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The Networked Cyborg: Practices of Self in Social Media 1

The Networked Cyborg: Practices of Self in Social Media

Bonnie Stewart

University of Prince Edward Island


Abstract:

The proposed dissertation project focuses on the practices of ‘networked cyborgs,’ or people

performing as both users and producers of content in non-anonymous networked publics. Based

on a re-visioning of Haraway’s (1991) cyborg as a hybrid not just of human and technology but

also capital, the networked cyborg concept is a way of naming and exploring a broad subset of

relational, traceable, participatory and content-producing digital practices by which people

connect and perform identities. The research proposes to map those practices and the ways in

which they intersect with Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and field, particularly in relation to

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their implications for the field of higher education.


Overview:

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one

practical consequence; we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

(Foucault, 1983, p. 237)

I didn't particularly set out to become a blogger. When I sat at my desk to write my first

blog post in early 2006, I didn't have a clear concept of what “a blogger” might be, beyond the

literal definition of someone writing a blog. I did, however, hope that a blog might be a place to

speak, to explore and publicly voice aspects of self in a particular time and place in my life. And

so I got a WordPress account and a domain, and tentatively waded into an unknown world. I hit

“publish” on my first post, emailed the link to a few select family members and friends, and

thought, “Huh. That wasn't as hard as I'd expected.”

I didn't particularly set out to become a cyborg, either. While Donna Haraway's 1985

claim that “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 cyborg” (1991, p. 150) enfolds

me within the category from the time of my own adolescence, it was blogging that facilitated my

particular rendering of and relationship with the notion of cyborg identities. Blogging – and the

complex social network that grew out of my initial foray into what was once called 'the

blogosphere' – expanded the boundaries of my sociality and my identities, and forced me to

confront my sense that my online practices shaped me, even as I shaped them. The notion of

being simply a 'user' of technologies did not suffice to account for the practices and engagements

that emerged in my experience with online social networks; rather, blogging made manifest my

sense of myself as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a


creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1991, p. 149). The complex and reflexive act of managing my

emerging digital identities and their concomitant practices, then, led to the grappling with cyborg

ontology that has informed this proposed dissertation research. In it, I will explore digitally-

mediated practices of self on blogs and social networks through the lenses of cyborg partiality

and hybridity. How these practices are shaped over time – and how they in turn shape identities

and fields of culture – will be my focus.

My research centres around the questions “how do people perform identities within social

media spaces?” and “what effects do social media practices have for higher education?” The

dissertation will document the practices by which people become known and networked within

digitally networked publics, how these practices are shaped by both technological design and by

social and discursive norms, and what trajectories these intersecting possibilities suggest for the

future of higher education and the field of cultural production. I intend to focus particularly on

the phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

I will be researcher and researched within the study. My own engagement in digital

practices will remain ongoing, emergent, and likely recursive over the course of the research.

Over the six years and 550+ posts since my first blog post in April 2006, I have come to

understand myself in relation to the horizons and norms of the multiple and intersecting networks

of which I am part. Additionally, as I have become a blogger and a practitioner of participatory

media, the practices that accompany these identities have impacted my life far beyond the scope

of the self my blog was originally intended to write into being. I have become, as Papacharissi

(2011) puts it in her eponymous anthology of essays on media convergence, identity, and social

networks, a “networked self.” One of the practical consequences of social media, then, for me

and others like me, has indeed been in the vein of what Foucault called creation of self as a work


of art. This dissertation project will map that process in light of theories of performativity and

networks.

But the self as work of art has not been all that blogging and social networking has been

for me. Rather, this proposed research will theorize networked selves as cyborg identities. More,

it will posit that my creation and performance of self via blogging and social media made me a

particular kind of cyborg: what I will call a networked cyborg, or a cyborg self in perpetual

performance on the stage of social media. Intended to be understood not just as Haraway's hybrid

of human and technology but also of capital in all the forms Bourdieu (1984) identified – social,

cultural, symbolic, and economic – the networked cyborg is the figure by which I hope to write

my own lived experience and that of my peers into the research record.

While my own cyborg practices began in the realm of personal blogging, I’ve gradually

found my way into a variety of networks centered around higher education in recent years. I now

blog about my emerging thesis, write professionally for higher education publications, and

collaborate with educators, fellow graduate students, my own B.Ed and M.Ed students, and

edupreneurs and institutions via participatory digital channels. I remain connected to many in my

earlier blogging networks as well, though I no longer write my original blog. This rare perch

across multiple networks of cyborgs allows me an embedded ethnographic perspective on

commonalities and distinctions between particular communities, and on the broad range of social

network practices, trends, and narratives that shape these communities.

One of the patterns that has interested and troubled me most during the period of my

engagement with networked communities is the tendency of open, collaborative, experimental

practices to become alternatively marginalized, or subsumed as they become more mainstream.

My insistence on including capital as part of the constitution of networked cyborgs stems from


my observations of the increasing commercialization of the platforms on which social media

identities are performed.

My overt incorporation of capital into the hybrid that constitutes the networked cyborg is

a re-visioning of Haraway but not a departure: her “cyborg world” is framed in terms of the

“machines and consciousness of late capitalism” (1991, p. 174) and she calls cyborgs “the

illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism”

(1991, p. 151). Her cyborg is a product of capital and capitalism, but she does not explicitly

claim capital as a part of the hybrid coupling that constitutes its definition. However, in drawing

on the figure of the cyborg to analyze the hybrid practices of social media, I intentionally

emphasize capital as central to networked cyborg identity. Social networks and even blog

platforms are built on branded and often proprietary software, thus they are irrevocably

embedded in contemporary capitalism. More, the circulation of individuals within what is

sometimes referred to as the attention economy (Davenport & Beck, 2001) of the information

age and social media (Wu & Huberman, 2007) encourages practices that commodify and

measure engagement, social capital (Steinfeld, Ellison & Lampe, 2008) and the self (Young,

2012). I will utilize the cyborg figure as a guiding metaphor through which to overtly explore the

roles of capital and the operations of late capitalism in the logic of social networking and the

identities it shapes and is shaped by. I will also draw on my experiences within online

communities focused around blogging, parenting, and Massive Open Online Courses to explore

the ways in which overt monetization and venture capital have of late made dramatic incursions

into the worlds – and the practices – of networked cyborgs.

To take up the ways in which capital affects and shapes cyborg practices, I begin with

Bourdieu. In The Forms of Capital (1986), Bourdieu defined capital as “accumulated


labor...which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents,

enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (p. 241). The

relationship between works of art and capital in society is extensively explored in Bourdieu’s

work, and tied to the concepts of disposition and field. Disposition is the way in which norms

and tastes of particular groups are socialized at the individual level: “internalized dispositions of

broad parameters and boundaries of what is possible or unlikely for a particular group in a

stratified social world develop through socialization” (Swartz, 1997, p. 103). At the same time,

disposition enacts preferences publicly and creates visible declarations of allegiance and

belonging. This resonates with my approach to the networked cyborg as a performative identity,

following Butler (1990). As Lovell (2003) notes, there may be productive tensions and even

parallels between Bourdieu and Butler: “Butler’s ‘reiterative performances’, in which social

norms are reproduced but may be reproduced awry, or with a difference, bear some resemblance

to Bourdieu’s ‘practices’” (Lovell, 2003, p. 2) Identifying and fleshing out those parallels and

tensions will be an interesting aspect of my research.

Field is a means, for me, of framing social media as a relational and networked sphere; a

social space in addition to a technological one. “To think in terms of field is to think relationally”

(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 96), Bourdieu claimed. At the same time, the field lens

emphasizes structure and the operations of capital: it makes the matrix of dispositions performed

within a society visible as structured and structuring relations. As Swartz (1997) puts it, “field

analysis calls attention to the social conditions of struggle that shape cultural production” (p.

119), and while I will also focus on technological affordances and the ways in which material

factors shape social media, I am interested in taking up capital, in particular, as a complex social

force. Part of my theorizing of cyborgs selves will involve exploring the ways in which


Bourdieu’s forms of capital manifest in and shape the practices of networked cyborgs, and the

ways in which his work on the field of cultural production – of which education is one – may

shed light on the forces shaping social media practices as an emergent field within society.

As Alison Muri notes in The Enlightenment Cyborg (2006), early cybernetics theorists

such as Weiner (1948) considered the defining feature of the cyborg to be “an organism steered

or governed by artificial feedback mechanisms” (p. 88). According to Muri, it was then

McLuhan, with Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), who extrapolated this specific notion of the cyborg to

a societal phenomenon, supplanting the need for cyborgs to have definitive integrated regulatory

components and emphasizing instead the homeostatic operations of electric media in general.

Cyborgs are in a sense a metonymic example of the recurring trope of humans being recast in the

mold of contemporary technologies. Following McLuhan's adaption of Weiner's cyborg, Donna

Haraway framed her own cyborg in contemporary digital and epistemological terms when she

called cyberspace “[T]he spatio-temporal figure of postmodernity and its regimes of flexible

accumulation” (Haraway, 1997, p. 100). Haraway claimed her cyborg as a hybrid of machine and

organism, a chimera who had “made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and

artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed” (Haraway, 1991, p. 152).

Like Haraway's before her, my cyborg is not a techno-centric figure but an ambiguous

hybrid. My research assumes Haraway's blended machine/organism identity as a given, but

attempts to go one step further: if we are already cyborg, what do the advent of networked

publics and digital sociality among cyborgs signify? Do our identity performances within digital

social networking environments alter our arguably-already cyborg subjectivities? My premise is

that they do, and that one of the key factors in those shifting practices is the neoliberal “Me Inc”


discourse that permeates social media and the social-commercial sphere of what Dean (2010, p.

2) calls communicative capitalism.

Dean frames communicative capitalism in terms of Zizek's (1999) work on the decline of

symbolic efficiency and the contemporary impossibility of pinning down a Master Signifier to

stabilize and totalize meaning. Symbolic efficiency, which Zizek developed from Levi-Strauss, is

the mobile capacity of a sign within culture to signify across settings. A decline in symbolic

efficiency, then, marks an era of almost traumatic openness: “The contemporary setting of

electronically mediated subjectivity is one of infinite doubt, ultimate reflexivization...The very

conditions of possibility for adequation (for determining the criteria by which to assess whether a

decision or answer is, if not good, then at least adequate, have been foreclosed” (Dean, 2010, p.

6).

This foreclosure of certainty complexifies the analysis of capital and identity in the

sociality practices of networked cyborgs, and also offers insight into the tensions they bring to

the fore. Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, also called denied capital, is “a form of power that is not

perceived as power but as legitimate demands for recognition, deference, obedience, or the

services of others” (Swartz, 1997, p. 43). Extending Durkheim’s sacred/profane opposition into

the context of contemporary society, symbolic capital is effectively the power to consecrate or

render sacred. In a secular culture like modern France, the primary subject of Bourdieu’s analysis

of capital, the sacred is associated with “legitimation, particularly in high culture and art where

boundaries delimiting the legitimate from the illegitimate are particularly strong” (Swartz, 1997,

p. 47). Yet in an era in which symbolic efficiency is declining, the means by which the appeal to

legitimation is secured are themselves subject to the incursion of “traumatic openness.” And in

the fields in which network cyborgs are immersed, social media and cyborg practices are


implicated in this process. Peer-to-peer and networked approaches challenge the symbolic capital

of traditional hierarchical systems and networks: at the same time, these challenges create capital

of their own. My exploration of various MOOC models and their implications for higher

education will be in part an attempt to name and map the competing discourses and practices of

legitimation at work in the field in the midst of the foreclosure of certainty.

This emphasis on change is in no way to suggest that human-technology hybrids are, in

the broad sense, new. People have depended on technologies to construct and perform identity

for thousands of years: the wheel created social structures that shaped who people were and how

they saw themselves, and writing – to Socrates’ chagrin – enabled a persistence of self over time

that has deeply shaped our notion of what it is to be human. But what I call the networked cyborg

is a particular hybrid of human and social media platform(s): a relational, reputational identity

with tangible, visible, measurable attributes. Moreover, the economy in which it operates makes

demands on the entity who generates it. It is an identity whose existence is not bounded by the

distinction between online and offline: it stretches across the technological and the organic

without discomfort. And ultimately, it is a networked, distributed identity, a repeated

performance within what LaTour (1999) would call an actor-network of technologies, people,

and capital. It is new only in its specificity, but it is that specificity and its implications for higher

education that are the focus of this research.

Donna Haraway called The Cyborg Manifesto (1991) an “ironic political myth” (p. 149)

that exhorted “both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space

stories” (p. 181). At the time of the first writing of A Manifesto for Cyborgs, in 1985, Haraway

made the daring claim that her cyborg was “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of

fiction” (1991, p. 149). She asserted that in its coupling of organism and machine, its partiality


and irony, and its postmodern politics, her cyborg was the ontology of the late 20th century. I

will argue that in the early 21st century, with the advent of social media and its part in the visible

rise of what she calls the “homework economy” (Haraway, 1991, p. 166) of insecure, newly

integrated work-life boundaries, the mythic cyborg is more a creature of social reality than ever

before. Against the backdrop of ongoing research into media's “functional convergence of mass

and interpersonal channels” (O’Sullivan, 1999, p. 580) and Jenkins' (2006) emphasis on

convergence as “technological, industrial, cultural and social changes in the ways media

circulates in our culture” (p. 282), it is difficult to deny that our most personal practices are

increasingly mediated and hybrid. Yet even as social media and convergence in general have

made human-technological practices a visible and familiar social reality, and the increasing

familiarity of our interdependence with technology has sanitized Haraway's radical politics and

its science-fiction monstrosity, the myth of the cyborg remains enmeshed in discourses of fantasy

and virtuality. In naming and tracing the practices by which networked cyborgs are constituted,

then, I hope to show that in fact cyborgs are no rarified science fiction. They are mothers,

teachers, doctors, grandfathers, teenagers, accountants, artists, writers. They live all over the

world, and work in every language.

Still, not all users who engage with social media and blogs are networked cyborgs. They

are, for the purposes of this dissertation, people who share a broad collection of identity and

communications practices both enabled and shaped by digital technologies; selves broadly

engaged with the affordances or action possibilities of the Internet, particularly in its Web 2.0

capacities and beyond. Particularly, they are people who produce – and often perform and

promote – bodies of work, paid or not, as part of their sustained networked identities. They tend

to have domains of their own – or at least spaces of their own, whether a public Facebook page


or an actual .com domain – affiliated with their work and with their reputations, hence the

connections I attempt to draw between their practices and Bourdieu’s fields of cultural

production. Their online interactions are publicly traceable to these reputational spaces.

