Rorty Archive Event

“Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty”

A Celebration of Richard Rorty's Archive

Humanities Gateway 1030

University of California, Irvine

May 14, 2010

Confirmed speakers include Michael Bérubé, Steven Mailloux, and Mary Rorty.

In March 2010, the UCI Library's Special Collection launched the archive of Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher, critical theorist, and public intellectual who is commonly described as one of the most important thinkers of his era. The Richard Rorty papers are part of UC Irvine's Critical Theory Archive, which includes significant works of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser, and Murray Krieger. Included in the UC Irvine collection are electronic word-processing files, created between 1988 and 2003, which were retrieved from Rorty's 3.5" floppy disks during processing of his personal papers.

Participants will address a number of key questions for criticism in the era of computational media. What is an archive if it includes “born digital” materials? How do new forms of digital production and reception change the character of scholarly discourse? What is the relationship between public memory and computer memory? How should teaching materials be handled in the age of open courseware? How can Rorty’s ideas about philosophy as cultural politics be read in both the liberal and the academic blogospheres? How can more dialogue between critical theory and the digital humanities be fostered?

This celebratory event is sponsored by the UC Irvine Libraries, the UC Irvine Humanities Center, and the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute.

The Temple of Books

Click image to enlarge for information about my upcoming reading at UC Irvine.

The YouTubing of ABC

Virtualpolitik friend David Folkenflik has recently reported on how layoffs at ABC indicate that news programmers there might follow the lead of other networks and news broadcasters and adopt the techniques of so-called "citizen journalism" in which participants record events without management by media professionals.

You know, one of the things that ABC has been experimenting with is being much more nimble. Think of some of the footage we saw from Haiti in recent weeks. Anderson Cooper of CNN among many others, holding his own camera getting exceptionally good digital footage out there. There have been number of anchors and correspondents at ABC, you think of people like Dan Harris and Bill Weir, have been experimenting with that over the last year.

A Black Eye for Open Access

Note how coverage of the murderous University of Alabama biologist Amy Bishop at the New York Times in "A Case for Tenure That Some See as Falling Short" implies that online journals would not be likely to be peer-reviewed and would be unlikely to strengthen a tenure case.

The publications include a recent paper in The International Journal of General Medicine, published electronically by Dovepress, essentially a scientific vanity press. Dr. Bishop’s paper in that journal, on nerve cells grown in the laboratory and exposed to drugs used to treat depression, lists her school-age children as the first three authors. The fourth author is herself, and the fifth is her husband, who is identified as being at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, although he does not have a position there.

Differentiating legitimate online journals from vanity press publications would seem to be important, given the unsustainability of current print models for academic publishing.

On its home page, the journal claims to be indexed in the large legitimate medical database PubMed, which many biological sciences students use, and posts a link that seems to affiliate itself with the open content initiative OCLC. It also includes the following description of its rigor:

An international, peer-reviewed, Open Access journal that focuses on general and internal medicine, pathogenesis, epidemiology, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment protocols. The journal is characterized by the rapid reporting of reviews, original research and clinical studies across all disease areas.

Phone Blue

In an article about how "Apple Bans Some Apps for Sex-Tinged Content," there is an interesting portrait of the entrepreneurs who depend on micropayments and an implied commentary about how Google's Android smartphone has taken a much less censoring stand. It is also worth noting that the article doesn't cover cruising phone applications that take advantage of the phone's geolocation to find willing sexual partners.

All Things to All People

This send-up of the latest Windows 7 advertisements takes the logic of user-generated content to its even goofier logical conclusion.

The Game of Avoiding Contagion

I've written before about computer games about HIV/AIDS and other forms of disease and perceived contamination, so I was interested to hear that Yale University had received a grant for a game about HIV avoidance.

A press release explains the project as follows:

Fiellin’s study is designed to develop and test an interactive virtual reality-based video game called “Retro-Warriors” that will teach ethnically diverse adolescents how to make healthier choices. The research goes beyond the use of a game for education and proposes to create a world in which the game players can engage in role-playing to learn to avoid risky behaviors that could lead to HIV infection.

