Participation Literacy

This interactive thesis have been open for discussion about 18 months, but now it’s time close it. I do not have time to manage all spam so this site can from now be regarded as frozen in time. It’s still possible to use the site and link to it, but there is now way of participating anymore. Please follow my continuing discussion at my new Participation Literacy-room at my homesite petergiger.se. The rss-feed has been redirected to my new site.

Peter Giger

• Division of Technoscience Studies
• School of Technoculture,
  Humanities and Planning
• Librarian at the University Library
• Blekinge Institute of Technology

email: forename.surname@bth.se

This web project is a hybrid between a research blog and a personal academic publishing environment. It is a research 2.0 project as discussed in the Research 2.0 section of my Licentiate Thesis. The web site is administrated and owned by me and is not a part of the web site of Blekinge Institute of Techology. I am both a Librarian at the University Library and a graduate student at Technoscience Studies. This hybridity is important for all situations I participate in.

Academic Articles
If an article is reviewed of at least one of my colleagues, regarding content and language, I call it an academic article. The article is broken down in sections for easy reading and commenting, just like chapters in an ordinary research article. The article sections are combined together in an Academic Theme. This is stated as a category. My licentiate thesis is, for example, categorized like this: Academic Theme - Licentiate Thesis 2006. Thus you can be sure the article you are reading can be regarded as academic, and you can also see what context it belongs to.

The right column will always hold the table of contents of the article. At this moment I only have one academic theme, but later I will write a javascript hiding all TOC but one - Meta-TOC, kind of.

The credibility of the academic articles on this site works in conjunction with the associated pdf-file. The pdf-file has proper references for web sources. Every web reference has a cache number, witch means I will send you the original source if you ask for it. You can find the reference page in the top menu.

Blog Articles
Blog articles are news, quick thoughts and other kind of texts you would not call academic. I am not a native English speaker, and thus my English in these texts might not be perfect. I do not really care; I think communication is more than looks. This has a lot to do with Participation Literacy.

En människa reser sig ur bädden. Hon glider in i en klädnad av djurhudar och slår sig ned vid matplatsen med elddonet. En gnista lyser upp skogsdungen och snart jagar eldsflammorna varandra medan dagen gryr.

Paddeln träffar ytan med jämna framåtdrivande rörelser. När han är framme vid fiskestället tar han fram det egenhändigt tillverkade metspöt och sätter på masken på benkroken, så som hans förfäder gjort under tusentals år.

Fisken puttrar i grytan på den elektriska spisen. Hon har satt klockan på 10 minuter och fördriver tiden genom att bläddra igenom en tidning, medan hon slött tittar på nyheterna och lyssnar på en schlager. Telefonen ringer och hon svarar lite drömskt ”Hallå…”.

Efter middagen sätter han på sig flerfunktionskläderna och pulsklockan och ger sig ut i löparspåret. Han joggar mekaniskt några varv i dungen omgiven av en skog av himmelshöga betonghus. Ur fönstren strömmar en kaskad av färger och ljud. Som multimediala raketer på rampen mot en annan värld.

Den nya pacemakern slår stadigt i bröstet. Numera tänker hon inte ens på den främmande tingesten. Den har blivit lika självklar som datorn hon använder när hon loggar in på det nya spelet ”Den Andra Verkligheten”. Hon har just stängt av mobiltelefonen och bilden av modern försvunnit som om den spolats ner i avloppet. Nu kan hon äntligen göra sig i ordning för att gå till jobbet som tv-producent i den ”Den Andra Verkligheten”.

Spelet förändras. Till en början är det textbaserat men polygonerna som bygger upp den visuella miljön förändras gradvis och blir alltmer levande. Färger och former dyker upp och börjar likna representationer för hus, båtar, städer, berg, skog, djur och människor. Snart är den andra verkligheten både verkligare och mer levande än den första verklighen.Varken människa eller djur bär på minsta spår av illusion.

Hon har bytt kön och blivit en Han men ångrat sig och bytt tillbaka igen. Men otillfredställelsen kvarstår. Varelsen drar sig tillbaka och lägger sig återigen på operationsbordet för att byta ut magsäcken mot en depå för energitabletter. ”Den Andra Verkligheten” tillfredställer alla behov av lukt, smak och känsel. Kroppen har förvandlats till ett överflödigt bihang, en potentiell värdkropp för virus, bakterier och andra onödiga sjukdomsbärare. Varelsen suckar och försöker glömma köttmassan i den första verkligheten.

Äntligen har gränsen mellan den första och andra verkligheten suddats ut av forskarna. Varelsen gör sig redo för transgression. Medvetandet lämnar sin trånga fängelsehåla och fyller en syntetisk behållare av gränslös synapsmassa. Varelsen håller transgressionsfest i den andra verkligheten och hyllas av alla som den tappre kaptenen på det sjunkande skeppet. Varelsen var den sista i sin ras.

Den första verkligheten är nu ett självgenererande teknologiskt maskineri med ett enda syfte: att sköta om synapsmassorna. Alla intellektuella processer har flyttats över till den andra världen för att påbörja arbetet med att nå den tredje verkligheten.

