Edna and I at A5u: Thoughts towards my new digital story

For my digital story assignment, I have decided not to do something related to my final project, but something more personal. My final project is still a little fuzzy, and when I heard we were going to have to do something more “creative” as one of our requirements for this course through the creation of a digital story, I wanted to take the opportunity to be free and make it a personally meaningful work. I also wanted a topic that would challenge me to tackle the technological elements that go into digitally creating a project like this and yet have content that was not so much challenging as fulfilling.

 So now some backstory to my project…I have an allotment plot in a very large community garden in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field. It is an odd place for a community garden, since there isn’t really any “community” around it, unlike the other community garden I belong to which is really part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Instead, this community garden is located in the Gateways National Park, at what used to be New York City’s first municipal airport, though the airport long ago ceased to operate. The space was left, and eventually became incorporated into the national park system. In the meantime, tempted by so much empty, unused space, squatter gardeners began to colonize a large area near the now-empty hanger buildings, and the Floyd Bennett Garden Association (FBGA) slowly evolved from those first pioneers. It is now one of the biggest community gardens in the country, and much more similar to British allotment sites than the typical American urban community garden.

I have been a member of the garden for four and a half years now. My first plot was a very tiny “starter” plot, all of fifty square feet. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was small, and I looked with envy at plots that were two, three, or even four times the size of ours. I was incredibly excited, then, when during the early Spring 2012, we received a notification that our application for a bigger plot had been approved! We had a double plot! One hundred square feet! I immediately began to dream very big dreams indeed.

We went to visit and were incredibly impressed with the garden. It was full of weeds, but had three big raised beds in the middle and beds around three sides. As an extra bonus there were two large shrubs planted in both of the back corners, which we later found out were a mysterious kind of cherry tree. The soil was amazing, and while the paths were a bit of a mess, the whole plot gave off a feeling of fertility and generosity.

As we worked the plot that first spring, we came to find out that the plot had belonged for many, many years to one of the founders of the garden, a woman named Edna, who had died the previous summer. As a little tribute, people who knew her and those who had neighboring plots kept the plot weeded and planted while she was too sick to garden, but of course, the plot couldn’t remain empty and it was assigned to us the following year. While she had been alive, she had been a central figure in the garden, and many people came over to tell us how fortunate we were to get this plot, and how wonderful Edna had been. And we came to believe it last year as we worked the plot; it had a spirit, a character, all of its own, which, as an experienced (previously professional) gardener, I have only encountered in garden spaces that were much loved by the amazing people who gardened there.

I don’t even know her last name! So for my digital story I would like to tell the story of that plot at FBGA, A5U, and get to know the woman whose spirit still resides in my garden plot. On the way, I think I hope to capture a little of what it is like to be a part of a community garden, and the connection that community gardeners feel to their plots.

Finally, I am very committed to the recording of oral history, and feel strongly that oral history is a precious resource we need to try to preserve. I feel it is an important way to connect to a community and to grow that community. Perhaps I have been subconsciously influenced by the ethos of the turn-of-the-twentieth century folk music collecting that is part of my musicology research involving figures like Ralph Vaughan Williams! I see this project as part of a bigger project in which I am involved, where I am writing down bits of FBGA garden history and publishing them in the garden newsletter. This will be a wonderful opportunity to explore how that oral history can be captured multi-modally, using real voices in all sorts of ways.

I plan to tell the story using photographs, voiceovers, text, and background music. I have photographs of the garden, and can take more of what I need, so the visual content is pretty much already available. Of course it would be wonderful if I could find some photographs of Edna, and it is possible that back issues of the garden newsletter might contain some of these. A definite part of my project will be interviewing some old-timer FBGA gardeners about Edna. There are a few that are still active in the garden, and many, many people knew Edna, so I feel that once I put out some feelers and start talking to people, I will be able to draw on others’ memories of the past. I will juxtapose this with my own experience gardening there over the past couple of years. I’m hoping that a few of the people I talk to will actually let me record them speaking and let me use their voices in my story.

I don’t know yet what software platform I will use to produce my digital story; I’m hoping that we have a discussion in class about this, and that I can try a few of them out during our workshop time in the computer classroom, in order to get a feel for the advantages and disadvantages of what is available. I am leaning towards IMovie, since I am a Mac user. I also want to explore Audacity for many reasons, some related to this project and others to my musicological research. I may ask some of my musicology colleagues what they use to edit sound clips.

