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New Media: A critical introduction (p.72-92)

Outline

-         McLuhan vs. Williams

-         McLuhan 3 key ideas

o        remediation- the content of any medium is always another medium

o       media and technology are extensions of the human body and its senses

o       the medium is the message

-         Four media cultures

o       A primitive culture of oral communication

o       A literate culture using the phonetic alphabet and handwritten script which co-existed with the oral

o       The age of mass-produced, mechanical printing

o       The culture of electric media: radio, television, and computers

-         The physicality of a tool/technology à an extension of the body

-         “the power of media technologies to structure social arrangements and relationships, and the mediating aesthetic properties of a media technology. They mediate our relations to one another and to the world”(79)

-         Williams acknowledges what McLuhan dismisses: “New technologies take forward existing practices that particular social groups already see as important or necessary” (81)à Sociological argument

-         Williams examined

o       The reasons for which technologies are developed

o       The complex social, cultural, and economic factor which shape them

o       The ways that technologies are mobilized for certain ends

-         what a culture is like does not directly follow from the nature of its media

-         “Williams is also wary about the theoretical implications that the term ‘medium’ has come to carry”(83)

Goodman

Teaching Youth Media

Outline

-         Media saturation in the life of children: “children ages eight and older spend the equivalent of a full work week… in front of a screen of some kind of electronic media àthese images contribute to young people’s evolving sense of identity, community and worldview”(2)

-         “The failure of schools and after-school programs to address the media as the predominant language of youth today, or to recognize the social and cultural contexts in which students live, has resulted in a profound disconnectà until corrected this disconnect willlead to the increased alientation of low-income urban youth from the dominant social, political, and economic mainstream

-         “Huge amounts of money and effort are invested in making kids literate in the language of consumerism and so apprenticing them for a lifetime of consumption”(6)

-         Students must develop critical literacy in order to be able to read and analyze the huge array of media that they are bombarded with on a daily basis à students learn this best by producing their own media

-         The dominant form of language has become the image

-         The factory system of schooling: the Lancaster/Dewey debate

o       School should be just as much as a social experience as it was intellectual, a community building force..cultivating independent-minded , critical thinking citizens capable of solving social problems.

-         Beyond the factory system:

o       Technology Integration- technology as a highly efficient instrument to aid teachers in delivering information to studentsà inequities along socioeconomic and racial lines resulted in a digital divide, unequal access

o       Media Literacy: curricula that stressed skills for analyzing tv and mass media textà media literacy had little impact on most of the new models of education that national school reform networks were designing (15)

o       Community Media Arts: Despite all the growth and creative energy being generated through arts and community-based initiatives (many government funded, beginning in the 60’s-80’s) schools remained virtually impervious to change. (18)

Questions & Comments

- I am currently enrolled in another CSRE course “Embracing Diversity” and I had the opportunity to read a couple of amazing articles by Linda Darling-Hammond who is a leading expert in the current state (and history) of our public school education system.  Unfortunately her research also shows that there continues to be huge issues of unequal access and funding that are directly connected to the racial demographic and socioeconomic status and of any give community across the nation. But what bothers me the most when I read article such as Goodman and Darling-Hammond is seeing the huge amount of money being spent in other areas of our society such as the war, the judicial system, and in this case “$2 billion spent annually on advertising directed at children”(6).  If that money could be invested in the children and schools that need it so desperately the outlook for our nation could completely change. Instead of just moving through school on the conveyer belt of the public education system these students could actually have an equal opportunity of learning the critical literacy skills necessary to succeed, maneuver, and truly understanding all the images that are thrown at them virtually every minute of every day, resulting in independent thinking individuals, and not consuming zombies.      

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

Outline

-         “Fandom is one of those spaces where people are learning how to live and collaborate within a knowledge community”(134)

-         “The new participatory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends:

o       New tools and technologies enable consumers to archive annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content

o       A range of subcultures promote DIY media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies

o       Economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship.”(136)

-         “audiences are gaining greater power and autonomy as they enter into the new knowledge culture. The interactive audience is more than a marketing concept and less than a semiotic democracy.”(136)

-         Levy “links the emergence of the new knowledge space to the break-down of geographic constraints on communication, of the declining loyalty of individuals to organized groups, and of the diminished power of nation-states to command the exclusive loyalty of their citizens”(137)

-         Fan communities ex of: “Cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate,, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifact of contemporary pop culture”(137)

-         “Collective intelligence” vs. “Hive mind”

-         “The new information space involves multiple and unstable forms of recontextualization.”