They don’t call themselves networked cyborgs. Most would not recognize the term I’ve

chosen to describe them: informal preliminary research in my own networked cyborg circles

suggests most think of who they are when they are online as simply aspects of themselves. As

one of their number, I don’t disagree. And yet the ways in which those selves are shaped and

constituted, and what their common practices bring into being in the larger commons of digital

sociality, makes the cyborg designation significant. It is my premise and experience that

networked cyborgs’ practices embody some of the promise of social media and digital sociality:

that even within the neoliberal circuits of communicative capitalism, these networks of identity

performance bring new and potentially subversive possibilities into being.

Haraway's cyborg is a powerful figure not only because it disrupts the binaries – animal-

human, organism-machine, physical-nonphysical – that Western epistemology has been based in

since the Enlightenment, but because its existence bears witness to the possibility of difference.

As Haraway notes, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (1991,

p. 151). In tying the networked cyborg to capital, I am interested in examining the ways in which

the incursion of monetization and venture capital into digital social networks affect the practices

and identities enacted within. I do not challenge networked cyborgs’ enrolment within the logic

of neoliberalism and communicative capitalism, but rather suspect that their practices

nonetheless contain the capacity for unfaithfulness and subversion. The primary goal of this

dissertation, then, is to conduct a deep and sustained inquiry into networked cyborgs’ potential to

both forge and subvert complex systems of complicity and possibility


Law and Moser (1999) claim that “a cyborg is a unity but also a composite of parts that

cannot be reduced to one another, which are different in kind, and which are not homogenous.

But which are also internally related to one another. Which would not be the way that they are,

individually, if it were not for that link, that internal relation” (p. 215.) To conceive of that link

and again work towards the possibility of difference, I am interested in Karen Barad's idea of

agential realism. Based in the idea of intra-action, agential realism asserts “the mutual

constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33). In short, she suggests that basic units of

reality do not precede their interactions but rather that what we come to think of as objects or

subjects emerge through particular intra-actions. Agential realism is an ontological,

epistemological and ethical position (Barad, 2007, p. 32) which refuses to take distinctions

between humans and non-humans for granted. Building on and extending Butler's work on

performativity – and by further extension Foucault's work on discursive practices – agential

realism may provide a framework through which to consider non-human materiality and capacity

for agency within the dissertation. Given my desire to take up technologies, societal logics and

discourses as forces shaping social media and higher education, it will be a needed framework.

What socially-networked cyborgs and their practices may mean for higher education will

comprise the central inquiry of the research. Social media and digital communications are

becoming increasingly prevalent within academia, and with that, the importance of

understanding the practices, potentialities, and challenges of digital networks for higher

education also grows. I am interested in exploring the practices of networked cyborgs in relation

to the different emerging models and narratives surrounding Massive Open Online Courses

(MOOCs). In considering the ways in which the logic of the social web is reflected, diffracted,


and elided by various MOOC models, I hope to examine the complex web of power relations and

practices shaping higher education in this digital age.

During the past year, MOOCs have grown from a grassroots phenomenon offering free

(mostly extra-institutional) networked courses exploring emergent digital meta-topics to one of

the major buzzwords of the year in higher education (Stewart, 2012). Hailed by The New York

Times as “re-shaping education on the web” (Lewin, 2012) and by The Atlantic as “a tsunami,”

(McKenna, 2012), MOOCs have been seized on by the most elite academic institutions in North

America, and are gradually – and quickly – spreading around the world. However, the large

institutional MOOCs operate according to a very different logic and pedagogy than the original

versions.

Early MOOCs were run – and largely populated by – educators and technologists from

within the research and education sector. They were open, collaborative, participatory ventures

that tended to explore topics related to educational technologies and their possibilities, and they

were highly decentralized. They operated on a contribution model rather than a credential model,

and there was no assessment of a learner’s performance in the course. Rather, learners were

expected to take on “a significant proportion of responsibility for learning goals and the

processes through which goals are achieved” (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens & Cormier, 2010).

These early participatory MOOCs were open in their registration policies – anyone with Internet

could register from anywhere, for free – and their content. They were also open in the sense that

their direction was in part up to – or at least open to – learners’ contributions.

The new, second wave of institutionally-branded MOOCs appears to be open primarily in access

rather than in learning design. This shift from radical openness and connection to a more


traditional and familiar organizational model – in this case based on conventional notions of the

classroom and knowledge production – is at the crux of my research inquiry.

The focus of MOOCs appears to be moving primarily in the direction of what is

frequently referred to as “disruption.” This concept, particularly popular in the business press,

grew from Christensen’s (1997) idea of “disruptive technology” or innovations that create new

markets or value networks. Christensen later re-framed his idea as one of “disruptive innovation,”

acknowledging that it isn’t technologies themselves but the practices around them – and

specifically their business models – that determine the survival or obsolescence of industries.

Media narratives have, throughout 2012, taken up the large-scale MOOCs as long-overdue

disruption of higher education: the Internet, in effect, happening to academia.

I don’t find that a particularly robust narrative, however. Certainly, the large-scale

MOOCs (commonly called xMOOCs within circles in which the earlier model is understood) are

disruption, in the literal sense. They’re an innovative business model attempting to create a new

market or value within higher education. As an industry, higher education has long been based

on monopoly and control over the capacity to sanction and credential knowledge; it is an

industry based in a culture of scarcity. Digital media’s replicability and remixability and sheer

abundance have always posed a threat to its stability.

But academia is not only an industry, in the sense that its cultural role and identity is not

encapsulated by – or even entirely aligned with – concepts of scale and efficiency alone. Higher

education is a messy, flawed, and contested field in which we’ve invested rites of passage,

cultural concepts of knowledge and learning, and the discourses and credentials of a whole host

of disciplines and credentials, not just business. We could, conceivably, at a global societal level,

decouple all those other things from the industry, and let it sail along on scale and efficiency


alone. But then, eventually, the Internet will still have to happen to it. And so I propose instead to

explore what is happening to higher education through the lens of MOOCs and networked

cyborgs, and the narratives shaping MOOC development.

Networked publics and Digital Sociality

Beginning from the premise that networked identity practices enmesh with and inform

our embodied lives and ways of being in the world – that the effects of digital practices are not

confined to the digital sphere – this dissertation will investigate the online identity practices of

networked cyborgs like myself during the time period 2006-2012. Within this time frame,

blogging's centrality within social networking has given way to a plurality of social media

platforms and applications, and to increased mobility, quantifiability, and commercial

permeation of networked cyborg practices. The effects of these shifts within the culture of

networked cyborgs, their implications for contemporary higher education and fields of cultural

production, and their effects on performances of self as works of art will comprise the central

explorations of my research. I am especially interested in the relationships between practices and

the particular technological affordances and social and discursive norms of blogs and social

networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Google+. This project aims to conduct

a rigourous, reflexive, and theoretically-informed investigation of social networking practices

from within the domain it attempts to map.

Defining that domain is one of the primary challenges of the project. Two of the key

conceptual frameworks that will inform this research are Thompson & Cupples' (2008) digital

sociality, and what boyd (2011) calls networked publics. Each of these frameworks attempts to

account for the complexity of social media interactions, taking into account material, social, and

symbolic functions, among others. From my perspective, each offers a resonant if limited


conception of the domain of my research, thus my intent is to put the two in conversation with

each other throughout the research process, in hopes that together they will begin to constitute a

workable context for the discussion of networked cyborg practices.

Networked publics are both the spaces constructed through networked technologies, and

the imagined communities that emerge from the intersection of people, technologies, and

practices within those spaces. As boyd (2011) frames them, networked publics “serve many of

the same functions as other types of publics – they allow people to gather for social, cultural, and

civic purposes, and they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family”

(p. 39). However, the digital properties by which networked publics are comprised and

connected are in some ways distinct from the properties of traditional analog publics. The

persistence, replicability, scalability – the possibility of exponential visible growth or reach of

mass audiences – and searchability of digital content (boyd, 2011, p. 46) all alter the way

networked publics intersect and interact.

As boyd (2011) points out, the concept of “public” has been used by Sonia Livingstone

(2005) as synonymous with “audience,” in the sense of “a group bounded by a shared text,

whether a worldview or a performance” (boyd, 2011, p.240). boyd cautions that this usage of

public, however, does not necessarily connote passivity, and draws on de Certeau's (1984)

assertion that consumption and production of cultural objects is intimately connected, and on

Ito's (2008) argument that “publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re) distributors, engaging in

shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of

media reception” (p. 3). In the context of social media practices and networked cyborgs, the

agency of publics to produce as well as consume, and to re-make and re-distribute as well as to

react, will all be key sites of exploration.


One key element of networked publics and the identity performances which take place

within them is that “context collapse.” Articulated by Michael Wesch (2009) in the context of

webcam usage, the notion builds on Goffman's (1959) theory of social context, which claims that

humans continuously and often unconsciously adapt ourselves and our self-presentation to the

social contexts in which we find ourselves. Goffman (1967) calls the “face-work” (p. 12) by

which we create our public image in social interactions to be a negotiated, transactional, and

contextual process. The emergence of digital networks and communities challenges people's

capacity to direct self-presentation to a single context. Wesch studied new webcam users in the

early days of Youtube, noting that the experience found many “would-be first-time vloggers

perplexed in front of the webcam, often reporting that they spent several hours transfixed in front

of the lens, trying to decide what to say” (Wesch, 2009, p. 23). A Youtube video, after all, is

“face-work” that is both for everyone and no-one in particular: the vlogger, says Wesch, has to

imagine the “nearly infinite possible contexts he or she might be entering, all of which pile up as

parts, pieces, and pieces of parts, a rubble that becomes the ground on which the vlogger must

struggle to get his or her footing” (Wesch, 2009, p. 23).

In relation to networked publics, Marwick and boyd (2010) have drawn on the idea of

context collapse to describe the ways in which different platforms within networked publics tend

to combine previously separated familial, social, and professional connections. They take up

Goffman's (1959) description of people's identity practices as continual performance, and

emphasize the ways in which his work frames self-presentation as collaborative:

Goffman maintained that this becomes a process of 'impression management',

where individuals habitually monitor how people respond to them when

presenting themselves. This process is self-conscious in situations of intense


scrutiny, like first dates and job interviews, but is habitual even in relaxed

social situations (Marwick & boyd, 2010, p. 124)

When people's habitual social situations, however, are mediated across platforms that combine

contexts, gauging identity performance and reception becomes complicated, as varying roles in a

person's life may demand very different versions of self. The boundaries between groups of

contacts are broken down, and juggling the very different expectations and identities that those

groups of contacts bring with them can affect relationships and create tensions and

misunderstandings. What friends are comfortable navigating may not be the same as what bosses

or students or distant relatives are comfortable navigating, yet Facebook in particular tends to

collapse all those contacts into the same collection.

Exploring this experience of context collapse and people's approaches to and accounts of

navigating it will be one of the foci of the study. I remember acutely the disorientation I felt in

sitting down to blog after my first face-to-face encounter with a self-described fan of my writing:

my day-to-day public self being identified with the deeply personal but discrete narratives of

identity I explored on my blog was surprisingly unexpected and surprisingly challenging. Not

long after, I struggled with the same sense of exposure and context collapse as I debated whether

and how to share my blog posts on my Facebook account, which was comprised mainly of

former face-to-face connections. I could have chosen to maintain the blog and Facebook as

separate aspects of my digital identity, but the ways in which my growing Twitter usage merged

the two networks made the idea of privacy through separation seem specious. Others within my

own network of connections, all hybrids of human, technology, and capital in their own ways,

made different choices. My research questions will investigate networked cyborgs' experiences


of context collapse and their navigation and management of disparate identity performances and

social expectations across the shared spaces of digital sociality.

Thompson and Cupples (2008) call digital sociality “a cyborgian or posthuman form

of social ordering that is only made possible because of the involvement of non-human actors” (p.

102). The network as conceived by digital sociality is a cyborg network enacted by the repeated

interactions between humans and technologies. Within this network, Thompson & Cupples

emphasize both the inscribed or intended use of digital technologies and also what they term the

“work of translation,” or the alternative meanings users attribute to their own practices, by which

they “create and defend a performed social order” (2008, p. 102). Their work stemmed initially

from research into the sociality of texting teens. They claim, “We understand teenagers, their

everyday cell phone use, the material components of their cell phones along with other actors

such as the major phone corporations like Telecom and Vodafone, ideas about technology,

children, and capitalism as well as research and researchers such as ourselves as constituting a

network which we term digital sociality” (Thompson & Cupples, 2008, p. 95). Their research

into teen cell phone usage shows that digital sociality does contribute “to the profits of the phone

companies” (Thompson & Cupples, 2008, p. 102) and therefore fits not only the cyborg model as

conceived by Haraway but also my own re-visioned networked cyborg, hybrid of human and

technology but also capital.

The ongoing life narratives shared within the digital sociality of blogs, status updates,

tweets, texts or Instagram photos are often partial, composite, and based on small, incremental

performative contributions. The small scale of many of these individual posts or contributions –

a tweet can only be 140 characters, maximum – flouts the canonical tradition of fully-fledged

stories with beginning, middle, and end. As Georgakopalou (2006) has shown, however, these


“small stories” can be important narrative meaning-making activities, and can be understood to

indicate their tellers' “narrative orientations to the world” (p. 126). Georgakopalou's work

establishes small stories such as status updates as identity work that tellers engage in.

Still, while the size of a contribution does not indicate its value, not all traces of a

person's digital interactions necessarily constitute or contribute to their digital sociality, or to

their cyborg creation of self as work of art and commerce. As Morrison (2012) points out, our

online footprints are increasingly broad and complex:

Ever-greater sections of the population engage in digital life writing online,

populating dating profiles, personal blogs, or social network sites with their

life stories, or otherwise leaving numberless small traces of their ideas and

experiences in their daily digital travels: a comment on a news site, a contest

form filled out, a shopping basket and personalized recommendations at

Amazon, a collection of bookmarks and interests maintained in the cloud. (p. 21)

For the purposes of this research, my emphasis will be on presentations of self and world that

have public, reputational effects: that are available to and visible within users' networked publics.