The study has far-reaching implications including the potential for this technology to become portable and global.

“The game could travel with the player—it could be used at home, on a console, a cell phone or a personal digital assistant,” said Fiellin, who also points to international implications. “Access to the Internet is growing in developing countries and these technologies could be transferred to adolescents in countries experiencing a growing HIV epidemic but which have limited access to targeted risk-reduction strategies.”

Again, the question might be why would anyone want not only to play this game but to play it in semi-public ways that use mobile technologies.

The Backchannel conference

Yesterday's session about "Investigating Multiple Channels For Participation in Online Gaming Communities" at the Digital Media and Learning Conference included Virtualpolitik friend Alice Robison, who discussed some of her work on the function of the backchannel in digital communication and how exclusion and inclusion were still intertwined in the Internet era. She mentioned the game Chatroulette! (now made infamous in this story in the New York Times) along with other more obviously backchannel-themed games.

Of course, the DML had at least one official backchannel site, in addition to Twitter and a number of other channels, but perhaps the most interesting backchannel was the one run by DML-nonparticipant, digital humanist, and Virtualpolitik conference co-lurker Mark Sample.

The Twitter stream on Mark's Digital Humanities 2010 fake conference contained some obvious parodies of goings-on at the DML, which included a closing keynote by "Henri Jenquin," and a few other conferences that I have attended in the past year that have been recorded here at Virtualpolitik. But this hoax humanities conference was also a lovely improvisational narrative based on the idea of having Halliburton serve as the corporate sponsor and a series of increasingly nonsensical paper titles. As the virtual chaos escalated, Lev Manovich, who was also at DML posted entries like "digital natives surround the embassy and demand exit visas" and "we love digital humanities - especially if you take humanities word out." Another talk was given by famed chatbot ELIZA.

The Island of Broken Toys

As it finished, it is worth reiterating the fact that the DML Conference invited a number of critics of techno-utopianism. Among them was my UCI colleague Mark Warschauer, who gave some of the most damning testimony about the Nicholas Negroponte's XO One Laptop Per Child program that I have every heard.

His first-hand report led off with his main assertion: "Laptops make a good school better, but they don't make a bad school good."

In his DML talk, Warschauer revisited the hyperbole from disgraced former Birmingham mayor Larry Langford, who had once waxed poetic about the promise of the XO, and had begun plans to acquire 15,000 of the devices for local students. Like others, Warschauer has interrogated the missionary zeal of XO enthusiasts and the way that that the technology made children feel disempowered rather than empowered by the devices, particularly since so many appeared to be nonfunctional within a very short time. At one point a dispirited boy, who supposedly didn't need oldsters, like others of the "digital generation," asked Warschauer miserably if he knew how to fix an XO laptop.

Warschauer also described poorly thought out skill-and-drill pedagogies that used the machines as virtual flashcards, and their compatibility limitations that force instructors wishing to project student work to use document cameras.

See my take on the OLPC at "A Story about Bicycles" for more sad stories of how the best of intentions might go awry.

Dance with Coltan

Throughout the DML conference, there were interludes staged by my UCI colleague, dance professor and performance artist Sheron Wray. Wray's project Texterritory uses audience responses keyed in by text messages on mobile telephones and smart phone apps that replicate musical instruments to widen the circle of performance to include those who would otherwise be bystanders. In her latest work, an anxious character "Grace," comes to Los Angeles seeking an odyssey of star-studded wonder and instead is redirected by her friend to pursue didactic dance classes and surreal gang tours. Her latest piece turns out to have a strong didactic component that is intended to get spectators more aware of how Coltan and other materials from Africa that go into mobile phones have costs to the political life, economic sustainability, and human rights landscape of mining countries. The last question viewers are left with is the number of phones that they have owned during an era of disposable consumer electronics in which devices are tied to plans, status, upgrades, and planned obsolescence.

