Saturday, November 29, 2014

ED 7720 Week 12 reflections


I went to the Bethany Music And Dance (BMAD http://www.bethanymusicanddance.com/) gathering on Friday night. The host of this monthly event has the beginnings of blonde dreadlocks, deep lines in his face, and moves with deliberation. His house is a converted barn filled with a lifetime of collecting. There are hundreds of art objects, old newspaper articles, and mementos handing on every wall and every fixture in the house. There is also a visible coating of dust on everything. I conversed with the man, and asked if he was an artist. After briefly dancing around the subject and telling me about his music, contra dance calling and drumming avocations, he revealed that he was a doctor and still practices two or three days a week, thank you for asking. Upon Googling him, I discovered he is an Internist. He is truly a man who "enacts particular versions of himself at particular times." (1112)



Most of us are social chameleons. It is not surprising that young people demonstrate different versions of themselves when they use IM (instant messaging.) An important difference, according to the authors of Chapter 36 of the Handbook of New Literacies, is that when one is physically present, one can passively absorb the atmosphere and conversation. When involved in IM, one must "participate actively in order to receive the social benefits."(1114)




IM is more than written text. For the study participants, tone was conveyed by using CAPITAL LETTERS for yelling and smaller letters (personally, I use parentheses) for whispering. Emoticons, now called emoji, were also important to the youth when texting. It was interesting that spelling was important for the participants when they felt they needed to impress the person on the other end of the conversation, and that abbreviations were used less with older participants. There was also mention of friends having too many simultaneous conversations to effectively communicate with any one other person. Additional IM communication includes photographs, screen shots, video and voice. In the business world, reading and writing all of these texts is becoming more important. One of my Vice Principals was notoriously bad at conveying tone in her emails. She is now the Principal and has improved out of necessity!

"IM motivates young people to exchange in decoding, encoding, interpretation, and analysis, among other literary processes, and yet very little empirical data has focused on this form of digital literacy."(1112)
IM evolved from electronic note-passing to a rather sophisticated form of communication. When I first typed this quote, I was unsure about the need for data about this. I am still not fully convinced that there is a need for data, the subject is much more involved than I initially thought.

References:
Handbook of Research on New Literacies.
https://docs.google.com/file/d 0B_SIJN0cY2IhSXotakRIeUJ3MGc/edit

An aside:
I thought about online identity when I was listening to the radio the other day. One of the NPR shows had a segment about a gay man who uses an app on his phone, Grindr, that allows him to meet up with other gay men in his immediate area. He is articulate and funny online. He generates a enough interest, though he does not get many dates, at least on first sight. He has cerebral palsy. (Sorry, I can't find the segment to post the link.) His true self, the self he is unable to project through his disability, is online.

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