, perhaps most, it's not. It is the nature of things.That's life.

The irony, of course, is that whether or not we are successful at crafting our part is ultimately judged by others. For most of us this judgment occurs during our lifetime and, for a very few, posterity may offer a new opinion based on changing circumstance. To be judged as 'good,' 'right', 'just', 'true', or 'kind' means we must be an empathetic character in the eye of the audience. They must like us or at least understand where we're coming from.

Our interpretation of how things are going gets funneled back into our character. We use our experience and the resulting outcomes and responses of others to refine who we are. This isn't to say it's all deterministic, or fatalistic. Our environment pushes us and we, in turn push back. We influence the story of others by writing our own.

So what does running have in common with Balinese cockfighting? Quite a lot really.

For my dissertation I've been re-reading Clifford Geertz's seminal book on ethnography, The Interpretation of Cultures. The end of the book contains Geertz's notes on the Balinese cockfights he witnessed back in the 1970s and the deeper meaning these events had for the people involved. It got me to thinking about the deeper meaning behind why people like myself feel compelled to run like, and as much as we do.

Like myself, and those I count to be part of my personal running community, the rosters are common. We are not elite athletes born with a certain genetic gift that makes us fortunate enough to make a living doing an activity we love. The Balinese select their roosters from common markets and do not breed for pedigree. We, like the roosters, are what we are. Simple working class stock. We work with what we have in order to maximize performance.

For the Balinese men their rooster is an idealized extension of the self. An opportunity to boil down the complexities of life into a moment that can be understood. They imbue into their cock (metaphoric pun intended) what they see as the best of themselves but, as in any great mythological tragedy, what also gets transferred is their darkest fears and fatal flaws, which make the stakes of the fight all the more meaningful. For runners our running serves that purpose. For all its complex machinations life is at its most basic is a struggle for survival overlaid with a drive to make some kind of meaning out of it. Running, for me anyway, is a way to strip away the veneer and see things, if only for a brief moment, from a more primal perspective. By simplifying things into a single moment I can actually gain perspective on the larger picture. Sometimes I win and I'm rewarded with the feeling of transcendence and sometimes I loose and feel feelings of pathos and despair.

For a runner, running is a means to actualize our mortality, as is cockfighting for Balinese men. It's a way for us to "play with fire without getting burned," to quote one of the men. Because for the most part we're able to push ourselves to our physical and mental limits and live to tell about it. Rarely are the results a physical death but that is a small possibility and, I think, part of the allure. What is very real though is the metaphorical death. A perceived failure at an event we deem to be important, generally a race of some kind, kills our perception of ourselves in a way that makes us re-think our purpose. For the most part we regroup, lick our wounds, learn from our mistakes and are reborn to run another day. The Balinese man buys another rooster.

Race events are like the cockfight. What Erving Goffman referred to as "focused gatherings." A basic definition of a focused gathering is 'a collection of people engrossed in the flow of some common event relating to each other in terms of that flow.' Runners are a dispersed community, because of technological advances never more so, and race days serve as a means for a mix of some of us to get together and become one by partaking in the event itself. In many ways it is the the cycle of training for, participating in, and recovering from these events that make us a community by providing a sort of tangible reality that enables a culture to rise from it.

Participation in this type of flow requires a state of "deep play" (Bentham, Theory of Legislation taken from Geertz). That is, participating in something where the stakes are so high that from a practical perspective seems ludicrous to do. Many of us are marathoners. Some are triathletes. And some are Ultra- or even Super Ultra-marathoners running crazy distances in the most extreme conditions. There is wagering for both high and low stakes. The Balinese wager their cocks against one another while we wager our runs against ourselves. It may be a low stakes goal such as completing a given race or something high stakes where our sense of identity as a runner depends on completing a goal such as setting a PR. We go through long rituals for relatively short events. We obsess over something that ostensibly has no impact on what we need to do to survive and get on in the world and yet the act of doing it is necessary for us to function in the world where what we do has no value from a utilitarian perspective.

I guess I have more in common with a Balinese cockfighter than I thought. 

So last week I posted a video question, "Why Do You Tweet?" to which I received varied and interesting responses. Responses that I'm still sorting through because beneath the veneer of the question lies some deeper insight into, what I'll refer to for lack of a better way at the moment, my Twitter community and what makes us click.

Even calling it that is a bit misleading. It implies Twitter is a destination. And end point. When in reality it's a launching pad. One of the most extreme changes brought on by the social web is it's lack of boundaries. In regards to both how we communicate with each other (we use multiple tools and multiple modes spread out all over the Web), as well as how we personally differentiate between our 'real' self and our 'web' self (more and more we don't, or can't tell the difference).

In my video I mentioned that I thought the impact of Twitter on my sense of self was profound. Here's why. We are nothing if not adaptable creatures. It may be our greatest strength. The social web, and for the purposes of this discussion, Twitter, has forced us to adapt to new ways of communicating and collaborating with each other. This, in turn, has forced us to examine how we are perceived in these spaces, resulting in us modifying both our sense of self as well as our presentation of self.

You see, not to long ago it was easier to separate your virtual selves from each other. I was professional Jeff working within the company intranet during the day and at night I'd become runningman2053 in a chat room discussing marathons. But that's no longer the case. Now my virtual identity is virtually singular. Pretty much anywhere I go, I go as some representation of my name. And I'm not the only one. It may have started with Facebook forcing you to use your real name, I don't know, but I do know it's a pretty standard practice in all social spaces.

And because these spaces are by nature social and therefore by design open (you need to change your settings to reduce access as opposed to opening it up) it's pretty much a given that whatever information you put out there will be accessible to a group vastly larger than your intended audience. Resulting in an overlap of worlds and a conflicted self. Conflicted until you work through the process of reconciling how you present yourself in an open environment. There was an extended period where I had to get comfortable knowing that what I tweeted to my running friends would also be consumed and commented on by the people I work with and vice-verse.

But I do not meant to sound deterministic. We also push back and shape the social web to meet our needs. As our list of friends grew it became increasingly difficult to partition off conversational threads with Twitter so we created companion application like TweetDeck to help us tease things out. And we use hash tags to help us aggregate topics of interest. But these are personal filtering systems used to make sense out of the conversations going on around us. There is no easy way to direct messages to a specified audience.

We also develop codes and symbols to work around the 140 character limitation and we insert links that take people to other places containing deeper content. Again, those behind the scenes adapted to us by shortening URLs with aliases and hash tag aggregating software.

There is continuous feedback loop between us social web. We each exist in our current state because of the harmonious tension these two forces bear upon the other. To quote Marshall McLuhan, "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

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Click here to leave a video reply: Why Do You Tweet?

The other day in our research class my adviser referred to me as an ethnographer. It wasn't so much as she said it. It was more in the way she said it. Sort of offhand, like it was obvious. Like the sun is going to come up. It was the way it was such a given to her that through me. You see I had not begun to think of myself that way. And it called to mind a favorite quote from a favorite author Kurt Vonnegut, who said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

Vonnegut's quote is all about self-actualization. And I'm all about that. I love the human capacity to continuously reinvent oneself. To learn from our past and use it to make a better future. In my life I've pretended to be a lot of things. Some good. Some not so much. Recently I've been pretending to be a marathoner, an educator, a writer. Now an ethnographer.

And so it goes.