From the Ivory Tower to the Control Tower

There is a word-for-word transcription of Sonia Livingstone's comments here, as she delivered the closing keynote for the Digital Media and Learning Conference, so perhaps it isn't necessary to do a long blog entry, although the talk was provocative and aimed at dispelling myths about "digital natives" in ways that often spoke to my own research about the rhetoric of the "digital generation" for my next book, Early Adopters. Livingstone may not be a familiar name in the United States, but she has an international reputation as "neither a celebrator not a fearmonger," who is also known for "immersion in policy discussions, American cultural studies

As a rhetorician, I must admit that there was one aspect of her talk, "Youthful Participation: What have we learned, what shall we ask next?," which hit a wrong note with me: her use of the "R-word," so that "rhetoric" always indicated deception, emptiness, or manipulation and never had any positive value for pedagogical or civic development.

In trying to understand "different constituencies" and "how the young sustain" certain media practices, Livingstone is known for "interviewing youth in their bedrooms while they are online." She acknowledged that "media are more privatized" but they intersect "with social activities and spheres of life." She explained the large themes in her research by pointing to the work of Friedrich Krotz: 1) globalization 2) individualization 3) commodification, and 4) medialization. The last term she described as the "logic of media systems and media forms (as combination and dependence)," and her work was clearly also influenced by lifeworld theory, since she discussed "instrumental and market values," as well as "surveillance in the lifeworld." She noted also that her talk would have three parts: 1) empirical: what's going on?, 2) explanatory: how shall we explain it?, and 3) ideological: how should we react to it?

She opened by asking "What claims are being made about digital media? Does the evidence support the claims being made, and are we examining evidence that doesn’t fit?" She wondered aloud also about if there were "sufficient independent evaluations of new initiatives," such as the ones that the hosting body, the MacArthur Foundation, was known for funding.

She described a thirteen-year-old trying to find German website on food and drink in vain. "It can involve the family, and it can fail," she lamented. She also depicted the parents of an eight-year-old "information junkie" who marveled at her fast clicking that doesn’t reveal struggle. As Livingstone summed it up, "she is not the digital native" that her parents assume her to be. "If we overestimate younger people’s skills, we can underestimate their need for support," since "children are struggling and have doubts."

She shared her observations about social networking attitudes when she asked teens a simple question about "how to change their privacy settings" and recorded their befuddled answers. She insisted that "hyperbole brings questions the wrong way round," particularly when young people using technology are talked about as a "new species." For her, central to inquiry should be "not what can the digital offer to learning and participation" but rather among all the factors shaping young people's experiences, what does the digital contribute, particularly when "not all the factors are within our expertise" and it is difficult to "escape the charge of technological determinism."

She told the story of how Megan, who was eight when her observations began but is now twelve, demonstrated her facility with the story-writing option on AOL. But Livingstone discovered that a far more mundane program, Microsoft Works, was allowing this student to produce a story she was in the middle of writing that was "creative," "dramatic," and had a "fantastic vocabulary." She also reminded the digerati present that the girl also lived in a "bedroom full of books." She also described eighteen-year-old marry who found "school council more meaningful than use of Internet" to explain how "school, information, and civic" spheres" might be "three things that don’t come together."

She also spoke about the "constraining of children’s lives" that took place now that "children were getting older younger and yet staying younger" and thus "held longer in a state between dependence and autonomy," much like the one described in the book Hackers and Painters. By seeing "childhood as last place for enchantment," she warned that adult society perpetuated a "construction of childhood" as endangered and fragile in which "we may inadvertently fuel surveillance" with "digital native rhetoric." She told about Anisah, 15, who lived in a housing estate that was troubled with parents with high expectations. Although she was never to download music, she did enjoy chatting with friends late. As computational media offered a route for temporary escape, the girl still had to face a mother who wanted "to empower and yet to control" by shutting off "opportunities and escape from offline constraints." In this situation "risks lurked and yet were not spoken about." For Livingstone, they were too "tied together" to be verbalized.

As she moved out of her summary of fiedwork experiences, Livingstone offered a few generalizations:

1) Children don’t draw the line where adults do. What they call meeting up with friends, we call meeting up with strangers. They might remix forms; we worry about copyright. There are fused activities.

