Belonging - Believing - Behaving

I am moving house next week. In the process of packing and finding documents to change address I came across something that I wrote when I was 19 (that's 19 years ago).  
At that time I had been involved in a Youth group/movement that sprang up in Gloucestershire called 'Holy Disorder'. Our purpose? To help churches understand how to reach and and engage with young people. Not only did we run regular week night 'services', we also traverse the country in a minibus and took our messages to others. That was while I was 16 - 18 years old. Then, one of the churches we visited asked if I would be a youth worker there for a year. I was about to go to Durham to study Theology. But I took a year out and got paid bed and board and £100 a month to help youth work in the community.

At the end of that time, I wrote a reflection on my time. I did not realise I still had this, or that I was so reflective back then as a teenager. However, I wanted to share some of the things I wrote, as the messages mirror those I am currently promoting/reflecting on. My spirituality may have changed along the way, but the message about belonging and relationships is at the core of our humanity.

" The heart of the message is love. The heart of youth work is love in action. We must be messengers of compassion and channels of love and peace. The most important thing will always be relationships. The interaction of people will always teach more than words.
Belonging. Believing. Behaving. I believe these are the three important stages of discipleship, especially with young people. A person will find it very difficult to believe, if they do not belong, and until they believe, it will be difficult to get them to behave. Once again the initial emphasis is on belonging - relationships.

Children want to copy and become like adults. Therefore the greatest lesson we can teach is behaviour and attitude. If we project behaviour which is not attempting to be a model of our values, then what are we teaching our children? 

So maybe my work has at times eemed 'unstructured' or not largely 'teaching' based. This is because I believe that if you have the relationship right, then the teaching bit follows"

That 19 year old my have been young, but I think those core values have developed over the next 19 years, and is probably why I believe that values in action make a difference. For me faith was never about words and the message I took from Sunday school wasn't about believing dogma or the bible. The message I have carried with me is that people will judge you on how you behave. Therefore if you want to make a difference, you do that through action and not through words alone. 

Social networking, ethics and exploring boundary management

Developing best practice for the small world. (Lannin and Scott, 2013)

The Lannin and Scott (2013) paper is focused on the psychology community and how to navigate social media by interpreting the APA Ethical Guide in a different context. This paper is a brilliant read and spoke to me about the personal professional context. In particular it reflecting on the opportunities and challenges that are presenting in social media, as similar to those that small rural communities face. Close contact, small worlds, means that it is very difficult to separate out personal and professional completely. The paper sees this a ‘small world ethics’, and situated the dilemmas created where younger members don’t realise there are dilemmas, but older members can’t help as they have no experience of the technology. By drawing upon experiences of navigating in small rural communities, then they could draw lessons in how to navigate in the social networking world.This resonated with Scouting communities for me. Often part of the communities becoming extended families. How do we maintain boundaries when boundaries collide? They say it is naïve of us to think that our ‘private’ lives will never intersect with our professional lives.

Social networking, like rural communities, increase the incidental contact, self-disclosure (remember we said that social media by its nature is a self-disclosure environment) and multiple relationships. Small world ethical thinking means we need to have a heightened awareness that the environment may produce some ethical dilemmas and boundary violations.  So we need to assess the risks and rewards that online activity might have, but we (talking about psychologists) may also need to be upfront and honest about the potential roles, set expectations from the start.

The paper ends by discussing the potential for good practice. This includes boundary management, technical competence and professional/personal liability. It’s a good idea to have formal social networking policies in place, so that both parties know the terms of use, expectations and what they will and won’t do, bearing in mind informed consent (e.g. – the psychologist will not search for the client online). They consider potentially avoiding multiple online relationships with clients and maybe having professional and personal profiles. They also say that psychologists should develop technical competence before engaging with social media, just as they would understand the cultural content in any work they undertake.

So this paper was interesting for many reasons but there are two takeaways for me. The guidance and advise advocated is very similar to that that I give to volunteers. Understand, develop skills, and recognise the risks. More importantly, there is a lesson here about the fact that in life, sometimes there will be boundary violations – how we manage and deal with these is important. So maybe some of the messages that need to be added in, are about what happens if you think you have crossed a line. How to you deal with that.