I think an important area to consider regarding my project touches on the issues discussed by Nelson and Hull in their essay “Self-Presentation Through Multimedia: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Digital Storytelling.” Nelson and Hull draw on Bahktin’s concepts of heteroglossia and addressivity to problematize the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and “addressees” that are engendered by the interplay of modalities in multi-modal works such as digital stories. As I have described above, one of the central goals I have for my project is the incorporation of the voices of others in my story, both descriptively and literally. Nelson and Hull made me think more deeply about what this might bring to my project, both in terms of presenting problems but also in celebrating the heteroglossic potential in my little digital story.

 I see this working on several levels. The first will be very concrete, as I choose what to include in my story from the various interviews I conduct with FBGA members who knew Edna. Do I just describe what they say? Do I quote from interviews, and if so, which ones and which parts? Do I actually include a voice over from another garden member? The degree to which I allow others’ voices to be “present” in my story will introduce aspects of heteroglossia, literally and symbolically. It will be interesting to see how much control I feel I need to exert over what they say and what I want my story to say. How comfortable might I be with competing meanings? Where will I find the balance between what I want to communicate and my story being open to other meanings suggested by the voices of others?

Other decisions related to heteroglossia center around the bigger issue of whose story will be told in this digital production. I see three stories here; Edna’s, of course, the garden and the gardeners who a part of the community, and my own. They are intertwined and there is no way to separate out one and exclude the others. This will be a story that is created as the greater amalgam of all three of these small stories, in a way, I hope, that mimics the fuzzy boundaries of individuals and communities to which they belong. I feel that heteroglossia is one of the goals of my project. This is easy for me to say, absolutely, and I do know that, like the two young women used as case studies by Nelson and Hull, the difficulties will come when actual decisions need to be made about the choice of voices to represent and when, and my own need to communicate central meanings that I see in the relationship between Edna, the garden, and myself.

From MySpace to Facebook - Are Teens using Social Media in Different Ways?

I was glad to see that one of our blog post prompts for the week focused upon danah boyd’s work on teens using MySpace and the ways in which they created, manipulated, and projected online identities through social media that worked within the agendas of the social communities to which they belonged. Several times as I was reading boyd’s fascinating and detailed analysis in her chapter “Writing Oneself into Being,” I jotted a “still?” or simply a “?” on the margins of my copy of the text. While the material made for compelling reading, I was equally compelled to consider how relevant boyd’s conclusions were in light of close to almost six years of evolution in the world of social media (I like Nakamura’s point that web years are like dog years, so that we should think of 6 years as a seeming 42!).

            What changed during the intervening years? Boyd’s UC Berkeley dissertation was completed in 2008, a time in which MySpace reigned supreme in the world of social media among young adults, though Facebook was beginning to become popular among college undergraduates. With its emphasis on music sharing, it was particularly attractive to teens, for whom the recommendation, transfer and discussion of music is a key element of identity and social interaction. Between 2005 and 2008, MySpace was the most visited social media website in the world, and for a short period during those years it was the most visited website, surpassing Google. After 2008, with the emergence and growth of Facebook, MySpace’s dominance quickly eroded, and now has a much smaller number of consistent users.

            The differences between MySpace and Facebook offer strong clues as to why Facebook eclipsed MySpace. While MySpace was (and still is) very useful for sharing, promoting, and even selling music in ways that Facebook does not allow on its platform, the number of features available in the creation of an online identity is far more limited. Facebook has features such as the “Wall” that allow for an interactive exchange with “friends” (people you have admitted into your list of people who can access varying elements of your Facebook presence), and a status update feature that allows you to quickly let friends know what you are doing, thinking about, or feeling. It is coordinated with photo-sharing programs in a way that allows photos to be easily posted. It has chat and private messaging capabilities. Above all, the “like” and the “share” buttons on Facebook are extremely powerful tools that instantly link users to friends in extremely easy ways. Such is Facebook’s massive presence in contemporary culture that so much webcontent already has links to Facebook built in to make such sharing easier. Finally, responding perhaps to the analyses of boyd and others which demonstrated the extent to which the control of accessibility was a key concern for social media users, Facebook is constantly developing and changing its “privacy settings” in ways that create controversy and invoke larger questions of privacy, ownership, and access to personal material posted on the web.

             Obviously, many of boyd’s points still hold true despite the migration of teens from MySpace to Facebook. Boyd’s thesis in this chapter is that teens use social media as one way to present a version of identity (“self-presentation”), and they manipulate that identity in ways that invoke Goffman’s “impression management.” Yet at the same time, as other of the authors we have read this week have argued, the potentialities and non-potentialities inherent in the use of these technologies and mediated environments in themselves affect the ways in which users can conceptualize their own identity.  I would argue that the features that differentiate Facebook from MySpace are for the most part features that fall in line with the needs that boyd sees in the teen experience of identity and social media, and that many of her points are even more true for Facebook than MySpace. It probably explains why Facebook has supplanted MySpace.

