Thinking it Through: I’ve Got Comics On My Mind

Digital identity dispersion effect

The conversations around the #DigCiz hashtag have certainly gone into different directions this past week. I’m still trying to create comics based off discussions, and blog posts, and tweets, and whatever folks are doing. The comic above, for example, was in response to wondering how people represent themselves different in different digital spaces, and how our multiple identities are both connected an disconnected.

There’s been more wrestling with language, too, and what words one uses to describe connector points. Communities. Networks. Conversations. I don’t even know anymore. Let’s just talk and worry about what to call it some other time.

Networked community or community network?

We circled back to a talking point from a few weeks ago, too, on whether online sites should be open for readers to engage the writer, or closed to the readers to protect the writer. I fall on the side of open.

Open or closed?

Interestingly, hashtags themselves became a topic of conversation, and what it means when discussion centers around a shared hashtag. Who owns it? Are there rules?

See ya at the hashtag

And what happens if you break the rules? (if there are any)

Break the rules, pay the price

There was the theme of “hospitality” that many of us grappled with this week. I see it as, how do we welcome newcomers and encourage latecomers, and connect with those already there. Whatever “there” is. Or wherever. See? Language!

Build it but they won't come

A discussion of what does the host give up of their identity and authenticity to make the guest comfortable led to this:

A messy world

This is what I hope will happen …

Ponder the positive

… but then, not long after, I was critiquing Google and other companies for siphoning up our data even while pitching educational sites to kids. Sigh. So much for pondering the positives.

But … the slip was momentarily … for the idea of remixing and collaborating and making stuff with others still keeps me involved and engaged, and hopeful, and I hope you find a way in, too.

Open for Jamming

Peace (framed),
Kevin

 

4 Comments
  1. After the week ended, I had to jump on a plane and travel for quite a long time, which gave me time to think a bit. It’s been lovely to scroll through these cartoons, thank you. I’ve been thinking about how I came to this point: literally, this point on the map, half way towards returning to where I grew up for a visit with my daughter who has never flown this far before; and also somewhat less literally how I came to this point in thinking about hospitality as a frame for the way we encounter each other online.

    I now wonder whether we each bring to a word like “hospitality” such different associations and assumptions that it gets hard not to talk past each other. I think this is one of the big things I learned in the week. So I stopped to retrace my own steps with it — how I learned about it as a kid, and then how I came to it a bit more formally through reading when I became a hospital patient and spent a lot of time sitting watching hospital staff work. What did it mean to be in their space? What was I meant to bring?

    So I realised through all of this that I’ve come into thoughts about hospitable pedagogy and digital hospitality primarily from the guest perspective — from thinking about what it means to enter a space that is important to someone else, to speak in a way that recognises and respects that someone else might feel at home where I feel unsure or inadequate. In hospitals I spent time thinking about hostile and threatening signage; as well as the ways in which patients learned surreptitiously how to act, where to go. This opened my eyes to the things I can see students doing all the time, and how our communications to them will often seem really harsh and rule-bound.

    Watching your practice I’m wondering about remix as a hospitable practice, a pretty astonishing gift of attention and time. I recently wrote something and a complete stranger sent me the gift of a needleworked phrase from it. I see this gift every day (it’s hanging by my bed) and I just think: human time, human time, human time. It’s the irreplaceable thing we can give each other.

    Anyway, this is long. Thank you.

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