“Agency in a socially networked world: library clients increase their room to move”

Agency: library clients in online social spaces Bridging Worlds Conference, Singapore, October 2008 Bonna Jones Senior Lecturer, RMIT University

Online social spaces
‘ rich user experiences’
‘ architecture of participation’

new 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

My interest
as a practising librarian in a university I developed an interest in some ideas that were being researched by our clients

Philosophy of complexity
Emergence of a science of complexity
Transdisciplinary, but also accounts for the achievements of the humanities
‘ being’ and ‘becoming’

Arran 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)

actions
strings of actions
networks of action
processes
hierarchies of action
systems of action

Making Narratives
“ the boat came in with the morning catch of fish”
“ the cats sat on the sea wall”

Narrative 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?

Product
Narrative
Qualities of narrative (from ephemera right through to grand narratives; always in time)

Events
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

Creativity
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)

Hierarchy of action
Symbol -> Word
Activity is interpretation
Sentence -> Narrative
Activity is emplotment
Narrative -> Library
Activity is collecting

Cats and Fishermen

Making 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)

Levels of action
word/sentence/narrative/genre/library
meaning is created in a story “I am….”
person/collective/field
social space is created “I belong….”

Product
Narrative (from ephemera right through to grand narratives)
Social space (‘my life’, ‘our group’, ‘our organisation’)
always occurs within time

Online social space
Social space
Narrative-making space

Evolution of social spaces
evening campfire - a vital social space in prehistory
the town square or marketplace
the public library

Power
Freedom, creativity
Non-nested hierarchies
Level of observation

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

‘ rich user experiences’
‘ architecture of participation’

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.

“ 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)

Onine social spaces
As products are more interactive
Verbal and graphic
Still and moving
Games
Platforms such as VastPark http://www.vastpark.com/

“Agency in a socially networked world: library clients increase their room to move”

by bridgingworlds2008 on Oct 15, 2008

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“Agency in a socially networked world: library clients increase their room to move” — Presentation Transcript