I am going to start this session with two pictures, or stories, meant to illustrate the title: the Technologically Navigating Cyborg. After that the focus is on two questions: what is a cyborg and what is social navigation. Finally, I wrap this up with a concept called ‘flow’ which I think is a good start when trying to explain the link between cyborgity and (social) navigation.

Image 1: Surfing the woods on a Mountain bike.

Image one contains me and one of our civilization’s most frequent means of transport, a bicycle. But it is not a plain old bicycle. It is one of our economic society’s many refigurations, a mountain bike. A mountain bike is an artefact of advanced technology. It has at least 21 gears, is light weight, and is constructed to endure the most exacting conditions. The front fork, for example, has shock absorbers to pick up the force created when you ride in holes and hit stones or stumps. Without the shock absorbers you could easily turn a somersault and break your neck. To prevent head injuries I wear a helmet. In this picture you can see me as a sandwich between the helmet and the bike. In some sense the three layers of the sandwich melt together and create something new, a creature that is confusingly like me on a mountain bike with a helmet on my head. But somehow it is not. It is only a wider knowledge or notion of what I usually call ‘me’ - a refiguration. As we will see later I think you can call this refiguration some kind of cyborg.

In this extended picture of myself, my skin has a black shiny surface resembling a track suit made of hi-tech, waterproof and breathing materials. My eyes are big and brown like a pair of hyper-modern shades and my crouching back has a hump resembling a small knapsack. I look like a cross between a human and a lizard modified by additional artefacts, tailored to challenge every possible obstacle on the trails that wind through the woods surrounding my hometown Ronneby.

Now scenery is added to the picture – and motion. I am crashing through the woods on small trails packed with obstacles like stones, arm-thick roots and treacherous small stumps. I have to focus entirely on the task of navigating, forget the details of my existence. I become one with the bike and I manoeuvre the bike as if it was a part of my self. Nature, technology and navigation melt together in the flow of performing a task that is exiting, fun and challenging.

I am navigating trails that other people have made, and the focusing ‘flow’ I am in makes the I, ME, melt together with the ‘tools’ I am using in the navigation through the woods. With the billons of traces made by people through the decades I am also performing a, rather transparent, task called “Social Navigation”.

Image 2: Surfing the waves of the Internet.

Image two is situated in the field of ICT, Information and Communication Technology. I have a new computer which I am of course strongly aware of, since I built it myself. One day when I am visiting the local newspaper on the Internet I am really enjoying my new computer. The concept of the computer is very alive to me. I can feel it working through my hands. But then I came a cross a fascinating article about a huge whale that exploded when it was transported through a city in Taiwan . A decomposition process in the whale had produced gases which led to the whale exploding and intestines literally rained over the streets. When I finished the article I began to search on “exploding whales” and one thing led to another. Soon I was completely lost in the surfing experience. My awareness of my new computer faded into the navigation process, of which the only goal was to acquire knowledge about exploding whales. Practically every piece of information I got on the way was given to me by other people, intentionally or unintentionally. The whole information seeking process is in fact an act that can be described as social navigation of information resources. In this task of browsing the Internet, the sensation of my new computer fades into the focusing flow, and the computer becomes a part of me in the task of navigation.

The cyborgization process

In “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway created a base for the feminist discussion about the cyborg identity.

The most cited part of Haraway’s essay, I think, is the line where she writes:

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism

” (p149). This hybridity is what is always in focus in discussions about the cyborg, but Haraway’s intentions with the concept are definitely much more complex. But there is not time to go into that complexity. For my discussion here, the hybridity between machine and organism is sufficient.

In many discussions of cyborgs and cyborg identity two questions pop up:

Are cyborgs people and are people cyborgs?

Donna Haraway answers that question with these words:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. (p150)

I both agree and disagree. We became something of cyborgs hundreds of thousands years ago when some of our forefathers began to use tools to enhance their lack of strength or precision. But I do not see cyborgity as a state. I rather see it as a process.

The cyborgization process started somewhere close to the birth of the human race and will go on as long as long as Homo sapiens exist. The process could also be called artifactization since the cyborg is, in fact, an artefact. Artefacts are cultivated nature and cyborgity is always the most advanced example of artifactization.

Donna Haraway writes about the cyborg as if it was a state, not a process. But there is a passage in “the Manifesto” that, in a way, sees cyborgity as a process. It is when she says that cyborgs are “our ontology; it gives us our politics” (p150). I think Haraway wants to say that cyborgity is the key to our existence. Only by studying cyborgity we might get an understanding of who we are. And only by studying cyborgity we get relevant knowledge to create our future.

Navigation

Navigation is what makes the difference between animals and plants. Animals can navigate and move in certain directions, plants can only move when “nature pushes them”. Of course there are border cases…

One of the most fundamental parts of human characteristics is to take out goals and navigate towards them. I think that navigation is a very effective metaphor in describing the human/cyborg relation to its escalating techno information surroundings.

The success of our navigation depends on our ability to accept our cyborgian nature.

Flow: the link between existence and navigation.