What is a digital persona (de Kerckhove and Almedia, 2013)

The paper identifies the core identity, the person, and then persona, which are the roles, relationships, attributes and identifiers of our person. And these aspects are persona;, social, institutional, legal, scientific and technological.    

“..society, experts, institutions and groups are still in a fragile unconscious, or pre-conscious phase, regarding the nature of the digital persona; ethical and mature management of its features and the need to develop more comprehensive, ethical and friendly self-management tools."

Once again we see that digital communication changes private individuality into networked and connected community.

When worlds collide in Cyberspace (Ollier-Malaterre and Rothbard, 2013)

The final paper I looked at picks up on the idea of boundary management, and looked at the different ways that we manage social media from the other side. How does personal information effect others professional views of us. More can be found at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/social-media-social-minefield/ . Another fascinating read and it starts to get ‘under the bonnet’ of how interactions online can effect others perceptions of us, and our identities. The paper points out that we haven’t yet figured out how to manage our digital persona and there are no comprehensive frameworks to draw on. This is good news in some ways, as it means all those discussions I have been having at work, are still very much in their infancy.

The paper recognising that there can be a collision between professional and personal lives and social media use require boundary management and identity negotiation through the opportunities and challenges present, especially because of self-disclosure. This is about the consequences of the personal on the professional and it was good to read some of the positive effects rather than focusing on the negative!. The paper identifies four types of management behaviours: Open, audience, content, hybrid.

Boundary theory in social networking is driven by preferences for segmentation (how we divide up different aspects of our persona) versus the integration of personal and professional identities and our motives for self-enhancement or self-verification. Basically, when you come down to it, social media is all about ego, and so it focuses on what we want to tell people about us, or the identity we want to create – consciously or unconsciously). The paper also explained how the notion of boundary management came about in the 1960s where there was a clear idea that professional and personal were separate. Once again this adds some understanding in to why some of our older adults find social media so strange, as the concept of sharing personally information is not one that they grew up with. However social networking has become a key forum for developing and maintaining relationships, especially if as me, you are a relatively isolated practitioner in your context.

The danger is, that our self-disclosures online are an archive of information that is not tailored to a specific context or a particular relationship or situation, and so it’s original context and meaning can be lost. Here’s the outcome of their research:

de Kerckhove, D., & de Almeida, C. M. (2013). What is a digital persona?. Technoetic Arts: A Journal Of Speculative Research, 11(3), 277-287.

Lannin, D. G., & Scott, N. A. (2013). Social networking ethics: Developing best practices for the new small world. Professional Psychology: Research And Practice, 44(3), 135-141.

Ollier - Malaterre, A., Rothbard, N. P., & BERG, J. M. (2013). When worlds collide in cyberspace:How Boundary work in online social networks impacts professional relationships. Academy Of Management Review, 38(4), 645-669. 

Culture, Society and Identity

“..values are the primary motivational construct that influences almost every aspect of human life, guiding us to consider what is desirable then energising and directing behaviour towards attaining these goals..” (Suke, 2009)

I wanted to explore further the ideas around cultural identity and ethics, as this linked to my project premise about taking a values-based approach to digital inclusion. My assumption was that many of the discussions about identity, trust and safety are, and will continue to happen, but what we need to do is find the right ‘conversational frameworks’ with which to have these discussion. Originally I thought that I could just point people in the right direction and give them some top tips. But it has become clearer the more I have researched, that these are decisions that people have to make for themselves, but you can help them to have these conversations.

Suke (2009) paper was an interesting look at male cultural identity with students in china, and how the digital world might be changing their cultural values. Chen describes values as objects, conditions or characteristics that members of that society consider important. This is interesting in a Chinese context, as cultural values were formed from the traditional culture of china and the increasing globalised culture of the online world. Therefore these young men were interacting in two potentially different social environments and so it would be expected that this might alter their culture values.