-         “As the community enlarges and reaction time shortens, fandom becomes much more effective as a platform for consumer activism.”(141) à moving towards the cultural mainstream

-          “Horizontal integration of the entertainment industry- and the emergent knowledge of synergy- depends on the circulation of intellectual properties across media outlets”(147)

-         “researchers are finding that fandom and other knowledge communities foster a sense of passionate affiliation or brand loyalty that insures the longevity of particular product lines”(149)

-         Culture jammers want to opt out of media consumption and promote a purely negative and reactive conception of popular culture. Fans, on the other hand see unrealized potentials in popular culture and want to broaden audience participation.(150)

-         We are in an “era marked by the expanding corporate reach of the commodity culture and the emerging importance of grassroots knowledge culture”(151)

Jenkins

Convergence Culture

Outline

-         Convergence = everything in one box, media consolidation-corporation, a top-down process shaped by corporate decisions and a bottom-up process shaped by consumer participation, the interplay between old and new media

-         collective intelligence is an achievable utopia

-         Multitasking, multitasking, and more multitasking!

-         Displacement of old media by new media tech.

-         Interactivity: product of technologies

-         Participation: product of cultures

-         New consumers are migratory, socially connected and willing to share their voice and opinion with the public

-         Intellectual property and the expansion of copyright regimes…Who owns this?!

Questions & Comments

-         It appears to be that with new media technologies just a click away it could be possible to create a sense of fandom around critical issues of importance in today’s society rather than brands…maybe then more people would vote for the presidency than for American idol…

-         But, I’m still not sure how I feel about collective intelligence.  Is it a double edged sword?  At the rate that new media technologies are being developed the possibilities seem endless.  Ideally the concept of a grassroots movement by way of these technologies and collective intelligence sounds very promising, but I still worry that the opposite side, those big scary media conglomerates, will they, could they abuse all the power at their fingertips (much like they’re doing now, i.e. Clear Channel, CBS, NBC, etc.) or will the people claim the virtual world as their domain and take control. I say lets beet them to the punch and start the revolution (both technologically and socially, in person and on the web)!!!

Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures

Outline

-         various modes of communication becoming more prominent and dominant in areas of public communication

-         Visual, music, the body in motionà music now no longer seen as a form of communication but as a means of expression, the same has happened to visual mode and others.  As a result the two modes of the visual and music have been placed outside a general theory of communication, to leave them untheorised,à they have been taken out of school curricula, except as specialist activities(183)

-         The “west” in now ill-equipped in the new landscape of communication, generally, institutionally, and non-institutionally

-         We have no means of representing whole areas of our sensory lives by either talking or writing

-         Rethinking language as a multi modal phenomenon

-         The stuff a culture uses as a means for expression of meaning

o       Physical stuff: variation of sound, marks on a surface, touch, sight

-         mode = the full semiotically articulated means of respresentation and communication

-         “Language in the spoken mode is a multimodal system; it uses the whole plethora of devices available to speech- pace, pitch-variation, rhythmic variations, tone of voice…uses the potentials of temporal, sequential ordering available to this time based mode rather than the initial spatially displayed mode of writing”(186)

-         If mode affects what can be said and how, media affects who can be and is addressed and how

-         Assuming that we as biological and physiological beings are not all equally disposed to the forms most developed and valued by our cultures, some members of one culture will be less well served than others.

-         The power of an object without language

-         Of all the semiotic systems, nothing rivals language in its effability…it is also the case that the visual mode has not been developed into as highly articulated a state as spoken or written language

-         Textual objects – spoken, signed, written, drawn – always occur in a multiplicity of modes

Questions & Comments

-         Why is “fine art” separated form other forms of visual expression??  Has it been placed on the “western” pedestal of “high art”?  I think so…

-         I would argue that because music is now seen as expression rather than a means of communication, music labels and artist are no longer as concerned with what is actually being communicated to the public through the visual and written text of someone like 50 cent; and use the “well I’m just expressing aspects of my reality” as an excuse or way of justifying the negative, false, and stereotypical images being put into the public communication sphere.

