Engaging the digital generation

I'm a keynote speaker for a conference being held at the University of Middlesex on June 29th. The conference is entitled: Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy, and looks like it's going to be a very interesting event. Other speakers include Tara Brabazon and William Wong. Below is the title and abstract of my keynote:

Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education

The Social Web is transforming the way students interact with others, and is challenging traditional pedagogies, values and practices. An analysis of students’ uses of social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) and video/photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reveals the emergence of collective digital literacies. These include filtering content, new textual and visual literacies, managing multiple digital identities, representing self in cyberspace and engaging in new modes of interaction. In this presentation I will argue that identification through digitally mediated tools has become the new cultural capital – the set of invisible bonds that ties a community together. It is this ‘social glue’ – such mutual understandings and exchanges that occur on a daily basis within social media – that build the digital communities, and create new learning spaces, nurturing the habitus of a new ‘digital tribe’.

Emile Durkheim suggested that it is easier for tribal members to project their feelings of awe toward a totem than toward something that is as complex as the tribe itself. For digital tribes, their totem – the traditional rallying point for all tribal activity – is patently the Social Web. The digital spaces found within the Web are in themselves objects of intense interest and become meeting places for the tribe, but they also act as transmitters of units of cultural knowledge – memes.

Max Weber once remarked that culture should be construed as a ‘web of significance’ spun by the individuals who constitute the culture. Significantly, the increasing role the World Wide Web plays in the shaping of modern tribal culture causes Weber’s notion to resonate. In this presentation I will argue that digital technologies and electronic networks provide fertile environments for the transmission of memes and that new literacies are needed to receive, interpret and comprehend them. Such new literary practices of communication rely heavily on shared spaces, shared symbolism and the viral nature of the social web.

I will explore how the new digital literacies impact upon teaching and learning in higher education, and discuss the implications of a growing gulf between traditional teaching and the expectations of the new tribe – the digital generation. I will pose the questions: What will be the new roles of academics in a world where the boundaries between novice and expert are blurring? and what new digital literacies will scholars need to harness the full potential of the social web?

Related posts:

The tribal web
En masse, online
Digital tribal identity
Virtual clans

Image source (modified)

The digital tribe and the network nation

This is a continuation from yesterday's blogpost entitled: Digital Tribal Identity

I will argue here that within the present information age, where digital communication technologies have fractured the tyranny of distance beyond repair, and where computers have become pervasive and ubiquitous, identification through digital mediation has become the new cultural capital (Bordieu & Passeron, 1990). Cultural capital is the set of ‘invisible bonds that tie a community together’ (Curtis, 2004, p 72) without which societal cohesiveness begins to unravel. It is this ‘social glue’ - such mutual understandings and exchanges that occur on a daily basis – that holds together the basic building blocks of social life in which people simply ‘look out for each other’. In the real life community, people work hard to sustain such mutual exchange, and its value is instilled in them from an early age. This results in the transmission of the culture from generation to generation.

For the digital community, such tribal identification operates at least within the social and individual levels, but may be inherently more complex, transcending age, ethnicity, gender and other social divisions such as disability. Paradoxically, it is largely the individual figures within this equation who act in concert to perpetuate the social cohesion of the tribe. Even stranger in the digital age, such exchanges are conducted regularly through one or more mediating technologies.

The anthropologist Erving Goffman suggested that the performance of the self is a social act designed to regulate the impression one presents to others. Goffman’s notion of impression management in public spaces evokes the construction of the self simultaneously in the mind of the individual and in the collective mind of the audience (Goffman, 1959). We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of the other, and adjust our behaviour to conform and remain accepted by those with whom we choose to identify (Cooley, 1902).

Rheingold (2002) applies this ‘theory of being’ to the use of short message service (SMS) texting by young people – who they send texts to, and receive them from, defines an element of their social identity, as constructed by themselves in relation to the others in their SMS circle of communication. Such small friendship circles may be physical, or virtual, or a combination of both, but for the individual, this may matter little, but remains very much an essence of his or her identity as a tribal member. The content of the text message may also be secondary to the fact that the message has been sent, and the perception that the sender has been ‘thinking about you’. Such management of impression is projected through the technology to show the sender in a ‘best light’ to others.

Tomorrow: Always connected

References

Bordieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications.
Cooley, C. H. (1902) Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner.
Curtis, M. (2004) Distraction: Being human in a digital world. London: Futuretext.
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.