2) Design of digital resources confuses and brings risks and opportunities into collision. For example searching for "teens" without the safe search filter on Google is quite something. We cannot draw these neat lines in online digital worlds.

3) Learning involves risk-taking as young people try "to expand experience and expertise." Children have to push against adult-imposed boundaries.

4) With participatory genres there will always be some "playing with fire" as young people "explore what adults have forbidden" and "take calculated risks to show off to others" in "trying to work out for themselves what adults consider strange and dangerous." In Livingstone's opinion, "this is not so very new." It may "look like young people are creating, participating, but it may be playing with fire." Those adult goals are being attained, but let's examine closely the adult structures next to or imposed upon young people.

Then she displayed a diagram with "State," "School," "Parents," and "Commerce" mapped out that she described as "not an elegant piece of art." At this point, she quipped that she might "need a younger person" to create a more dazzling computer graphic. Such diagrams could reinforce the "need to focus on structure as well as agency," as she reviewed a number of dyads and connections: "create" (state and school), "subvert" (state and parents), "network" (school and commerce), and "explore" (parent/com). She made the analogy to earlier sites of illicit discovery like a "bike shed" or "World War II bomb sites." She talked further about the relationship between "political economy and popular opinion" and the disengagement (or collaboration) of critical theorists and semioticians.

She then reiterated a number of points that she described as "repeated findings": children engaged in online participation are generally the already engaged; they are not the newly motivated. Backgrounds of the children shape their digital use more than the digital technology affordance itself. The design of digital resources confuses and brings fused behaviors. Learning involves risk-taking, and children must push against boundaries, which involves intimacy, privacy, vulnerability. These were capped off with the inevitability of "playing with fire" when it could be "fun teasing the suspicious man in the chatroom" or trying out chat roulette where "you might be able to go and meet a rapist," much as earlier generation might have dared themselves to sleep in a park or street. She described how some of her informants even disrupted an adult Yahoo chat room for police and fire officers by pretending to be blind orphans in a home with abusive caregivers.

As she closed, she warned against the "unholy alliance" between "network society optimists and popular opinions" in which fan activities, profits, autonomous learners, and state interests might be served by "digital native rhetoric."

Of course, as some one who hands out awards for bad official websites, I was most charmed by her mockery of a government website supposedly designed for children: Epal.tv. Producers claimed it is "about participation in the broadest sense," because services for young people "need to engage with young people in a participatory way." However, Livingstone derided the site by complaining that "such vague expectations regarding engagement contrast with the considerable planning of project funding and design." "When pressed, they could not state what kind of participation they aimed for," she chuckled. Teenagers, not surprisingly, resisted this approach and found the site "boring." Despite well-meaning statements, young people "need to know about a lot more these days to make the right choices" rathen than be talked down to by adults or appealed to as if "youth" could be treated "as single thing." (This has also been called the "creepy treehouse" problem.)

She also encouraged critical thinking about publicly funded use of technology in education. She described observing an after-school computer club in which there was a math game and how she couldn't help intervening by reading the instructions, because "neither the game nor the teacher gave instructions." In this numerical simulation "one mistake, and the boat crashes." She said that there were many instances of "the supposed fun of digital media," although she did tell about a stopped school in Denmark where all participants devoted themselves to a digital animation project successfully. But she asked that if "radical transformation" is desired, are teachers, parents, and governments ready?

She cited the excellent work of my UC Irvine colleague Mark Warschauer at this point to ask "in whose interest" such projects are undertaken, when there are "unequal power relationships that exist in society." Technology may actually "reinforce existing interests of power" in such situations, rather than overturn them.

She said that host Henry Jenkins understood that there was also a sense that our use of digital media might only foster consumerism, edutainment, standardization, and individualization, so that collective interests might be overlooked in the promotion of self more than community. We must "counter that rhetoric," she said, as the "R-word" appeared yet again. Among "transnational elites," there were "new forms of illiteracy as well as literacy," she claimed.