Anonymous comments on news sites, then, which do not trace back to a user's blog or Twitter

account, or commercial activities largely disconnected from the networked channels on which

digital sociality operates, will not factor in the study.

This study's investigation will focus on adult users from within the North American

English-language mainstream who engage daily on multiple social media platforms, and who

utilize digital social networks for both personal and professional purposes. Diversity and

difference within the study population will be explored, but the practices of particular

marginalized groups and other Others are not a focus of this research. Participants will be drawn


from among three broadly-defined and occasionally intersecting networked publics, all

connected to Bourdieu's fields of cultural production. My hope is this analysis will provide a rich,

theoretically- and empirically-grounded analytical account of the digital sociality practices and

dynamics through which people create themselves as works of art – and also works of commerce

– within networked publics.

This research will not focus on any particular platform or practice within digital sociality,

but rather the lived experiences that participating networked cyborgs offer as their own. My

interest is in how and why we use those that we do, and how we make performative choices

within the cyborg realities of digital sociality and context collapse. My premise is that networked

cyborgs involved in the study will have multiple sites of regular practice and performance –

“convergent media use has become the norm online, with many users cross-posting and

seamlessly communicating in multiple platforms” (Johnson, Zhang, Bichard, & Seltzer, 2011, p.

200) – but not that these will necessarily intersect in all cases.

Additionally, the practices of networked cyborgs as posited by this proposal are not

intended to be generalizable to or representative of the general population of internet users. This

research is intended to interrogate and illuminate the lived experiences of people – myself

included – for whom digital social networks and the practices they encourage and reward have

become a daily part of self-presentation, identity, professional performance and sociality.

Recognizing that while we networked cyborgs are currently still a minority within contemporary

culture, we are nonetheless a new and growing phenomenon, this research project follows

Foucault (1983) in asking “What is the present reality? What is the present field of our

experiences? What is the present field of possible experiences? Here it is not a question of the


analytic of truth but involves what could be called an ontology of the present, of present reality,

an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves” (p. 21).

Web 2.0 Culture & Produsage

In order to extend the frameworks of digital sociality and networked publics to the

specific practices of networked cyborgs, I want to first address the term Web 2.0 (O'Reilly,

2005) and the actions it signifies. Used to designate the popular advent of a read/write web, or an

internet in which documents and artifacts could be mutually constructed and owned, early Web

2.0 platforms such as blogs and wikis were credited with changing the internet and the nature of

digital sociality in it. Tim Berners-Lee, however, who wrote the first web client and server in

1990 and is thus frequently hailed as the inventor of the internet, famously claimed that his

vision was always about connecting people to people: “That was what the Web was supposed to

be all along” (McManus, 2006). Nonetheless, the emergence of Web 2.0 practices and platforms

in the early years of the new millenium saw the rise of a social, participatory, personalized and

networked Internet (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007). Representing a complex shift of power relations

and an emphasis on connectedness, user-centered design, information sharing and collaboration,

Web 2.0 effectively made many-to-many communication possible, particularly for lay people

outside of “geek” communities. Many of the practices and potentialities I want to explore in this

research into digital sociality within networked publics are grounded in Web 2.0 conceptions of

the Internet.

In education in particular, Web 2.0 has been taken up to signal a shift to diversified,

technologically-based activities that allow students the opportunity to choose, create, or

customize their own learning (Stewart, 2011) and to network with other learners. This project

will explore Web 2.0 within higher education in the particular form of MOOCs, which began in


2008 as a way to open participation in a University of Manitoba course on connectivist

knowledge, or knowledge built on the model of the internet itself (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens &

Cormier, 2010). In 2012, the term MOOC became broadly applied to a variety of 100,000+ free

course offerings by elite universities and affiliated start-ups, and the site of significant hype

regarding disruption and the future of higher education.

The social and participatory practices that mark Web 2.0 networked publics occur in what

Axel Bruns (2007) calls a produsage economy, one in which creation and consumption are

combined. Also referred to as prosumer exchange (Ritzer, 2010), this phenomenon is one of the

hallmarks differentiating Web 1.0 and 2.0, and is one of the key factors in shaping social media's

relational, interdependent environment. Produsage relies on networks to collapse notions of

production and consumption. The exchange is, on the surface, simple. I write posts, you read

them, and vice versa. You make a YouTube video, I click the link on Twitter & leave a comment.

You announce your start-up venture, consolidating information I think might be useful, and I

share that with 1400 followers. Or 12. or 63,000. The interconnectedness of networks and their

capacity to intersect and create reciprocal audiences is a key feature of Web 2.0. It is – in its

idealized narrative, at least – a participatory, collaborative venture made possible in part by the

fact that in the digital environment, copies are infinitely reproducible and extensible. Texts and

capacities and representations are all recreated each time a specific technology housing these

possibilities is turned on, thus sharing requires no additional material investment on the part of

network participants.

But the technological capacity does not operate in isolation from the social and economic

shifts that produsage reflects. Henry Jenkins claims that the new participatory, interactive culture

of digital sociality found in the produsage networks that Web 2.0 enables is accounted for by:


a) New tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate,

and re-circulate media content, b) a range of subcultures promote DIY [do-it-yourself]

media production and a discourse of how consumers have deployed their technologies,

and c) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates

encourage the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels

and demand more active modes of spectatorship. (Jenkins 2003, p. 213)

The interconnections between these technological, social, and economic aspects of the

participatory, interactive culture of Web 2.0 will be a focus of the dissertation, as will the ways

in which trends in these areas influence the practices of networked cyborgs. In fact, my de facto

definition of networked cyborgs centres around active engagement in produsage and in

networked creation and consumption of content in some area of Bourdieu's field of cultural

production, be it academic, literary, journalistic, or otherwise arts-based. These are arguably,

outside of business, some of the professional fields most dramatically affected by produsage's

challenge to traditional gatekeeping and credentialing structures.

While the term prosumer was originally coined by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave

(1980), the distinction between notions of producer and consumer was dismissed by Baudrillard

as far back as 1976 (Ritzer, 2010). Ritzer notes that a version of the concept can be found even in

Marx, wherein he “recognized that the “means of production” were consumed in the process of

production, and that people switch back and forth between being sellers and buyers” (Ritzer,

2010, p. 2). Bruns, however, asserts that his neologism of produsage is a meaningfully different

representation of collaborative content creation, in the sense that prosumption extends the

industrial model of the assembly line to include input from professional users, where produsage

emphasizes user agency beyond the realm of traditional production models. “The prosumer, as a


professional consumer, assists commercial producers in being better at what they do. The

produser, as a productive user, becomes active in their own right in content creation, replacing

producers altogether or at least working with them on an equal basis” (Bruns, 2009, unpaginated).

For the purposes of this dissertation inquiry, I am inclined towards the term produsage, though I

recognize that it may tend to veil the interests of corporate and traditional production models at

work even within digital realms. I utilize the concept of the produsage economy to represent a

process in which capital may or may not be present, but ought to be considered and – where

possible – accounted for.

Within networks based on produsage, then, what are the practices by which people

connect? How do sociality and identity intersect within these practices? One cannot engage in

produsage in full isolation: how is the self created and exchanged as work of art and commerce

in digital sociality? In this project, I will trace and map narratives around practices of produsage

and identity and sociality by a number of networked cyborgs, myself included.

Affordances:

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

(Culkin in Stearns, 1967, p. 50)

The number of Facebook users worldwide reportedly crossed the one billion mark in

October 2012 (Schroeder, 2012). What does it mean to have nearly a billion people across the

world engaging with each other via status updates and “likes”? What does it mean that Twitter

had at least 140 million active users in March 2012 (Twitter, 2012)? What types of practices do

these social media platforms encourage and normalize within contemporary societies?

Papacharissi (2009) observes that social networking sites “operate on enabling self-

presentation and connection-building” (p. 201). In eliciting status updates, Facebook currently


asks “What's on your mind?” in order to, as Morrison (2012) frames it, “coax life narratives from

its users” (p. 12). Earlier update prompts included “write something...”, “...is....”, and “what are

you doing now?”, the last of which paralleled Twitter's early “what are you doing?” In the blank

spaces that follow social media prompts – or in their absence, as Twitter has dropped prompts

altogether from its web interface – users create the composite identities by which they will be

known within their networks. I am interested in the ways in which these identities and the

connections they make online are shaped by the architecture, structures, and social norms of the

platforms utilized, as well as in the ways the platforms are used and shaped by humans,

technologies, and capital.

In digital sociality, people share and circulate what is frequently referred to as content, in

the form of writing and/or visual media, within the networks of connections they accumulate on

various digital platforms. The texts that constitute content can be original, remixed, or borrowed

wholesale from others: response to content within the network – via blog or Facebook comments,

“likes,” re-tweets or further sharing – is visible. Beyond enabling production and various re-mix

capacities, digital technologies also support asynchronous communications and – as with texting,

Twitter, and Facebook status updates – can make interactions immediate but not obligatory.

Different blogging and social networking sites are built on different platforms. A

platform can be described as “a technology package that integrates a number of tools available in

the marketplace (for purchase or for free) that one can acquire, install, or rent” (Wenger, White,

& Smith, 2009, p. 40). Each social networking platform has its own particular set of tools, and

also its own configurations, structures, and norms for reinforcing content visibility and the

connections and interactions that content facilitates. These specific structures or design features

are generally referred to as affordances: they encompass the action possibilities (Gibson, 1977)


of particular sites, platforms, and practices, as well as the possible or suggested uses (Salomon,

1993) of technological configurations and their normative effects. As Donald Norman frames it

in The Design of Everyday Things (2002), an affordance gives clues as to how a device should be

used: a flat metal plate on a door suggests pushing, a handle, pulling.

Digital technologies share some common architectural or design elements. Some of the

affordances of social networking technologies, such as mobile and asynchronous

communications possibilities, may be relatively consistent across platforms as they become

technologically possible and culturally integrated. These affordances of mobility and

asynchronicity shape particular types of human practices and usage. As Papacharissi (2011)

notes, “The confluent properties of information technologies suggest particular possibilities for

interaction, which tend to be structured around the potential for interaction to converge social

spheres, remix social resources, and reorganize the time and space contours of sociability” (p.

307). The remixed and remixable nature of most digital media is also important in terms of

acknowledging the ways in which affordances shape practices: the replicability of digital media

makes it possible for users to draw upon, enhance, and share each others’ work across space and

time with minimal friction or effort. It is helpful to understand social network platforms as

resources that are both remixed and remixable, in the sense that they actively combine all aspects

of our social identity into a singular sphere (Papacharissi, 2011, p. 306).

While many digital affordances are common to any number of platforms, others may be

unique to a given site and become defining features of that platform and the communities and

networks which emerge within it. In this sense, the technological and social affordances of a

given platform can shape people's usage of that space. In Digital Habitats: Stewarding

Technology for Communities (2009), Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith call


platforms “the building blocks of the habitat” (p. 42) in which communities form: each platform

has particular features in a particular configuration, and “together the set of features determine

the 'habitability' of the habitat” (p. 44). The affordances of particular social media platforms, then,

allow them to be used in differing ways: Facebook demands reciprocal connection (“friending”)

between peer users while Twitter allows people to subscribe to, or “follow,” anyone's stream of

communications. The study will explore how this differing structure for relationships affects

usages and practices among networked cyborgs, who may in many cases use both platforms

daily but for slightly differing purposes or audiences.

Morrison's work exploring the affordances of Facebook status updates suggests that

particular interfaces both shape and constrain users' identity performances and self-presentation.

She uses the term “coaxed,” following Poletti (2011), as a way of acknowledging that “all

autobiographical acts, from the literary to the popular and everyday, can be usefully examined as

contextual and relational instances…as well as being attempts to construct and manage affective

relationships with their audiences” (Poletti, 2011, p. 79). Morrison's analysis suggests that the

small stories by which Facebook users share their lives and engage in impression management

are affected by the environment in two ways: the architectures of space and platform design, and

the social norms that are taken up – and arguably shaped by space and design – within that given

platform.

Every user’s Facebook page offers an environment for both authoring and

reading, and thus their practices are conditioned by both social norms

among the Friends whose updates they read, and the potential actions

afforded by the software. Users are coached by what they read in the

display interface, at the same time that they are coaxed by Facebook’s


design of the composition interface (Morrison, 2012, p. 20).

On both Twitter and Facebook a user's networks are articulated or made visible: the scale

of the audience with access to that user's content is listed both by number and, if permitted by the

user in the case of Facebook, by alphabetized listing. The network is, in a sense, an aspect of

identity. This is a common feature of most social networking platforms: as boyd & Donath

(2004) frame it, “Participants in social networking sites are usually identified by their real names

and often include photographs: this network of connections is displayed as an integral piece of

their self-presentation” (p. 72). This searchability and visibility of scale are affordances of both

platforms which I will want to explore in the research: how does having one's audience

quantified and made visible affect user's performance of identity on those specific platforms?

Does it affect people's following and friending behaviours? boyd & Donath (2011) suggest it

does: “seeing someone within the context of their connections provides the viewer with

information about them. Social status, political beliefs, musical taste, etc, may be inferred from

the company one keeps” (p. 32).

On the other hand, blogging platforms have traditionally made a blogger's networks

visible only via action: either through comments linking back to another blogger's site, or

through a blogroll intentionally created by the blogger to list his or her perceived community or

network. Thus, quantifiability in particular has not been as defining a feature within blogging. As

blogging has regularly been declared “dead” since 2008 and social network site usage continues

to expand, is quantifiability therefore an increasingly influential affordance within contemporary

culture? Does collecting large numbers of followers or friends become an end unto itself?

Dean (2010) contends that on social networking sites, as opposed to blogs, “contacts

matter more than information, angle, or opinion...Instead of writing for strangers, a characteristic


of blogs insofar as they are available to search engines, social network sites privilege sharing

with friends, with a circuit of others that one has explicitly “friended” (p. 35-36). While this does

serve as an important distinction between blogs and Facebook, specifically, Dean conflates all

social network sites with Facebook: Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and a great many other popular

sites explicitly encourage sharing outside a model of reciprocal relationships.

