Adrian was shocked in this week’s symposium to discover how little it seemed our cohort knew about the validity of certain internet content. I think, perhaps, that this was a stretch too far as I would hazard a guess that most of what we subsequently heard about looking for cues for legitimacy, such as locating which type of domain it’s coming from, was not new information for many in the lecture theatre. Where I thought the discussion turned very interesting though was when talking about how and why these practices are emulated, undermined, and impersonated (such as by The Onion, an American parody news site).

I think a similar area which is equally interesting is the rise of Twitter accounts which impersonate various organisations or people. Such as Vice Is Hip, Fake Pinterest, or even this article showing what might happen if Disney Princesses had Instagram.

Why Mumford & Sons’ next album is just a gif of a cat yawning

— VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) August 24, 2014

If you’re not wearing a little straw hat on each of your fingernails, you’re doing summer wrong

— The Fake Pinterest (@PinterestFake) May 1, 2014

However, I think these types of humour rely heavily on a more widely understood humour of parody, as opposed to impersonation.

We then listened to discussions about network literacy and its relation to print literacy, including what limitations and affordances both have. Adrian explained that we have a tendency to confuse form and content, which I wholeheartedly agree with. It was also interesting to hear Adrian say that the spaces within which network literacy happen have to be performed. They do not preexist us, we actually have to actively do them.

Adrian also reminded us that literacies, which exist in hundreds of forms, are always enacted in very minor detail. His example of ordering a lemonade in America illustrated this well. He explains that the varying social etiquettes of literacies complement and contest each other. They are not clearly defined, but entangled and messy, interacting and embedding themselves in our social practices.

We were reminded that we constantly rely on third parties to do things for us, leaving us disempowered due to our constant reliance on expertise. For example, we may know about books and how to write one, but we don’t necessarily know how a printer works. Similarly, we know how to curate our online presences with content, but we might not know how to build a web page. This is the sort of network literacy that needs to be ramped up in order to participate fully as effective media practitioners in our changing media landscape.