The idea of cultural identity is also pick up in a paper by Cullen (2009), researching ideas of identity and information privacy in the context of New Zealand. Cullen notes that the concerns about privacy are different for different groups and reflect the cultural values and concepts of personal identity that people have. This difference in privacy concerns is also the basis for Lorenzen-Huber et al’s (2010) research on privacy and older aged adults. Their motivation was understanding whether privacy frameworks should be different for older aged adults, as their perceptions will be influenced by different psychosocial motivations.  They say that studies suggest that older adults are unconcerned about privacy related to data-collection and sharing and that their perceived risk is lower than the actual risk. They explored a five part privacy framework using a variety of practical experiments with older people.

• Seclusion (right to be left alone)
• Autonomy (right to self-determination)
• Property (right to determine use and dissemination of personal data)
• Spatial construct (physical and virtual boundaries)
• Data protection

They found that older adults were more concerned with emotional connections to family and friends, but particularly focused on independence and autonomy. Therefore they balanced privacy preferences against their desire for independent living, personal autonomy and satisfying relationships, and had little concern around the five areas of privacy. If devices were perceived as useful then they generally viewed them as acceptable, but they wanted to control the decision making.

What this starts to show us is that we need to understand identity and privacy as not universal. The concerns and approaches are not only different according to culture, but also to age. Therefore discussions and work with volunteers might need to be approached differently. One size won’t fit all, and the risks to one group may be different to those of another because of their perceptions.

The digital world and youth culture.

Discussions about the fragmented self are scattered around literature about the digital world and culture. Besley (2011) reminds us of Foucault’s view that our identities are not fixed but fluid. They change and develop over time in a fluid, dynamic and creative process. As Besley is reflecting on creative media and how this contributes to the wider ‘knowledge’ economy, the paper naturally explores identity with a personal and public dimension, and how the public dimension shapes our behaviour. Besleys notes that the digital identity can be more fragmented and more temporal, so we need to manage it more, although we tend to put our best side forward. Youth culture is often situated within the online world of content creation and participatory culture (affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving and circulations), and much of this makes us ‘media producers’.

KImmon’s (2014) focuses in on new media and the literacies that ensue. We need to have an understanding of the relationship between online participation and identity and also how the structure of social media spaces influence and shape identity. Gradinaru talked about ‘context collapse’ in the sense that it is hard for us to figure out what context we are in, but as Belk pointed out, social media context afford certain characteristics, like more self-disclosure. Therefore, according to Kimmons social networking sites have their own cultures and norms that force us to behave in certain ways, making it difficult to express ‘authentic’ identity. It is also easier to misinterpret identity through online information as it often doesn’t go deeper into the whys and whats of what we are expressing. Therefore (back to Foucault), identity is fluid and shaped by the context of the media we participate in. Which is not a new idea, as we behave differently at work, as we might at home, and so forth.

“…we need to empower learners to participate in SNS in ways that are meaningful and truthful for them, but do not reduce identity to the strict confines of the medium”. (Kimmons, 2014)

Besley, T. (2011). Digitised youth: Constructing identities in the creative knowledge economy. Annals Of Spiru Haret University, Journalism Studies, 12(1), 9-22.

Cullen (2009) Culture, identity and information privacy in the age of digital government.  Online Information Review, 33(3), 405-421.

Lorenzen-Huber, L., Boutain, M., Camp, L. J., Shankar, K., & Connelly, K. H. (2011). Privacy, Technology, and Aging: A Proposed Framework. Ageing International, 36(2).

Kimmons, R. (2014). Social Networking Sites, Literacy, and the Authentic Identity Problem. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning, 58(2), 93-98.

Suke, C. (2009). College Male Students' Cultural Value Identity in the New Media World. China Media Research, 5(4), 41-46.

A further quest for identity

I have been continuing my exploration of identity, after some carefully worded searching on the Open University library (not sure what I am going to do without it). The next few blog posts are a summary of some of the papers that I read on my long train journey yesterday to see family.