In particular, she attacked how the once critical field of media literacy, personified by Patricia Aufderheide and legitimated by a national report on media literacy that emphasized critical thinking:

Media literacy may be defined as the ability to access, experience, evaluate, and produce media products. Media are seen to represent actual events, but those representations are subjective and incomplete. Journalists and news producers select which stories to publish, what aspects to emphasize, and what language to use. Media literacy is necessary for media consumers to sift through the variety of presentations, including films, newspapers, Web sites, and video screens to arrive at meaning.

Eventually these kinds of statements were watered down by those with more socially conservative agendas. Ofcom (2004) reduced it to "the ability to operate the technology to find what you are looking for, to understand that material, to have definition of media literacy" when "put simply." AVMS (2007) paternalistically announced that "media literacy refers to skills, knowledge and understanding that allow consumers to use media effectively and safely." (Note the language of use and consumption not production and creation.) The Minister of State for Culture, Media, and Sport (2004) reminded one of Foucault's concept of "governmentality" with its summary definition emphasizing "personal responsibility for what they watch and listen to." By emphasizing what Ulrich Beck has called "the individualization of risk," the possibilities of citizen collective action in the digital realm are delineated extremely narrowly, according to Livingstone.

In cataloging "financial literacy, health literacy" and other literacies in which "media literacy has parallels with other skills," she reminded the audience of how Robert McChesney’s critique of "literacy" emphasizes how it "distracts from questions of power."

Livingstone expressed her concern about how "critical and state priorities are aligned for now" and the need for an "explanatory form of critique" with a "wider gaze that encompasses the structures" be they "political or ideological," as academic discourses move "from the ivory tower to the control tower."

Her call to action urged that participants "must be tougher on ourselves" and must "stop being so nice to each other." "Are we cheerleaders for change?" she asked plaintively.

Jenkins served as her respondent and repeated his self-characterization as a "critical utopianist" engaged with the question of "what kind of world do we want to live in" and "blockages and obstacles" that represent "what do we have to overcome." As remedy he emphasized that the event had brought "theorists and practitioners into the same space," even if it was impossible to represent "all voices in US much less the world" or to analyze "deeply cultural problems."

Like Livingstone, there was a lot of the R-word with Jenkins, who talked about "dismissing that rhetoric" and the "digital revolution rhetoric" in his closing remarks. As he closed the conference, he again referenced his mentor John Fiske, author of Media Matters, by quoting his line that "in early modern Europe everyone had a larynx, but not everyone could speak."

One of the most retweeted lines from the session actually came from danah boyd who said that the group needed to add "playing w/ fire" to the standard trio of "hanging out, messing around, and geeking out" as core youth practices.

Here is the formal copy of her paper.

Exploding the University

The session on "Digital Media and Learning as a Post-Academic Field" at the Digital Media and Learning Conference encouraged participants to keep and edit notes on the session, which were displayed as the panelists were speaking, along with the backchannel thread from participants in the audience. Despite the publicity given to recent incidents of "Tweckling" on the backchannel in conferences, in this intimate gathering all who were present behaved themselves. And although not everyone on the bill made it in to the conference, since computer scientist Alex Pang and academic blogger and instructional technologist David Parry couldn't be there, it was still a lively exchange of ideas in the third panel of the conference on higher education.

(Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the higher education panel after my own at the conference, which featured Tracy Fullerton, who discussed her creation of Pathfinder U. The game is described below.)



Kathleen Fitzpatrick talked about "getting our students to do things openly" and in public, collaborative ways that foster the "use of digital rhetorics." However, she expressed concern that "we don't seem to use them to the same degree as we teach them," because "we get credit for the formal stuff." As Fitzpatrick asked, "What if that wasn't the case?" She inquired further: "How can we model the critical/analytical skills we want our students to have--particularly in our writing & audiences." She acknowledged, however, that "making this sort of change, particularly institutionally, is hard work," although she pointed out that the collective work being done at Media Commons "may represent a model of cross-institutional work." As for her own work at Planned Obsolescence, she characterized it as part of a "strategy for making such changes," because she emphasizes "changes in peer review, and what that means to the ideas surrounding authorship/readership." She asserted that "universities need to rethink what publishing is and why they engage in it." When considering if publishing should function as a revenue-center, she insisted that "the mission of the university is diffusion of knowledge, and university publishing should reflect this." For her, institutional collaboration (university presses, libraries, IT, academic units) should be an important part of serving that value.

