Media en masse

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York UP, 2006.

Henry Jenkins covered a range of media to write through a personal addiction of “hoping to glimpse tomorrow before it was too late (6). The author reapplies a number of recent marketing, such as affective economics, “the need to quantify desire, to measure connections, and to commodify commitments, and the need to transform all of the above into return on investment” (62). I interpret that to say that the tension between an audience’s desires and their pressures from life are taken into account when building new products and new media. He adopts throughout Pierre Lèvy’s term collective intelligence (4), describing a system wherein “grassroots communication” is the principal means for learning (224). This sounds like a trickle-up model for learning, as distinct from learning from the masters, but I would argue that it is not just a more democratic but also more empirical system of education. The lives of people increasingly center on digital and interactive media, including a cooperative winnowing-down of a harvest of information to that selection they determine to be interesting, amusing, or significant.

He is driven by his inference that “Consumption has become a collective process” (4). I agree—but marketers know that most viewers, readers, and netizens still have personal motives in mind. What have changed are the modes of sharing news, talking back to the television, sharing in game play, and cooperation in generating texts—such as with wikis of all sorts. I have recently been interested in on-line translation companies, because an old friend started a translation business. Translators in 2011 can put in bids to translate texts (for Russian medical equipment, proper maintenance of shoes) and be accepted to complete the entire translation. Another friend is paid per word to write articles on a breadth of subjects, such as the history of Groundhog Day or the advantages of Visions cookware. A few hours this semester I will work for an on-line tutoring company, where students submit their essays for feedback. The tutors have scheduled shifts and must comment on a new essay every thirty minutes.

Jenkins gives me a sense of how much I have missed by hitting the books the last few years—not just the voting through text messages and Dawson’s Desktop, which I did look up for a retrospective—but the spirit that has passed me by through my failure to keep my finger on the pulse. I was intrigued by the discussion of The Beast and the resultant model for decrypting data which was used to encroach on terrorism (127-32 sidebars), Machinima (153-8), which I had never heard of, and political drama in The Sims’ Alphaville (166-71) were standout moments of American history that had escaped my notice. Jenkins’ work also makes a compelling argument for a change in copyright law that bodes well, or at least creatively, for the future: that the copyright law as we know it was designed for mass culture, and that its application to folk culture, as he calls our decade-old frenzy of creative processes, is outdated and inappropriate (end of the Tarantino/Star Wars chapter). Convergence Culture leaves me re-thinking the machine that is the mass-media, wondering if the mass of viewers has created the media all along.

I want to share one syncretic form of media I like, a comic called Wondermark, which is best explained by looking at a few of the artist David Malki’s panels.

http://wondermark.com/

Walter Benjamin’s much-cited and less-often read 1936 work “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” from which Jenkins pulls some ideas.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Anthologized in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Harvard UP, 2008.

http://design.wishiewashie.com/HT5/WalterBenjaminTheWorkofArt.pdf

I have already been reminded several times by Literate Lives and Convergence Culture of Donna Haraway’s famous 1991 article “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which is linked here.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

I have located a video tutorial and advertisement for Sumatra .pdf reader, for those of us who are sick of updating Adobe cumbersome-ware or want something that works well on a slower system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNeVUIK36HE

A Literacy, Technology Reflection

I tried to make a meta-flight-simulator from and Airstream respirator, some sound effect, and the A/C blowing, centered around an office chair and an Apple IIe—my mother refused to play the aircraft game & opted for Apple Panic, a strategy game like Dig-Dug. I didn’t know then that the terminal was just another piece of home furnishings & discarded industrial jetsam. I didn’t know we were do lucky, affluent, still behind any edge of technology, but far above the curve for other households. I know now we couldn’t afford it, and that my father believed it was much more important to have a system in the house for me to learn on than that we go out to eat more than a couple times a year.

Like one of Selfe & Hawisher’s interview subjects, I learned to come out of my shell and make small talk with other boys and girls and, and less often men and women with IRC clients, when AOL and CompuServe were the two choices for dial-up connectivity.

The Imagination Network, the Sierra game company’s INN, brought me others’ avatars to play chess and Othello with. Instead of becoming more cloistered and hermetic when networking was limited to other antisocial kids and collegiate whizzes, the early Internet brought me up to a level of acceptable social communication and kept me from putting my faux pas in my mouth every third exchange. I’m seventh grade, I took a girl from the INN server out to a movie and tried to leave after I saw her but before I met her. Ten years later I had another Internet rendezvous, and before she left she stole the radio out of my car.

In teaching, I’m caught between resolving technologies and preventing my students from using online resources exclusively. I borrow rampantly from the net while preaching to my students the need to keep their noses in books. [This is a problem especially in small branch campuses, where we essentially have computer labs linked to the main library and a footling book selection.]

I have precisely one friend who is not online: no email address, no spreadsheets—who still writes out invoices in triplicate with carbon paper. I wonder, at his age and mine, who has squandered more time on technology or the lack of it. I believe his day has more hours in it than mine.

