I have had different websites and blogs over the years. Yet, none have been particularly meaningful or useful—to me or others. With sporadic, haphazard, and disjointed posts, my blogging has been flawed by limited research, rudimentary technological prowess, and a decided lack of commitment. This time around, I propose a more serious engagement. Time to “change life”—at least, my approach to writing and creative practice
No late comer to computers or to the internet, I’ve been on email since 1989 when I started grad school at Simon Fraser University, which at the time saw itself as a leader in networked learning. And I began browsing the World Wide Web with Mosaic sometime in late ’92 or early ’93. As an undergrad in the mid 1980s, I started with a (then) fancy, digital Sharp typewriter (my parents picked up in Japan) that I replaced with a Commodore 64 with “word processing.” In grad school, after trying a couple of DOS/Windows boxes, I settled on Mac and began a long love affair with all things Apple—iPhone, iPods, iMacs, Macbooks etc.
High-speed internet connections and cellphones have been a fixture in my life for almost as long as I can remember. As with most “younger” academics, these are the tools of my trade.
so why another new site?
Quite simply, this blog will thus give me a focus to expand my online practice and presence. I propose to use it to work through an updated writing (and thinking) practice.
Furthermore, while I’m weary of all the corporate language around blogging and branding, I do think it is important to have a space where the people I meet in my travels, real and virtual, can check me out and ideally to refer back to. For me, the act of claiming (actually purchasing) my own name—in the form of glenlowry.com—raises the stakes, psychologically and perhaps professionally.
The best way to understand the new forms/forums is to put myself in the flow and then to try to sort out meanings as I go—or so I’m betting. A child of TV—an addict of the “drug of the nation,” proud citizen of the “united states of unconsciousness” as an irascible Michael Franti of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy fame (myspace) put it, I’m comfortable in the flow of information. True to form, my research and teaching reflect both a fascination with contemporary cultures’ continuous unfolding and a strong commitment to process/practice-based work.
Why not use my official Emily Carr blog? For the past couple of years, I’ve been faithlessly posting to blog.eciad.ca/glowry. However, because it is a WordPress Multi User blog and administered by the university, I don’t have the kind of control I would like. A tinkerer, I’m constantly wanting to try out different plugins etc. and there’s no way the university can support me to the level I want or need. Nor do I feel that it’s the best place for me to develop the kind of thinking / practice I want to here. That said, I will continue to post work related to eLearning, edTech, course-relevant material to the Emily Carr site.
if content is king…
What to write about? What’s my focus or schtick? I’ve been thinking about this, trying to come up with a clever angle. Borrowing from the numerous how-to blog blogs around (examples to follow), I’ve been carefully considering a niche for myself. So far, I haven’t found anything that fits perfectly.
My best guess is that it will be something around collaborative practice and the convergence of contemporary cultural/art praxis and social media. As a cultural theorist and creative practitioner, I have access to resources—situations and ideas—that I hope might be useful, even vital to others who are attempting to understand the deep social transformations we are living and working through.
As politicians, economists, and entertainers struggle to come to terms with new forms of mediation and new ways of connecting communities (of citizens, consumers, fans), the question of culture and the arts has begun to take on new significance. Long considered extraneous to the important work of the economy or politics, thinking about culture was relegated to an Arnoldian concern for the good and beautiful—rather than vital, practical, or economically powerful. With the rise of Cultural Studies and throughout the cultural political battles of the 1980s and 1990s, however, things changed. Now with the inculcation of the net into the very fabric of our being the lessons of the cultural theorists are even more important. Or so I want to suggest.
In my composition courses and as an editor, I counsel writers to trust the process—to jump in an let the ideas emerge for themselves, rather than trying to structure everything from the outset with a well-honed outline or thesis. I am jumping in.
new times / new space / new me
As I get swept along with the crowd, I find my digital profile is beginning to spiral out of control. More than a digital tattoo, as the folks at UBC so nicely put it, my online markings (identities more than identity) resemble a complete makeover with extreme piercings and plastic surgery.
