ARTEFACTS 

Original work/Remix + Commentary/Response

No.1   Adriana de Souza e Silva & Jordan Frith (2010)
​remixed by Michael Sean Gallagher (2016)

The original work by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith

What follows are representative passages from the original de Souza e Silva & Frith (2013) work that detail a few of the major points addressed in the interpretation presented below by Michael Sean Gallagher. Please note that the bolded headers are Michael's and do not appear in the original work. 

Location as Relational Identity; Places are not containers?
“Locations, however, are not isolated entities. They are relational, and their meaning derives from their ability to develop connections to other locations. Consequently, locations will be understood differently depending on which other locations are perceived as connected to them.”
...While geographical features play a role in the construction of spatial identity, places do not construct their identity on their own. Their identities are instead constructed by people. People attribute meanings to places. These meanings are created by the elements that exist in a place, such as physical elements (e.g., buildings, public plazas, streets), social elements (e.g., the people who live in them), cultural elements (e.g., historical traditions, folklore, etc.), and the various ways that these categories converge. The interaction of these elements is what gives spaces their identity. As Henri Lefebvre argued, spaces are not merely containers. They are constructed by social relationships, but those social relationships are not limited to the people who live in a specific place; instead, places are also influenced by other people who live elsewhere. With globalization and the increasing adoption of communication technologies, these external influences become more obvious. Throughout most of history, contact with what was not physically close was very limited. Consequently, the identity of a place was mostly developed in relation to its internal elements. However, the development of communication and transportation technologies, such as the train and the telegraph, enabled connections with distant people and places. This connection contributed to the development of relational identities, that is, a way of seeing one place in contrast to other different (and similar) places."

The Generalized Elsewhere? 
"But even with the development of new transportation and communication technologies in the nineteenth century, many of the world’s cities and settlements were not reachable by the railway or the telegraph. Thus, for most of the world, local identities were still mostly rooted in local practices. In the twentieth century, however, newly developed electronic media, such as the radio and television brought distant actors into people’s private homes, contributing to a much greater awareness of what was happening outside the local village or community. As a consequence, people gained awareness of distant places. Rather than just erasing local cultures and local identities, as many globalization scholars suggested, Joshua Meyrowitz observed that these mass communication media actually helped people foster greater emotional attachments to places, through what he calls the “generalized elsewhere.” According to Meyrowitz, the generalized elsewhere works as a mirror in which to view and judge our localities. The generalized elsewhere makes us more aware of our local spaces because they acquire relationality. The comparison to other localities adds meaning to places."
​
Importance of Location Redefined?
"….The idea that physical location and mobility would become unimportant as we spend more time online, however, has more or less been proven false. People still drive and take public transportation to work, they still frequent cafes and restaurants and meet face-to-face, and they actually engage in corporeal travel at unprecedented rates. 12 With the development of new interfaces to connect to the Internet in the first decade of the twenty-first century, such as mobile, location-aware technologies and mapping software, it became clear that physical location has always been important to the construction of people’s identities and to the development of sociability.”

De Souza e Silva, A., & Frith, J. (2013). Re-narrating the city through the presentation of location. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, London, NY: Routledge.

The remix by Michael Sean Gallagher

Commentary on the remix by Michael Sean Gallagher

The mobile learning community, while growing, is rather intimate. You tend to gravitate towards those that present parallels to your own work, which in my case is mobile learning as it applies to the humanities (particularly history and literature), urban space, and multimodality. So it was natural enough for me to gravitate towards this chapter in an excellent book that helped me to articulate a lot of my research inquiries away from merely “hey, mobile learning is different!” and into something more tangible. 

