On the 10th July 2019 we ran the ‘Networked Making’ event at the University of the Arts London. This post introduces a podcast in which myself and Jon Martin reflect on the ‘Making Networks’ workshop activity we designed for the start of the day
(with input from Dr Sheena Calvert and the ‘Interpolate’ student group) .

The activity was described as: “A workshop session in which participants collaboratively make and reflect on a physical model/metaphor of their networks.”

The Podcast is offered here unedited. I may try and edit it down to around 20min for Spark, our UAL creative teaching and learning journal.

https://daveowhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/networkedmaking.mp3

Themes touched upon in the podcast include: reflection, thinking-through-making, ambiguity, risk, trust, play.

There is also a YouTube version of the podcast if you require captions

Sheena and two Interpolate students, Jack and Safiya, helped to facilitate the activity.

Participants were asked to ‘make’ a version of their networks and were presented with a number of peg-boards, a few other objects, cord, index cards, pegs, pens, various fasteners etc. The boards had labels on them such as ‘Work – Mode’, ‘Tool – Space’, ‘People – Institution’ and ‘Desire – Aspiration’.

Around 30 participants engaged with the activity for about half-an-hour then we convened a short discussion.

The best way to get a sense of the activity is to watch this very short video:

Networked Making – Making Networks from Teaching and Learning Exchange on Vimeo.

The full description of the event:

Whether it be through collaboration, in a collective or as part of a cohort, the practices of making are never without context and commonly not undertaken alone.  We understand that our students are keen to make and work in disciplinary and interdisciplinary networks as this nourishes and
supports creative practice, reflecting the fluidity of the professional environment.

Networked making, including writing, is often facilitated by digital connections which allow us to go beyond the physical boundaries of the studio, seminar room or lecture theatre. Yet, while we all work online’ in some form, the practices of networked making are still emerging. The diversity of
voices the digital allows us to include and connect encourages us to reconsider our modes of learning and teaching for making.

This UAL Teaching Platform invites participants to discover and explore the potential of networked making through collaboration, discussion and, of course, making. “

Back in 2009 I was one of a group of men with the time and money to get together and attempt to make sense of what was going on with digital technology and the Web. What we came up with was the notion of the postdigital – the original proposition is here: Preparing for the postdigital era.  

It’s a short document which explains a simple idea: now that digital tech and the network are so prevalent our thinking should go beyond the tech in-of-itself and focus on the way our interactions are played out in/on the digital.

For me the idea was a useful counter to techno-centred narratives of the time which pushed new platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as things everyone should ‘get into’ but without really discussing why. It all felt highly uncritical and implied that the tech, rather than those using the tech, was ushering in a new era. I was bored of talking about how ‘revolutionary’ technology was and saw the postdigital concept as a good way to take a shortcut past the shiny surface of the machine to discuss what might be happening in socio-cultural terms.

At the time the idea was met with a mixture of mild confusion and ambivalence. Broadly it was misunderstood as an attempt to negate the importance or existence of the digital and just an exercise in coining a phrase. It appeared we had decided that just at the moment digital went mainstream we thought it would be radical to not-talk-about digital. There is some truth in this but things have moved on…

So now, in 2019, the notion of the postdigital has gained some ground. Not necessarily as a response to our original paper but in parallel and in a number of locations. One of these locations is the newly founded journal of Postdigital Science and Education edited by Petar Jandrić. Petar discovered our paper along with some later reflections and requested that the group revisited the theme a decade after its inception.

The group is currently posting their 2019 reflections:

• Dave Cormier
• Richard Hall
• Ian Truelove
• Lawrie Phipps
• Mark Childs
• David White

Postdigital in 2019

There is much discussion of how the technology is becoming ‘transparent’ in the 2009 paper. This transparency is framed as an opportunity to be less tech, and more person-centric when considering digital. In 2019 we are unknowingly postdigital, not because our tech objects have become transparent but because the network they are part of is not, and never has been, visible. We don’t ‘see’ the infrastructure because we are still enthralled by the obscuring new-shiny surfaces of our phones/laptops/tablets/tvs. We are happy to swap understanding for ‘intuitive’, ‘frictionless’ and convenient tech. This is reasonable but dangerous.