My old job was insurance, and when the middle managers declared, “Guess what!? We’re going paperless!” our office manager stopped at Office Depot on the way back from the meeting, saying, “Trust me. This will only increase our need to keep every piece of paper that crosses our desk.”

Giddens sources and ETD tutorials

Bibliography:

Giddens, Anthony. Also Baron Giddens and Professor Lord Giddens. The Consequences of Modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1991.

An outline of the final chapter:
www.pineforge.com/upm-data/16341_Chapter_12.doc

Giddens’ 1999 Reith Lectures for the BBC, regarding the risks of globalization and the “runaway world”:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_99/

An overview of Giddens’ writing on time and space, concepts he calls “disembedding” and “distantiation”:

Jones, T. Colwyn and David Dugdale. Working paper: “The ABC Bandwagon and the Juggernaut of Modernity.” University of West England. Available 18 Jan 2011: http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/1999/documents/accounting/wwwagon.pdf

Video tutorial: Brigham Young University is UK’s recommended site for information on formatting electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) for easy publication both on the Web and on paper. These tools are equally useful for formatting hypertext in a .doc file or converting to .pdf, either of which can easily be read by our current students. This semester, The Graduate School at the University of Kentucky has misplaced the links, and Google isn’t very helpful, either. The repository of videos can be found here.

General information:

http://etd.byu.edu

Topic-specific videos:

http://etd.lib.byu.edu/creation/movies/2002/

Literate Lives, contingent on tech.

This week’s assignment:

Selfe, Cynthia L and Hawisher, Gail E. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 2004.

Cynthia Selfe created an interview strategy which chronicles the computer literacy of twenty people over several generations, social classes, ethnicities and cultures, within the United States. They repeat the interview structure and also the mode of interrogation of ideas throughout Literate Lives, which makes it a sedate experience to read. Their themes for the study, listed in the conclusion, are clear throughout the text.

Each chapter proceeds from an introduction of two or three interviewees to a historical context for interview subjects’ experience. These historical summaries are my favorite recurring segment of the book, since they are focused, angling toward civil rights and individual autonomy, and interested in the region where the subjects were raised. These sections stand out because the condensation of history comes from a different set of narrow sources in each chapter, and the several authors of each chapter have done an excellent job (to my mind) of setting the stage for either a reader unacquainted with American history or for the well-versed reader, starting with generalities but growing specific with respect to historical figures and events. In each of the seven chapters I learned several historical facts I have somehow not run across before—therefore I’d place myself in the middle of the target audiences for this book.

Several questions raised through the book are essential for writing teachers, therefore I think the book is worth reading for us, for its pedagogical knowledge in its interviews, for its summary of social history, and its history of home technologies. There were several particular issues outstanding in my reading.

Anthony Giddens is referenced a number of times in the work, as follows, citing Giddens’ 1979 concept of the “duality of structure” (32). They cite Giddens’ duality to “to explain how the actions of people are not only shaped by the society within which they live and the technological systems they inhabit but also how they themselves help constitute these environments” (60). Lastly, the trope is repeated in the conclusion. The editors quote Giddens… “who notes that people both shape, and are shaped by, the social systems within which they live in a complex duality of structuration, that ‘every competent member of every society’ (71) not only ‘knows a great deal about the institutions of that society’ (71) but also draws on this understanding of ‘structure, rules, and resources’ (71) to make changes in the surrounding environment” (Selfe & Hawisher 221).

The academic trajectory of the book is one of awe and exploration, and the editors’ continuing relation of the concepts as a ballistic, accelerating trend of computer usage in the home and workplace reminds me of one of Giddens’ final chapters in The Consequences of Modernity, where he refers to the “Juggernaut of Modernity.” He envisions (aesthetic and literature-based) modernity as an uncontrollable beast racing through the streets of cities around the world, crushing all beneath its path with massive wheels, disregarding all humanity before it. Selfe and Hawisher’s study is rather cheerier, but it assumes this same unstoppable beast has citizens of many persuasions clinging to its sides, hoping to reach the frontier of technological modernity rather than finding themselves mashed.

They add the important caveat throughout that technological literacies are not monodimensional (227) and, as all literacies, have limited life-spans (212). In one interview, the availability of technology is directly proportional to the availability of money. Interviewee Janice explains how she and a friend put together a system, “I knew a lot about computers, but he did too and probably more than me because he had more money and everything” (175). A friend of mine in Georgia builds computers cheaply, but it occurs to me only now that the systems he his building were once purchased whole-hog or as components at full-price. Giddens’ duality of structure is posed as a sort of dialectic here: that technology influences society, but society also influences the development of technology. The progress in tandem. The questions left us are these: what do we lose in skills or information as technology progresses, with its many gains, and more importantly, who is left out of these developments as the juggernaut reigns?

For next time, I am interested in how the “trench work” theorists are referenced, and I wonder what might comprised writing in the trenches in the information age, amidst or after the information explosion.