            Facebook to an even greater degree allows teens to do the two things that seemed central to their use of MySpace, according to boyd; first, to project a version of themselves that rides a fine line between difference and unity with their peers and second, to control access to their profile so that they are guarded against adult surveillance and perceived danger from unknown adults. The second, quite easily, is enhanced by Facebook’s myriad ways in which the content visible to the web onlooker is controlled by the user, most importantly through the “Friends List” but then by the division of those friends into various groups. Postings can be designated as visible on various levels to various groups. All of this, of course, is predicated on the user going and adjusting the visibility and privacy settings, which many, many users do not do. One would think, then, that teens would be particularly good at adjusting the privacy settings to control their web “signal.” I’m not sure I see this in my students, though I haven’t asked this extensively. When this issue comes up, students still seem to be relying on the idea that, “people who don’t care won’t find me,” similarly to boyd’s 2008 findings. Many times I have had discussions with classes and individual students about the necessity of “being careful” about who they are friending, and what kinds of messages they are sending to those who can access their accounts. This is always attended with varying amounts of surprise, concern, and perhaps a heightened awareness that was not present before.

            What I feel boyd’s analysis misses, situated as it is in 2008 before the development of features that make Facebook so attractive, is the degree to which it allows the user to be “present” and “connected” to friends in very immediate and intimate ways, despite RL distances between those friends. When I talk to my students, this seems to be the element they like about Facebook, even while they will complain about aspects such as time-wasting, advertising, friends who in some ways make a nuisance of themselves on their feed, or the discordance between social worlds, as when an older family member comments on a thread populated by peer comments. It seems to me that MySpace encouraged a more static relationship to the profile identity posted by the user, while Facebook encourages a constantly-shifting and changing identity. In many ways, the identity projected on Facebook at a particular moment, through newly-posted photos taken and posted immediately from a smart phone, comments on the wall by friends, the latest item shared by the user and the comments its engendered, and the items coming from larger Facebook communites made when the user “likes” something, has the possibility to be completely different 30 minutes later. If boyd emphasizes how hard teens work to maintain stable identities in MySpace, Facebook poses an even greater challenge to identity control, since the elements constituting that identity are constantly shifting, and identity boundaries are incredibly permeable due to friends’ ability to influence what shows up on your feed.

            Yet I feel that the impermanence of the Facebook identity in many ways predicates the idea that your friends are “present” in a manner that the more static MySpace did not. Your status and theirs, a photo of what just happened to me, my Spotify playlist popping up on my friends’ feed – community is always present. The fact that it changes so frequently adds to the feeling that one is part of the dynamic flow of RL, even if that flow cannot always be controlled. If we allow that teens are particularly clued in to the demands of belonging to a group and yet creating an individuality within that group, the wide array of features found on Facebook cater to just such a mission. I feel that this demand to be “present” is something that, while implicit in what boyd is saying in her article, would today demand a reckoning in an account of teens’ interaction with social media.

Rewatching "Scandal in Belgravia" after Rereading Hayles and Haraway

            The first episode of the second series of Sherlock (“A Scandal in Belgravia”) presents us with a fascinatingly complex character in “the Woman,” Irene Adler. Adler is a highly successful dominatrix in the sex trade, using her skills to attract a very powerful and well-known cliental. The nature of Adler’s cliental and her interactions with them often bring her into dangerous situations, and she takes a number of steps to protect herself from the possibilities, including using her smart phone to store information that might prove useful, including compromising photographs and other items that would allow her to negotiate with potential attempts to harm her.

            Adler is both visible and invisible, operating in a boundary area that both Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway might find interesting as a sort of liminal identity that involves both real and virtual space, realized through the mediation of technology. She is “visible” in that she has a website which gives her persona a wider circulation among potential clients and curious onlookers. In both virtual and “real” space, Adler’s movements can be tracked; at certain points in the episode, people comment that she can always be found. Given her profession, this is a curious openness about her presence, and more often than not it is a presence that is projected through the digital technologies of websites, smart phone photos, and Twitter. Her “work” on several levels involves an obvious, conscious attempt to use digital visibility first to create a persona that will appeal to a certain cliental, but also to protect her from the potential dangers associated with that cliental.