Jeremy Hunsinger then described himself as someone with "an aversion to walls, classrooms, and pedagogy" as too divorced from the "essential question of episteme and practice" that are central to his STS outlook and his personal philosophy that "we learn (in school and out) informally," and "pedogogy treats learners as kids." Hunsinger argued that "Digital Media and Learning isn't new; it's existed as an approach for about forty-five years." He also claimed that digital media served "as an escape from the strictures (economic & control) of the university." He pointed to "hack-labs, as collective good" as an exemplary case of "post or extra-academic education" and "spaces that encourage learning not teaching." (p2pu was also cited as another model that complicated the Chicago School model of education from Dewey et al.)

Panel chair Alexander Halavais introduced himself with a "provocation" with a reference to the panel on higher education that I chaired, where Diane Harley, author of a recent Mellon Report on Higher Ed, had cautioned that those devoted to "blowing up the university" with digital media tools may be misguided. Halavais explained that "reexploding" the university might not be such a bad idea to recognize that "learning happens in a network or web of activities (often self-directed)" rather than in institutions.

Lately Halavais has been occupied with the "question about mobile media" and his role in the "Collaboratory" that served as the "inner space for which DML served as the "public space." He said that the challenges in expanding the K-12 digital learning model to higher education even included questions like "What kind of software do we want to use?" Basecamp might be better for the adult group, while Remix World might be better for digital youth. Yet, as Halavais asked, "Why is our collaborative software different from what we want students to use?" He pointed out that "maybe students should be asked to think about 'grown up' project planning skills" that include budgets and schedules to be in keeping with the outlook of the Obama administration and its priorities for education. As he noted, most of life is about "learning informally" and the "sea of blue" that illustrated one DML conference talk. However, even though informal learning over a lifetime is undoubtedly important, the MacArthur Foundation saw the value of "building a bridge back to the institutions" and chose to praise a "mix of researchers and practitioners."

Should online collaborative tools and spaces be different for kids and for grown-ups? Is autonomy in terms of interest-driven learning as applicable to adults as it is to kids? Is the importance of sharing ideas openly as important for adults as it is for kids? How can institutions support more informal kinds of research, and how can that research build a bridge back to institutions?

These questions took up much of the question-and-answer part of the panel in which participants admitted that "all of our work as academics becomes formalized." They also pointed to the irony of asking these questions in the context of a formal academic conference, since a THATcamp would seem preferable "if we really value informal learning."

When talking about to what degree should kids and adults be shielded from economic concerns," Halavais pointed to the example of Japanese kids asked to clean their own schools before turning to the question of how research agendas should be handled.

Can we create a research community in which research is:
- Based on our interests
- Openly documented, with opportunities for peer mentoring
- Published, then filtered
- Without destructive competition

Does open source present a peer-to-peer model that we can follow?
- Peer reviewed scholarship pre completion
- Peer reviewed scholarship after "completion"
- Peer reviewed scholars

At one point Halavais quipped "tenure should only be granted to people who don't want tenure." His last question to the audience was "Why I am still a professor?"

Although, the MacArthur Foundation might "provide scaffolding for the new discipline of DML to form," some asked if there should "be more friction, more argument, more . . ." If the theme was really about "diverse participation," they questioned why should participants be agreeing with it so directly and warned against the dangers of the "tendency to genuflect in this environment." Furthermore, despite the fact that "fields are built by shared interests," Renee Hobbs emphasized the importance of "calling out the economic powerhouse that takes away our ability to determine what counts as knowledge." -

These questions followed: What happens when the funding dies? Are we critical enough of the infrastructure that supports the nascent field? What's with all the talk about public/private? Who do we invite to these things who will challenge us more directly?