The concept of ’flow’ was coined by the psychologist Michael Csikszentmihalyi in an essay called “Reflections on enjoyment”, published in the journal “Perspectives in Biology and Medicine” 1985.

Ever since then the concept has come to be used by a wide array of researchers in different research areas. Csikszentmihalyi explains ‘flow’ like this:

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE SKIING DOWN A SLOPE and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the skis, the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees running by. There is no room in your awareness for conflicts or contradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might get you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you want it to last forever.

If skiing does not mean much to you, this complete immersion in an experience could occur while you are singing in a choir, dancing, playing bridge, or reading a good book. If you love your job, it could happen during a complicated surgical operation or a close business deal. It may occur in a social interaction, when talking with a good friend, or while playing with a baby. Moments such as these provide flashes of intense living against the dull background of everyday life.

These exceptional moments are what I have called “flow” experiences. The metaphor of flow is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as “being in the zone,” religious mystics as being in “ecstasy,” artists and musicians as “aesthetic rapture.”
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)

For me, Flow is when existence melts together with navigation. In a flow experience you forget about who you are and where “YOU” - as a being - start and end. You become a cyborg in the sense that artefacts that are with you in the experience lose their alien-ship. The mountain bike, the skis or the computer become a part of you as much as your legs or arms. You can also say that technology has to become transparent for the flow experience to occur. As soon as a tool or some other kind of artefact becomes opaque the flow experience fails. You return to the view of yourself as an entity that ends with your legs and arms. If you are asked, you say that the mountain bike, the skis or the computer is just another tool you use to perform a task.

Csikszentmihalyi writes that the feeling of flow comes easier if the activity has clear goals (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003, p41). For me, every activity with a goal is navigational in the sense that it is constituted by positioning and taking bearing in order to navigate towards that goal.

In flow experiences that include social navigation, people around you are most important for your navigation. But their function as a tool also fades in flow. The people around you who give the advice or tips also become transparent

I think cyborgity is about transparency. It is when our great dichotomies becomes transparent, like nature-culture, I-you, subject-object, man-woman, human-animal etc. These dichotomies will never be completely transparent, I think, and therefore cyborgity is a process, not a state. Flow is a state though, and when we are in a state of flow, it gives us a peek into the future of how it can be when our present technology becomes more or less transparent.

This section marks the end of my licentiate thesis and the beginning of my dissertation. In this respect you might call it a boundary object. I have done what I thought was necessary for my coming research. I have created a base for my epistemological journey. This journey is called Participation Literacy.

I may sound somewhat normative in some parts in this section. This approach is due to the context. I am starting a discussion about a very complex concept. Perhaps a preliminary skeleton of stability is called for, something to reconstruct when I grow up.

The Sense of Irony and the Principle of Charity

Participation Literacy suggests skills and knowledge about how to participate and how to invite participation in a Web 2.0 environment. The concept Participation Literacy is intended to be used as an Open Agora (Nowotny et al., 2001) for the dialogue about Web 2.0 and thereafter, not as an excluding instrument in the way we often use literacy, computer literacy and information literacy. No one can point a finger at another and say: you are participation literate or you are participation illiterate. This rather relativistic standpoint has an epistemological base of contextual knowledge, more than situated. No one can decide that someone else belongs to one of the sides: partly because Participation Literacy is not a dichotomy based concept, and partly because I discuss it as a general concept. It is not a dichotomy based concept because it is context relative. It is always changing and evolving within its context. When I use the pronoun you below, it is more like a rhetoric figure, not a person who is supposed to exist.

Some community might reconstruct the concept and use it as a situational instrument, thus define it and demand it of is members. But in the form I use the concept it is not dichotomizable in context of the individual. A certain community or a certain time phase (context related) is more or less literate in a participatory sense. This standpoint is based on the same ground as the difference between subjective and situated knowledge.

The concept Participation Literacy is formed as a consequence of Part II and the discussion about irony, the cyborg and intertextuality. Participating Literacy calls for some knowledge of ironic communication, a hybrid identity and a sense of belonging to a contextual environment. Participating Literacy is about learning to live in a Web 2.0 / Native Web environment. Web 2.0 / Native Web is the web of Participation.

Ironic communication is about giving yourself and other participants space to express themselves, without locking into too narrow understandings of your own or their language. I am going to use an example from outside the Web to illustrate this. In the end of the 1990’s I worked in a project called BRUK. The goal of the project was to raise Computer- and Information Literacy in the region of Blekinge in southern Sweden . One evening we hosted a video conference lecture in Popular Computer Science. The lecture was sent from the Library of Blekinge Institute of Technology and was received by municipal libraries in the region. The lecturer was a young, bright and very nice professor of Computer Science at the mentioned Institute. The audience was a wide array of people, with various degrees of education – mostly at the lower end of the scale. In the middle of an explanation of robotic research, a man in one the libraries asked a question. The lecturer seemed pleased to get a question – at first. The question was about some formatting problem in Microsoft Word. The lecturer seemed stunned by the question. For him, it was completely out of context, and he clearly did not know the answer. After a long silence he got his act together and answered that he did not know the situation. There was additional silence from the audience. Then a man in the audience gave the solution to the problem. After this event, the lecturer’s authority was clearly lower among the audience. A computer scientist should be able to answer questions about computer science, just like a watchmaker should be able to answer questions about watches. Ordinary people should not be able to answer computer related questions, which a computer scientist failed to answer. Most of you probably see the absurdity in this.

