25 things about me – an auto-biographical patchwork of mini-narratives
25 things about me is about sharing. It had started off as a Facebook-chainletter. One of the few that does not end up asking for money. So, it is more difficult than you may think at first and it is better fun than watching some mind-numbing TV. It is a bit like Facebook status updates or Twitter updates or old-fashioned text messages. It made me think about those I am going to send it to and those moments and individuals I refer to. It made me think about culture and that sharing here is over-sharing there…
To me, writing this auto-biographical patchwork of mini-narratives has been quite a learning curve. There is a lot of reflexivity involved in such kind of writing. I am curious who you are and hope to hear what would be in your list of 25 things. But I am equally curious – in case you think that is way too personal – what you think of all the [over-]sharing in the online social networks and blogs and microblogs that has mushroomed over the past few years. Does that have an impact on our offline lifes? Can we grow by taking a very conscious approach and think in a long-term fashion just as anyone else who is subject to the public eye, say politicians for instance? Is the world becoming a bit more equal now we face similar dilemmas or it is just contributing to a bit of ever more self-styled celebrity cult we are already tired of?
1. I feel and act differently when speaking English. German tends to put a stifling net over me.
2. My grandmother was a beautiful petite woman with an angel-like reputation. She never raised her voice, I never saw her angry, she was deeply religious. When I turned 12 she gave me two books that changed my life. Martin Luther King’s biography and Kaethe Kollwitz’s, a German artist. Resistance is always possible, I learnt, joining the many who questioned the ‘we knew nothing’ generation.
3. I was a very peaceful child who became an angry teenager who understood quickly that healing has to start with ourselves. I keep waking up as a very happy adult who got through very dark times.
4. I am a bigfoot: size 7.5 (UK) / 42 (EU) / 10 (US) – yet, can’t beat Kate Winslet’s size 11 (US).
5.In 1999 I lived with an extended family in Quito, Ecuador while having Spanish classes. The one thing that struck me most was that there were no prams – and no worries about the mental damage caused by placing the infant in the wrong direction into that pushchairs. Children were carried around, frequently by their fathers or male relatives. They did not seem to have ‘another kind of people’ status as we assign it to them in our contemporary societies.
6. In the mid-1990s I was running and managing my own toy-shop. Neverland. It was then that I assembled a Lego technic truck. The first time ever.
7. Je ne regrette rien.
8. This 25 things about me is like a collection of mini-narratives, I loved reading others’ – I believe that we are pretty over-controlling in these days. Perhaps many of us had simply enough of that and now it is all about public sharing. Some say it’s over-sharing now. Well, we can get neurotic about each and everything, but letting go of some control and facing the unknown responses is a bit like going back to childhood days when we were not worried sick about career and reputation and all those adult things. That’s why I love blogging, although I have been mistaken for a citizen journalist that I am certainly not. Should I start worrying about control and being misinterpreted? Or being misquoted once I have circulated this list here?
9. While I am writing this I am listening to Irene Cara’s flashdance. Fear seems to hide deep inside, she claims. Facing my fears became something I discovered at a relatively young age, not facing fears seemed to take an awful lot of energy that I just knew I could give to other things. I was 16 when a schoolmate died and I was 19 when I got an organ donor pass at the local GP.
10. Climate has a vital impact on my productivity and creativity. In Norway I once cross-country skied at minus 33Celsius /-33F. The lakes were frozen, untouched – this is among the most remarkable moments in my life. Raw beauty but merciless white landscapes. Meeting people in these environments is a bigger deal than in any city where the look-through approach has been brought to perfection.
11. Snowshoeing is what I found an incredibly empowering experience, yet it makes me very modest and it surprised me how quickly you can get up a mountain. I felt a bit like an animal myself.
12. I believe in what comes around goes around.
13. I hated Leo and Kate in the Titanic movie; how could she fall asleep and let him go die? Now it’s revenge in The Revolutionary Road. He did not forgive her for that…
14. When I was 12 I had a pretty bad accident. I lost 2 x 0.5 front teeth. In hospital I was told not to look in the mirror. I couldn’t resist, of course. Perhaps that’s why I don’t like horror movies. All too real.
15. The fragrance I miss most is lilac bushes. They were lilac and white in our village and on the way to my primary school, I felt like drunken by their intense scent – yet they had innocently tiny blossoms.
16. Cate Blanchet declares in Elizabeth-The Golden Age ‘I am my father’s daughter. I am not afraid of anything’. That left me deeply impressed and made me think.
http://hansbohlinger.blogspot.com
17. When I was in my early teenage I was very skinny and tall, my hair was very short and I got mistaken for a boy several times. Those who had mistaken me seemed to be very confused, I got confused about the fact that my appearance obviously provided me with the power to confuse considerably. They usually apologised wordily.
18. In my early teenage I read Gone with the Wind. After hundreds of pages the ending was a bit disappointing, Scarlett: I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow. I lack patience with people who resist learning.
19. My maternal grandparents instilled a strong sense of old age as being beautiful and desirable in me. I wanted to get gold as soon as possible, life in one’s late 60s and 70s seemed to be so cool.
20. I am a righthanded person but keep using my left hand for operating the mouse, it tickles my brain nicely. And often it prevents people from sharing my computer at work *grins*
21. Linus Torvalds commented two days ago on the whole 25TaM chain letter. He was praised by dozens for that one sentence he provided ‘I get bored easily’. Is having a small attention span really reason for celebration? Or is the underlying fact that many of us struggle with these kind of requests because they make us see that building a public persona is actually quite a bit of work and indeed quite a bit frightening? Who wants to get haunted by a list comprising confessions or platitudes? But why not saying so? Why hiding behind a ‘I get bored easily’?