My rationale for presenting the work in this way, as layers of related though disparate activity, emerges from the nature of urban space itself. It is haunted with the past (hence the layers of public domain stock footage from Asian metropolises mostly from the 1930s and 1940s), rich with parallel activity (hence the rows of apartment blocks from Hong Kong), and decipherable only as a set of interrelated streams of activity (the audio I recorded from Seoul layered into the background is incongruous with the activity taking place visually, yet in concert it almost sounds like the expected din of Asian urban space. The traffic in front of the apartment blocks might be seen to represent that is what perceived but not fully seen, one of the million data points that we routinely discard from our urban existence. All of this builds from one of the points of the chapter, namely that:  

“locations, however, are not isolated entities. They are relational, and their meaning derives from their ability to develop connections to other locations. Consequently, locations will be understood differently depending on which other locations are perceived as connected to them.”

This, as a long-time expat in Asia, has significance beyond the cognitive elements of it. As an expat, you are often hyper-aware of your environments, you develop relational connections between these elements askew from those created by those who have lived their lives there. You associate freely from memories and with media seemingly at odds with these presented: each window from the apartment block telling a different story and each story reminding me of something other than an Asian metropolis. Leading to the second point of the chapter, that of the “generalized elsewhere”, the idea that mobile and online connectivity creates hybrid space, ones often unmoored from physical space. As the authors state:

“people could live in places without fully integrating into place-defined communities because they could create their own “community” in an online chat or virtual world...As a consequence, people gained awareness of distant places. Rather than just erasing local cultures and local identities, as many globalization scholars suggested, Joshua Meyrowitz observed that these mass communication media actually helped people foster greater emotional attachments to places, through what he calls the “generalized elsewhere.”  According to Meyrowitz, the generalized elsewhere works as a mirror in which to view and judge our localities. The generalized elsewhere makes us more aware of our local spaces because they acquire relationality.”

The relationality I applied to my urban Asian spaces, however incongruous, made them my generalized somewhere. 

Responses to the remix

by Howard Scott
​
Looking at this I’m drawn to consider a student telling me of her 7 year old son who spends too much time on his iPad. A flat statement; a negative value judgment. “And what does he do on his iPad?” 
“He spends all his time looking at GoogleEarth,” she replied.

This is a thoroughly modern (and ordinary) means of transport and of transcending time – and not dissimilar to how we, as children of the past, watched TV or escaped into books. I think of that child as a traveller who cannot wait to arrive, so comes to know alien places through representations (in travel guides, in stories, in articles) by barely moving. And when he is really there it may be as people feel when they visit New York for the first time and say “I feel like I’ve been here before”, because they have lived it through other media. 

​There’s something inverted about postmodernism that’s shrunk global dimensions to those in a screen, so that we may come to know places without leaving home. Simultaneously we come to exist in different ways all at once, immersed in a window to elsewhere, with a reflection of ourselves glazed before us but by our other senses fixed in one space, while prescient in an alternate physical place. Time stops, but everything else travels.

I don’t think we are knowing the places, but coming to know something of ourselves. With this remix, I’m at once in my study in Yorkshire as I am in my past, when I lived in Asia, and in its soundtrack the film of memory becomes realised again. 
Calvino says:

“Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” [Invisible Cities]. 

We’re co-habitating within a collection of images. Within m-learning are possibilities to preload experience to the forefront. 

Howard Scott is a TEL PhD research student, and a FE Lecturer at the University of Hull.

by Stephen Bezzina

My immediate reaction to the multimodal artefact was ‘spaces, places and people’ – the title of the Geography textbook that I used as a student, back in secondary school, some 20 years ago. This strange, yet natural occurrence was brought about and evoked by the juxtaposition of the different modes, which Michael effectively uses in his remix of the original piece. It felt like a (fast) walk down my memory, seeing all those familiar ‘spaces, places and people’.

Experiencing the remix was a kind of relational affair and multimodal journey to which I could effectively connect. The message conveyed by Michael, stemming from a well-constructed representation of academic knowledge, moved on to become a more personal and embodied experience. The ‘past’, represented by the ‘the layers of public domain stock footage from Asian metropolises mostly from the 1930s and 1940s’, combined with the present ‘rows of apartment blocks from Hong Kong’, creates an unconventional link through ‘spaces, places and people’, which disrupts the conventional linear narrative, often experienced in text-only modes of representation and communication.