The Extended Self in a Digital World (Belk, 2013)

Russell Belk is a professor in business and marketing and his discussion focuses on how possessions are an extended part of our identity. This paper was so fascinating that I even discussed it over lunch. It is interesting to come to discussions about identity from a different place, and his paper looks at rewriting an earlier work about possessions, and how digital possession might change how we view and create identity. The digital world means that many of our possessions are now ‘invisible’ (like music, film), and what was once private collections has now become public. The paper discusses whether that means that we no longer view possessions in the same way, or does it mean that we alter how we use and view these possessions as a wider part of our identity.

The key concept is that possessions serve as markers for others to form impressions of us, and are cues for individual and collective meaning. Belk notes that digital good can change our behaviour. They can stimulate consumer desires, and help actualise possible daydreams or impossible fantasies (by becoming a wizard in world of Warcraft or building a village), but they also serve to facilitate experimentation. However, the problem with digital possessions is the uncertainty over ownership. Belk asks if their roles change when we turn off the device, but I think this is no different from the collections you keep in the attic, or the music and films that sit on shelves.

This prompted discussion during lunch around how digital things might have change our own personal possession. We are moving house soon and have started to ‘declutter’. We have ‘got rid of’ a number of dvds (from a collection of over 500), books and cds. Several years ago I said that I would never have a kindle – now – I wouldn’t be without it. I have come to realise that my love of books wasn’t the physical object, but the places that they took me. I still feel the same emotions towards reading and treasure some of the stories, but I don’t need to keep the physical book. I love my kindle and find that a physical book constrains me being able to just pop it in my bag for those odd moments. It’s the same with music. My whole music collection fits on a disk that fits in my phone. I have listened to more music in the last year than I did the previous ten years before. Why. Because it fits in my pocket, and I can play it whenever there is a moment. My walk to work everyday has afforded a great deal of opportunity to revisit albums from my youth, and long train journeys home from training weekends, let me rest my brain and listen to new albums.  So music suddenly has been repackaged and repurposed in my life. I guess this is about the fact that possession are extended parts of us, and it’s how we use it, rather than the physical presentation of it that is important. But what digital possessions have meant for me, is that I get to explore my heritage and discover new things that will potential help me reconfigure my identity for now.

Getting back to Belk, there are a number of other points he makes, which many others also make, about the natural of the digital world. Our representations of ourselves can be fictional (online games and virtual worlds) or real-life (blogs, forums and social media). What we have started doing more of, is sharing our possessions, as a way of enhancing our sense of self: self-portraiture, self-reflection, and self-confession. I really important point that I had not really consciously considered, but is acknowledged by many of the writers about digital identity, is that less face to face contact encourages more self-disclosure. And most social networks afford self-disclosure as the heart of their existence. Belk tells us that this means there is more self-revelation (and this is acceptable, in fact a necessity) , a loss of control, more shared digital possessions and aggregated self (there’s lots of little bits of us joined together) and a shared sense of space. It means that the construction of self is more social, and focus on affirming our existence in a social world, while building an ‘extended’ self. But it also means that we start to have a more distributed memory, where the digital world gives us digital clutter, as well as different narratives of self, and digital cues to our sense of past.

Belk, R. W. (2013). Extended self in a digital world. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477-500. [online] Available at: http://www.dies.uniud.it/tl_files/utenti/crisci/Belk%202013a.pdf

Exploring online identity - convergence of self

From Multitude to Convergence: Contemporary Trends in the Study of online Identity (Gradinaru, 2013)

This paper attempts to explore the changes in our understanding of identity, and how ‘technological domestication’ (the fact that the internet is a functional part of our everyday lives), has meant a convergence in the online/offline identity. Today our online identities are similar to our offline, as people want to be honest and direct, and because it would be incredibly difficult to manage multi-personalities now that it is easier for us to find ways of verifying people’s identities and that we have less control, sometimes, as a user. The information about us needs to fit together.

