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Bridging Worlds Conference 2008, SingaporeDay One Track TwoSpeaker 4
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Agency: library clients in online social spacesAgency: library clients in online social spaces
Bridging Worlds Conference, Singapore, October 2008Bridging Worlds Conference, Singapore, October 2008
Bonna JonesBonna JonesSenior Lecturer, RMIT UniversitySenior Lecturer, RMIT University
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Online social spacesOnline social spaces
• ‘rich user experiences’
• ‘architecture of participation’
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new online social spacesnew online social spaces
our understanding of these could grow out of earlier research on social spaces and how they operate:
• Making Narratives• Making Social Spaces• Making identities
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My interestMy interest
• as a practising librarian in a university I developed an interest in some ideas that were being researched by our clients
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Philosophy of complexityPhilosophy of complexity
• Emergence of a science of complexity
• Transdisciplinary, but also accounts for the achievements of the humanities
• ‘being’ and ‘becoming’
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Arran GareArran Gare
• Gare “Nature regarded as mere product is for us an object; but as productivity, it is for us subject” (2000, p. 336)
• Gare “a conception of the world in which humans, understood as conscious and self-conscious, free, creative and essentially social agents able to struggle to understand the world and themselves, could be seen to have evolved from nature” (2004, p. 2)
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actionsactions
• strings of actions• networks of action• processes• hierarchies of action• systems of action
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Making NarrativesMaking Narratives
“the boat came in with the morning catch of fish”
“the cats sat on the sea wall”
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Narrative as an actionNarrative as an action
Prestory (Prefiguration)
Story (Configuration)
Restory (Refiguration)
This is a spiral that loops back on itself and meaning is an achievement of its process. Transfiguration?
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ProductProduct
• Narrative
• Qualities of narrative (from ephemera right through to grand narratives; always in time)
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EventsEvents
• Carr (1986)• Events are already in a form that can be
described as ‘narrative’ • Action takes place in time and has both temporal
and practical order
Order understood as:• Closure (beginnning, middle and end)• Departure and arrival, or departure and return• Means and end• Suspension and resolution• Problem and solution
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CreativityCreativity
• Defined as a process:
• Narrative operates as an action of synthesis or a ‘grasping together’ of the heterogeneous within language.
• With narrative, the semantic innovation lies in the inventing of another work of synthesis - a plot. By means of the plot, goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. (Ricoeur 1984 , p. ix)
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Hierarchy of actionHierarchy of action
• Symbol → Word• Activity is interpretation• Sentence → Narrative• Activity is emplotment• Narrative → Library• Activity is collecting
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Cats and FishermenCats and Fishermen
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Making social spaceMaking social space
• social space – an invisible reality that cannot be shown, but nevertheless organises our actions
• the economy of symbolic transactions
• acquiring capital (social, cultural, economic, and symbolic)
• time (ongoing in time - sustained by a central argument; tradition)
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Levels of actionLevels of action
• word/sentence/narrative/genre/library
meaning is created in a story “I am….”
• person/collective/field
social space is created “I belong….”
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ProductProduct
• Narrative (from ephemera right through to grand narratives)
• Social space (‘my life’, ‘our group’, ‘our organisation’)
• always occurs within time
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Online social spaceOnline social space
• Social space
• Narrative-making space
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Evolution of social spacesEvolution of social spaces
evening campfire - a vital social space in prehistory
the town square or marketplace
the public library
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PowerPower
• Freedom, creativity• Non-nested hierarchies• Level of observation
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• Levels in the hierarchy of action constrain lower levels, more or less
• Lower levels may be able to ‘act back’
• Nested hierarchies that wholly constrain vs those with some freedom for action
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• ‘rich user experiences’
• ‘architecture of participation’
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• When we talk about ‘rich user experiences’ and an ‘architecture of participation’, these ideas about narrative, social space, identity and constraint are helpful I think. They give us a basis for thinking about the kinds of new social spaces we are now creating and how these will be an extension of what we already do in libraries. Indeed, I also think that librarians are beautifully placed to understand these dynamics, where other professions are not.
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“With each new integrative level, societies have become more differentiated and hierarchically organized, generating mutually amplifying co-evolutionary systems within these societies. Co-evolution has generated further specialist structures mostly associated with the regulation of society and the means for this regulation” (Gare, 2002 p 9)
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Onine social spacesOnine social spaces
• As products are more interactive• Verbal and graphic• Still and moving• Games
• Platforms such as VastPark http://www.vastpark.com/