Skip to main content

Open at the Margins: What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice

Open at the Margins
What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeOpen at the Margins
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

Show the following:

  • Annotations
  • Resources
Search within:

Adjust appearance:

  • font
    Font style
  • color scheme
  • Margins
table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Introduction
  7. Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be Confronted Head On
  8. From "Open" to Justice
  9. The Fallacy of “Open”
  10. A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content
  11. Decolonising the Collection, Analyses and Use of Student Data: A Tentative Exploration/Proposal
  12. Reflections on Generosity of Spirit: Barriers to Working in the Open
  13. Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley
  14. Open Education in Palestine: A Tool for Liberation
  15. Open Hearts, Open Minds, Crossed Purposes
  16. Antigonish 2.0: A Way for Higher Ed to Help Save the Web
  17. What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
  18. Locks on our Bridges: Critical and Generative Lenses on Open Education
  19. Reclaiming Disruption
  20. Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms
  21. Queering Open Pedagogy
  22. Student Spotlight: Matthew Moore, The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, 2nd edition
  23. Open Education, Open Questions
  24. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Open Research and Education
  25. OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
  26. Towards Openness Provocation for #oeb17: How to Create a Non-inclusive Learning Environment
  27. Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse
  28. Breaking Open: Ethics, Epistemology, Equity, and Power
  29. OER, CARE, Stewardship, and the Commons
  30. OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining
  31. Open as in Dangerous
  32. When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South
  33. What Open Education Taught Me
  34. The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation
  35. Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination
  36. The Future of the Public Mission of Universities
  37. The Tyranny of “Clear” Thinking
  38. Open Praxis: Three Perspectives, One Vision
  39. Holding the Line on Open in an Evolving Courseware Landscape
  40. Exploring Origins as a Decolonizing Practice
  41. Openness in Whose Interest?
  42. Logic and Rhetoric: The Problem with Digital Literacy
  43. Educational Content, Openness and Surveillance in the Digital Ecology
  44. A Reflection on Open: An Open Reflection
  45. Accessibility Assessment

11

What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice

Autumm Caines

Originally published on June 10, 2017

Theory

Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt just finished a round of facilitation in the #DigCiz conversation where they challenged us to think about moving away from a personal responsibility model of digital citizenship. In a joint blog post they spend time distinguishing digital citizenship from cybersaftey and present Jole Westheimer’s work identifying three different types of citizens to ultimately ask “What kind of (digital) citizen” are we talking about.

Additionally, this week, outside of our #DigCiz hashtag, Josie Fraser blogged about some views around digital citizenship. Here we see Josie, reminiscent of Katia and Alec, making a distinction between digital citizenship and what she identifies as e-safety but also setting it apart from digital literacy. Josie presents a venn diagram where digital citizenship is one part of a larger interaction overlapping with e-safety and digital literacy.

In other DigCiz news, this week a group of us (Sundi and I included) who presented at the annual ELI conference in Houston on digital citizenship in the liberal arts published an EDUCAUSE Review article highlighting four different digital citizenship initiatives inside of our institutions.

All of this is on the tails of our first week of #DigCiz where Mia Zamora and Bonnie Stewart troubled the idea of digital citizenship. In a post about this Bonnie artfully lays out the conflict of utopian narratives of the web as a tool for democracy with the realities of what I’m more and more just lumping under Shoshana Zubhoff’s concept of Surveillance Capitalism though you could just say it is the general Silicon Valley ethos.

But I want to get back to Katia and Alec’s call to move the conversation beyond personal responsibility. Often, digital citizenship is lumped in with things like digital/information literacy, nettiquette, online safety, and a whole host of other concepts. Often these are just variations of issues that existed way before the “digital” but are complicated by the digital.

I’m considering Katia and Alec’s call, reflecting on all of these posts and articles as well as the last year and several months of thinking and conversing about this topic on #DigCiz and I can’t help but feel like we are in the weeds on this concept.

So here it is – my foundational, basic, details ripped away, 10,000 foot view at digital citizenship where things like safety and literacy are part of the model but not the whole thing.

I’ve thought about digital citizenship like this for some time and Josie’s post reminded me the idea of representing it as a venn diagram and though some of the overlaps are messy I think that is normal.

I really want to focus and drill down on digital citizenship so I put it in the middle and zoom out from there. The factors that I see at play around digital citizenship are environments and people. In terms of people there is the individual and then others. Since this is “digital” citizenship they are digital environments and identities. The items in the overlaps are messy part. This is draft one.