I remember reading a number of articles when I first started my Masters in Online and Distance Education about anonymity and identity and how the internet is changing behaviour. So this article, despite it being a difficult read, really spoke about the ways that technology use has changed and that for most people, honesty and ‘realistic’ portrayals of self are more important, especially in a networked age. Gradinaru takes us back to the early internet of the 1990s and how the multitude of possibilities and anonymity spoke to us of the freedom and liberty that the internet affords, and links in with postmodern ideas and multiple personalities.  ‘Self’ could be distributed and so we could have a portfolio of personalities and play different roles at the same time. Being able to explore numerous aspects of ourselves potentially led to tensions between our online and offline identities.

However the way we use the internet and technology itself has changed, especially with the advent of social media tools and platforms, meaning that the difficulty is now knowing which identity to us in which context (Rodogno, 2011). Or in fact knowing what context we are in. Rodogno introduces the idea of ‘content collapse’ in sense that the complexity of the platforms and services available to us make it difficult for us to determine which identity we are in, and so multiple audiences are suddenly in the same context.  Therefore as users it’s not surprising that we have started adopting a ‘imagined audience’ and lean towards shaping our online identity to that of our offline. Otherwise we have a great deal of work to do in ‘archiving’ and protecting our different personalities.

Online identity then, is about how we present ourselves to others, but also about how we perceive ourselves through our interaction with others. This the way we present ourselves online becomes a process of managing and constructing impressions, so that we can control how other perceives us. Therefore the internet is no longer a playground with which to construct different identities (although we still use the internet to explore different facets of identity), it becomes a way of ‘customising’ our identities, with symbolic markers that link back to the ‘real’.

How is this relevant to my project?

Many of our volunteers will be of a generation who lived through these debates in the 1990s, and may see the internet still as this ‘other’ place where people go to play and be someone or something they are not. The article reminds us that the way we use technology has changed. The more embedded it has become, the more people use it as a part of their everyday lives, and so their online identities will mirror the offline. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who create completing anonymous identities, and we know that some of the fears about safety come from the fear of not knowing who you are talking to. But it has become easier to verify identity. Because people are being ‘real’.

Thus if we want to help our volunteers with their trust issues, we can once again draw on our values. The way we behave and act offline should be the same as the way we behave online. The way we interact with strangers, should be the same. Just as we might be wary of the stranger on the bus, we should also be wary of the stranger wanting to be our friend on Facebook. Being ‘real’ about our identity makes it easier to manage our identity.

Gradinaru, C. (2013). From Multitude to Convergence: Contemporary Trends in the Study of Online Identity. Argumentum: Journal The Seminar Of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory & Rhetoric, 11(2), 95-108.

Rodogno, R. (2011). “Personal Identity Online”. Philosophy and Technology 25 (3): 309-328.

Binge studying......

A lovely picture of a squirrel to represent me binging, but also to provide some cute factor by way of an apology.

So we have had binge eating. Then binge entertainment (where you what the whole series in one day). As you know, I like to 'binge' study. This is through necessity rather than choice really. That's what time resources do. 

According to the urban dictionary binge studying is about cramming for a test, and is not useful. However, my binge studying is more about utilising my resources within a temporal context (time). I am breaking up study time by looking at forums, twitter and other students work.
So sorry, but I guess if you are binging - it's better to share it right?

Part two: exploring concept of digital inclusion

Social and Digital disadvantage (Helsper, 2008)

Helsper’s (2008) study explored the relationship between social and digital disadvantage using available empirical data. It is a comprehensive look at the links between digital and social engagement and focuses on the debates around socio-economic links to digital inclusion. The study picks up on the question about use – and asks does it matter that many households don’t use the internet?

Key findings

The report found that those in socially deprived areas were also least likely to have access to digital resources, and the analysis suggested that this had not been improving. However it points out that there are clear exceptions from the norm. These included the ‘unexpectedly engaged’, who tended to be younger, single, socially disadvantaged and certain ethnic groups. It also included the ‘unexpectedly disengaged’, who were those in more rural areas, older and unemployed.  The analysis highlighted that educational achievement, employment and rural access could affect engagement, but this was not necessarily because of access or skill. There were links found with the level at which people accessed technology and social isolation and economic disadvantage. Those who suffer specific social disadvantages were least likely to benefit from technology that could potentially help them (for example, those with poor education faced barriers to access education, the elderly faced a reduction in the likelihood of using social application).

