Simulacra and stimulating conversation

I enjoyed some really interesting and stimulating informal conversations tonight in a variety of watering holes around the Plymouth Barbican area. It was a pre-conference Tweetup, and several old friends and new were there, holding forth on their views about just about everything under the sun. Tomorrow, we all meet more formally for the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference, but tonight it was a chance to let our hair down a little.

Quote of the evening must go to Simon Finch (@simfin) who said something along the lines of: 'On Twitter people I don't know let me know about stuff that really interests me. On Facebook people I do know tell me stuff I don't want to know about'. OK, it was a signature piece of hilarious wordplay from Simon, and it made us all laugh out loud. But it also shows up what some people see as a contrast between the frivolous nature of Facebook, and the way Twitter is becoming a serious professional networking tool.

There were other conversations about our personal experiences with institutional VLEs. Cath Ellis (cathellis13), James Clay and I all related our views and others joined in the conversation. We also reminisced over the early days of educational computing and whether there should be an 'e' in front of e-learning. One of the most interesting conversations for me though was later on, in the oldest pub in Plymouth - the Minerva Inn, which dates back to 16th Century times.

I was sat with Mark Power, James Clay and Rob Stillwell (@theboywhodrums) and we were discussing user generated content. We discussed how surreal it was that we could meet up face to face for the first time after tweeting to each other for long, and actually know so much about each other. An phenomenon that still needs some exploration perhaps.

Someone remarked how a lot of video clips on YouTube didn't look very user generated these days. I shared my theory that many of the well known clips, such as Charlie bit me and the Star Wars Kid appeared quite polished and produced, because perhaps they had become so iconic and archetypal and etched in our minds that we have forgotten the first time we actually saw them. They are also so emulated and repurposed that they tend to become parodies of themselves. Rob and I talked about Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which seems to frame this idea, and the notion that people tend to over-analyse content too - with the interesting result that much content tends to mean more to the viewer than to its original creator. I told the story of my art college days, when I became disallusioned with my tutors' negative comments about my work. I eventually took to throwing paint at a large canvas just to make a point. It was absolute trash but the fools liked it and even displayed it as an 'innovative piece' on the college gallery wall. I guess they must have been into Kitsch or some such art appreciation. I walked out of the college the same week and never returned. Does our interpretation of a digital artefact become more than what was actually intended by its creator? Perhaps this is an effect we should consider a little more when we come to evaluate the relevance, reliability and puspose of user generated content:

'The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacru is true.'

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