Venn diagram with Digital Environments, Your Digital Identity, and Other People's Digital Identities all overlapping in a space labeled Digital Citizenship
Draft 1 – Autumm’s Digital Citizenship model CC-BY-ND

This is a really broad model but I think that digital citizenship is a really broad concept and that a narrow model would not do. I think part of the problem that we get into with confusing digital citizenship with digital literacy, cybersafety, netiquette or any other number of similar ideas has to do with narrowly defined models that do not allow for liminality or overlap.

In theory that is… but that brings me to the second half of this post.

Practice

I hope that the web still can exist as a place for community building, artistic expression, and civic discourse but I fear that use for it is shrinking under the pressures of its uses as an advertising and surveillance tool.

I worry that as we are used and targeted by systems that we have been normalized to the experience of being used and targeted. Resulting in us feeling that using and targeting others does not seem like such a big deal.

***

In 1974 performance artist Marina Abramovic produced and performed Rhythm 0.

I rather like the idea of performance art. Making an artistic statement not through polished practice but rather through the practice of a lived moment.

In Rhythm 0, Abramovic wanted to experiment with giving the public pure access to engage with her actual in-the-flesh self.

She stood for six hours in front of a table with all manner of objects for pleasure and pain with a statement that told the public that they could engage with her however they saw fit.

She was a type of living doll.

Quickly the public forgot that she was a person. She had told them that she was an object after all. So fast they moved from tickling her with the feathers or kissing her on the cheek to cutting her with the razors. She said she was ready to die for this experiment. She said she took full responsibility. One of the objects was a loaded gun. Someone went as far as to put it in her own hand and hold it to her head and see if they could make her pull the trigger.

But why? Why when given the chance to engage with her would people choose to harm her of all the choices of things that they could do to her?

What happens when we interact with people? Is it about us or is it about them? Are we seeing people with lives and needs and wants and fears and all the messy that is human? Or are we seeing an object that we want to interaction with… for our sense of good or bad or pain or pleasure?

I’m not sure much has changed since 1974 when Marina Abramovic first performed this piece. I’m not sure if given the choice between tools of violence and tools of peace that the public will choose peace even today.

I’m not Marina Abramovic

#DigCiz is not Rythem 0

***

I think we need to look at ourselves and our communities and ask why we are engaging with each other. Is it out of a selfish need for engagement? Is there a hope for beneficial reciprocation? Is there a concept of consent being considered?

I think we need to look at our tools and wonder why we are engaging with them and the companies behind them. As they say if you are not paying you are  probably the product.

Environment shapes identity. Identity shapes other’s identities. I fear that we are shaping each other mindlessly. I fear that we are not just shaping each other but that the predatory environments we use are additionally shaping us.

I think we start to change by knowing ourselves first and then engaging where we think we will find recripciotaton, and by recripciotation I don’t mean comments and I don’t mean reply. I mean really trying to listen to one another and getting to know one another. Caring about how we think the other may want to engage and not just satisfying some hunger for engagement.

Going Forward

#DigCiz continues next week and I’m hopeful that we will start to explore these nuances of engagement even deeper as Maha Bali and Kate Bowles take the wheel. Keep an eye on #DigCiz on key social media outlets and digciz.org

I’d also like to thank Sundi Richard, Maha Bali, and Mia Zamora for looking at a very early draft of this piece and giving much needed feedback. You each help me be better every day – thank you.

About the Author

Autumm Caines is a liminal space.

Part technologist, part artist, part manager, part synthesizer

Mostly educator

Passionate about the use of technology in education and the many differing facets of how technology impacts society and culture, I like spending time at the place where differing disciplines intersect.

A first generation high school graduate and first in family college graduate, I’m dedicated to the transformative experience of education for those to whom the opportunity often does not present itself.

I currently work as an Instructional Designer at the University of Michigan – Dearborn prior to which I had professional appointments at St. Norbert College and Capital University. I’m also a Co-Director of Virtually Connecting and I use my work in Virtually Connecting to explore questions of presence and spontaneity in synchronous virtual conversations as well as equity and inclusion in online community.

Autumm.org

Attribution

What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: thoughts on theory and practice by Autumm Caines is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Annotate

Next Chapter
Locks on our Bridges: Critical and Generative Lenses on Open Education
PreviousNext
Open at the Margins EPUB
Copyright © 2020 by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Open at the Margins by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org