In my study of networked cyborgs, I'm interested in exploring the different ways in which

affordances affect people's choices and strategies for sharing content and performing identities. I

posit that Dean's distinction between social network sites and blogs also fails to account for the

inter-related and inter-platform nature of communications within networked publics: the

collapsed contexts explored by Marwick & boyd (2010). Blogging can certainly involve writing

for strangers, but the networked relationships that digital self-presentation enables can and do

occur around blogs, as well. In my own case, after a year of blogging I had developed a large and

diverse but quite intimate network of fellow bloggers, most of whom wrote what might be called

narrative or identity blogs rather than the information or opinion blogs Dean refers to. These

bloggers became my first Twitter network, when Twitter was released in 2007, and also early

Facebook friends. The different affordances of Twitter and Facebook, I will argue in the auto-

ethnographic section of my research, both augmented the blogging networks I had formed and in

the same process, altered them.

Not all of these effects may have been foreseeable by designers of the platforms.

Thompson & Cupples (2008) point out that research has shown that technologies' meanings and

usages are never inherent to their artefactual forms: “As Pinch, Ashmore and Mulkay (1992, p.

265) have argued, technology is indexical in the sense it ‘takes it meaning from its use’ and the

use of cell phones to perform a particular form of social order demonstrates how the meanings


inscribed in the cell phone are not fixed and cannot be fixed by designers, teachers, parents or

journalists” (p. 103). Conole & Dyke (2004) discuss such unintended affordances of information

communications technologies (ICTs) as new forms of plagiarism, spam mail, and intensification

of work availability and pressures (p. 119). In my exploration of how affordances shape practices,

I am interested in the ways in which particular environments encourage or reinforce particular

types of actions and interactions. In the social networking context, Morrison (2012) points out

that Facebook has introduced a variety of features that automatically share passive content,

making all engagements – rather than just status updates or intentional identity cultivation –

visible to a user's friends list.

Many user actions within and without the Facebook environment now result

in an update being automatically generated and published—for example, if a

user has checked into a location automatically, or posted to a blog, or ‘liked’

something somewhere on the web, or completed an online yoga class, or

earned a badge in a social game. This innovation raises the difficult question

of how and if these ‘updates’ are an act of authorship on the part of a life writer,

and how we are to understand them as part of the digital life writing practices on

Facebook. (Morrison, 2012, p. 20).

My research questions and data collection processes will focus both on intentional identity

practices and on these more passive but still visible ways in which networked cyborgs perform

digital sociality.

The concept of affordances has epistemological and ontological limitations, some of

which I will explore in the following Theoretical Framework. At this point, affordance theories

do not often investigate the assumption of the “thing” as a given, rather tending to frame the


boundaries – and therefore the action possibilities – of particular technologies as self-evident. In

terms of working with Karen Barad's (2007) concept of agential realism, this pre-determined if

not necessarily technological determinist framework of “the object” negates examination of the

intra-activity of networked cyborg practices. Still, in terms of conducting a study of networked

cyborg's self-reported practices, I suspect I will require multiple layers of analytic concepts, and

the prominence of affordances in the literature around networked publics and social media makes

them necessary for me to evaluate as a conceptual tool.

Going further into the complexities of how affordances and digital ecologies shape

practices will require a way of accounting for power relationships. The ways in which Actor

Network approaches frame networks and phenomena as assemblages may be productive for me

here: a means of foregrounding the relational and intra-active factors that affect subjects’

perceptions of possibility. As Fenwick and Edwards (2010) assert, power is a particularly

important factor to trace when considering educational assemblages:

ANT can also trace how assemblages may solidify certain relations of power in

ways that continue to affect movements and identities. The sedimentation of power

relations in educational spaces and their continuing effects are ubiquitous.

(p. 13)

In terms of the implications of digitally-networked identities for higher education, the lenses of

affordances, unintended consequences of design, and assemblages of power relations all shape

my approach to my inquiry. What kinds of learner and facilitator roles and identities do the

affordances of traditional classroom structures privilege, and how are these altered by digitally-

networked practices? How do power relations assemble in the various models of MOOCs


currently emerging inside and alongside higher education? Do these differ from the power

relations sedimented within more traditional or conventional models of higher ed?

I am especially interested in the ways in which the digitally-networked practices which

dominate what are sometimes called connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs, or MOOCs not started by

major elite academic institutions, in short) constitute a different sort of social contract among

learners and facilitators than has traditionally been possible given the affordances and structures

of classroom environments and academia. Most MOOCs are free and non-accredited, and while

some offer forms of assessment, others do not even claim to deliver established knowledge but

rather to explore emergent domains in networked and participatory fashion. These affordances

and assemblages shape the social contract or order into which learners are inculcated, and

operate largely along the principles and practices of networked publics and digital sociality more

generally. It is in this sense that I take up the practices of networked cyborgs within cMOOCs as

examples of the Internet happening to education.

The xMOOCs - or large MOOCs affiliated with elite institutions and generally with

venture capital - are also to an extent evidence of higher education grappling with the

affordances of the Internet. But as designed thus far, xMOOCs like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX

emphasize few experimental or participatory affordances, and tend more towards discrete, pre-

sanctioned, linear delivery methods for knowledge. They revert to the “sage on the stage”

method of mass transmission, and assume what needs to be known is known. They appear

designed and assembled not to address the emergent domain of knowledge or the cultural shifts

occurring as hierarchy is challenged by heterarchy, but rather to capitalize on the Internet’s

capacity to scale traditional course “delivery” around the world instantly and without cost. In this

sense, I will argue that xMOOCs may be higher education circling the wagons of its own


sedimented power relations, against the challenges of participatory pedagogies and the types of

practices networked cyborgs engage in.

Theoretical Framework:

Pivoting on the threshold of a ‘revolution’ that implies more than just information,

we are in fact hip-deep in the interdisciplinary moment of our time where the

metaphors and realities of socio-cultural, technological, and media empire convergences

can no longer adequately be understood or analysed through

single-lens disciplinary or theoretical positions.

(Luke, 1996, p. 2)

Participatory, reputation-focused online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs

allow people to perform sociality, self-presentation, and learning in newly public, connected, and

traceable ways. Framed within this research project as digital sociality (Thompson & Cupples,

2008) and as networked publics (boyd, 2011), these are intersections of people, technologies, and

practices that simultaneously create both public spaces and imagined collectives (boyd, 2011, p.

39). They are also, I will argue, performative intersections of people, technologies and capital; a

networked attention economy wherein selves are a primary product.

Participatory online networks are not bounded communities or societies in the original

tradition of ethnography (Mackay, 2005, p. 134) and the lines drawn around practices and

identity in this context will always be fluid, partial, and arbitrary. Nonetheless, the research

process will attempt to trace and map these differences without replicating the digital dualism

that assumes a real/virtual separation between online and offline interactions.

Ontologically, this research is located in the realm and politics of the cyborg: the

postmodern, the material-semiotic, and perhaps most pervasively, the relational. The ontology of


the cyborg is one of difference and context and location, and one of connections. The theoretical

frameworks I draw on in this analysis all emphasize relationality and the reframing of traditional

binary categories. Haraway positioned her “political-fictional (political-scientific)” (1991. p. 151,

brackets original) analysis within what she called three crucial boundary breakdowns: that

between human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical-nonphysical (p. 151) In the

research, I will attempt to foreground those blurred and broken binaries as I approach the

research questions, participants, process, and the very subject of social networking.

Augmented Reality, or How Online & Offline are Not Binary

Even as I position my research within the breakdown of boundaries between the physical

and the non-physical, I believe that digital performances of self warrant specific focus. This is in

no way to suggest that online identities are any less “real” than embodied identities, or more

multiple or fluid or in some way inauthentic. A premise of my research will be that all identity,

following Butler, is performative, and that distinctions between digital and offline interactions

and connections are becoming increasingly blurred for many cyborg subjects. Nonetheless, the

discursive field of social media – the site or stage on which the cyborg self performs and

circulates – deviates from that of the broader culture, as do its material affordances. But these

can be understood as distinct without assuming that the selves they bring into being are

inherently separate from the selves who first sit at the keyboard or in front of the iPad screen to

bring them into being.

This research begins from the assumption that the affordances of digital technologies

shape users' sociality and identities beyond the online sphere. As noted in the introduction, the

enmeshment of the digital within contemporary culture means that the effects of digital practices

are not confined to digitally-mediated interactions. Certainly, my own blogging and social


networking history has had effects in my life that resonate beyond the digital sphere: my online

communications have resulted in close personal and professional relationships with friends and,

more recently, fellow researchers and learners, many of which have long since spread beyond the

confines of the digital spaces in which they originated. Additionally, my blogging has led to

hard-copy literary publication on a number of occasions, and to freelance writing opportunities,

thus enabling the identity shift of openly calling myself a writer, among other things. Within the

academy, I have been part of funded research grants that came out of my non-institutional

MOOC work, have presented at academic conferences about my first-hand experience with and

research into MOOCs, and most recently, been contracted by Johns Hopkins Press to write a

book exploring MOOCs. All of the above are tangible professional benefits that have stemmed

from my online networked cyborg practices.

Less positively, I can also report that my blogging and social media practices have

created a sense, in me, of always having to be present and performative within the spaces of my

networked publics. The idea of being offline for more than a day or so makes me anxious about

missed connections and opportunities, a phenomenon Sherry Turkle calls fear of missing out

(2011). More, extended offline periods also create the uncomfortable sense of simply not being

present to people I feel obligated to be available to, at least asynchronously. Even when I am

offline, in other words, my digital networks are with me and constitute part of the way I conceive

of my relationality within the world. Just as I feel obligated to call my mother or to check my

work email or to maintain ties with old friends by stopping by occasionally, I feel similar

impetus to check in on Twitter and Facebook at least daily, when I can. More, on Twitter and

Facebook, and with my blog, I feel obliged by my own sense of audience and impression

management to regularly contribute to the fray and to perform aspects of my identity. While the


affordances of digital technologies enable – and thus perhaps, spur – me to sites and aspects of

performance that might not have been available to me before social media, I do not experience

the social demands as distinct.

This research will be premised, then, on the idea that networked cyborg identities are

recursive and possibly intra-active, affecting practices across multiple aspects of people's lives. I

conducted informal, preliminary research via blog comments and extensive Twitter

conversations regarding the question of how networked cyborgs experience and conceive of the

relationship between their so-called “real” or embodied lives, and their digital practices and

performances. I asked my own networks who they felt they were when they were online, and

whether they felt any divide between their embodied selves and interactions and those which

take place via blogs or social media. Their responses broadly suggest that many of us who live

large portions of our lives online in participatory and produsage-based networks, at least, tend to

perceive our digital identities simply as extensions of ourselves, as aspects of identity rather than

as anything separate and distinct. The term “extension of our lives” was one that a number of

these informal respondents utilized, and one that resonates with me as well. Since one of the

affordances of digital media is that they are infinitely extensible, however, while human lives

and time are not, I am interested in exploring in my dissertation research the tensions that may

arise in networked cyborgs when our sociality expands beyond our capacity to engage in it. I will

take up those questions of time and scale and extensibility further in a later section of this

proposal.

A key premise of my dissertation research, then, will be that the connections and sociality

that comprise networked publics are not “virtual” or solely digital; that rather, they enmesh to

create what is sometimes called an augmented (Jurgenson, 2010) or PolySocial (Applin &


Fischer, 2011) reality. Marwick (2010) explains this reality as one in which digital practices have

social consequences that blur boundaries between spheres:

The historical separation between online and offline life is blurring as people

use technology to manage their relationships. Wishing someone happy birthday

on Facebook is a visible display of emotional ties, a reinforcement or

strengthening of a social bond, and an adherence to modern etiquette. Thus,

the way people are regarded online has an impact on how they are viewed in

real world or face-to-face interactions. (p. 2)

For networked cyborgs, I will argue, the effects of this blurring or enmeshment also extend

beyond the social sphere into Bourdieu's other areas of capital, particularly the symbolic and the

economic. For bloggers, for example, regular, repeated performance of writing or photography

skills – combined with scale of attention and luck – can sometimes result in real-world

publishing opportunities or the development of a respected portfolio of work. Presenting oneself

as a writer or photographer in one's online space, in other words, can lead to being publicly taken

up as a writer or photographer in one's embodied life and community as well. The two are

neither distinct nor necessarily opposed, though their differing affordances do sometimes enable

different interactions or opportunities as well as creating differing constraints.

Nathan Jurgenson's work emphasizes the ways social media networks are embedded in

everyday life, rather than in some separate or “virtual” sphere. In his essay The IRL Fetish,

(2012) he states “The power of “social” is not just a matter of the time we’re spending checking

apps, nor is it the data that for-profit media companies are gathering; it’s also that the logic of the

sites has burrowed far into our consciousness” (Jurgenson, 2012a, paragraph 2). Jurgenson

asserts that this logic has reached such proportions that we have, collectively, begun to fetishize


the idea of off-line interaction as more “real:” “The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a

recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and

view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected

is inseparable from what we do when disconnected” (2012a, paragraph 13). Note that Jurgenson

posits that the phenomenon of treating the offline as more real only becomes possible with the

emergence of the binary online/offline: this fits with Haraway's description of the logic of

dominance which occurs within the binaries that hierarchical social structures create and always

privileges one side or the other of the dualism. In my approach to this research, I consider what

Jurgenson calls the enmeshment of this material-digital binary within networked public practices

as corresponding with the physical-nonphysical boundary breakdown Haraway identifies as part

of the ontology of the cyborg. Since my research is overtly of and about networked cyborgs, it

will consciously work to challenge and deconstruct the binary of real vs. virtual that circulates in

many cultural accounts of social media. Jurgenson calls this binary “digital dualism” (2010).

The origins of digital dualism have sometimes been pinned at the feet of early cyberpunk

literature, with its fantastic “virtual.” I see the scholarly roots – or at least early signs – of the

binary in the early online identity scholarship of the 1990s, in which online and offline tended to

be treated as distinct and effectively opposed domains, especially in terms of lived experience. In

the seminal digital identities work of Sherry Turkle, Howard Rheingold, and Alluquere Rosanne

Stone, early online community spaces such as MUDs (Multiple User Domains or Multiple User

Dungeons) and the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) were framed as spaces of possibility

for performances of identity uncoupled from the body and its limitations of gender, race, ability

and other apparent materialities. Generally heralded as postmodern evidence of the breakdown of

the unified, humanist self, these early text-based online spaces were taken up largely as foreign


from – if enlightening regarding – mundane everyday life. In Life on the Screen (1995), Turkle

claimed that the multiplicity and constructed nature of online identity heightened awareness of

what she framed as the identity projections of embodied life:

Having literally written our online personae into existence, we are

in a position to be more aware of what we project into everyday life.

