Dear Committee,
Urgent! You need to take action immediately. It seems that my video notes about the research have been stolen. I managed to take down the video in You Tube and for now our other location is safe. Somebody infiltrated the hospital secure ward and stole my materials.
I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive my mistake and not choose to terminate me.
It all started with me setting out to do the daily create. We were meant to explore boundaries in a video. I thought about it all day and decided I wanted to focus on social boundaries. What happens when these collapse and we end up airing our dirty linen in public without intending to? I remembered about the idea of context collapse as described by Michael Wesch amongst others.
Re-read the paper and it also explored what happens one step beyond contexts collapsing for us in our virtual lives. We imagine and prototype of ‘the public’ but this overwhelms us. So we hide in an ‘ideal private’ that is context free as we broadcast ourselves to the world (potentially). All that is left is the echo of ego in the mind.
Context collapse takes on a new dimension in which the collapse of infinite possible contexts, what we might call a virtual “ideal type” of “the public,” itself collapses with the individual’s construction of an ideal private outside of all contexts. The scene exemplifies what Anthony Elliot and Charles Lemert (2005) describe in The New Individualism as the “disappearance of context” in which “we have replaced the old contexts of tradition and custom with a focus on our individual selves” (p. 13).
Mike’s paper is about You Tube Vlogging and how it can be used to develop self awareness. I figured I could turn this inside out by using to tell the story of Dr M who is looking to find ways to ‘get residents to give information’ in the fictional village of The Prisoner.
It was of interest to me that in the prisoner the psychological torture is always about deleting contexts. A sense of claustrophobia develops as you watch as the psyche turns inwards. In that case physical and mental. In the case our online lives, contexts collapse via social media. Is there a way that context collapse may affect our mental health? This led me to the idea of spiritual narcism.
Spiritual narcissism is the feeling or thought that 1) I´m a spiritually advanced being, enlightened, third tier etc. and 2) because of that I deserve love and respect.
In the series, N6 has only himself. Can he trust himself? Does this drive him mad? I am reminded of the idea of being an ‘un-mutual’ in one of the episodes. Compliance in that case is forced by the threat of complete isolation. As N6 walks around the village, everyone turns away. It made me wonder if this ‘idealised private context’ we create when we engage in open online activity is to some extent driven by our fear of becoming ‘un-mutual’. Feeling suitably dystopian after #prisoner106 work today.
The daily create turned into a whole day’s exploration. Boundaries and what they mean have always interested me. Perhaps I should have kept to physical spaces….my front porch?
I cannot even start to offer information about the making of the video. Nothing worked as planned. I was going to be a ‘quick’ iMovie pull together a few fun things to take the story forward and explore boundaries. Let me just say it was not that. I ended up having to find and relearn the old iMovie. There was ScreenFlow, there was Audacity, there was Quicktime, there was Freesound.org and a stiff neck from sitting here all day making this ‘quick’ daily create. In the end, I was reminded of the simplicity and ease of the old iMovie as well as had much fun thinking about human boundaries collapsing, us becoming overwhelmed by the whole of life being accessible online and that driving us mad.
This gif has information. No. It has INFORMATION.
On July 1st I had one foot in the past and one foot in the present. I started the day working in the peony garden at Fort Edmonton. It was quieter than usual when I arrived at 8 am but by the time I left the crowds had started to gather to celebrate Dominion Day. […]
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Dear Village Committee,
I keeping with my assignment at your village this summer. I have started investigating the signage around the village and recreating them in square format. There is a significant amount of research to indicate that square signs correlate positively with increased conformity.
I am consulting with our resident Dreamer by numbers, jjgifs, and he has offered the hypnotic blue backgrounds to this week’s quotes from the 3 dossiers you gave me to study in the Archives for this week. His research shows that this background colour and complex shapes supports this committee’s aim to keep all residents wondering ‘whose side are you on?’ in order to instigate uncertainty and enable our residents to give the committee the information they need. It appears these subliminal background messages work over time to increase compliance and extraversion. It is early days in this DS106 special assignment at the village and we hope that this work will evolve into kinetic typography with sound to enable even faster acquisition of information from residents. We are researching this process thoroughly and hope to offer a sophisticated technical innovation that will allow all residents to create their own compliance devices. Here is a prototype for your approval.
I hope that this week’s work meets with your approval and added to my viewing of the 17 dossiers that tell the full story of this village and it prisoners residents last week will suffice to be paid the Credit Units I need to continue my very important work at the hospital this summer s your resident psychiatrist.
Be seeing you.
I am excited to announce that an article I co-authored was just published by Educational Media International, a Francis & Taylor peer-reviewed journal. Here is the abstract: Imagine the challenge of being immersed in a dynamic learning network where you play brinkmanship with being overwhelmed by a plethora of information, comments, and conversations on a […]
The post What Makes a cMooc Community Endure? appeared first on Rhonda Jessen.com.
Well, I have been told by the committee that once I resigned I need to produce…I spent the afternoon trying to turn this animated gif into my Twitter avatar for the start of DS106 Themed The prisoner. All the workarounds I tried failed. APIs that promised to do it did not, brute force ( just change the extension and upload) did not work. I am swimming like the blazes to get away from the village, production here is hard. Where is the beach? And what does the new Photoshop mean with Save For Web (Legacy)? All the other new options don’t seem to have preview or allow me to play with colours. WE WANT INFORMATION! Update: if this Save for Web glitch matters to you. Complain!
Gearing up for a busy summer of DS106 I decided to turn today’s daily create into my first proper assignment. It is called Splash the colour and I had a little help from the lovely Jack Hylan to get it done. He made a tutorial to make it easy and enjoyable.
The prompt for the daily create asked us ‘see beyond the buildings’. I looked out of my office window to see the beautiful roses outside. I wondered if I could take a photo from the inside that would show the window (building) and focus on what was beyond it (the flower). I did that.
Then I wondered if I could make one of those photos where everything is black and white and only a splash of colour. I used to have a cheap camera that did that automatically, I still miss that camera.
Then I remembered Jack and his towel. All I did was follow his tutorial exactly and then add my tacky pink frame, I could not help it. I wanted the pink to highlight the roses.
Well, that is me dusting the blog up for this DS106 summer!