Like millions of others, I find myself juggling a growing number of online IDs and a dizzying array of social media passwords and purposes. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I keep signing up for every new social media application or site (Digg, delicious, twitter, zotero, facebook, igoogle, Deqq, etherpad, alltop, google wave, et cetera, et cetera) and do use many of these tools.
Nevertheless, I feel the need to assert more control over the situation, to actively develop a cognitive space of my social media self, which is what I am hoping the space/time of this site might help me achieve. As a writer and cultural theorist, it is hard to refuse the power of the net or resist the pull of new media.
“New times” is a phrase borrowed from cultural theorist Stuart Hall (resources / wikipedia) and others of the New Left, who used new times to chronicle a rupture in Britain’s social fabric during the 1980s, as well as to situate resistance to the Neoliberal (my term) policies of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government. For me, the term continues to be relevant in helping to mark a dramatic shift in the economic and political basis of national and international cultures.
Linked to dissolution of Bretton Woods (and the “floating” of international currencies away from gold standard), post-industrialization, post-Fordism, and consequent emergence of globalization, the new times are also co-terminus with the emergence of the internet as a dominant social force and the advent of new forms of citizenship. New times forecast more than just the end of an era—and beginning of a new time—and called for the radical reimagining of the experience and practice of time it gestured toward is now an important aspect of in 21st century life.
writing is a social act
Because writing is first and foremost social, I want to give a shout out to some of the people and situations that I see this writing in dialogue with. Many of other names will emerge as my writing does, but there are a few I’d like to mention up front from the outset:
Alexandra Samuel (@awsamuel), CEO of Social Signal and new Emily Colleague, is the Director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre (SIM). Conversations with Alex have strongly encouraged me to push a deeper into the realm of social media. And because it is now a key part of our collective research focus, I want to take it more seriously.
Work at Play: I met David Gratton (@ddonat) a few years ago through a BCCampus sponsored blogging pilot project. We have kept in touch to talk about some of the interesting work that’s happening at Work@Play. This past summer, David introduced me to Deqq, a social media app developed for the entertainment industry and prototyped by David Usher and Nelly Furtado as a way of communicating with and managing their respective fan bases. I was impressed by its potential, and we decided to try Deqq in an education context. In January, 2010, my colleague Joy James and I will be rolling it out in a 100-level English lecture course at Emily Carr. (I will have a lot more to say about this in the up coming months).
CODE.lab: linked to the 2010 Cultural Olympiad and part of Vanoc’s new media extravaganza Code Live 2, CODE.lab promises to be a provocative experiment in collaborative practice. Led by artists Jer Thorp (@blprnt) (check out Jer’s blog blprnt.com) and M. Simon Levin, who also worked together on Glocal (a flickr-based work they describe as a massively contributive artwork), CODE.lab is designed to engage questions of surveillance and the fact that Vancouver’s Granville Island, where their interactive lab space is situated, will be the epicentre of snap-shot culture for the duration of the Olympics. Thorp and Levin have enlisted the help of Emily Carr grad and undergrad students and they using their lab space to create a number of interesting photographic capture and display technologies that will go live during the festivities.
Lift studios: a Vancouver-based design firm formed by award winning Creative Director Haig Armen (@haigarmen), are responsible for renovating Emily Carr new website to include more social media tools. So far I’ve been impressed with the work Lift has done and I’m enthusiastically looking forward to seeing how the new functionality changes life at Emily Carr, for students and faculty. In the coming year, I’m hoping to enlist Haig and the Lift team to help me transform access to Emily Carr’s online learning portal.
The end of my longest blog post ever.
Regarding the work on the ECU site – I love it! I anticipate it also helping to connect those far-flung ECU students in a more meaningful way with those actually at the Vancouver campus.
Thanks for sharing your longest post ever.
Thanks Joyce. I appreciate your vote of confidence in the Emily site—nice to know someone is reading it. In any case, I’m not going to abandon the old. Far from it. I think I’ve figured out how to use categories to target it (and the maraya blog), and hope to feed both with more engaging and focused posts. http://glenlowry.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php#comments-form
Glen, quite the read, informative and provocative. Hope you keep with it, keep it flying. You have a dedicated subscriber here!
Ashok, you’re too kind. Subscribers! Will do my best to continue informin’ and provocatin’.