Like the anthropologist returning home from a foreign culture, the

voyager in virtuality can return to a real world better equipped to

understand its artifices. (Turkle, 1995, p. 263)

Turkle's binary presentation of real and virtual was common in this early era of digital

identity research. Her most recent (2011) work continues to frame online interactions as innately

different and separate in both nature and quality from embodied sociality: while she makes

important cautionary points about management of digital sociality, she does so by hearkening

back to a simulacric past before human conversation and attentiveness were sullied by what she

repeatedly frames as the lack of connection one finds in the digitally-connected. The fact that she

fails to acknowledge that people engaged in digital sociality are actually engaging with others, if

albeit not face-to-face, makes Turkle one of the most visible proponents of digital dualism in the

field today.

Even Stone, who studied under Haraway and did groundbreaking work in multiplicity

and fiduciary identity, and in bringing transexual identity out of the proverbial closet, did not

challenge the cyborg frontier of digital dualism. Her doctoral thesis, published as The War of

Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1995), tells the story of “Julie,” the

extraordinarily successful female persona of a male psychiatrist in an early CompuServe

chatroom. Julie's is a complex tale of non-essentialist identity performance, but one in which the


incursion of physical “reality” into the virtual world and community in which Julie operates is

her undoing.

Admittedly, at the time of Stone's research, the affordances of digital sociality and

communications did not support focus on enmeshment between worlds: “cyber” social networks

were still text-based, computers were not yet mobile, and engaging with others via the systems

available was a far less frictionless – and societally pervasive – act. Geosoftware and location-

based applications tracing users in physical space did not yet exist, and the social spaces that

existed had barely been monetized: the prevalence and promise of financial capital that currently

permeates social media was as yet a long way off. While online identities were touted as having

the capacity for fluid performances of self, the notion of fluidity or enmeshment between online

and offline performance was largely absent.

Today, however, multiple frameworks exist through which to explore this emerging

enmeshment. In the dissertation analysis, I intend to explore augmented reality – or what

Jurgenson (2012b) calls “the implosion of atoms and bits” (p. 86) – and PolySocial Reality as

theoretical frameworks for enmeshments between online and offline. However, keeping in mind

Luciano Floridi's (2006) caveat that “we are probably the last generation to experience a clear

difference between online and offline” (#3: The Evolution of Inforgs section, para. 1), I want to

research and write the distinctions not only between so-called IRL and the digital, but between

the various platforms of the digital and the practices and selves they coax and coach. I am

inclined to grapple with what it means to be enmeshed through the lens of affordances, and want

to trouble the online/offline binary by treating my offline practices simply as a different

constellation of affordances and social/symbolic norms than those I confront in using Facebook

or Twitter. Moreso, I want to explore whether Facebook and Twitter are actually similar in terms


of these affordances and norms, or whether the varying constellations lend themselves to an

entirely different configuration of realities.

Material-semiotics and Performativity

This grappling with realities will be reflected in the theoretical perspectives that I bring

with me to the research. In addition to – though in keeping with – Haraway's work, I intend to

draw on and with aspects of Butler, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and with what Law (2007) calls the

“disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat

everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of

relations within which they are located” (p. 2). These somewhat disparate emphases on

performativity and power relations and practices and partiality do not all cohere perfectly, as I

will explore in the dissertation analysis, but all focus to some extent on relationality and have at

least extended-family connections, sometimes once or twice-removed, to Law's material-

semiotic family description: “It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of

those relations” (2007, p. 2). This foregrounding of relationality, while admittedly untidily drawn

between the various theoretical perspectives, seems to me to be appropriate to an examination of

networked practices and the effects they have in shaping selves.

In analysis of the interviews and blog narratives, then, I will consider how relations are

enacted between networked cyborgs, the technological platforms on which they circulate, the

forms of capital with which they engage, and – especially in the case of MOOCs – the practices

and power relations they represent. The goal of the study, from this perspective, is to map

whether and how all those relations assemble, or possibly, don't.

Part of my usage of material-semiotic frameworks to inform my research approach is

related to my rejection of the notion of virtuality, which, while dependent on the materiality of


matter to define and counter it, nonetheless tends toward an erasure of the body. Although much

of what networked cyborgs produce is text or image, I am interested in the ways practices of self

in digital sociality and networked publics may be constrained and shaped by physicality. Just as I

use the cyborg as a guiding metaphor for the self in resistance to binaries and essentialism, I will

draw on material-semiotics as a reminder of the embodied aspects of everyday digital sociality,

even where the body is not visible. Lenoir notes that the material-semiotic turn in scholarship is

in part a response or reaction against a perceived erasure of the body: “the emphasis on practice

in recent science studies has included material as well as symbolic culture. We want to call

attention to both a materiality of the text and a materiality beyond it. We want, in Brian Rotman's

phrase, to put the body `back in'” (Lenoir, 1994, paragraph 5).

I am also interested in what material-semiotic approaches offer to the analysis of capital,

particularly economic capital, within social media. As Law (2007) frames it, “To understand

markets we need to trace how the webs of heterogeneous material and social practices produce

them. It is these that are performative, that generate realities” (p. 12). I hope to get a sense of the

ways in which networked cyborgs have been webbed and interpellated into the monetization of

social media, and how their sense of their networked public performance is shaped by overt

relationships with – or the possibilities of relationships with, and the increasing normativity of

relationships with – economic capital.

Material-semiotic approaches emphasize actions as relational and performative. My

interest in material-semiotics comes from the desire to explore the ways in which networked

cyborgs not only create themselves of works of art and commerce on social media platforms, but

are also in turn created by the enactment of the relations involved. In this research, the actions

under investigation will be the practices of self by which connections – between humans,


technologies, and capital – are made within networked publics. In analyzing them, I will be

attempting to account for the ways in which they are shaped by both the material affordances of

platform design and by the discursive social and symbolic norms that emerge on – and

sometimes across – platforms. Morrison (2012) frames both semiotic and material circulations

as part of the performative practices of Facebook status updates:

In constructing our life stories—or assembling the disclosures, facts, and

documents which, taken together, offer the basis for the inference of life story—

we are guided not only by the often-implicit discursive precedent of the genre

in which we write or speak, but also by the material affordances and constraints

of the objects through which we structure these stories of ourselves.

(Morrison, 2012, p. 8)

Affordances, here, are posited as the material aspect of the hybrid relations by which

performativity in social media takes place.

A major challenge in moving ahead with the theoretical framing of the research will be in

choosing its ontological approach to the concept of “things,” and by extension, affordances. I

tend to read Gibson's (1979) definition of affordances positing a non-binary material-semiotic

hybridity:

But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property or a subjective

property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy

of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is

equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical

and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment

and the observer. (p. 129)


My intent, in a sense, is to work alongside and in sight of material-semiotics, cognizant and

mindful of its tenets. As noted in the introduction, I am particularly drawn to and wary of the

ontological and epistemological implications of both Actor Network approaches and Karen

Barad's notion of agential realism for my dissertation research. My work is premised in the

assumption of enmeshment between what might be termed the material, the social, and the

symbolic orders, in various assemblages this research process will attempt to name. As I will

examine at the end of the methodologies chapter of this proposal, Barad's Meeting the Universe

Halfway offers guiding principles towards a methodology that may co-exist with the

ethnographic and auto-ethnographic models I hope to draw from.

Performativity more generally, however, will definitely inform my approach to the

research. My study will posit blogs and digital “small stories” (Georgakopalou, 2006) such as

tweets as performative, participatory meaning-making strategies that shape selves and

connections within networks (Thompson & Cupples, 2008). Performativity is the stylized

repetition of acts that are discursively established and socially validated. Early work by Goffman

(1959) defined performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which

serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (p. 15). Over the past few decades,

within both self-styled “late modernity” and post-modernity, theories of self have take a

performative – or at least performance-focused – turn. Giddens (1991) claimed the “reflexivity of

the self” and Gergen (1991) emphasized the self-monitoring of the “mutable self” focused on

process. In the era of social media, the concept of performance is sometimes used as a way of

addressing, acknowledging, or positing multiplicity of self. Papacharissi (2012) says:

Information communication technologies, such as Twitter, further augment


these tendencies by saturating the self with ever-expanding networks of people,

relations, and performance stages. Gergen (1991) termed these “technologies of

social saturation,” suggesting they provoke a form of performative incoherence

by populating the self with multiple, disparate, and even competing potentials

for being. As a result, each self contains an ever-increasing multiplicity of other

selves, or voices, that do not harmonize and are presented in contexts that

frequently lack situational definition (Meyrowitz, 1985). Networked

technologies might thus be understood as enabling access to multiple voices

or aspects of one's own personality. (p. 1992)

Papacharissi's work is focused on the practices of the networked self, particularly on Twitter. She

notes that on that platform, performance requires “crafting of polysemic presentations that make

sense to diverse audiences and publics without compromising one's own sense of self” (2012, p.

2001). Her work treats performance as the norm of self-presentation within social media: she

calls Twitter a “performative platform for the networked self in the greater context of the habitus

of the new – a social architecture that is in constant flux” (Papacharissi, 2012, p. 2001) She

claims that particular types of performance – the Twitter norm of playfulness, for example – are

“invited by the architecture of the platform and partially enabled through the expressive and

connective tendencies of the self in late, networked modernity, that is, a networked self” (2012, p.

2001), a position similar to that expressed by Morrison (2012) regarding the coaxing and

coaching by which the affordances of Facebook's status update design operates. In all these

senses, her research offers mine a rich and growing body of work on which to draw, much of

which aligns with my own interests in social media practices. Papacharissi's concept of

performance, however, is not necessarily congruent with my understanding of performativity.


The difference is an ontological and epistemological one. While Papacharissi's

networked self is inarguably not the unified self of the Enlightenment, neither does it address the

conditions of its own creation. My own premise that the self is performative is grounded

primarily in the work of Judith Butler, though also enhanced by that of Barad. For Butler,

performativity is both the repetition or citation of cultural norms and the means by which

hegemonic norms can be subverted. Based in speech-act theory, Butler's performative identity is

“instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (1988, p. 519). Exemplified by the marriage

pronouncement which both names and creates a new life status, a speech act functions only by

reference to a law or an accepted norm, code, or contract cited or named in the pronouncement.

The citation of the law or norm brings the specific instance into being and makes it intelligible.

Just as Haraway's cyborg challenges binaries, so does Butler's subject. Subjects are

brought into being through a process of interpellation, in which ideologies address the pre-

ideological individual and thus bring into being an intelligible subject. In Althusser’s classic

example of interpellation, an officer of the law hails a subject and the subject turns in acceptance

of the terms by which s/he was hailed. The individual is subjugated to The Law in the very

process of his or her own creation as its subject. Butler notes that the subject/object dichotomy of

Western epistemology means that notions of the subject – even as situated self – have been

discursively constituted within an epistemological frame of opposition. The “I” is established

through signifying practices that at the same time create the “Other” as a necessary and

unknowable opposite to the inner self, “concealing the discursive apparatus by which the binary

itself is constituted” (1990, p. 197). This process of constitution and apparent naturalization by

concealment gives rise to the individual's sense of inner self as differentiated from the Other.


It is important to note that in its emphasis on discourse, performativity is not a reduction

of everything – or anything – to language. Theories of performativity stand in contrast to theories

of representationality, which are premised on an ontological distinction between entities and

representations of entities. Within performative ontologies, this separation is challenged or

collapsed, and emphasis is placed on practices that produce particular representations. As Karen

Barad notes,

A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges

the re-presentationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting

things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn

everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary,

performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted

to language to determine what is real. (Barad, 2003, p. 802)

In considering networked cyborg practices, performativity emphasizes not how our digital

performances of self are representational of or distinct from our physical entities, but are rather

the relational practices through which we perform identities, both in embodied life and within

digital social networks.

Butler's (1993) work on the normative forces of performativity notes that it operates not

only through reiteration but through exclusions that “haunt signification as its abject borders or

as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic” (p. 188).

Social media and the long tail of the internet allow for socio-symbolic discourses – and I would

add, from my own blogging experience, material practices – and interpellations that subvert the

norms of polite company and embodied etiquette. Thus a subject may experience what is

intelligible and iterable in digital sociality differently. My dissertation research will specifically


explore experiences which have been altered by social media participation and by narrative

blogging, and which have educative impacts within digital sociality. Subject positions and

aspects of self that have traditionally been rendered publicly unspeakable, particularly outside

close circles, are regularly expressed, explored, shared, and supported in community on the

internet. My premise is that this capacity to perform newly communicable public identities is

recursive – or potentially intra-active – impacting not just the subject's digital self but the broader

experience of what Butler calls a livable life.

In addition to Haraway's cyborg, this exploration also has its ancestry in Foucault's notion

of “technologies of the self,” or the “putting in place...of “relations with oneself,” with their

technical armature and their knowledge effects” (Foucault, 1994, p. 88). Foucault's technologies

bear more resemblance to what is commonly called techniques, in the sense that they do not

focus on artifactual objects so much as processes, some with artifactual components, by which

humans function. In Technologies of the Self (1982), he outlines his four matrices of practical

reason: technologies of production, of sign systems, of power, and of the self. Each of these

enables work towards particular ends, and each is, arguably, its own form of hybridity: Foucault

notes that “each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the

obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes”

(1994, p. 225). It is in this Foucauldian sense – even though she called his biopolitics “flaccid” -

that I understand and extend to the present day Haraway's (1991) claim that “we are cyborgs” (p.

150). I am interested in the particular technical armature and the affordances that shape us as

networked cyborgs.