This constructive interplay allowed for a metacognitive personal experience of meaning and life - looking to and through the contrasting and/or complementary physical, social and cultural formations of my own identity, as a student (past) and teacher (present), thus adding that ‘generalized elsewhere’, allowing for a cognitive shift from an informed ‘outsider’, yet through a personal and ‘local’ perspective. Many thanks for this experience Michael! 

Stephen Bezzina is Physics Teacher in Malta and is also researching Digital Game-Based Learning.

by Sarah Lloyd-Winder

I love the idea of taking work from the written and placing it in another context adding sound and image. What I want to ask is......did it help in the understanding of the initial work?

Did a confused student working, studying and learning at home come to a greater understanding of the initial work through the secondary interpretation? OR would the student have come to a greater understanding of the initial piece by doing a multimodal response themselves.

​Would there be better understanding through other interpretation or their own deconstruction and interpretation?

Sarah Lloyd-Winder is a Researcher in Digital Storytelling and external examiner in the Institute of Education at the University of Central London.

by James Lamb

I’m making a point of responding to your remix without having first read your commentary, Michael. I thought it would be interesting to reflect on your work without knowing what you set out to achieve. At the same time, I’m offering my ideas having only experienced it once, rather than studying it in detail. I used the phrase ‘experiencing’ your work rather than ‘viewing’ it, as the latter would be an incomplete way of describing the importance of the non-visual content, and in particular the soundtrack which particularly grabbed my attention. 

For the time being I’ll put aside my interest in the way that you put the artefact together and instead draw attention to a question I’ve been thinking about since the credits stopped rolling and the video entered ‘fade to black’. I wonder whether when we approach the representation of scholarly content in a way we feel is unconventional, our own backgrounds, histories and interests have a particularly important bearing on how we approach and experience the work? 

For instance, my interest in multimodality means that I’m interested in the cohesion and collision of different resources in your work: What is the effect of juxtaposing the ambient sound (overheard conversation? people in transit?) against the high-rise building backdrop and the movement of car lights? Why does the choice of font (default Calibri?) seem under-considered and out-of-step with what I imagine is the careful selection and creation of visual and aural content? Why do I feel like the text content is getting in the way? 

I realise though that the next person in line might be more interested in decomposing the different components of your artefact before considering them in isolation. Without claiming that a modal deconstruction and analysis of the artefact would be the wrong approach, for me it would feel like attempting to unpick the magic in a fairly tale. My point here is the varying ways that we might approach the artefact wouldn't come into play when we read an article prepared predominantly or entirely in print (although our epistemological and theoretical positions would come into play).

Another question that arises in my consideration of your work is the technical talent and resources you were able to draw on at the point of composition. Compared to putting print on page, and in particular when it comes to adhering to the strict submission guidelines laid out by academic journals, you will have encountered many more decisions and opportunities as you composed your work. I’m not suggesting that a conventional journal article is somehow mechanical and straightforward however issues surrounding the meaning-carrying potential of colour, typeface, timing, volume - and what happens when these different semiotic resources are orchestrated in a particular way - don’t come into play. I’m interested to know whether you felt these questions and decisions were an opportunity or a dilemma, Michael?

My third and final point is that, 700 words into my response, I haven’t given any thought to the content you were trying to represent: my interest has been drawn to the method rather than reflecting on the meaning proposed by the content and form (which are surely inseparable in this type of work). An immediate if incomplete comparison would be to suppose that I’ve just read the abstract of a journal article and have only paid attention to the sentence structure and syntax, whilst ignoring the meaning contained within the words that my eyes have passed over. It isn’t a perfect comparison, however perhaps it is useful in surfacing the idea that, when we take an unconventional and multimodal approach to the representation of academic content, there is a danger that we focus too much attention on the compositional technique and effect, rather than its content? 

These are questions for another day, however. Meanwhile, I’m going to experience your artefact again and think more deeply about what it has to say about the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith and the way you feel about it, Michael.

James Lamb is an ESRC-funded PhD student within the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh