Participation Literacy

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.

Tags: agora, cyborg writing, episteme, hybrid, identity, identity 2.0, ideology, intertextuality, irony, Nowotny, participation, participation literacy, plural identity, principle of charity