A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Can Public Education Co-Exist with Participatory Culture?
At Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning SummitHenry Jenkins (Team Cultural Studies) and Elizabeth Losh (Team Critical Theory) offer a progress report on whether and in what ways the public schools and universities are going to be able to absorb or meaningfully deploy what Jenkins calls “participatory culture.” Rather than an abstract discussion of a theoretical construct drawn from their supposedly opposite positions studying fan culture and institutional rhetoric respectively, the two will discuss concrete experiences of young people acting appropriately or not, inside or outside the classroom. What might a participatory learning culture look like? What policies make it hard for even supportive teachers to achieve in their classrooms? What stakeholders would need to be engaged in order to change the current cultures of our school? How might participatory learning take place beyond the schoolhouse gates? What is everyone afraid of?
Boy scout and local boy Jason Pitts has become the talk of Santa Monica with his video "Prom?" that has attracted over two hundred thousand views as the likeable teen seranades his potential date with his "Lianna, you're so beautiful refrain." Pitts, his date, and his backup singers were all flown to New York to be on this segment of Good Morning America.
Given that most viral videos that merit TV coverage have jumped over the million view mark, I was surprised to see Pitts recognized by ABC. It wasn't until the hosts mentioned corporate parent Disney and the upcoming release of the movie Prom that the media synergy made sense.
Of course, some might say that I'm likely to be cynical about teen festivities, given that my own prom date went on to direct Saw 3D, but it's far to say that network TV wants YouTube to follow more traditional story arcs.
It's noteworthy that Pitts doesn't actually use YouTube as a technology of distance to ask his date and eschews digital effects in favor of strolling into the classroom with an acoustic guitar.
In honor of 10/10/10 on the calendar today, the inheritors of the legacy of Powers of Ten creators Charles and Ray Eames have organized a number of events around the world. Of course, what kinds of scientific management are imagined by digital time? The sight of a decimal clock from the period of the French Revolution makes clear how strange these artifacts of revolutionary temporality look to us today.
After the lights came up at the end of the screening, Henry Jenkins gave a talk about "How YouTube Became OurTube." (USC's Jenkins was accurately characterized as a "commentator," "participator," and "icon" in fan remix culture in an introduction by Mimi Ito that gave audience members a sense of his importance in media studies and the study of popular culture.)
I'll try to summarize Jenkins' argument for how to understand 24/7 DIY video and then offer a few thoughts of my own, by using my own wedding dance example.
Jenkins and I have differed before, but our exchanges are always friendly, collegial, and supportive. After all, we both ground our arguments in our own community membership, and we both share loyalties to DML Central, scouting, K-12 education, and urban Los Angeles.
I'm interested in potential shortcomings in Jenkins' arguments because I want him to be right not because I want him to be wrong.
(Another person who has been similarly generous in our exchanges is John Palfrey, who opens the "Afterward" of the new edition of Born Digital with a very kind mention of my work.)
Although Jenkins began by reminding the audience that the Google-owned company was controlled by a "proprietary interest," he noted that the "you" of YouTube seemed to be both singular and plural, much as the "you" in "DIY" and "broadcast youself"could refer to both self-branding and collective engagement with community.
He then showed a slide that he often shows to praise the virtues of "participatory culture." Jenkins defines this kind of cultural production by its low barriers to entry, focus on sharing and informal mentoring, and merit-system of contribution and opinion. He also noted that the slide itself was a product of user-generated content, although he didn't cite its precise origin in this presentation.
Then Jenkins granted that "ninety-five percent" of what is on YouTube is "crap," but described such "crap" as "glorious," because people "need a place to be bad and get better." He also showed another slide by Gary Hayes that often appears in talks and blog postings about Web 2.0, although he quibbled with 1995 date for the launch of the web and reminded the audience that his own history of participatory culture goes back to "Web Negative 10" and his interest in toy printing presses used during the Civil War.
Next Jenkins talked about the many fan responses to the Saturday Night Live digital short "I'm on a Boat" that opened the 24/7 DIY video program, which included a capella versions like this and the riding of other kinds of vehicles like Harry Potter-inspired brooms and Yu-Gi-Oh! parodying blimps. (I was sorry not to see my favorite "I Want a Goat" video in the program.)