I don’t want to return to the days when the tech infrastructure was so tenuous that I spent more time trying to get-it-to-work than doing the work I needed it for. Nevertheless, I think those moments of failure, when the connection goes down or the software crashes, are important in revealing just how quickly we pass through the digital to the postdigital. In 2019 many people are surprised when the tech stops working, whereas I’m constantly surprised it works at all, given how complex it is.

What we have failed to comprehend in the last decade (or didn’t want to think about) was the complexity, power and intention(s) of the network and those that control it. The network has never even gone through a ‘digital’ stage (in the terms of the paper) where we get over excited about its newness, it has in some sense never existed in the public consciousness even though it saturates our lives and our spaces. When we buy a new phone we are told about how amazing the camera on it is, not the fact that we are renting a node on a network which is a vast, relatively unregulated, corporate space.

Only very recently has the nature of the network appeared via stories of ‘bad actors’, the manipulation of democracy through globalised targeted propaganda and the aggressive use of ‘personal’ data to feed uncanny algorithms. In 2019 I’d suggest we need to be less postdigital about the network. There is ongoing work to reveal the network, making it un-transparent and to educate and regulate towards a place which supports citizens over and above the drive for power and capital. The trouble is that it’s super boring compared to the latest app or a few more megapixels and if you want keep a secret, don’t hide it, just make it super-dull.

While we play at being human on the surface of the network we simultaneously being dehumanized, converted into forms of interoperable data. Here is where Donna Haraway’s, A Cyborg Manifesto was so prescient. Writing before the Web in 1984 she highlights our rush to convert all things into the universal ‘exchange’ language of code:

“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well.”

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Donna Haraway

There is a section in the original postdigital paper which speaks of our hope that the digital environment will be a place where we can ‘become’ in positive and connected ways. It’s difficult to retain that hope in 2019 but we know that negative stories travel the fastest. Ultimately society has moved online, and while it might seem misanthropic, I’d argue that the pettiness, hate and abuse of power is evidence that we are now postdigital and that this is what it looks like when (almost) everyone gets online. More sinister is that while this sound and fury is played out on the cultural meniscus of the Web we are simultaneously being codified in the networked waters that lurk beneath. Ironically it is this process of digitising and ‘codifying’ being which is moving us from the digital to the postdigital at such a rate we can’t even see it happening.

Some thoughts on the production of the original position paper

Looking back over the original position paper I feel a mild sense of guilt. We appear to have been naively working on the assumption that the technology was neutral. In 2009 none of us were really aware of how our data was being used and abused. If I recall correctly the principle that ‘if the platform is free to use then you are the product’ might have been starting to surface but most of us interpreted this as the risk that we might have to look at a few adverts.

Certainly my thinking in this area was still based on broadcast media and crudely targeted ad campaigns which had to scatter their messages far and wide in the hope of making a sale. We hadn’t understood the manner in which politics and ideology could be embedded in code. We were keen to develop language and models that would somehow explain what was really going on if you could pull away from all the ‘newness’ and increasing corporatisation of the Web which up until then had mainly been endearingly shoddy, slow and full of nerdy guys like us. We wanted to mansplain what was actually interesting to all these newcomers who we felt were hypnotised by the shiny tech. We wanted to own what it all meant, in the same way we had owned what it all was.

I still believe postdigital is a useful concept because it shifts emphasis away from the technocentric. I also feel uneasy about our motivations for developing the idea and the manner in which it came about. It’s fair to say that the reason we didn’t discuss the potential negative aspects of the digital is because we were not in marginal or precarious positions and so didn’t have perspectives that arise from vulnerability. (perhaps I should say ‘I’ not ‘we’ as I can’t speak for the other members of the group)

This is a summary of my Lilac 18 keynote on the changing character of ‘information literacy’ – the talk was entitled “Posthuman literacies: reframing the relationship between information, technology and identity”. This was described as ‘the most cyberpunk title for a lilac talk ever’ (which I’m quite proud of) but could have been rephrased as “Don’t Fear Complexity”. There is a video of the talk and a shorter write-up from Shelia Webber.