-         Why have three critical forms of communication been taken out of school curricula, especially if they are such inherit part of our culture?  I believe that if we had the opportunity to express ourselves through such texts and modes, especially in such a diverse environment as school, perhaps we could better understand each other in terms of our differences and similarities specifically in dealing with issues of race and ethnicity.  It is also very interesting to note that at one point in our nations’ history, mainly during the 60s and 70s, the government was providing schools and artists with grants and other forms of funding to produce all forms of art, in many instances for the purpose of community building.  And over the course of the last twenty plus years, the government, schools, and communities have lost most if not all funding to the point were music and the arts are the first things to go in our public school systems.  Could the current state of perpetual apathy in the USA, specifically by members of my generation, be as a result of this lack/gap of communication?  

Sin City

Frank Miller

- Out of all the comics that have been made into a film, Sin City is by far the most unique in terms of its cinematography.  Beginning with the opening credits, I truly felt as if I was watching a film that had been made into a comic book, not the other way around.  The careful and strategic use of color throughout the film is also key in sending very clear messages to the viewer.  The very dramatic all black and white scenery with very intense contrast is set off even more by hints of red like Goldies’ red lips, red satin sheets, and red tight dress, evoking feelings of passion, excitement and in some scenes death.  The whole film is very sexual, very violent, very dramatic and very successful in its manipulation of various modes that appeals to all our senses even our sense of smell through the description and visual of the hideous yellow monster.  

Literacy: Reading the Word and the World

Outline

- “Language and reality are dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context”(29).

- The world that one feels and experiences vs. the word that is read in various forms of text

-“reading a text as pure description of an object (like a syntactical rule), and undertaken to memorize the description, is neither real reading nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers. (33)

- “Insistence on a quantity of reading without internalization of texts proposed for understanding rather than mechanical memorization reveals the magical view of the word” (34)

- teaching to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, a creative act

- “learning to read and write means creating and assembling a written expression for what can be said orally” (35)

- “reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is of transforming it by means of conscious, practical work”(35)

- Codifications: pictures representing real situations

- “reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read” (36)

Comments & Questions

- I actually found this article to be very enjoyable, insightful, and sympathetic to the extremely stressful experiences encountered on a day to day basis by students in the USA, and I am sure all over the world. Now, it might just be that I am a slow reader, but on many occasions, in a wide variety of classes here at Stanford, I have experienced an overwhelming sense of frustration because no matter how hard I tried to keep up with all the readings in all of my classes, there would always be an article that I did not get a chance to read, a chapter or two I had to skip in a novel, or I would skim through a piece of literature so fast in an attempt to make sure that I covered all the material that I wouldn’t really have the opportunity to truly understand and develop my thoughts on the text. In many cases the professors already assume and know prior to even giving us our reading lists that we simply will not be physically capable of doing it all. So, why place the importance on quantity instead of making sure that we have adequate time and a less stressful environment that would be more conductive to critical analysis and deeper understanding of text than the current conditions?

- If reading and writing are constructed through the process of “translating”/ “decoding” visual language and experiences into written form, what exactly (if anything) gets lost in the translation?

Luke & Freebody

Shaping the Social Practices of Reading – Reading and Colonization

Outline

- “reading is a social practice using written text as a means for the construction and reconstruction of statements, messages, and meanings”(185)

- “reading is tied up in the politics of everyday life in literature cultures”(185)

- Colonial education: the literacy goal was to introduce a student into a canon of classical English literature (very few middle/affluent people even had access to an education), women had even fewer opportunities

- 19^th-20^th cent: two stage model- “the basics” à “the classics”

- “in an era of post-colonialism and global capitalism, marginalized, minority, and indigenous communities have an urgent stake in the nature and efficacy of literacy education efforts, and, importantly, in the dominant theories and methodologies used to legitimate those efforts”(192)

- Reading and Social Epistemologies

o Reading and writing are social activities

o All text are motivated- there is no neutral position from which a text can be read or written…refracting the world

o Different cultures and communities prescribe and direct who can read, what texts people can read, how reading should occur, where, etc…cultural constraints and how they are tied to larger political imperatives

- From Psychological to Sociological Models

o “the shift here is from viewing that which students bring to schools and classrooms in terms of individual differences, knowledge’s, skills, and backgrounds- to a view that students bring to classrooms available cultural, community and social resources, texts, and discourses”(204)

o Different purposes and goals of reading education: teaching and learning standpoints, cultural expectations, norms of social actions and consequences