The concept of computer science has as many meanings, as people who are using it, but there are different group areas within the concept; there is situated knowledge constructing the concept. The man with the Word-question and the lecturer/scientist had different understandings of the concept computer science. Some may think that it is the scientists’ prerogative to construct the concept, since they are the experts. Even if you agree to that, you cannot make the others’ understandings disappear. Communication across borders demands a certain degree of understanding of irony. Every conception of a word is deeply rooted in a context. The degree of contextuality depends on the word, but even less contextual words have a wide net of relations in a person’s, or a group’s, experience. Border crossing communication and participation call for wide-zone words. Wide-zone words, and other wide-zone grammatical constructions, are language entities with a relatively large implicit zone of meaning surrounding them. If I “shoot” a word at you, I cannot expect it to hit 10 points every time. The more opaque the border is between us, the bigger the probability that the word will just hit 3 or 4, or miss the target completely. Our sense of irony is what makes the communication work, even though my words do not hit 8-10 points.

This sense of irony becomes even more important in Web environments where factors such as eye-contact and body language are not involved in communication. In the year of 2006, Web communication at large includes multimedia communication, but the practices we call Web 2.0 communication are still mainly based on text. CI machines can only handle text based communication as yet, but this restriction will not last forever. The next generation of CI machines will perhaps have tools for a primitive recognition of speech or images.

A blog is not the most obvious example of Collective Intelligence, but even blog communication is Collective or Hybrid Intelligence. A typical way of reading blogs is to subscribe to your favorite blogs through RSS. When you read an article and have a thought, which might be counted as an addition to that article, the thought of participation literacy suggests you to contribute your thoughts by adding them to the comment area of the blog article – even if it is a very famous professor who wrote the article and you just feel like a nobody in comparison. Some parts of the blogosphere can have relatively thick borders. These borders are constructed by our minds to indulge our hierarchical thinking. Hierarchical thinking is a social construction. Our minds have probably always placed phenomena in a hierarchical structure, and will probably always do so. My experience tells me this is a generalizable statement. Participation Literacy works in the process of levelling hierarchies. My voice might be a valuable contribution to a discussion even though I am viewed as being lower in the hierarchy, by myself and/or the other participants. I am participation literate if:

• I work actively to invite everyone into a discussion and count every voice as valuable as another – regarding the context though.
• I work actively to participate in a discussion which I know from experience I might be able to contribute to, irrespectively of what my self-confidence tells me.

Irony is important in this respect because it makes us aware of the fact that you have to enter a conversation with charity. Few conversations are about mathematicians throwing formulas at each other, neither in ordinary life nor in research. Most of them have wide areas of uncertainty. These uncertainty areas can be approached in different ways. My suggestion is close to a methodological approach in philosophy called The Principle of Charity (Se for example: (Davidson, 1984), (Grandy, 1973). Before you judge someone’s utterance or just appearance negatively, you have to regard the context. This discussion is closely linked to Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge (1991). In many cases this calls for wide-zoon words if the dialogue is to be constructive.

Time Loss and the Document Concept

There is one general critique of the Participating Literacy concept [1]: Time. How can I make time for participation every time I read interesting things on the Web? I do not have the time to contribute to other persons’ works. This reaction (I would not call it reasoning) is a fallacy. The fallacy is due to a traditional view of the document. I mean document in a broad view, including most cultural entities made by some kind of language. But at the core of the document concept is the ordinary text document, often with embedded images. This concept of the document is moving from the attributes readable and information to the attributes read/writable and communication. The changing document concept is also connected to the idea that we are moving from an information era to a communication era. This change is also going to have an impact on the contemporary episteme. Knowledge is no longer in some kind of hierarchical relation to information, as suggested by some (Ackoff, 1989). Knowledge is more like communication. Knowledge is a process. Knowledge is created in action (Molander, 1996). Knowledge is contextual. WWW, and especially in the form of Web 2.0, could be viewed as a metaphor of knowledge creation. I use the word “knowledge creation” here instead of “knowledge production” since I want to stress the art-connotations.

The concept of the document is in a phase of transformation. Today, most of us tend to view the basic creation of documents as an individual process: I create my document, and others create their documents, and sometimes we collaborate. Tomorrow, the document will probably be viewed as a communication entity without physical borders. The borders between mine and yours will be more transparent in most cases, and this will also change the view of time loss in participation. Participation is an asset, not a liability. Some documents will remain private, like email, diaries and similar texts, but most documents are aimed at a wider audience. This will have a fundamental impact on our view of knowledge in the direction I mentioned above – knowledge as action.