The final major theoretical thread in my research will likely be the actor-network

approach. This relational, material-semiotic approach was formally called Actor Network Theory


(ANT) but was denied theory status by its own creators. It is an empirically-focused, material

semiotic “toolkit for telling interesting stories” (Law, 2007, p.1) about how relations assemble or

don't, but it is less a specific set of actions than an orientation or perspective on the world. In its

emphasis on the ways in which actors are enrolled into particular assemblages and power

relations, it offers a way to unpack some of the ways in which networked cyborg identities are

produced. Research informed by ANT tends to reconfigure taken-for-granted aspects of the

social and material world, and aims to “deploy the actor's own world-building activities”

(LaTour in Law & Hassard, 1999, p. 15). Thus, it operates in research far more like a

methodology, informing the analysis at hand and offering a conceptual toolkit to researchers. Its

originators effectively disowned it, because the act of defending the fixed positions users kept

trying to attribute to it was antithetical to their reasons for articulating it in the first place.

In this sense, like Barad's agential realism, it appeals to me deeply. I am not interested in

creating fixed positions. Since my data can only be framed in terms of fluid, shifting networks

and assemblages, the actor-network approach's emphasis on circulations and the immersive,

relational phenomena of digital sociality seem to me to offer interesting congruences to explore

via reflexive and what Haraway (1992) and Barad (2007) call diffractive methods. Additionally,

Fenwick and Edwards (2010) note the fit between cyborgs, ANT, and social media:

Network ontologies, such as ANT, help us to illustrate the capillaries that

enact cyborgs, the hybrids of humans with information technologies, and new

forms of knowledge, such as those that emerge through Twitter formats based

on highly limited communiques and the imperative to attract net-surfing

followers. (p. 84)


ANT is also congruent in its foregrounding of performativity. As LaTour asserts

“...(S)ocial aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition - like mugs and cats and

chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger - but only of a performative definition. They are

made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist” (2005, p. 34). For LaTour,

the performative definition of a group draws attention to the means necessary to keep it up, and

also to the contributions made by the fact of it being studied or analyzed. As I intend to study, in

part, my own cyborg community, I will want to be mindful of these tenets.

I am interested in ANT because of its emphasis not just on networks, but on circulation,

heterogeneity, and the agency of non-human actors in any assemblage. The approach “starts

from the position that subjectivity and agency are not merely given in advance, but are relational

achievements involving people and things” (Leander & Lovvorn, 2006, p. 297). I suspect that the

extent to which some ANT theorists go to extend this agency to non-humans may challenge

some of my own understandings and those I put into conversation with ANT. Still, I hope that by

drawing from the approach to consider the relationality of capital and status within networked

publics, I may be able to study how these networks hold together as an assemblage, how they

shape their components, how the material practices enabled and demanded by particular

technologies generate practices, and how these practices generate hybrid selves who impact the

broader culture and the field of cultural production as works of both art and commerce.

Methodological Approach:

The proposed dissertation is intended to be a post-critical, multi-sited and participatory

ethnographic and auto-ethnographic exploration of the day-to-day online identity practices of

regular users of social media networks. It will examine how users understand and strategize these

practices of identity performance, reputation, and relational connections within their particular


networked publics. It will also consider how the affordances of social networking sites shape

users' practices and sociality. The implications of networked publics and digital practices for

higher education and the broader field of cultural production, in a world wherein the digital and

material are increasingly enmeshed, will be a focus of the analysis.

My approach to this research is one of critical curiosity rather than determinism. I hope to

avoid trajectories of technological emancipation, and certainly of corporate-technological hybrid

emancipation. But I also hope to avoid constructing a simplistic dystopian narrative about status

and social media and identity, because my experiences – narrative, educative, discursive – as a

networked cyborg subject have been too complex to sum up under such a predictable trajectory.

What I am interested in is not the synthesis of middle ground, but the tensions and specificities of

messy, situated, lived experience in the digital.

My concept of practices draws on Bourdieu, but also on DeCerteau's The Practice of

Everyday Life (1984). DeCerteau posits that people's consumption practices of then-

contemporary media are in themselves a form of poiesis or making (p. xii): that “users make

(bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural

economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules” (p. xiii-xiv). In this sense,

I approach social media as a particular but not separate extension of that dominant cultural

economy as it has emerged in the 21st century. In my framing of the networked cyborg as a

hybrid of human, technology, and capital, I am locating the cyborg's habitat within what Dean

(2010) calls “communicative capitalism”;

Communicative capitalism designates the strange convergence of

democracy and capitalism in networked communications and entertainment

media. On the one hand, networked communications technologies


materialize the values heralded as central to democracy...On the other

hand, the speed, simultaneity, and interconnectivity of electronic

communications produce massive distortions and concentrations of

wealth as communicative exchanges and their technological preconditions

become commodified and capitalized. (p. 4)

Within those commodification and capitalization processes, however, my premise – following

DeCerteau – is that networked cyborgs also have a myriad of ways of exercising agency and

poiesis, re-making and even subverting the affordances and intended uses of social network

technologies and platforms in their practices. Utilizing this concept and DeCerteau's additional

framework of “the procedures of everyday creativity” (p. xiv) to approach the production-

consumption medium of socially-networked communications enables me to take up the minutiae

of day-to-day digital sociality practices as meaningful ways of operating. My goal, then, is to

gather a rich collection of accounts and analysis of these meaningful ways of operating, and to

consider the effects they may have on the systems of communicative capitalism – and

particularly higher education – in which they circulate.

I approach this research into networked cyborg practices from the position of a fellow

practitioner. As Hine (2005) notes, there is as yet little certainty within scholarly communities

about best practices for research inquiries into digitally-mediated communications: “Mediated

interactions have come to the fore as key ways in which social practices are defined and

experienced...At the same time, however, there is considerable anxiety about just how far

existing tried and tested research methods are appropriate for technologically mediated

interactions” (p. 1). Since my interest is in participatory practices, it is important to me that I


investigate them from a participatory perspective; one that “speaks their language,” as it were.

As DeCerteau claims in his work on the signifying practices and trajectories of consumers:

Statistical investigation remains virtually ignorant of these trajectories, since

it is satisfied with classifying, calculating, and putting into tables the “lexical”

units which compose them but to which they cannot be reduced...statistical

investigation grasps the material of these practices but not their form; it

determines the elements used, but not the “phrasing” produced by the

bricolage (the artisan-like inventiveness) and the discursiveness that combine

these elements... (1984, p. xviii)

In attempting to understand the ways in which networked cyborgs create themselves as works of

art and commerce, then, I will aim to be attuned to both the material and discursive ways in

which they show their “artisan-like inventiveness” in the production and consumption of social

media. It is my hope that my longstanding familiarity and lived experience with some of these

practices will help me recognize, interpret, and reflexively reframe the accounts I am privileged

to collect, in ways that participants themselves find both resonant and insightful.

My research approaches the Internet, and networked publics in particular, as a culture

appropriate for ethnographic methods of investigation. This is supported by Hine's (2005) claim

that the Internet is both cultural context and cultural artefact, from a research perspective:

The Internet as cultural context is established...through application of

ethnographic methods to online settings. That the Internet is also a cultural

artefact is apparent from the extent to which it is manifested as a

varying and variably used set of technologies that have different

meanings for different groups of people. (p. 9)


It is also supported by a small but growing body of literature treating digital sociality as a

culture within ethnographic studies. danah boyd is perhaps the best known ethnographer of social

media and networked publics: in reviewing the cultural practices and values reflected in

platforms such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, boyd (2008) was one of the first theorists

to analyze social networks and communities in terms of race, class, and social belonging

categories. Her extensive body of work has focused on youth and the culture of particular social

media spaces and networks. Dr. Michael Wesch, who founded the Digital Ethnography Working

Group in 2007, has produced widely-disseminated videos on the effects of social media and

digital technologies on society, particularly within education. Ethnographies utilizing Twitter

(Beneito-Montagut, 2011) are becoming increasingly established in ethnographic literature, and

Twitter accounts like @ethnographymatters and @digitalethnography are easy to find.

While there has been some research into early MOOCs and their networked learning

practices, I am not at this time aware of any published ethnographies of MOOCs. The

proliferation of the term and the various types of learning opportunities made available under

that term during the writing of this thesis proposal has been enormous, but my research will

focus especially on the model in which I have participated, facilitated and conducted previous

research: the model now broadly called the “cMOOC” or connectivist MOOC. The culture of

these cMOOCs tends to align broadly with the profile of networked cyborg practices I've defined

for this research, and I will be inviting former cMOOC learners to join in the study if they wish

to. The research will therefore be original not only in identifying and exploring the figure and

practices of the networked cyborg, but in connecting these practices to the much-hyped MOOC

phenomenon and considering the implications of all of the above for higher education.

Mapping as Method To Getting Lost


All approaches to research are a reflection of cultural beliefs about the world we

live in and want to live in.

(Scott & Usher, 1996, p. 25).

This work will be an effort in making visible the connections and relations that constitute

digital sociality and networked publics. In the ethnographic study that will comprise the primary

data for the dissertation project, I will investigate and map practices, trajectories, uses, and

meanings of social media, as detailed by the regular users I frame as networked cyborgs.

Mapping will be the guiding methodological metaphor for the research process, and it is central

to many of the methods and theories that will accompany me on the journey. In keeping with my

material-semiotic sympathies, however, and particularly with Barad's performative

posthumanism, my map will not just mark how the things it brings into being or visibility

assemble together, or don't, but will also try to keep them in relational conversation with one

another. Since I myself have no map for creating and navigating such a territory, I frame my

research approach as one of “getting lost.”

The map – and the traces and trajectories it attempts to territorialize and re-territorialize –

will not be a Cartesian one. Michel DeCerteau points out in his discussion of the trajectories of

everyday practices of consumption that the word “'trajectory' suggests a movement, but it also

involves a plane projection, a flattening out. It is a transcription” (1984, p. xviii). Mapping, I

would argue, suggests a similar reduction to plane, but in lieu of a more multi-dimensional

alternative, I employ it here with the caveat that not all maps are tidy, final products, nor need

they be two-dimensional. The mapping of networked cyborg practices need not be conceptually

limited to the technological affordances and constraints of paper.


The ethnographic study itself will be based in part in the post-critical work and example

of Patti Lather, who has framed her own post-foundational ethnography as a process of getting

lost (2007). For Lather, this approach makes both ontological and ethical claims, raising difficult

questions about “necessary complicities, inadequate categories, dispersing rather than capturing

meanings, and producing bafflement rather than conclusions” (2007, p. viii). As I embark on the

mapping of practices within networked publics, I will being drawing those necessary

complicities and inadequate categories into the picture, and will attempt to trace some of what is

dispersed as well as captured.

A sense of time is often part of that dispersal in any mapping process. One of the key

reasons my approach to the practices of networked cyborgs will include the historical or

genealogical lens I'll outline later in this chapter of the proposal is that I am mindful of

DeCerteau's (1984) assertion regarding the flattening out of trajectories or maps:

...transforms the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of

points...A reversible sign (one that can be read in both directions, once it is

projected onto a map) is substituted for a practice indissociable from particular

moments and 'opportunities' and thus irreversible (one cannot go backward in

time). (p. 35)

From Deleuze, however, I gather hope that the dimension of time can in some way be

mapped without flattening it altogether. Deleuze calls the process of mapping “entirely oriented

toward an experimentation in contact with the real...The map is open and connectable in all of its

dimensions...It can be...conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or a

meditation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 13). This has resonance with many of the themes of

openness and connection which run – often without critical engagement – through the literature


on networks, and with the research's guiding cyborg figure. Gough (2004) points out that

Haraway's cyborg, like Deleuze & Guattari's map, is heterogeneous, multiple, and also

historically located (p. 254) This map – and the research processes which bring it into being –

will be all those things. It will require a sensitivity to the historicity of practices while

maintaining a wary stance towards linearity in the narratives it collects. In the end it may, like

Deleuze’s rhizome with its multiple entryways, be an assemblage mapping the experimental

process of getting lost in the practices of networked publics.

The dissertation will, then, in these multiple senses, draw from the model of post-critical

ethnography. As Lather frames it, the post-critical stance towards research is one of “continued

commitment to critique and demystification of truth but with a meta-layer of being critical of

demystification itself” (Lather, 2007, p. 7). The process of this research investigation is not one I

expect to reach completion, in any summative or “eureka!” sense wherein the last layer of the

onion will be revealed. Rather, the mapping will be a coming to terms, likely, with both what I

already know about networked cyborgs and with ideas and accounts that alter my understanding

from a multitude of directions. Lather's framework for post-critical ethnography is one of

knowledge that grapples with and “loses itself in the necessary blind spots of understanding”

(2007, p. vii). In this foregrounding of blind spots, she references Derrida's grasp of difference

that shatters understanding, “a blindness, a confession that we are up against something...to

which we can only bear witness” (Caputo, 1997, p. 74, in Lather, 2007, p. 7). For me,

approaching my research with this concept of bearing witness in mind seems appropriate: the

theme of witness to what is otherwise unspeakable has been a central thread in my own

performance of identity within social networks and on social media platforms, and will inform

part of the auto-ethnographic aspect of this investigation.


My use of the term witness draws on Haraway's (1997) challenge to the “modest witness”

of objectivity and its history of legitimating scientific discourse. My inclusion of myself within

this research is in part a refusal to perform what Haraway (1988) calls science's “god-trick” of

speaking authoritatively from no particular social position. Instead, I will locate and map myself

within the research processes and product, as a visible and accountable participant within the

networks and practices I explore and bear witness to. This is research in the open, wherein the

researcher will have public, articulated network ties to those who collaborate as research

participants: the particular affordances and pressures of networked publics will therefore be at

work within the research itself. Notions of objectivity as a means of validation and legitimation,

therefore, will have little relevance within this participatory study.

Lather has grappled with these issues of witness and legitimation in the context of

ethnography for much of her academic career. She situates her work within Tomlinson's (1989)

concept of science “after truth”, working the ruins of traditional ethnography's purported realism

in a post-positivist world. Her messy, situated ethnography is an effort to “reflect back at its

readers the problems of inquiry at the same time an inquiry is conducted” (Lather, 2007, p. 136.)