Section 1: Two ‘new’ identities

As with anything relating to education it’s important to frame the ‘self’ before defining values and approaches. This is especially important with information literacy as the relationship between our identities and the information we engage with is now tightly interwoven. We can no longer work on the principle that we a neutral seekers of facts and truth traveling through a disinterested taxonomy of information. We have to frame the self or risk getting taken for an ideological ride.

Technoself

What it means to be human involves an ongoing incorporation of technology. Whether this is books, reading glasses, cars, the Web, connected devices etc. We (those who can afford to) quickly build the ‘new’ into social norms. For example, it’s now increasingly inappropriate to ask a fellow human a question which could easily be Googled. I encountered this at the doctors when I explained my mild symptoms and he replied “Why didn’t you just look this up online…?”.

This is the technoself: when we consider our phones, laptops, tablets etc – they are not just devices, they are an extension of who we are and an element of what it means to be human. The educational implication being that when we teach information literacy or advise on digital practices we are hoping the student will extend or change their who they are. Identity, information and technology flow into, and through, each other. The best way I’ve seen this put is that we are not addicted to our phones, we are addicted to being social. 

Dataself

The notion of the dataself has recently exploded into the public consciousness via the Cambridge Analytica story. I suspect the reason that story has resonated is as much to do with people feeling they have had something stolen as it is about fears around the erosion of democracy. Even so, it has made it abundantly clear that our interactions online generate a dataself or ‘shadow profile’. This highlights again that Facebook and others don’t simply ‘connect people’, they also connect people to organisations, institutions and businesses in ways which are unseen and anything but neutral.

The implication for information literacy is that it must reveal these mechanisms and reframe our relationship with information.

Section 2: Two forms of information

My response to the dataself is the need to now characterise information into two broad categories –

1. Information we actively seek out
2. Information we receive without consciously asking a question

In some senses category one has traditionally been the remit of information literacy while category two has mainly fallen under media literacy. I would argue that any critical approach to the Web has to combine the two.

The (Dave) White Ignorance Cycle

I’ve condensed the negative aspects of category two into a diagram which mirrors Kolb’s learning cycle (which I have never been particularly comfortable with). It is designed to capture what I see as a relatively new form of information illiteracy which might be better thought of as a lack of digital fluency.

This process drives polarisation and cedes power via polaristion to both the providers of the platform and those paying for the targeted message. In short, we have a responsibility to make this cycle visible to students to equip them with the critical faculties they need to retain any real agency in the networked environment.

Section 3: It’s not about facts

“There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.” Jacob Bronowski

Firstly, let me be clear, I’m not a total relativist, I do believe that information can be more, or less, ‘true’. What I’m more interested in though is regularly questioning why we believe something to be true and, most importantly, focusing on how we respond to information. While information literacy clearly isn’t only about validating sources to establish ‘factiness’ I am concerned that this is how is often comes across. I worry that implicit in information literacy is the notion that if we could all understand how to separate facts from lies then the world would be a better place.

This implication plays into the hands of those that secure power through polarisation as it is, in of itself, a polarising approach. We can fall into the trap of arguing over ‘who is right’ rather than respecting and understanding diversity, different perspectives and experiences. Much of what society runs on is socially constructed, negotiated knowledge and understanding. There is very little in the day-to-day which is utterly objective. I’d argue that totally objective information is only that which has no moral or ethical implications. As a corollary of  that I suspect our desire to define something as a fact is often an attempt to portray our worldview as the ‘natural order’ and therefore not morally questionable. Mark Fisher put it well:

“Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” Mark Fisher

As I alluded to earlier, the key to emancipation over polarisation is to always frame the self as integral to the process. I proposed the following practical response to this:

“Questioning why you agree with something is more valuable than bolstering your views on what you disagree with”

This is my antidote to ‘Truthiness’, a problem which has been amplified by the way in which the network facilitates both individualism and homophily.

“Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I *feel* it to be true, but that *I* feel it to be true.” Stephen Colbert

Truthiness is especially dangerous where the ignorance cycle has unconsciously and uncritically maneuvered an individual into ‘truths’ or a false consciousness which serve those in power.

Section 4: So what?

My conclusion is unashamedly educational.