Digital choice

Helsper introduces the idea of ‘digital choice’. This concept, I think, encapsulates the idea that just because you can go online, you do. Online initiatives that focus purely on access and digital services, forget about the support factors that are needed for social inclusion, which may help with engagement with technology. Attitude to technology are just as important as access quality and the access location.

This picks up on some of the categories that the Tinder foundation have highlighted:

Digitally Excluded – perceive they have no access

Digitally Dismissive – choose not to use, but have access and skills

Digitally Included – have the desire, access and skills

Digitally Determined – have the access but it is not readily available

Digital choice is driven by cultural factors and social context. This means that individuals may have positive and negative attitudes and we need to tackle these attitudes and cultural barriers. This report in particular highlights that despite discussions around inclusion, the potential for the internet to address social isolation and economic disadvantage are largely untapped, because the focus has been on the barriers and have not included the enablers. There is a need to address ‘digital choice’ as well as ‘digital divides’. Digital disengagement is a complex problem and there are social, cultural and attitudinal factors that inform digital choice.

Beyond the digital divide (Selwyn and Facer, 2007)

This report from Future lab, brings us back into the sphere of education, and focuses on the more traditional approach to ‘digital divides’ and the uptake of digital technology. This puts inclusion back in to the realms of ability; “All members of society are able to access the affordances created and offered by technology use”; and focuses on the debates around digital literacies, which is the area of the report that is of most interest here. However it’s worth noting that the authors remind us that access is not just a bout broadband, but also about wireless and satellite connectivity.

The report states that skills are not limited to basic physical actions like keyboard skills but also to those which have technical and social qualities.  We need both a basic literacy, that is the ability to read and write; and a ‘functional’ literacy, the ability to put our skills in to use.  The report develops three core areas of literacy:

•  Information literacy – to be able to discern the quality of content
• Adaptive literacy – to be able to develop new skills whilst using ICT 
• Occupational literacy – to apply skills in a business, education or domestic environment.

  

Definitions of digital inclusion

INCLUSION – DIVIDE – CHOICES - PARTICIPATION

So where does that take us on our analysis and development of the concept of digital inclusion? Clearly inclusion is a complex area, and, going back to what we said at the start, it is not just about access or about skills. People need to decide whether using technology is meaningful in their lives, but we also need to remember that inclusion is not just about deficits and barriers but also about opportunities, outcomes and practices. These reports highlight the conversations that continue to take place at a government and education level. There are barriers, access is important, people need the skills and there are technology and social issues to address.

We need to localise these conversations, so that we truly understand the cultural and social enablers.  I have already written my thoughts on inclusion with my own context and that of the project, linking back to the ideas of openness. For me it’s about participation, and empowering people (giving them the motivation and belief in themselves), to participate online. It’s not about the financial or economic benefits to the individual, but about the wider societal impact of participating in the world with others. This takes me back to how I think that self-efficacy links to empowerment. 

Seale (2009) reminded us that people bring their own set of motivations, skills and resourcefulness to the online world, and my hope is that by highlighting the skills and resourcefulness, as well as the values that people share in my context, we can encourage participation and inclusion.

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Helsper, Ellen (2008) Digital inclusion: an analysis of social disadvantage and the information society. Department for Communities and Local Government, London, UK. [online] Available at: http://www.esd.org.uk/esdtoolkit/communities/DigitalInclusion/tools%5COXiS%20Report.pdf

Seale, J. (2009). Digital Inclusion. A research briefing by the technology enhanced learning phase of the teaching and learning research programme. [online] Available at: http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalInclusion.pdf

Selwyn, N., & Facer, K. (2007). Beyond the digital divide. Opening Education Reports. Bristol: Futurelab. Retrieved October, 24, 2007. [online]. Available at: http://www2.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Digital_Divide.pdf