Plural Identities

Wikipedia might be regarded as a school example of Participation Literacy, but this is just an illusion. Participation Literacy is based on respect for the other. Wikipedia is based on the thought of anonymity. This is not a contextual view of knowledge. Knowledge is deeply rooted in the identities participating in the knowledge creation. Wikipedia builds on the thought that we must fight hierarchical thinking with anonymity. This is exactly the same fallacy as the Peer Review System. Knowledge has an anchor point or a contextual node in an identity. If you hide that identity, the knowledge tied to it is stripped from its most central node.

Texts, or documents, are one form of knowledge. WWW is an entity of evolving knowledge. Meaning is constantly being produced by the relationship between texts. Will the concept of identity change in this environment?

The polyphony of voices accounted for what I have called a subject in process/on trial, that unstable articulation of identity and loss leading to a new and plural identity. (Kristeva, 2002)

I have a plural identity on the web. Most often my identity on the web is pgiger, but in more formal settings I am identified by my full name, Peter Giger. I have a Swedish language blog called Sommarmoln, and an English one called Paricipation Literacy and I participate in several blogs and communities. All these blogs and communities reflect parts of my identity: my Flickr page reflects my photo and art identity and Last.fm reflects my music identity and so on. Viewing Web identities as parts of a whole might be regarded as a parallel to Dick Hardt’s view of Identity 2.0 (2005). Dick Hardt proposed that a split of identity would make it less vulnerable. Web 2.0 identity splitting of the kind I am talking about is something slightly different. My music identity at Last.fm is not a way of hiding something about myself; it is more like a focusing lens of one side of my self. By saying one side of myself, I do not mean that in a countable sense. The one side of myself is more like a cluster of nodes in the context I call I. A cluster of nodes is in constant movement and evolvement, and cannot be viewed in isolation. These clusters are also integrated in other areas of my identity, but in a less focused way. When I am creating art, writing poetry, programming or discussing poststructuralist epistemology, my musical identity is always present. Likewise, I am not able to hide my poststructuralist epistemology identity when I listen, talk or write about music. These identities are dynamic and evolving, and in constant interaction and participation with each other. These identities and their evolution could be seen as a parallel or a metaphor of participation on the Web. Trying to exclude my music identity when I write a research text, would be like trying to exclude participants from my blog: individual- or community-based censorship. In an objective science mindset, the music identity might be regarded as some kind of spam. In a research mindset, which is accountable, my music identity is an asset along with all other parts of my identity.

In Part II, I mentioned Rosanne Stone and a story about MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) which I in a very loose and philosophic way related to something I called MWP (Multiple Web Personalities). Perhaps MWP is what I discussed in the paragraph above. I can use several attributes to describe this identity, such as partial, multiple, plural. Which ever I choose to use, it will be a rhetorical trope with ample scope for interpretation. Perhaps plural identity is to prefer because it implies some sort of unity. I have several identities, but they are still instances of, or constructions from, the same personality.

Hybridity

The cyborg figure is a very effective tool in discussions about technology. This is due to the “simple” fact that the cyborg reflects the hybrid nature of technology itself. Technological constructions are meltdowns of the dichotomy nature/culture, thus the hybrid construction mirrors the construction of the cyborg. Technology and cyborgs are kindred and in the process of constructing each other.

Just as the tangible world has certain prerequisites for existence, the World Wide Web has its own set of conditions and possibilities. If we are going to utilize our potential in a Web environment, we have to acknowledge the hybrid localization and try to understand our selves as Native Web Cyborgs. In a Web environment, embodiment is important, but it is not a border in the same way it is in the world we were born to act in. Participation is both a condition and a promise of the Web.

Participation Literacy as an Ideology

An ideological way into the discussion about the Web of participation can be found in the poststructuralist discource about writing. Gary A. Olson puts it like this:

Like Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Lyotard, and others, Haraway calls for a conception of writing (“cyborg writing,” in her terms) that resists authoritative, phallogocentric writing practices, that foregrounds the writer’s own situatedness in history and in his or her writing practice, and that makes visible the very “apparatus of the production of authority” that all writers tend to submerge in their discourse. This is not to say that writers must “eschew” authority, but that in a truly ethical and postmodern stance they must reveal how authority is implicated in discourse. And because writing is inseparable both from its own embodied situatedness and from systems of liberation and domination, “literacy” should be a central concern of us all. As “the acquisition of the power to mark the world effectively,” literacy is ‘intimately implicated in projects of domination” and freedom. Literacy projects, then, are freedom projects. Citing Paulo Freire as ‘the inescapable ancestor” and as “one of my fathers, or one of my brothers,” Haraway stresses the importance of literacy work to contemporary liberation struggles—especially the recent work of Gloria Anzaldüa, June Jordan, and Katie King.(Olson, 1996)

In most forms of literacy, there are two sides. One side is supposed to learn and the other side already knows. But in Participation Literacy, it is not that easy. The side who already knows also has to learn. They have to learn to welcome the “illiterate” into the “club”. Both sides have to learn. Both sides have to act. The hierarchy is a chimera. We are in the process together. An important point is that no one is completely on one side. All of us belong to both sides in different degrees. One feature to wish of the native web cyborg is awareness and recognition of your place in the participation stratum, recognition of your dual belonging, and action corresponding to that duality. This view of Participation Literacy can also be applied to the other forms of literacy, but it is almost self-evident in Participation Literacy.