At my institution, the University of the Arts London, we see the value in uncertainty. In many of our courses it is important that our students are in a liminal state for much of the time within which they are not quite sure of what they know. This is a key aspect of the process of creativity and it’s also central to my reframing, or extension of, information literacy. Questioning our self, our motivations and methods, for seeking and validating information is our only chance of maintaining our agency within complexity. Not being afraid of being immersed in complexity requires understanding the value of uncertainty. This is all the more important where we receive information as an effect of our interactions. To ask how what we engage with has arrived in front of us and why we are comfortable with it (in the context of our identity and position) has to be central to what it means to critically evaluate.

To maintain the agency of our students (and ourselves) and not fall into the trap of assuming a ‘natural order’ which just so happens to be our current worldview we must reveal, not simplify, complexity. In tandem with this we must provide the critical tools to navigate complexity without denying it.

———-

The new definition of Information Literacy which CILIP Information Literacy Group launched at Lilac 18 is well aligned with much of what I have discussed here.

 “The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society.”

The next challenge is to develop pragmatic ways to respond to the new definition in educational terms.

One of the challenges we face is bridging the macro and the micro of approaches to teaching and learning. On the one hand we have high level university-wide strategies and on the other the design of individual teaching sessions. The gulf between these two ‘levels’ is so wide that it can be difficult to understand how strategy might influence the immediacy of day-to-day teaching.

Generally, course validation process, handbooks and the design of assessments should bridge this gap but it’s rare to meet anyone in a teaching role that sees the course validation process as a positive design opportunity – one which draws clear threads between teaching values or principles and the day-to-day of running a course.

Incorporating digital into teaching and learning  inevitably suffers from the same problem. We can create strategies that talk of embedding digital into all aspects of teaching and discuss digital ‘tips and tricks’ for teaching sessions but struggle to define, or work with, course level digital learning design. The result is often laudable institutional aspirations and a smattering of ‘groovy’ digital interventions by confident staff who have agency through their structural position within the institution… 

This year the University of the Arts London launched its Creative Attributes Framework (CAF), which provides a valuable shared language to respond to the challenges I’ve outlined. It’s nine high level attributes which are clustered into three areas (all of which fall under the banner of Agency):

The CAF was designed by Careers and Employability at UAL and is a great example of how taking a ‘becoming’ rather than ‘skills’ approach to employability stops ‘getting a job’ being in opposition to ‘getting a degree’. Or perhaps it demonstrates that curriculum and employability can operate on similar principles if the focus is on personal development rather than on collecting-knowledge-and-skills. The CAF has been well received at UAL and because many aspects of digital teaching and learning are about ‘becoming’ it was an obvious next step to develop a digital lens for the CAF.

The CAF-Digital or D-CAF as it’s becoming known is currently a simple list of digital skills, practices, capabilities, literacies, behaviours… which operate on a meso level, providing bridges or stepping stones between the macro and the micro – a form of curricular or learning design scaffolding. For example:

• Being able to switch between different discussions and roles online – in Agility
• Managing collaborative writing or media production online – in Communication
• Documenting, reflecting on and analysing the development of an idea online – in Storytelling
• Managing and analyzing large bodies of data – in Enterprise
• Constructively responding to critique online – in Resilience
• Seeking out people from beyond your immediate community – in Curiosity

Trying to define the D-CAF elements as a particular type in terms of skills, practices etc is not the aim. What is important is that they operate at a meso, in-between, level and that we agree that they are a valuable aspect of developing a particular creative attribute in the digital. The elements of the D-CAF are designed to be contextualised by disciplines and courses, each of which can describe their approach to facilitating a relevant collection of the D-CAF elements. Importantly, courses can also map their curricular to the D-CAF to highlight which elements their teaching supports in a language students can relate to.

The current draft D-CAF has around 30 elements mapped to the nine CAF attributes. We are in the process of consulting with colleagues from around the university to ensure that these elements are in the best possible form before we publish/post a version 1.0. I have a basic rule that the D-CAF has to fit on one sheet of A4 paper, just to keep us disciplined… I’ll share version 1.0 here under a CC license. My hope is that others can build on the work and modify it to reflect the character/aspirations of their own institutions.