            She is also invisible. So much of what is known about her is via a controlled and mediated visibility – a created avatar, or perhaps, more aptly, created avatars –and so much of the “real” Woman Adler is hidden. This is metaphorically projected by the shots of Adler constructing a version of herself as she prepares for her first meeting with Sherlock. The camera lingers on her applying makeup, deciding what to wear, essentially covering her “true” self (if there is such a thing) with layers of functional, second skins. These are our first glimpses of Adler in action, apart from a few digitally projected photos we see attendant to Mycroft’s description of her to Sherlock. From the beginning – as website media, as a construction in process -  we see Adler as a cyborg in many of the ways discussed by Haraway. As Adler prepares herself for Sherlock’s arrival, she employs the artificial so that creates a hybrid is created who is half natural, half unnatural. Ultimately she presents herself to Sherlock naked, without clothes. But this is hardly a gesture that projects the natural or the real. Instead, it questions the very reality and naturalness of our essential bodies in ways that resonate with several of Haraway’s points about cyborg identity. Adler’s body – her very skin, with its important tattoo – has a functionality about it, and it becomes one more arsenal in her tool box, complicating the concepts of unity and naturalness we tend to project on bodies, in a way that Haraway would find compelling in her search for the new cyborg-woman.

            Adler’s cell phone is a crucial element, not just in the plot of the episode, in which information contained on the phone is highly sought after by various individuals and groups, but more importantly, as a way of constituting Adler’s very being. The point is made repeatedly throughout the episode; the phone is Adler’s life in some essential way, both containing the information she needs to make the connections necessary in her busy professional life and as a way of limiting potential danger. But the episode’s subtext goes much deeper in its insistence that Adler feels that the phone actually is her life, and without it she will cease to exist. When she is separated from her phone, she is “dead,” though she comes miraculously back to life when she is reunited with it. And in a surprising twist towards the end of the episode, she has actually engraved her pulse – her life’s blood – onto the phone in the form of the unlocking password. The connection is insisted upon throughout the episode, as we are increasingly told that the phone goes far beyond acting as a functional tool. Instead, this is a woman who cannot exist accept through the mediation of the device and its digital technologies.

            For Hayles, the episode’s play with Adler’s absence and presence in real and virtual spaces both would point to the lack of stability surrounding a character who is so mediated through digital technology. The most central aspect of Sherlock as a character in both this series and in his multitude of other media incarnations is that he is obsessed with creating patterns. Hayles might argue that it is the seeming randomness of the myriad of problems presented by Adler that work to confute Sherlock and which create the bond that is formed between the two of them within the episode. The subjectivity – body connection is one that Hayles finds interesting and potent when exploring presence and absence, and in Adler’s multiplicitous “presences” using various faces, technologies, skins, etc., she is a constant roadblock to Sherlock’s obsessive search for meaning through pattern. Hayles might also focus on the issue of materiality with Adler, a point that causes tension within the episode; Adler’s power is in so many ways located in her body- what her body is and what her body does – and yet, through playing with a mediated availability, that body is both present and absent, depending on perspectives of virtual reality. In a more extended analysis, one might consider whether Adler is herself what Hayles might consider a “flickering signifier.” I’ll leave that for now, but certainly Hayles might point to her as a character that exhibits the lack of distinction between human and machine in her co-dependence with her phone,  the “biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is emeshed….the fascinating and troubling coupling of language (subjectivity?) and machine.” (35)

            For Haraway, it is Adler’s lack of essential unity, her hybrid existence somewhere between human and digital device, which forms the essence of her power. It is also because she exploits the unresolvable irony of a woman whose existence exploits the most public and most private sides of experience, available to the millions via her web and twitter presence, and yet its secrets locked inaccessibly away in the digital networks of her phone.  Haraway’s article validates the cyborg-like of Adler’s characteristics, particularly in her uses of technology to live a life of power on many levels, subverting traditional television and film stereotypes. In both her uses of technology and in her quest for power, Adler and the creators of this episode are willing to compromise a unified female character in the service of a character through whom explorations along the borders can occur. This is symbolically projected in the episode through Adler’s ultimate ability to enter into the virtual landscape by the river previously “owned” by Sherlock. Her penetration of that space reveals her access to that inner private space of Sherlock’s consciousness, and that very ability allows her to further exert her power over him.

            But it is also, in some ways her undoing, and possibly that of the episode as well. That encounter with Sherlock’s virtual world, represented by the landscape and the mysterious murder enacted in it, both augments her power and diminishes her power. It is no accident that in this scene we see a denuded, though not naked Adler, (she actually is wearing more clothes than she “normally” does) without the normal protective veneer we saw her self-consciously applying at the beginning of the episode. She appears vulnerable, though we are later meant to question if that was yet one more projected avatar or not. But this is the point at which the episode descends into the romantic, and seems at its very end to insist that we at least consider that vulnerability and the romantic attraction to be real. And if that is the case, then as Sherlock and Adler slip into a romantic relationship, Adler loses the power she has attained by her cyborg persona, ironically through the very power move, projected within the episode through the means of her penetrating his virtual space, that was meant to augment her power.