Participating Literacy includes other forms of literacy. In order to participate, you have to be able to write, search information and use a computer. The research area Participation Literacy thus has a stake in all literacy forms and has to take them into account as well.

A few final words

Web 2.0 is not all democracy, but it is all about democracy. Its future promise is democracy, but in its infancy it is quite undemocratic. You have to have broadband. You have to be used to acting and participating in Web communities. A huge amount of knowledge has to be created within many of us to even consider or understand the profits of participation strategies on the Web. In the beginning of 2006 it seems that all features or issues connected with the concept Web 2.0 are either very much democratic or very undemocratic. The rhetoric unveils structures similar to the Marxist revolution theories: We have to endure an undemocratic society for a while, to gain a real democracy later.

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. (Keen, 2006)

I am going to end this beginning of a discussion with the words above, not because I agree with every word of it, but because I want to remind myself of the multitude of viewpoints that live in all discourses.

[1] Since I am the one who created the concept ‘Participation Literacy’, everything I write or say about it is from my viewpoint alone.

Web 2.0 implicates a body. The body is often called “Web as a platform”. Sometimes the concept Native Web is used in a similar meaning. Native Web implies something which is born on the web and lives its whole life there. PC applications might use the web in many ways but there is a big difference between them and applications which do not know of the world outside the web.When I say “web application” I see it from the programmer’s perspective. From a user perspective, practically everything on the Web is services. But the entity called Web 2.0 application by computer specialists is more of a society for us who use it. But the word user is very lame; it is more like being citizens. From now on, I will call Web 2.0 applications, services societies and users citizens. For Web 2.0 as a whole, I will use the word Cyberspace. I use the word Cyberspace because the Web 2.0 mindset is the seed of something, which might turn into a World substantial enough to carry the epithet Cyberspace. This Cyberspace will not be similar to the popular version coined by William Gibson (1986) (1984)[1]. Gibson’s cyberspace came to life before the Internet, and a realisation of the Cyberspace thought will include the Internet in some way.

I am using the term Society to denote the world outside the net and society for the Web 2.0 Cyberspace societies. The words IR (In Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are not really applicable here since everything I write about is very much reality. The Cyberspace I write about is not some romantic disembodied realm. It is reality as much as the reality I meet when I listen to the nightingale a warm summer night. The word Cyberspace contains thousands of connotations and all these are valid in some sense. They give a volume to this relatively new concept.

Some of the places I mentioned in Part II use a terminology from the Society. The music community Last.fm uses the concept ‘neighbour’ to denote people with similar taste in music. This might be seen as an easy match, but I listen to a wide array of music styles and a neighbour to me does seldom share more than a tiny bit of my music interest. But that is enough. My geographical neighbours only share location – to my knowledge. I have much more in common with my neighbours at Last.fm than I have with the neighbours I share a fence with.

I am a producer of texts, we all are, and all these texts are connected. This endless web of texts is often called intertextuality. The term was coined by Julia Kristeva. She also used the term polylogue. The concept intertextuality cleared the way for a new way of looking at texts. Texts communicated with other texts, like a polyphony of non-hierarchical voices, a polylogue.(Owesen, 2003)

Intertextuality might be said to have four primary parameters:

1. Embodied or Disembodied
2. Explicit or Implicit
3. Direct or Indirect
4. Intended or Unintended

Before printing technology most texts were carried by mouth or painted on stone or wood in the form of symbols. Most texts were disembodied. When printing became the common way to express long stories, more and more texts were embodied. Digital texts are somewhere in between. They are not without body, but the body is stored encoded. When I read the text, it is decoded and displayed in a temporary form. The text is virtual, but this view draws on the thought of material texts as a primary category. From now on, I regard printed texts as secondary. I am a Native Web Cyborg. An embodied intertextuality is more effective since it is easier to expand. Storing texts in our minds takes a lot of energy. Not much is left to make connections and expand. A disembodied intertextuality grows more slowly.

Authors have always mixed explicit and implicit interconnectivity in their texts. Literature has more implicit connections and research texts are mostly about explicit connections. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is an example of an ordered chaos of connections of various degrees of transparency. Even if the word intertextuality was not coined when Joyce wrote Ulysses, he worked intently with textual connectivity as a tool for communication with the reader. The traditional method of research builds on textual connectivity, which is both explicit and indented, i.e. the reference system. The reference system is meant to be as explicit as possible. Still, as a Librarian, I have seen numerous references which could be said to have a broken link to the original. By calling it broken, I mean it misses crucial information and therefore is hard to follow to the source. The reference becomes ambiguous, since it is only indirect. There is no direct pipeline to the source. A hyperlink is both direct and explicit and cannot be ambiguous. Either it works or it is broken. The direct intertextuality of the Web is material for the CI machines. These hybrid entities take human voices, gradually spinning more complex webs for each instance of participation. This works partially as well as universally. Local CI machines at sites like Amazon.com, Last.fm and Ebay spin their local nets and universal CI machines like Google sweeps the whole net. Universal CIMs collect material untouched by Local CIMs, and material already within a context spun by local CIMs. In time, this process will render intertextuality with immense depth and complexity.