- Elements of Reading as a Social Practice

o What kind of reading practices and positions should schools value, encourage and propagate?

o Heteroglossic democracy

o All texts represent cultural positions, ideologies, and discourses

- “Given cultural resources, institutional access, and support, entire populations can learn to read. To reshape that selective tradition there are several imperatives:”(221)

o Attend to critical pragmatic, text-meaning, and coding elements of reading at all stages and levels

o Move away from psychological skills models, and toward sociological models that recognize and capitalize on the varied and hybrid cultural and discourse resources students bring to classrooms

o Integrate the analysis and study of new text forms

o Focus instruction on how community, workplace, and everyday cultural texts and discourses work, linguistically and politically

Questions &Comments

-Because of my experience as an immigrant and someone who is bilingual I have been witness to the current failing literacy practices in the public school system specifically here in California. Prior to reading Luke and Freebody’s article I had come to the conclusion that there clearly had to be huge shifts from the “western”, very linear Eurocentric methods of education and literacy at the foundation/base level. I had never thought of it in terms of the current psychological model vs. a new sociological model, which is very insightful and now that I think about it quite obvious. But it appears that the politics of this nation would rather keep the current interlocking systems of oppression in place, and keep “minorities” and other marginalized communities oppressed by not introducing new methodologies into the education system. Issues of culture, equal access, and support for students must be made key factors in the education system. The most recent changes& modifications to the education system and literacy, such as the No Child Left Behind initiative has only managed to function as a band aide on the gaping wound of poor quality education in the USA. This wound without a doubt will continue to bleed and widen as the drop-out rates of Latino and black youth continues to grow on a daily basis. The shift that Luke and Freebody purpose is a great starting point, but what will it actually take to change an education system that has not been drastically modified since the days of slavery and colonization?

Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki’s

I did not really have any clear expectations when I sat down to watch Princess Mononoke because the only exposure I have ever had to any kind of Japanese animation has been anime through Pokemon, thanks to my younger sister. But to my surprise this manga inspired film proved to be very adult in its themes, a completely different experience from Pokemon, thank God. But what struck me the most about the film was its’ very in your face racialization of particular characters. As in many American films the main female protagonist was a tall, thin, white, blonde hyper-sexualized “beauty”, while the villains were dark skinned, loud, and extremely aggressive, almost beast like. The pairing of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s voice with her particular character was also a very interesting experience. There I was looking at a short, big breasted Japanese woman running around in a robe with a very loud, bold, in your face attitude. I felt so confused as a result of my previous media literacy experience. The miss match of a “black” voice with an “Asian” visual was very uncomfortable to me especially because I could not find a logical reason for the pairing outside of the fact that using Jada Pinkett-Smith was a marketing ploy.

Cyberspace in everyday life: the material and the virtual

-         cyberspace : the space behind the monitor, the network, “disembodied and exhilarating – promising the new, new worlds, new frontiers, new identities”, but cannot be a placeless place

-         virtual reality: “a new world in direct opposition to the old world of everyday life…we can find a new kind of life and society online, a democratic public sphere unencumbered by the stultifying routines and alienating hierarchies of the real world”

-         everyday environment inseparable from and coextensive with digital technology…breathe in technology with the air

-         Media technologies are the products of already existing social and economic structures and forcesà reinforcing and extending social constraints and power relationships 

-         Practices of consumption are integral to the commercial success of new media, and how they are used

-         Faith that in cyberspace the contradictions and iniquities of the modern world are being overcome through the virtual alliance of free market economics and digital technology.

-         A consumer economy, marketing strategy, Ex: the black box- technical features as well as the device’s symbolic status is critical to its commercial success.

-         Cyberculture – “a space in which social divisions based on bodily and material attributes and positions can be transcended”

-         Video/Computer games: Stallabrass- a capitalist, conservative form of culture, consumption of empty images and narratives, addictive immersion, new forms of political and commercial surveillance and domination of time and space in everyday life, computers also enter into the development of personality, identity, and sexuality, ‘bricolage’ self expression on a web page & in the bedroom

-         The meaning and uses of popular new media are not fixed, encoding and decoding a text à computer- toy or tool?