In introducing "spreadable media," the subject of his forthcoming book, Jenkins explained his own antipathy to the label of "viral ideas" by quoting from Neal Stephenson'sSnow Crash and its explanation of the appeal of dehumanizing self-replicating information:
We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
Jenkins similarly scoffed at using "memes" to describe these phenomena by citing the slavish imitation at work in how Richard Dawkins describes cultural ideas, symbols, or practices traveling from brain to brain. Overvaluing "fidelity," "fecundity," and "longevity" could cause critics to misunderstand the Internet events as they unfold onscreen and the potentially transformative power of seemingly trivial media-making in the moment. He referred members of the audience to Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cate Theory of Digital Activism" to support the thesis that "any medium sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also, under the right circumstances, be deployed to bring down a government."
In characterizing the line-up of videos, Jenkins insisted that they were less about individual expression and more about the collective ethos of participatory culture. After all, he asserted, even the hero of "Where the Hell is Matt" leaves the isolation of his early videos to become part of a gyrating crowd. (Creator Matt Harding was a no-show at the Hammer event, although organizers had hoped to shoot him dancing with audience members congregated around him on the stage.)
Online bystanders like this female vlogger collectively mourned the death of Derrion Albert and the urban violence that took his life with multiple response videos, and anti-homophobia activists generated "fuck you very much" collaborative videos like this one from France. Despite its slick information graphics and use of broadcast news video, Jenkins also thought that the citizen testimonies aggregated in "Why Would Anyone Stop You from Voting?" were also emblematic of this trend.
Jenkins lauded his mentor in the study of popular culture, John Fiske, the subject of a recent conference about his influence on cultural studies, but argued that his ideas about "cultural resources" were born out by Internet practices that he probably couldn't have forseen. At this point, Jenkins cited a few non-YouTube examples, such as the use of altered images of Dora the Explorer in the debate about immigration or depictions of superheroes doing jobs generally done by illegal aliens.
Having interviewed Jenkins in a discussion about the analogy between the online practices and democracy (and the limitations of that analogy), it was interesting to see the theme of "pluralism" being so central to his thought about civic participation. The videorecorded commentary I shot over a year ago mostly focused on the theme of "access."
It was also interesting to see Jenkins looking to film history in a way that he rarely does in his highly accessible public lectures. He noted that Eisenstein was interested in juxtaposition within shots as well as between shots and that fan vidders in the "Deconstructing Our Icons" portion of the program used similar techniques.
Over the course of what he described as thirty years of research on vidding, Jenkins said he had observed how political remix content-creators and fans were learning from each other. He did, however, express concern about the "flow of content," when video of Obama's pastor created for one purpose and audience migrate to use by oppositional camps. Yet in the era of "tactical consumption" Jenkins saw a more global participatory culture for whom the "hallmark is Iran." Even if calling Iranian online activism a "Twitter revolution" is a misnomer that omits certain facts about the role of other technologies and forms of political organization, he credited a culture highly literate in blogging and other diasporic forms of Internet communication.
In understanding what he called "new kinds of political speech" that include Avatar protests on the West Bank by Palestinian activist fans and the latest Glenn Beck Donald Duck mash-up.
Jenkins also used the work of Bolter and Grusin on "remediation" to point out forms of "hypermediation" at work in the DIY 24/7 program, whether it be created with Autotune or multiple windows. Such forms of software use "demystify broadcast media," according to Jenkins, even if the subjects of such videos may seem lowbrow icons like "drama hamster" and "keyboard kat."
Enter "lip dubs" or "lipdubs" into the YouTube search box and Jenkins argued that you would soon find hundreds of examples of "collective joy and mutual performance." With these one-take videos that can be almost as ambitious as the one-shot film Russian Ark, "every environment can become a performance space." (I have embedded a video that wasn't in the DIY 24/7 line-up.)
Jenkins pointed out that the changes wrought by this "OurTube" weren't just about user-generated content. As an example of "grassroots media circulation" of professionally produced broadcast media content, he pointed to Susan Boyle's performance in the same week of the finale of American Idol, which only garnered 40 million views in comparison to the 200 million who watched Boyle's performance on a similar English show online.