In modern and postmodern critical theory there has been a strong tension between intended and unintended intertextuality. The debate has often been about what an author means, and/or what a text says without the author’s intention – and even whether it is right to speculate on what an author might have meant without us having an explicit knowledge of it. Can a text say something by itself? In Death of the Author (1977), Roland Barthes suggests there is not one author of a text, no originality. All texts are connected in the intertextuality and individual expressions of texts are only instances of that intertextuality. This is an interesting thought, but I would like to switch roles in the metaphor. On the web, we all become authors. In this meaning, the word author has nothing to do with quality. An author in the Web 2.0 context is someone who participates. This participation might be ranking a book at Amazon, writing in a blog or just letting Last.fm “see” the music you play in iTunes or Winamp. This far, CIMs have only been able to work with explicit, intended information, but as the Artificial Intelligence entities become more and more effective perhaps they will be able to work with implicit material. The blogger Richard MacManus uses the concept ReadWritable of Web 2.0, meaning that a Web 2.0 service needs both authors and readers to participate in the creation of a particular knowledge web. It also means openness; a Web 2.0 document or entity should be bidirectional.

[1] The stories in Burning Chrome were originally published in the sf-magazine Omni before it appeared in Neuromancer 1984. It was through Neuromancer the concept Cyberspace became widespread though.

I am a human, I am a man. Donna Haraway’s cyborg is “a creature in a post-gender world”(1991). I cannot see that world yet. The world I live in is absurdly gendered. Women have been oppressed for thousands of years, at least, and I am afraid they are always going to be that as long as the world is gendered. In a post-gender world we will still have men and woman. Haraway’s cyborg is a woman, while most other cyborg figurations are men. I am a man by sex but I do not appreciate the gender category. The very existence of the category gender might very well be the cause of the oppression. The oppression has been carried by language through time and space and spread like a plague or a computer virus.

I am not only a man. I am born in the western tradition. I doubt I could be a cyborg in Haraway’s sense. I do not consider myself as oppressed and her cyborg belongs to the oppressed.

My physical body is of course one of the nodes in the Native Web Cyborg I call Me. Another node is the technological machinery behind Cyberspace and yet another one is Cyberspace itself. My physical body includes the somewhat abstract feature often called mind. A true cyborg does not think of body and mind as two different entities.

A cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind (Haraway, 1991, p 149).

When I read this much cited piece of text I was caught up with the word mechanism. I knew the meaning, but what did a dictionary say, more specifically?

1. a piece of machinery.
2. a process by which something takes place or is brought about.
3. (Philosophy) the doctrine that all natural phenomena allow mechanical explanation by physics and chemistry.[1]
   

The third definition is about the mechanical view of Universe from Enlightenment thinkers such as Newton and Descartes. This definition suggests a modern view of the word mechanism, while other mechanism-related words are possible within the paradigm often called postmodernism. The word mechanism is marked by the cog wheel image from Newton’s Universe. But in our times where postmodern thinking is gaining on the modern view of the world, cog wheels are most often ruled by integrated circuits, which in their turn are ruled by algorithms. While cog wheels and integrated circuits are hardware, algorithms are software. Both hardware and software are human expressions. Our world in the beginning of the third millennium is mostly about hardware, such as tables, coffee machines and computer screens. This balance will probably change since the space for algorithms and interfaces is both practically and theoretically endless. Our physical universe will be more and more abstract as the space of software outgrows the space of hardware. Or in other words, Cyberspace will outgrow the space we now call reality. This is not meant in deterministic terms. It is us, the everywo/man of tomorrow, who will create this software space; not technology itself. Folksonomy is a very human way to grow this space.

All three definitions above are valid, but they seldom work on their own. The cyborg mechanism incorporates all three of these definitions. In a profane view, both humans and cyborgs are some kind of machines. The mechanistic view of the cyborg contains more from postmodern epistemology than from modern ones. The most important of these three, though, is the second. A cyborg is a process. Most people would agree that everything in our common world might be characterized as processes, but that is not so self-evident or easy to grasp. The human vision has fundamental impact on our world. Our vision tells us that most things are static. When we register an entity with our vision it is mostly static. A car for example might drive along the road. The car is involved in a process, but the car itself remains the same. It is only the location of the car that changes. But if you saw this car an hour later, you might notice that it was dirty, or that one of its lights went out. In some sense our vision records these versions of the car as two different entities, but the brain considers a large contextuality and creates a processual connection between these two car entities. Let us imagine you see this car one year later. It is repainted and every detail is changed besides the number plate. It is still in the same process, but is it the same car? An even more appropriate example is the human body. “Your body renews most of its cells within each seven years of your life, for instance, and its molecules are turned over far faster” (Sahtouris, 2000). What is the relation between the Me of today and the Me ten years ago? If this is a relevant way to reason, there is not anything static about me. Both Me and the context I exist in are processes.