Thus there is no absent author in her post-critical ethnographies, as there will be no absent author

in this dissertation process. Lather's work takes up issues of validity and voice in “a post-

foundational era characterized by the loss of certainties and absolute frames of reference”

(Lather, 2007, p. 149). She posits the oft-untroubled notion of voice, particularly, at the heart of

claims to the “real” in ethnography, and attempts to destabilize the common sentiments that

surround concepts of voice as truth while still being mindful of Spivak's subjugated and

subaltern knowledges (1988). Lather's example aims, overall, to “displace the privileged fixed

position from which the researcher interrogates and writes the researched” (Robinson, 1994;


Lather, 2007, p. 137). I hope to follow that example in mapping and witnessing to the practices

of networked cyborgs and our implications for higher education.

Collaboration in Post-Critical Ethnography: Surprised by Difference

Post-critical ethnography emphasizes complex, non-linear interrelationships. Research

designs and approaches aim to “take the research subjects' perceptions, knowledges and

understandings seriously...neither the researcher nor researched is privileged, but the dialogue

between them” (Hytten, 2004, p. 103). In other words, the goal of the data collection process is

to encourage collaborative, respectful, and meaningful participation. As a researcher, my

audience for this work is thus not only the traditional academy but also the networks in which I

regularly perform identity. As collaboration and meaningful participation are key principles – or

at least ideals to which lip service is paid – in social media and Web 2.0 circles, then navigating

this research will be a complex meta-engagement on my part, and on that of participants.

Efforts towards collaborative meaning-making will not be assumed, however, to negate

the power differential between researcher and researched. Campbell, Copeland, and Tate (1998),

posit power as “part of the ruling relations of research...Participation, we argue, must be

understood within a research framework that addresses power as enacted within everyday life” (p.

102). As this study explores practices – including ruling relations of power – within the peer

networks of social media platforms, participatory research acknowledging and interrogating

power relationships seems the most appropriate methodological approach. The researcher's

relationship with the researched will be foregrounded and reflexive, challenging implicit

assumptions that researchers "know how the world works and power operates, and the

researched don't" (Hytten, 2004).


Power relationships within networked publics will also require examination in this

research. Haraway (1988) claims that “we do need an earth-wide network of connections,

including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different – and power-

differentiated – communities” (p. 580). In exploring networks and the ways networked practices

are shaped, I will be inevitably grappling with issues of power, social contracts, and what

network theorists call homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001) or the tendency of

similarities to result in associations and bonds. I am interested in the ways in which digitally

networked communication practices among networked cyborgs translate knowledges, and

whether and how they destabilize – and alternately, reinforce via homophily – the operations of

the god-trick's positivist worldview.

I expect Lather's model of getting lost within post-critical ethnographic inquiry will be a

challenging guide to the process of my research, but also a productive one. I hope to draw on

Lather for reminders of the ontological and epistemological value and validity of not-knowing as

I weave my way through the mapping experience and the theoretical distinctions and potential

incompatibilities that inform it. Patti Lather's (2001) discussion of Judith Butler's 1992 address to

the American Historical Association helps me articulate the situatedness of my research: “Butler

delineates what opens up when economies of victory narratives are interrupted and what is left is

worked for the resources of its ruins towards new practices” (Lather, 2001, p. 478). I will be

working the ruins of a multitude of disciplines and knowledges from the position of a seeker,

rather than a knower.

I also intend to overtly invite the participants in my research into that same stance with

relation to their own creations of self as works of art and commerce. In a book chapter entitled

“Postmodernism, post-structuralism and post(critical) ethnography” (2001), Lather asks “what


would be made possible if we were to think ethnography otherwise, as a space surprised by

difference into the performance of practices of not-knowing” (p. 480). I do not expect that I or

my participants will know summatively what it has meant for us to become the particular social

media subjects we are; rather, we will focus on opening up our “performance of practices of not-

knowing” and see what emerges. We will explore what differences and blind spots networked

publics have opened, for us, and what they have constrained, and then see where the exploration

and mapping has brought us. I believe this is in line with both Lather's tenets and with many of

the other theoretical stances which inform this methodological approach: “It is not enough, as

Judith Butler notes (1993b, p. 52) to focus on the limits of our knowing. The task is to meet the

limit, to open to it as the very vitality and force that propels the change to come” (Lather, 2007, p.

37). I hope that this exploration of our networked cyborg identities becomes a space in which all

of us who participate end up surprised by difference.

Multi-sited Ethnography: Follow the “I”

This space and the mapping of it will also draw on the concept of multi-sited ethnography

(Marcus, 1995), which addresses the construction and boundaries of any space of investigation.

“Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of

locations” (Marcus, 1995, p. 105) and tracks subjects across spatial and temporal boundaries,

focusing “attention on the construction of the ethnographic object” (Hine, 2007, p. 655). Multi-

sited ethnography is sometimes used to follow a commodity item through global capital

networks, or to trace communities in diaspora. In relation to my research, it raises questions of

the boundaries of identity: my premise is that the selves brought into being by the practices and

affordances of digital social networks are not separate, either from each other or from the

multiplicity of embodied identities to which they are tied, and tracing those chains, paths, threads,


conjunctions and juxtapositions will be a part of this research. My intent is to “follow the I,” to

the extent that I will frame that “I” as a set of performative practices within the collapsed

contexts of networked publics. I will, essentially, take up the elusive and complex notion of

digital or social media identity practices as what Marcus calls a multi-sited “imaginary”:

In short, within a multi-sited research imaginary, tracing and describing the

connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate

is ethnography's way of making arguments and providing its own

contexts of significance. (Marcus, 1998, p. 14)

Marwick (2010) claims that the lifestreaming – or personal sharing – practices that dominate

social media can engender connectedness, creating “affective bonds that form through the

ongoing sharing of personal information” (p. 389). The multi-sited approach is focused on

pursuing connections, and this emphasis on connective practices and relationality will guide my

efforts to map the imaginary of digital identities within networked publics.

Marcus' conception, however, of multi-sited ethnography is one in which “the

ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic

of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography”

(Marcus, 1995, p. 105). While I will – and do already – have a presence within the sites that

define my intended ethnography, they do not all involve literal, physical presence. Hine's work

explicitly positing multi-sited ethnography as a methodology for Science and Technology

Studies, therefore, is important for my attempt to locate my own multi-sited imaginary within the

enmeshed digital and physical world of augmented reality. Though I take issue with

contemporary use of the term “virtual” for online activities because of the connotations of digital

dualism the word tends to enforce, Hine's double entendre on multi-sited “virtual ethnography”


as studies that “range around between online and offline activities, exploring connections

between them without assuming that online and offline would be maintained as distinct cultural

spheres” (Hine, 2007, p. 666) serves as a guide in my own mapping process.

In discussing Mol's (2002) multi-sited research into atherosclerosis, Hine posits that

moving across sites of investigation opens up new theoretical perspectives: “The strategic

attention to practices in different locations moves her from looking at construction to concerning

herself with matters of coordination and dislocation, and from epistemology to the inherent

multiplicity of ontology” (Hine, 2007, p. 664). This research process will involve attending to

practices across different locations and considering coordinations, dislocations, and affordances.

While I am, at this preliminary stage, entirely uncertain whether I will need new theoretical

perspectives in order to do justice to my research, the ethos of not-knowing that guides post-

critical ethnography inclines me to a stance of openness to the possibility.

Multi-sited ethnography also invites me into the map of my own making in a way that

resonates with the participatory, embedded practices under investigation. “When we talk about

methodology we are implicitly talking about our identity and the standards by which we wish our

work to be judged” (Hine, 2005, p. 8). This research is about situated and relational

knowledge(s) (and not-knowledges, to extend Patti Lather's concept of not-knowing).

There are always others within who know (or want to know) what the

ethnographer knows, albeit from a different subject position, or who

want to know what the ethnographer wants to know. Such ambivalent

identifications, or perceived identifications, immediately locate the

ethnographer within the terrain being mapped and reconfigure any kind

of methodological discussion that presumes a perspective from above or


“nowhere.” (Marcus, 1995, p. 112).

I have been an embedded observer of the particular Internet culture I intend to study since the

point at which I began blogging in 2006, and have openly performed and articulated my research

interests within this networked culture since early 2010. It is important to me that I am located

within the terrain being mapped, not only as an auto-ethnographic subject but as a part of the

networks of other research participants. This is, as previously stated, in part to avoid what

Haraway calls the god-trick (1991) or the illusion of infinite vision and the view from nowhere.

However, in locating my self within this study I am also attempting to create a space in which I

can be called to account both on the terms of the theoretical principles my research espouses and

by my own networked publics and the larger social media spheres in which they operate.

A second orientation of this investigation will focus not on the minutiae of daily practices,

but on the broader discursive trajectories of social media over time. While day-to-day practices

will be a key site of investigation in the research study, practitioners' perceptions of change and

shift in relation to time will also be central to the study and to the dissertation. Social media and

its attendant practices are a relatively new phenomenon, but nonetheless have specific histories

and trajectories, and are embedded and enmeshed with the contemporary culture of

postmodernity. Certain versions or performances of identity are more privileged within this

culture than others: Alice Marwick (2010) points out that “we prize performative social

skills...the path to advancement rewards extroversion, the ability to synthesize information into

bite-size chunks, and public-relations finesses. In a highly capitalist, highly service-oriented

economy, this cultural logic encourages neoliberal subjectivity” (p. 294). Digital sociality's

relationship to capital and neoliberalism will be one of the threads I follow across locations and

theories in this multi-sited ethnographic mapping process.


Genealogies

In addition to ethnography, Foucauldian genealogy will inform my methodological

approach. Foucault described genealogy as “effective history” (Foucault, 1984, p. 88), or a

situated, contingent mode of inquiry which challenges the teleological tendencies of traditional

history by tracing “a profusion of entangled events” (Foucault, 1984, p. 89.) It cultivates “the

details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault, 1984, p. 80), and emphasizes

the mundane, the non-linear, and the disparate. As social networks like Twitter are frequently

derided precisely for being mundane, non-linear, and disparate or incoherent, they seem rich

fodder for a genealogical investigation.

My intent is to use genealogy to investigate and critique the dominant cultural notions of

what social media do, both in their trivializing and their salvation-focused narratives. I will argue

in part that the narratives that circulate within popular culture about social networks and social

media function as what Foucault called technologies of the self, “techniques that permit

individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies,

their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct” (1994, p. 177). These act as the

suggested or prescribed means by which individuals in our culture can come to know themselves.

Mitchell Dean, in Governmentality: Power & Rule in Modern Society (2010) calls genealogy a

“diagnostic of the present problematizing taken-for-granted assumptions” (p. 3). While I will

interrogate and problematize the claim – and even the possibility – of “knowing” ourselves, I

will also show ways in which blogging and social networking have fulfilled that function. I hope

to identify and challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions that circulate in my own

social networks about what our practices mean, and to construct an account of the formation of


these values and practices in history; to write into being a diagnostic of how identity has come to

operate within our social media present.

This diagnostic tracing will entail unpacking discourses of identity and capital and

neoliberalism, and mapping their trails within the data that emerges from the research study. In

keeping with the spirit of genealogy and of Lather's poststructuralist leanings, it is intended to

remain methodologically and epistemologically wary of any definitive claims of diagnosis.

It is also intended, at the same time, to raise questions about how the practices of

networked cyborgs have come to be understood. Drawing again from Barad's agential realism, in

which any act of observation makes a “cut” between what is included and excluded from what is

being considered and thus creates practices – what Barad calls apparatuses – my examination of

practices may offer insight into the ways “cuts” around cyborg selves and digital sociality have

been produced. Barad claims that this process is how the divisions between “the social and the

scientific, the human and the nonhuman, nature and culture” are constituted (Barad, 2007, p.

169), making it “possible to perform a genealogical accounting of the material-discursive

practices by which these important distinctions are produced” (ibid).

Reflexivity and Diffraction

I will want my work to engage with Guba & Lincoln's (2005) seven new criteria of

research quality, rooted in an epistemology/ethics nexus. In approaching this research, I

understand the concept of ethics to mean accountability, both to the other networked cyborgs

who participate in my ethnography, and to our respective stories and to the networked publics in

which those stories circulate. Because digital sociality is participatory, always connected to

conversations and communities, I consider myself accountable as a researcher to represent

participants' accounts in ways that ring true for the many people already familiar with them. This


will mean not just sharing and co-constructing the research with participants but with our

respective networks: crowdsourcing resonance, as it were. It will mean being careful to frame the

aspects of the research that are not my own story particularly mindfully, and respecting feedback.

It will mean being concerned with what my research might mean for others. As I see it, an ethical

stance towards my work is one in which I am never, in my own mind, the sole speaker nor the

sole arbiter of the story I aim to tell.

Rigour in this ethnography and autoethnography will mean reflexivity, both endogenous

and referential (May, 2000). Endogenous reflexivity is the examination of the ways in which

communities constitute their social reality, how they are constructed ontologically, as lifeworlds.

In this case, since I am a member of the lifeworlds of blogging, Twitter, MOOCs, and Facebook,

and since the particular discursive phenomena I will explore are all central to my own

participation in those lifeworlds, it will be important to me that my research come to what May

(2000) would call a reliable understanding of what is being studied and re/presented.

Referential reflexivity is the study of relations and positionality, between researcher and

researched (May, 2000). Part of referential reflexivity involves an exploration of imbalances of

power between researcher and researched (May, 1998): to this aspect of the research I suspect I

will want to bring a Foucauldian lens. While I will not be in the traditional ethnographic position

of researching the Other, the power relations of being the primary researcher and speaker will be

important for me to grapple with. It is possible that the analysis may raise issues that the

ethnography participants are not comfortable with me discussing, or may raise disagreements

between us regarding how I perceive and present their extant blog texts and their performances

of subjectivities. If this happens, I need to be open to dealing with it in a forthright manner, both

with the participants themselves and openly in my accounts of the research.


I also need to deal with myself in the same forthright manner, where possible. Since the

work will involve interrogating my own texts, I will need to be conscious of myself not just as

inquirer and respondent in this research, but as a fluid self whose awareness and perception of a

given post's topic may have been different at the time of writing than they are now. Part of my

commitment to reflexivity will involve an openness to narrative and analytic multiplicity: to the

exploration of the messy and sometimes conflicting spaces of not knowing and of bearing

witness from which both my blog writing and my scholarship draw their motivation. As a

qualitative study, this research does not aim for generalizability but for description of the local

knowledges of participants: both similarities and differences will be of interest in the data

analysis process.

