In my post last week, I was thinking about how the digital could function as a “thin place”, creating that magical sense of almost there, a step apart from someone and somewhere on the planet. This week, Ruth Stalker-Firth kept my mind whirring on that thought. I love that sense of synchronicity when ideas seem to draw in others, though my supervisors tell me that happens when you are early in your PhD and everything seems connected to your research 🙂

Ruth asks “Where do we go when we go online?” and talks in her post about attending a live webinar with Eckhart Tolle. His talk focuses on living in the now,  discussing how we can live fully in the present, while considering how our online practices can serve to distract, pull us into the “collective unconscious” as Ruth terms it. We go online and lose awareness of time and place.

I began to wonder about presence, our physical presence like mine in the garden, and our virtual presence when we are connecting to the Internet… I was off wondering: Where do we go in the space? (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

I smiled as I read this – as Ruth was distracted from Eckhart’s talk as she wondered about our virtual presence, I was equally distracted from her discussion of the research, caught in her “peripheral” report of her surroundings. I was sitting in her garden listening to the birds tweet and the traffic go by, echoed in the sounds of tweet and traffic in my own garden. I was feeling my breath and thinking about my presence. I had stepped out of time, and through her description, my virtual self had traveled to sit with her. Her brief description of her garden was not enough for me to visualise my/her surroundings, but there I was, sitting beside her, eyes closed, breathing deep and listening to the birds.

This medium – the Internet – expands us and influences how the message is perceived and so, creates a symbiotic relationship. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

By now, you will have realised I’m a sucker for symbiotic relationships. Ruth’s comment above weaves into my previous thoughts on this, on the digital, on the physical and the lack of boundaries between what is “me” and “everything else.

I believe it is our desire to connect and experience and be experienced which really drives our minds, not the technology. It is our willingness to want to reach out for are hardwired for connection and shared experiences are a quick way to connect. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

My drive is to connect beyond the human to the more-than-humans that share the place where the networked human is located. I wonder if it is possible to reach out and connect with the meshwork of relations that are local to someone else. I’m aware that my experience of Ruth’s garden is tied to my current experience of birdsong and traffic in my local area, not hers. Margaret Somerville warned me already that this might be the case, that meaning-at-distance may come only through reference to my local place-based connections.

If we, as Tolle recommends, learn to cultivate a stillness inside us against which everything happens then it is will be easier to retain a sense of self online, a sense of presence, and our virtual and physical will be aligned. (Stalker-Firth, 2018)

Ruth asks “where do we go when we go online”; I add to that my own question “what do we bring with us”. If there is truly no division between “me” and “everything else”, perhaps cultivating that sense of stillness allows us to be more aware, to integrate and celebrate the all that is now and the all that surrounds and permeates us. We can acknowledge it and bring it with us, share it out into the network and allow other voices to be heard. We can welcome the presence of all our relations; I just need to fine-tune a few methods of doing that!

For now, there is more in Ruth’s post that I need to dig into, when I can stop myself getting distracted by the spring chorus. It may have only been based on my local place-connections, but it was nice to sit with Ruth in the garden, even if only for a virtual digital moment.

References

Somerville, M. (2007). Becoming-frog: a primary school place pedagogy. Australian Association for Research in Education Conference, Freemantle, 26-29 November. https://www.aare.edu.au/publications-database.php/5511/becoming-frog

Stalker-Firth, R. (2018). Virtual presence: where do we go when we go online? https://www.ruthstalkerfirth.com/virtual-presence-where-do-we-go-when-we-go-online

I have grown up with a fondness for “thin” places; places that have given me a sense that there is a “somewhere else” just a breath away. From a Celtic spirituality perspective, these places are described as sacred, close to the Otherworld, locations for pilgrimage and reflection (Béres, 2012). My thin places have rarely been those selected by tour companies; they are often liminal zones, edges of rivers, lakes, paths or woodlands, with a kind of somewhere-in-between-ness that makes me feel as if I have stepped out of the flow of time.

One of my clearest memories as a child of such a place was a family holiday to a cottage my uncle had recently purchased. The cottage stood in the middle of a ploughed and mucky field (yeay, muck!) and at the edge of the field there was a small stream running in a deep mossy ditch under trees. Though the ditch was deep, the stream was not. I liked to wade in to the middle in my wellies and stand in the quiet cavern under the green tree canopy. The sound of chuckling water and birdlife and my breath. The scent of water and moss and green and primroses. I remember the primroses most of all, as the banks were covered in them and the scent wrapped all around me. It was a magical spot; if I stood long enough and still enough, I thought, I will see fairies. To this day, the scent and sight of primroses makes me smile.

I’m thinking about these thin places as I am exploring connections to place, reading about Indigenous research methods, and thinking about my own cultural heritage. As Béres (2012) states, there is a valid concern about appropriation of the ways of other cultures. I want to draw on my own cultural heritage and wonder what exactly that is. I wish to encompass Béres’ approach as outlined below.