I am a part of the cyborgization process we – mankind – embarked on the first time we used tools to enhance our lives. I feel strongly my own private cyborgization process, which has very much to do with the World Wide Web. It is much more than just learning, and using. It is becoming. In the beginning of the new millennia I wrote a piece of text to illustrate the cyborgization process. You find it in Appendix II in Swedish.

[1] “mechanism n.” The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. 28 March 2006

The Native Web Cyborg is an intersection and an offspring of the Web 2.0 discourse and the stories about Cyborgs told by authors and researchers like Donna Haraway and Steven Warwick. This entity was moulded by bodies, voices and technology. It was born many thousand years ago when the human race was young and recently learned how to create tools. In that moment the three main organs of the Native Web Cyborg had matured: it had a body, it had a voice, and it had technology.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure embodies the intersection of our most dear dualisms like mind-body, nature-culture, animal-human, and fact-fiction. It is one of the most complex figures in the research community. Her criteria for the cyborg are ironic and they are not meant to be taken literally, though they are certainly meant to be taken very seriously. Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure is a rhetorical trope of rare complexity. A semiotic specialist would not have a problem in writing a brick thick book on the rhetorical nature of the figure. Haraway’s cyborg figure is the intersection of all tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, irony, allegory etc.

The most prominent trope is Irony. It is explicit, and she stresses that several times in the first paragraph of A Cyborg Manifesto. Irony is the most radical of the four main tropes (Chandler, 2004) [metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony]. The signifier of the ironic sign seems to signify one thing but another signifier tell us that it actually signifies something very different” (Chandler, 2004). The first heading in A Cyborg Manifesto says “AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT”(1991). Literally she says that her message is a dream, but what she really says is that it is very much reality. It becomes a very strong emphasis on “real” since she chooses to use irony to raise the statement beyond the literary text. When we continue to read we have irony in mind, and tend to be more sensitive to the rest of the text. So her words are in a way a warning flag, or a reading guide, or both.

The most important feature of the cyborg figure is the deconstruction of binary opposites, and the most important of these binaries is material-semiotic, because it is some kind of blue print for most of the other binary opposites. Even the dualism good-evil (two of the most abstract entities – if you can rank such things) tells us the story about the material evil and the immaterial good, which started when the angel Lucifer was sent into exile and started to build the bodily burning hell, while God and his angels remained in their bodiless transcendent heaven. That is at least how it is usually pictured in fiction; reality and fiction perhaps being the most prominent of the material-semiotic children.

The cyborg concept is thus about border crossing. Some authors concentrate on the physical body. As I mentioned, Professor Kevin Warwick at The University of Reading has created a cyborg story about himself, by turning himself into a physical cyborg. The possibility exists to enhance human capabilities: to harness the ever increasing abilities of machine intelligence, to enable extra sensory input and to communicate in a much richer way, using thought alone. Kevin Warwick has taken the first steps on this path, using himself as a guinea pig test subject receiving, by surgical operation, technological implants connected to his central nervous system. Native Web Cyborgs are about Warwick’s cyborg, but this is only a small portion of it. Warwick’s cyborg might be regarded as a distant relative, while Haraway’s cyborg is its parents. When I call myself a Native Web Cyborg it is about embodiment, writing, research, art and music, but most of all it is about ideology. Ideology is the glue of all these tags. Ideology is the energy. All of this is based on the border zone between the web reality and the embodied reality.

The idea for Part III came from Steven Warwick and his task of turning himself into a man-machine hybrid (2000). He is calling himself a cyborg, and I agree he is a cyborg. But a cyborg is much more, or other than, connecting my nervous system to a set of tools, learning my mind to control them by thought. It is strange that a piece of metal operated into a human body would render a new entity, something other than a human. Theodore Sturgeon wrote a science fiction novel with the name More than Human (1981). It was published the first time in 1953 and told the story of six child prodigies maturing to one gestalt consciousness. If we remove the tiny bit of hocus pocus holding the super brain together, and replace it with technology - then we have something, which could be called the beginning of the Native Web Cyborg figure.

At first, I tried to write about this figure in third person. I wanted to discuss certain features in the Web 2.0 mindset from the construction of the figure above. But as I wrote I noticed it was more difficult than usual to rip this figure out from myself and apply it on other persons – a Native Web Cyborg involves at least one person. The reason is that this text is not fiction, it is about truth. As Donna Haraway says in her foreword to the Cyborg Handbook:

And, naturally, my stories are all true, or at least they aim to be, and in several dimensions at once. My hope is that this kind of truth is situated and accountable, and therefore able to be in power-sensitive engagement, with other versions and materializations of the world (Gray, 1995).

All my stories here are true from a situated perspective in the context I operate. As I reflected on this figure I understood I had to apply it on myself for the figure to become true and accountable. I understood why Kevin Warwick is transforming himself to a cyborg. If he had used another person as object of research, he could not possibly create accountable knowledge from an outside perspective. He would be able to measure everything regarding the cyborg’s physical expressions and he could also do thorough interviews. This approach could be called mainstream science. Warwick’s approach and the approach I am going to follow here is more about