This study is intended to scaffold a critically reflexive space within which participants

can consider their social media performances. It also aims to go beyond reflexivity to Haraway's

(1992) and Barad's (2007) concepts of diffraction, or the mapping “of where differences appear”

(Haraway, 1992, p. 17). Performative accounts of self frequently emphasize reflexivity, from

Giddens (1991) through Judith Butler's efforts to extend the limits of reflexivity by thinking

about the self beyond the dichotomy of sex and gender (1990). But Barad's posthumanist

performativity suggests that the limits of reflexivity reify meanings and are inherently about

representations and finding accurate representations. Diffraction, on the other hand, takes up

knowing as a material practice, and emphasizes both differences and relationalities (Barad, 2007,

p. 89).

As Haraway suggests, diffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to

reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection is about

mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference...


Haraway notes that “[reflexivity or reflection] invites the illusion of essential,

fixed position, while [diffraction] trains us to more subtle vision (1992).

(Barad, 2007, p. 29)

Barad argues that “a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other

materials in ways that reflexive methodologies are not” (2007, p. 29). She notes that with

diffraction, the object and subject are not fixed in advance: my attempt to consider the networked

cyborg as a hybrid and possibly intra-active self is an attempt to move beyond the binary

boundaries imposed by conventional approaches to the idea of people (subjects) using social

media technologies (objects). I want to design my research questions so as to investigate, as

much as possible, the mutual constitution of human, technologies, and capital within the

networked cyborg self.

Diffractive methodologies are also a “critical practice for making a difference in the

world” (Barad, 2007, p. 90) and a “commitment to understanding which differences matter, how

they matter, and for whom” (ibid). This focus on difference will guide my approach to the

mapping process of my research: I want, in Barad's words, to “take account of the fact that we

too are part of the world's differential becoming...that practices of knowing are specific material

engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” (2007, p. 91). In working publicly

within my network to draw out and collaboratively re-frame the practices by which we perform

ourselves, I intentionally engage in research I both recognize and hope will reconfigure those

practices and their becoming.

Auto-ethnography

I will be one of the participants in my own research, thus locating the work within the

realms both of participatory ethnography and auto-ethnography. Increasingly my professional,


personal, and academic “selves” intersect within the mediated publics of my social networking

platforms. Likewise, they intersect increasingly with facets of my embodied identity as my

performances of identity within digital networked publics lead to in-person speaking

engagements and opportunities. Moreover, whole facets of my self and my embodied history

have been made speakable within digital sociality – particularly my blog – in ways that have

been meaningful and resonant and life-changing for me. And yet I struggle with my practices and

with the pressures of scale and context collapse that accompany my participation and produsage.

The study will be ethnographic in the sense that I am a regular user of social media

embedded in the peer networks from which participants will be drawn, and at the time of the

study will have spent months and years already engaged in observing and engaging with the

practices under investigation. It will be auto-ethnographic in the sense that I will investigate my

own practices, strategies, and meaning-making within social media spaces in parallel with those

of the other participants.

To engage in an autoethnographic examination of my own writing of my self does not

necessarily mean that I believe I – or any subject – can write the self in any authoritative sense.

Susanne Gannon (2006) notes, “Poststructural theories problematize taken-for-granted humanist

notions of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and self-articulation” (p. 474). The idea that

subjects can speak for themselves is undermined by the partiality that poststructuralism – and

Haraway's cyborg – emphasize as the always-situated condition of the self: “although auto-

ethnographic research seems to presume that the subjects can speak (for) themselves,

poststructural theories disrupt this presumption and stress the (im)possibilities of writing the self

from a fractured and fragmented subject position” (Gannon, 2006, p. 475).


My auto-ethnographic contribution to the research process will consist of a series of

historical blog posts that span the years 2006-2012, and a genealogical narrative examining these

posts as assemblages of shifting relations in terms of capital, enrolment in networks, and

Foucault’s “techniques of the self”; identity work opened up during the heyday of blogging.

These posts will offer a window into the period of shift between blogging practices and norms

and those of social media. I will explore the details of my own posts and consider the codified

practices which brought them into being. I will examine the ways in which they enabled me to

know and/or be a self I could not have been without them.

Gannon notes that auto-ethnography has tended to be located within the reflexive turn, at

least in its post-structuralist incarnations: “Autoethnographic writing within a post-structuralist

frame leans toward the ancient imperative to care for the self in a constant practice of reflexive

attention to the past, present, and future moments of subjectification within complex and

contradictory discursive arenas” (2006, p. 480). My hope is to extend beyond that reflexivity to a

diffractive auto-ethnographic methodology: attending to the material as well as discursive arenas

of my own subjectification as a networked cyborg. Barad suggests the following specifics:

attending to fine details in dynamic relationality to each other, placing “understandings generated

from different (inter)disciplinary practices in conversation with one another” (2007, p. 92-93). I

will be doing the latter throughout all aspects of the research process, but my auto-ethnographic

contribution in particular will consist of attending to the fine details of my historical blog posts –

as relates to perceptions of identity within the network and emerging practices and

understandings – and keeping those in conversation with my genealogical narrative of those

understandings. I expect that both will be altered by the diffractive relationship engaged in.

Methods:


Research objectives:

1. To explore the day-to-day identity practices of networked cyborgs - entities with deep,

sustained engagement in producing, performing, and sharing traceable content within networked

publics - and the meanings they ascribe to their digital sociality practices.

2. To consider the effects of differing platform designs and affordances, social norms, and

assemblages of power relations in shaping the performative practices of subjects within

networked publics, within conventional higher education practices, and within xMOOCs.

3. To examine the ways in which capital – economic, social, symbolic, and cultural – circulates

within networked cyborg practices and analyze the implications of these assemblages for higher

education as a field.

The study will investigate the cultural phenomenon of digital sociality and identity in

networked publics from a post-critical ethnographic and auto-ethnographic perspective, using

participant observation, interviews, and document analysis. In keeping with the traditions of

ethnography, my research role will involve participation "in people's daily lives for an extended

period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions; in fact

collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues" (Hammersley and Atkinson,

1983, p. 2). In divergence from the traditions of ethnography, however, much of this

participation will be always already part of my own daily practice within the digital networks

under investigation. This is a factor of digital research that stands counter to conventional

academic research practices of legitimation, but at the same time opens up one of the key

potentialities of research within networked publics: the possibility of participatory engagement

of subjects. Navigating this terrain will require conscious and sustained identification of the

processes and assemblages of power relations by which symbolic capital and legitimation are


understood both within networked cyborg circles and within the academy, since both are the

audience for this work.

Sampling and Participation

Preliminary public conversations discussing and shaping this research study and the

larger dissertation have been ongoing on my blog(s) for over a year. I have introduced the ideas

of social media identity, digital sociality, and networked publics, and facilitated a week-long

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) session on six key aspects of digital identities. All of

these conversations have been iterative and exploratory, inviting input from members of the

public on terminology, practices, and general fitness of ideas. This is simply part of my own

networked cyborg practice of openness: I find value and connection in doing much of my

preliminary thinking “out loud.”

The network across which this thinking out loud has occurred has been quite broad. I

maintain or have contributed to a number of blogs, some of which are personal and fully my own,

and others which are collaborative and published and republished broadly within higher

education circles. I also “retired” or closed my first – and until that point, primary – personal

blog in June 2012 after more than six years. Its 525 posts narrated and explored identity, memory,

grief, and parenthood publicly: it got approximately 6-7,000 visitors per month during the years

2009-2012, when I began keeping statistics. In January of 2011, I began a “theoryblog” to

document some of my education- and research-related ideas, and on which I write specifically

about social media, MOOCs, and other aspects of my learning and work. I also post links to my

work on Facebook, thus expanding my sharing of content beyond circles of networked cyborgs.

All my work has been openly circulated as within the public domain.


During 2010-2012, across my own two sites, my posts specifically about social media

and digital identity together generated over 750 comments and citations, in addition to many

untallied comments and conversations via Twitter and Facebook. These public posts exploring

my potential research areas and inviting contributions and input led to a number of regular users

of multiple social media platforms expressing interest in or volunteering to be part of my

impending research. Some of these volunteers are well-known to me within my networks, others

are not. There has, however, been no formal call inviting participation in my research yet.

In designing that call, I need to weigh carefully the multiple contexts in which I hope my

research will be taken up. My research paradigm is qualitative, and generalizability of the

practices of networked cyborgs to all users of the Internet is neither a goal of my work nor

appropriate to its claims. At the same time, I am cognizant of the tendency of networks towards

homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001) or similarity between ties, and thus am

inclined to perhaps incorporate some element of probability sampling or randomness within my

process. I will begin from the confines of my own networks, however. Once REB approval is in

place through my institution, I will put out a formal call for participants within my networks.

The call itself will outline the participatory qualities that define networked cyborgs, or

people performing as both users and producers of content in non-anonymous networked publics.

Three common and interconnected features are key:

1. public production and sharing of content (as part of the performance of)

2. a digitally-traceable and relatively coherent identity over time (across)

3. multiple digital platforms, at least one of which may be considered a personal or home

space (predominantly a blog, but could also be a Tumblr, Youtube channel, Facebook

page – as opposed to account – or Pinterest account, for example.)


Regular ongoing produsage across at least two social network platforms and engagement in one

of what Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production, in addition to some connection with or

experience in cMOOCs will be the actual criteria I ask respondents for.

I will then share the call for participants across my digital networks. I will use my blog,

the xEdbook blog which I write for, my Twitter network, and the MOOC groups I'm a member

of on Facebook as channels to begin the process. I will ask my network outright to share the call

with others they think might be interested or appropriate for the research: in this sense, both

convenience and modified snowball sampling will be employed. I will make my Twitter handle

and email available as part of the call and encourage interested networked cyborgs to contact me.

At that point in the process, however, I will take the expressions of interest and subject all those

which qualify to a random draw from which six participants will selected. I will then privately

invite potential participants to be part of the research study, emphasizing that they are free to

decline without penalty, guilt, or diminishment of goodwill. These users are themselves

connected to diverse and disparate networks of their own, thus whatever their response, I may

additionally ask them if they know of other suitable participants to whom they'd be willing to

forward the blog call.

Six participants – in addition to myself – will be sought, for a total of seven. Though the

sample will be small, my aim is for the group of participants to speak from a diversity of

positions in terms of geography, status in social media circles, and raced, classed, and gendered

identities where possible. If I am lucky enough to get a broad selection of potential participants,

therefore, I will separate them according to categories of gender, geography, race, and any other

visible attributes before drawing names. I would like, if participants are forthcoming, to have at


least four of six participants with experience working in higher education and/or participating in

a MOOC.

When participants are selected, I will notify them and the formal invitation will be issued.

If they agree to participate, I will follow or friend them on all networks they deem a regular part

of their social media practice, so that I can begin to get a sense for their milieu, interactions, and

identities performed.

Process

Research will be conducted primarily online, via email and direct/personal messaging,

Skype calls, and the gathering of public records of participants' practices, engagements, and

performances of identity within social media spaces. Face-to-face interviews may also be part of

the process if proximity and availability allows.

The scope of the research will be both historical, exploring participants’ recollections and

narratives of shifting practices, discourses and assemblages since their entry into the social media

sphere, and intensive, detailing the specific practices of one particular 24-hour period chosen by

the participant him or herself. The intent is to enable thorough and sustained investigation of

day-to-day identity practices and their meanings, but also to open the possibility for Foucauldian

genealogical counter-histories of identity online to emerge.

Step 1:

Participants will be asked to identify in writing the social media platforms that they use

on a regular basis, and to give a short description of how they perceive and use each platform.

Step 2:

Participants will be asked to choose a 24-hour period for which their records of

participation across social media platforms will be closely interrogated in the ensuing interview.


Participants will be asked to provide screen captures and/or other records for interactions not

publicly visible or coherent. Activities within shared networks will be already visible to me, but

variant perspectives on accounts may also be forthcoming and may be interesting to investigate.

Step 3:

Each participant will be interviewed, either face-to-face or via Skype, about his or her

practices as reflected on the 24 hour record and since s/he began using social media. Both a

detailed close record of day-to-day practices and a genealogical narrative about practices over

time will be sought, and specific questions about MOOC experiences will be asked where

relevant. The research seeks to learn how users understand and strategize their own practices of

identity performance, reputation, and relational connections, and how the different affordances

and structures of various social media platforms affect practices. Norms and discourses within

communities, relationships to monetization, and how the chosen 24-hour record reflects

individual users' typical practices and norms of practice within his or her networks will be

discussed. Interviews will be recorded.

The research instrument for the interviews will be a semi-structured series of questions

related to practices, relationships, networks, reputation, and identity. Day-to-day practices and

long-term genealogical observations will be explored. How relations assemble will be the

primary thrust of the interviews, and questions will be asked that try to make those relations and

the practices around them visible. Conversations will be encouraged to emerge and diverge from

the interview script.

Step 4:

After the interviews, participants will be invited to blog or email any written

contributions they'd like to make reflecting further on their social media practices, participation,


and identities. They will also be asked to identify any posts in their blog archives that take up

issues surrounding social media performance or that represent contributions to participatory

cMOOCs.

Step 5:

The researcher will then explore the blog posts identified, looking specifically at

narratives and discourses of identity, platforms and capital, plus any contributions to MOOCs.

Including the researcher's own blog, it is expected that there would be at least 20,000-25,000

words of written, non-interview data. This corpus of posts, all in the public domain, will span the

years 2006-2012. The texts will provide an additional window into the shifting identity practices

of participants over time, and allow investigation into the discourses and material practices of

identity construction and performance represented. This data will be combined and triangulated

with the interview data for detail.

It will also be explored in light of my field notes and the various concepts and theories

explored in this proposal. All the preliminary work that has led to my identification of the

networked cyborg as a subject has been based in sustained if informal participant observation.

When my proposal gains approval of my institution’s Research Ethics Board, I will begin the

process of making formal field notes in the course of my daily networked cyborg interactions.

The auto-ethnographic narrativizing and analysis of my own posts will follow a similar

process to that of other study participants but will be treated in the emerging dissertation text

under separate headings from the broader mapping journey. I intend to intersperse the text with

auto-ethnographic inserts and also with brief case studies of particular public blogs and network

events which illustrate some of the analytic points being raised. All of the texts under

examination in the research will be in the public domain.



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