-         The consumption of media technologies is both shaped by and shapes existing family dynamics,  anxieties about the relationships between everyday space and time

-         ‘Edutainment’- education as a commodityà  education and the information age will support and reinforce each other

-         postmodernist theories- cyborg…a contemporary monster to be celebrated, Plant- machines not only appear to take on the characteristics of biological systems, including the human brain, but no meaningful distinction between the natural and the machine can now be made.

Opinion

-         Will the same interlocking systems of oppression that function in the real world today (i.e. the judicial/legal system, the education system, etc.) eventually extend into the virtual world?  How will the legal system change to address crimes committed in the virtual world?

-         Ahhhh!!! Big Brother!!!

-         What kind of implications does a socio-economic hierarchal structure in cyberspace have? “Consumer goods and mass media serve to sustain and reproduce the existing economic and social order.” Who is really taking part in the new free market and who is not?

-         Only a minority of the population has access to this new media.  The majority is not taking part in the consumption of education, information, and play on the net or the creation of peoples own websites.  How will that be reflected/affected in future forms of new media? Gentrification of cyberspace?

o       “Information technology for Robins and Webster is neither progressive nor neutral. Far from being open to appropriation by ordinary people these technologies are shaped by the corporate and bureaucratic systems that develop them, and in turn, through their dissemination they colonize everyday life.”(225)

-         Constantly having to tell my little sister “get off the computer!!!, what are you even doing on there?!”

Theory wars and cultural studies – Kellner

-         Historical context: 1960s-present  culture wars, “dramatic change and upheaval”, capitalist world + conservative governments = expanding military sector, increasing federal deficits, massive debts, covert and overt wars, constant fear (aka: “terrorism”) à policies that mainly benefit the greedy and powerful, while postponing much need social reform and creation of a more just and equitable social order (15)

-         New media technologies and computer technologies are ambiguous and can have contradictory effects… they provide powerful forms of social control through more efficient, subtly concealed techniques of indoctrination and manipulation.

-         New computer technologies = new forms of surveillance and control. Ahhhhhh!!! Big Brother… Again!!!

-         Media culture has become a dominant force in socialization…media images and celebrities have replaced families, schools, and churches as arbiters of taste, value, and thoughtà producing new modes of experience and subjectivity

-         Media junkies and technofeaks: hunters and gatherers of information and entertainment

-         (pop)Culture which is largely informed by the media is playing a huge role in every realm of contemporary societyà economics, politics, social, self

-         TV in the USA continues to be dominated by conservative voices, the same old right-wing think tank, Ex: Rush Limbaugh

-         Culture wars around the world: misery and oppression continue to grow in the more underdeveloped regions of the world and the wretched of the earth appear more wretched than ever.

-         Theory Wars, helping people make sense of the world – feminism, the postmodern , multiculturalism vs. monoculturalism, each new theory was the “solution”

- Weapons of critique and instruments of practice, as well as cognitive maps

-         Frankfurt School developed model of culture industry from the 1930s-1950s, differentiates between high culture and low culture?!! …very problematic…

-         Culture is constantly being produced and reproduced

-         Popular culture = top down culture, what is the popular? Does the term need to be re-appropriated

-         “There is no communication without culture and no culture without communication…our culture is a media culture”

-         text, context, audience, and reception must all be taken into account when looking at media cultures

-         fetishism of resistance and struggle

-         Manipulation theory vs. populist resistance theoryà what kinds of culture do each result in?

-         cultural studies cannot lose the critical and political edge

-         we are living in a borderland of tension between the old and the new

 Opinion 

It would appear that the Dark Side of the media and new technologies has taken over.

-         The balance must be maintained, the use of new media technologies cannot be taken to extremes by either side, (i.e. the forces looking to control the culture and population or those looking to liberate and educate). But how can this be possible if new media technologies are the products of already existing social and economic structures which reinforce and extend social constraints and power relationships. And if only a very small minority of the worlds’ population actually has regular access to new media technologies, and even a smaller minority of that population are in the position to make powerful decisions within these structures. I am once again forced to ask the question Who is creating the new media technologies and Who is using/consuming? Are we repeating the same mistakes of our ancestors  in extremely limiting the voices and perspectives that can be found and created in the virtual realm?

-         Postmodern…just another buzzword?  Kellner distinguishes between modern and postmodern, two different time periods, styles and theories rejecting features of classical modernismà it is a construct not a thing or state of affairs