22. When I was a child I had a large doll, blonde hair, blue-eyed. She made me feel cold when she stared at me. I loved her, though, when she was asleep, eyes closed – much less frightening then. I still have an utterly loved soft and totally shapeless teddy bear. In Berlin.
23. 25 things about me in these days could quickly be answered by listing Flickr, Youtube, delicious, citeulike etc but actually a video assignment would have been my ideal way to respond. Lack of skills. Lack of time. As I said, see point 19 above.
24. Who said this list needs to cover 25 items? Why? I am not much of a follower…
Britta-
This list is wonderful! I love lilacs (I have a large lilac bush), think all your international experiences are so rich a foundation for contemporary society (and envy you in some ways!), and really like your choosing to end at 24.
I have seen a number of these, and have always felt I learn a lot from people who do this, but have also felt, when tagged to do so myself, that I am being “told” what to do through being tagged. I hate being told what to do (I am not 9, after all), so have always resisted. However, I really like how you link this to autoethnography and biographical narrative inquiry.
After having such an opportunity for public reflective practice, what was the experience like?
Jeffrey
Britta – no snowshoeing in Western Australia, I am afraid. Lots of sand, though, and desert.
Love the list,
Mark B. (from deep within Western Australia – Geraldton today, in fact)
Jeff,
That’s great, thanks so much for the comment. I had a feeling that facebook’s panopticon design can impose a level of control and peer pressure that may be counter-productive.
Resistance, as you point it out, can be such a creative [passive] practice. I think we frequently underestimate silence or mistake it for ignorance for instance.
That’s exactly the point I believe we need to contemplate much more in contemporary research methodologies. I have learned to appreciate highly the value of auto-ethnographic work as a preparation for my actual research. The learning curve has been steep in so far as I learned to listen differently, not least also to people’s rhythms.
I have learned to take invisible audiences into account but I am not afraid of them. I notice, it is quite a bit of hard work to develop this aspect of public persona. And even if it is only a module of our complex public identity we learn to represent. I cannot be alone with this experience, though.
Listening to silence in cyberspace (while keeping an eye on the ‘noisy’ statistics) and never loosing sight of the power issues involved (who is able to respond in which way within which online tool and how will their comment be perceived/represented, what will it ‘do’ to them once it has been published) has resulted in more questions…
Britta-
I really like how you stated your last paragraph:
“Listening to silence in cyberspace (while keeping an eye on the ‘noisy’ statistics) and never loosing sight of the power issues involved (who is able to respond in which way within which online tool and how will their comment be perceived/represented, what will it ‘do’ to them once it has been published) has resulted in more questions…”
That would make a wonderful autoethnographic inquiry into technology-enhanced learning, especially related to the challenges established F2F instructors have when they finally enter the Web 2.0 worlds their institutions feel they should approach to reach their students.
Jeffrey
Thanks so much for the comment, Jeffrey. Indeed, that’s part of what I hope to research in a PhD. Currently, I rather try to establish what triggers silence and what constitutes good conversation in the online sphere – in other words, what grabs our attention, what feeds our imaginative processes that make us come back. And want more.
I find it hard to investigate learning without framing my research plans in line with educational departments. I am interested in the sociology of online learning processes – but a lot of this happens in an informal manner. At the IR9 I received great feedback for the research plans I discussed then with a few individuals but was told it would be very hard to research this. Now, this points towards methodologies, it seems. And I cannot forget the comments Nancy Baym made once in an article where she discussed online interviewing that seemed to me dominated by the researcher asking questions and the interviewee providing answers until the interlocutor simply fell silent. Passive resistance? You would not get away with that in real life – but then there are elements of manipulation, power and status involved that we may rarely address to the extent online setting force us to acknowledge them now.
Britta-
I really like how you think about methodology and how issues of power and positionality appear, almost silently at times, to crush voice or to shepherd it toward somebody else’s goals and intentions.
I am also interested in a PhD, and have struggled at the intersection of (adult) education, sociology, technology, and culture. That is a place where many programs venture, but few want to commit to. I think in our hyper-real world, it is someplace we have to understand better than we do now, and have found that I have to think in a postmodern way to even consider programs out there.
Perhaps one place to start is by considering the outcome or next state once the degree is in hand (and after being affected and effected by the experiences and change en route)–what then? How will that change the research and questions and methods you are already using?
Jeffrey
Very intrigued by your first point – language indeed goes way beyond words – it influences disposition, temperament, even personality. I’m a different person when I communicate in Indian languages – less politically correct, yet somehow more constrained in what I convey about myself. With English, my most profound, philosophical thoughts flow so easily, it’s liberating, literally..
Language is just amazing, I find. There is no word for the English gender in German, for instance. Which indicates Germans have never felt need to come up with a term for the socially constructed sex – the biological notion has been sufficient. The Finnish term sisu is something you can only describe, it covers stamina, perseverance, strength of will and a lot more. It is a wonderful Finnish concept but so deeply rooted in nature and culture (which are intertwined) that no translation would ever cover its many shades of meaning.
I engaged for some time in the online business network Xing that is quite German/Swiss dominated yet the discussions often take place in English. The amount of misconceptions informing conversations was frustrating, the cultural baggage involved on a subconscious level was anything but inspiring. It left me confused – getting ever more aware of being a cultural hybrid. Perhaps being a cultural hybrid is the one identity I embrace most as it capture the moasic within. Sadly, the name, current location or birth of place are still the social markers people ask for first. It may be subject to change, though, in these days….
I just tried switching to the left hand mouse. I picked up the hand-eye coordination okay, but I have trouble using the middle finger for left-click. Anyhow, I think it’s better on the right as that’s where the browser scroll-bar is.