Hunsinger reminded those in the room about the difference between "interdisciplinary" and "transdisciplinary" enterprises that "mean different things." In response Hobbs talked about the "problem of training people for both media studies and education" when there were "obligations to PhD students facing a world where silos don't talk to each other." Hunsinger agreed that such students faced the "exclusion of both silos." Others piped up that the "disappearance of humanities disciplines" that were de-funded at universities from the digital media and learning field only made things worse. To this Halavais suggested that "collaborations with museums and libraries, not just universities" might provide some solutions.

After the group admitted that they lacked "shared axioms," they suggested some other possible terms, such as "shared axiologies, "shared epistemologies," or "shared ontologies." Then they turned to the bullet points for "who do we need next year":

* Deans and presidents, who can make the field happen on their campuses

* More "cranks" and people who are highly critical of edtech, but ones that are more Maxine Greene than Andrew Keen.

As the session ended there was energetic discussion of the problem of travel funding, of boycotting journals that were not open access, and of the virtues and vices of electronic resources such as IJLM and the eScholarship repository that were "technically open but badly designed for public access." Of course, they also noted the ironic lack of live streaming or videorecording of most of the panels at the conference.

Appropriating Attire

In the first part of two panels on "How Race, Ethnicity and Class Shape Digital Media Practices and Activism" at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, session chair danah boyd encouraged a range of scholars to speak about research about Internet practices that constitute a form of racial profiling online.

The session began with Alexandrina Agloro's analysis of how the website Stardoll was used by working class girls of color in a youth center with a computer lab. Agloro argued that white defaults and racial coding of attractiveness shape behavior in ways that might be familiar to those who have seen Kiri Davis's A Girl Like Me in which the young filmmaker restages the famous pre-Brown v. Board of Education white doll/black doll study and gets similar results decades later.

Since I've had a lively exchange with Henry Jenkins about "Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies" and what I call the "Vanilla Ice Problem," I was particularly interested to hear Heather Horst's presentation about YouTube responses to Jamaican dance hall music by white participants. Horst focused her analysis on ways that the "Dutty Wine" dance had been redone by non-Jamaicans in videos like this and this and how Jamaicans viewing these videos might react very negatively to forms of appropriation that might be celebrated by others. Her reading of "culture, class, and race" in terms of "phenotype" and "inscriptions on the body" suggested a number of interesting avenues for YouTube research.

Next Katynka Martinez looked at how "home in where the humor is" when it comes to a young boy creating a game called "El Imigrante" that satirizes the realities of Latin American life in Southern California. (As a college student, he later went on to suggest a PacMan game in which the UC Regents serve as ghosts.)

Lisa Nakamura closed the session with a great presentation about racialized trash talking among professional videogame players, whether they be elite competitors with corporate sponsorships or Chinese gold farmers toiling in industrialized gaming.

Queer You(th)Tube

Alexandra Juhasz and I have often questioned the participatory culture hypothesis that was once championed by many at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, so it was nice to be presenting with her again, albeit virtually, because Juhasz was in Berlin for the debut of THE OWLS. Fortunately for those who couldn't be at our session, which looked at sexual education, identity politics, and coming out narratives on YouTube, Juhasz's talk is available entirely on YouTube.

My colleague and co-author Jonathan Alexander opened the panel by reading from parts of our forthcoming article in the forthcoming LGBT Online collection coming from Routledge, which argues that coming out videos have become a recognizable YouTube genre that has even been parodied and remixed. I followed with a talk that showed our analysis of specific case studies to support our reading of the complex and rhizomatic practices of queer youth online. Juhasz then followed with a critique of our article, which included examples of fake documentary and homophobic homage on YouTube, to argue that supposedly subversive forms that undermine the supposed integrity and wholeness of more traditional coming out narratives have become so part of the mainstream that they can no longer be called "queer."

There was a lively discussion afterwards about what it means to be "queer online" and whether "queer" itself might have two sometimes conflicting definitions in these videos. One meaning of queer would be to identify with a specific community, while the other might be to undermine mainstream discourses and systems of signification.