I am able to honour, respect and learn from North American and Australian Aboriginal ways of being with the non-human world and also from Celtic spirituality (European ways of being in pre-Christian and early Christian times) regarding the sacredness of the non-human world. (Béres, 2012; p.183)

I talked about Newgrange last week; another location that was special for me. Again, that same sense of somewhere-in-between-ness. Unsurprisingly, things have changed in the 20-odd years since I was last there! In an excellent article by Stephen Brown (2006), it seems that heritage-park marketing has run a little wild. If I return, it won’t be to the Newgrange of my memory, though it sounds like they may still be using the same light bulb to replicate the solstice. Brown’s article considers the various contested interpretations of what it means to be “Celtic” as an introduction a special issue exploring “Celtic marketing”. There are three elements to Celtic marketing, Brown suggests: practice, paradigm and philosophy. Practice is the marketing of Celtic “goods and services”, from events to merchandise and everything in between.  Paradigm “celebrates intuition, idiosyncrasy, iconoclasm and irreverence” at the heart of the Celtic ethos, which sounds like fun. Philosophy, it seems, marketers share with the Celts, who Brown describes as “proto-entrepreneurs”. As with the Celts, Brown says, Celtic marketers are “simultaneously abhorred and admired, we attract and repel, we intrigue and infuriate”. What ties the practice, paradigm and philosophy together is storytelling; the Celts are renowned “yarn-spinners”. I inherited that tale-telling gene and wonder what the Celtic researcher practice, paradigm and philosophy is.

The articles may seem like strange bedfellows, loosely connected by Celtic association. However, both articles emphasise how places are not static, even those containing structures that have stood for thousands of years. My stream and the primroses are locked in a memory, as I do not know how to return to that location and the quiet cavern may be long gone. To know a place, and for a place to know us, is simply for the moment. My sense of thin places being those briefly outside the flow of time may be linked simply to my focus on being in that place at that time. Thinking about my research and connecting with other places at distance, the thin place may prove to be the shared online space with my participant, when they hold open the door for me to be with them in their place as I stand on a digital threshold. We will both be “somewhere else” and perhaps our shared places can allow us to feel as if we are just a breath away.

References

Béres, L. (2012) Celtic spirituality and postmodern geography. Journal for
the Study of Spirituality, 2:2, 170-185. https://doi.org/10.1179/jss.2.2.h84032u7246xg776 #paywall

Brown, S. (2006) Tiocfaidh ár lá: introduction to the special issue. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 14:1, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/09652540500511206 #paywall

I have a confession to make – I’m rubbish at writing catchy titles for things. I know a great title when I see it, but the Title Muse has passed me by. This causes problems when writing articles or conference abstracts; you want something that sounds interesting, but can end up causing confusion.

My recent abstract to the Networked Learning 2018 conference is a case in point. I knew what I meant when I added “Digital Compost” into my title, but completely failed to explain to my readers. The very kind reviewers pointed out that I should either explain or remove, hinting that I should seriously think if it was necessary to include.

And that’s the key point – is it essential? I knew it was, but I hadn’t explained why. I included an outline in my revised paper and am now sharing my thoughts with a little more depth. So on we go – let’s dig in to digital compost!

My brief explanation in my paper is as follows:

Inspired by her partner, Haraway (2016) proposed the term “compost” as an alternative to posthuman, as human and more-than-human alike become compost. I see the data gathered and shared through [my proposed research] networked stories as forming “digital compost”, acknowledging that the networked relationships include human-to-human, human-to-more-than-human, human-to-things, and human-to-place.

I like this term, I like “becoming compost”, as I personally find “posthuman” a bit anti-human. Moving from being anthropocentric to ecocentric does not make me any less human. Instead, it encourages me to be aware of all my relations, to connect as best I can with the Others that I share my life with. As Haraway states, it is about “making kin”.

Compost, that rich living humus cake, is wonderful stuff. I am at my happiest when up to my elbows in soil and take great delight in making more, making-with my soil-production kin of microbes, earthworms, fungi, et al. Refer to “soil”, “fungus” and “posthuman” in the same paragraph and I’m off on a rhizomatic tangent with Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Better yet, Ingold’s (2011) moving mycelial meshwork of relational, participative engagement in the world. I talk about “living compost”; compost is decay-in-action, decomposition of the dead to nourish the becoming of the living. By choosing this term, Haraway reminds us of the process of living and dying in kinship with each Other. I am aware I’m comfortable with this process, but it is not so for everyone.

So much for compost, what about the “digital”? Our “digital footprint” could as easily be termed our “digital compost”, the data we can be reduced or decomposed to, the traces we leave online. Part of my work includes using various forms of digital data to gather more detailed information on a location to share with others. In some cases, people actively wish to “capture” something from their local place; the use of digital and analogue media means that the element in question is left in situ, yet “taken home” by the person. “Digital” may facilitate an Ingoldian entangling of the person and place data, a composting of the physical and the virtual. The goal is to create a rich substrate to nourish stories from our places around the world, to celebrate our relations.

I’ll keep you posted on how that progresses!

References

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/thousand-plateaus-9780826476944/