Charting the Course

Yesterday's plenary session "Digital Media and Learning: The State of the Field" featured a number of researchers whose reports have offered findings that contradict depictions of new media practices by the mainstream media and indicate a more complicated story to tell about the so-called "digital generation." In their rapid-fire presentations, speakers were limited to ten minutes to summarize what was often years of work.

Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart discussed the recent report on "Social Media and Young Adults," which indicated that commenting on blogs by young people was down as well as blogging itself, and that remix activities were less of a focus of digital activity than a simple sharing of content. She also noted that game consoles, as well as cell phones, were important portals for Internet access.

Stanford's Brigid Barron of the Youth Lab project looked at a spectrum of interactions with technology from more common publication activities to less common membership in robotics clubs. Researchers created a "technobiography" that examined how social networks played a key role and that not all young people were in the "hothouse environments" that seemed most revolutionary. Barron advocated more attention to "process not outcomes" and critical thinking about "what do we care about assessing."

Eszter Hargittai began her remarks by noting a conversation that she had had with Harvard's John Palfrey in which he reminded her that the fact that "there is a field" was itself a significant finding. Hargittiai, known for her focus on the "question of skill and digital literacy," announced to the audience that there were "no numbers in this presentation." In thinking about "learning about the average user," Hargittai unpacked the notion of "skill" to connect it to its "uses" and "dimensions," which may include activities such as "evaluating credibility" and "managing material at the end." She also defended her seemingly instrumental interest in "what explains variations in skills and uses" by arguing that "skill can be intervened in more easily than other issues." For her references, she directed her listeners to the publications in the Web Use Project and encouraged them to continue to look at "risks and problems."

In his plenary session, Joseph Kahne described his study of 430 youths that looked at "interest-driven" and "politically-driven" forms of digital participation to note that there was "political but not civic participation" and that this political participation may still be at a lower level than cyber-utopians might hope. He depicted a more complicated spectrum of "skills" and "agency" among digital young people and summarized his findings as showing "no relationship to voting from politically-driven participation and interest-driven participation," but "some friend-driven participation" that correlated to voting. (I had already interviewed for this DML blog posting.)

Kevin Leander of Vanderbilt University explained how his own research was "not site-based" but oriented in "flows and networks" that might include "imagery" and "spatial analysis" to characterize "hotspots for learning" such as instant messaging or networks in a town. He showed a diagram of visual markers of the hybridized digital life of a young immigrant to the Netherlands with family back in Morocco, which included a headscarf nexus, one for Moroccan "male hotties," as Leander put it, fashion outlets like H and M, and "I love Holland" branding. I liked the fact that Leander argued that their goal in digital media and learning should not be "to recreate institutional sciences" and that he noted the presence of "scholars in the room trained in the humanities. At the same time, he said that although "bodies aren’t stable," "they aren’t moved by critical theory." In another case study he showed an image of someone decked out in Naruto costume accessories for whom "swordplay is not just about texts and tools." Although he cited Deleuze and Guattari and Massumi, he also cited the more prosaic work of CNN's infographics-map maestro John King as an example of "learning to see" in a new way that included "spatial analysis" and "new ways to understand" that expand learning and offer an alternative to "memorizing state capitals," which certainly wouldn't help contemporary students who "need GIS and spatial–navigational work." (He closed by noting that his Space, Learning, and Mobility Group were looking for a postdoc who could speak Dutch.)

Lynn Schofield Clark introduced herself as someone studying "parenting in the digital age" from the dual perspective of "Mom/social scientist" in project in which her own pre-teens were "collaborators" as well as subjects, as she explained her Guitar Hero mom persona.

In closing Mimi Ito described the Digital Media and Learning community as "at a place where the field is coalescing, diversity of sites both on the level of research and on the level of intervention" for which "multiple approaches" were needed. Of course, Lev Manovich, who was sitting next to me, couldn't help but point out how much he was reminded of the dawn of sexology as a similarly interdisciplinary scholarly enterprise.