As "people sort through a sea" of cultural content, the battle over cultural resources could become complex. Jenkins emphasized two fundamental problems: 1) digital rights and 2) digital inclusion. For example, he noted the imitators of "Limelight" by Rush who jockeyed to get their fingering good enough to lead to an automated YouTube takedown by its matching algorithm until they became involved in a battle over copyright led by Kevin Driscoll (from whom it seems I have less than six degrees of separation) called "Tribute Is Not Theft." Jenkins also raised the question of what's not on YouTube in his conclusion and left the audience to think about a "participation gap" that results in "ideas and diversity we don't see" much like the "systemic bias" in Wikipedia articles where some topics get more digital print than others.
In the question-and-answer session afterward, he reiterated a narrative about the twentieth-century assault on folk culture, which is also familiar to readers of Lawrence Lessig. As Jenkins put it, "my grandmother was a remixer," because she was a quilter who actively participated in a folk culture of reuse and reappropriation. During the twentieth century he charactered fan cultures as "pockets of resistance." He also argued that because Latin America preserved its folk culture in samba schools and carnival traditions, they might embrace "different forms of digital creation" as they go online. He argued that "most artists" were "building on other people's stories" throughout literary history, and that the century which just passed was the exception rather than the rule.
There were also a number of questions about current events and upcoming policy decisions involving cameras in courtroom and net neutrality, which Jenkins saw as critical in "struggles over rights and liberties" that were central to his civic concerns. However, he argued that free and open access to video wasn't always desirable as Sam Gregory of WITNESS has pointed out when the pain of a victim becomes "comedy" or "pornography."
The last word went to a question about remixes out of China and highly coded or indirect forms of political speech that involve Kung Fu Panda material.
There was a video camera recording events at my own wedding, as The Del Rubio Triplets and King Cotton played live music, but the moving images were never digitized much less put online.
I'm a fan of the vast human archive of vernacular dancing on YouTube, but I wonder what it might mean for our celebrations and rituals if everything is to be choreographed for display and replay on the web.
The people dancing with me in this photograph are not looking at the camera; the action is meaningful because it is not synchronized; they don't need to be part of a collective. What possibilities for interaction and intimacy would have been foreclosed by enforcing an elaborate choreographed routine? What romance and wistfulness would have been refused?
What if those lip dubs aren't always just about "collective joy and mutual performance"? In what ways are interactions in call centers, chain stores, hospitals, laboratories, schools, military bases and prisons constrained by the rules of neoliberalism and the membership economy and new schemes for scientific management?
For more about Henry Jenkins on this blog and his sparring with Virtualpolitik friend Bogost, see "Who Will Be Voted Off the Island?" For more about the conference in 2008, go here and scroll down.
Despite what Ito calls the "happy opening video" for the conference, she cautioned that "opportunities and risks are inexticably linked," as Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon articulately argued in Kids Online. The "collapse of treasured gatekeepers" might have many unintended consequences, and the "constant allures" of social contact with remote others may lead to checked out behavior at both the dinner table and in the lecture hall and dinner. For Ito, the benefits of learning that is personalized and social make developing new educational models promising, but she argued that it was a mistake to "hold on to old boundaries," particularly those between work and life and between different generations. She admitted that not all learning practices fostered by peer and friendship networks were laudatory in a world of Sparknotes, ratemyprofessors,com, and Cheathouse, but she also argued that educators shouldn't be too punitive about Facebook study groups and other examples of "lateral flows of knowledge."
To make her larger point about evolving networked practices and peer reputation networks, she drew the audience's attention to the genre of the amateur webcam lip synch video. First she showed the pre-YouTube classic Numa Numa video. Then she played an example of the transnational dual efforts of the Back Dorm Boys. Finally, she screened "A Day at the Office," shown below, which was recommended to her by YouTube ethnographer Michael Wesch.
This video documents a particular form of subversion of the workplace through collaborative media-making that demonstrates what Ito called the "ecology of Internet video." She also pointed to more explicitly political remixes by Jonathan McIntosh, who curated the political remix sessions at the 24/7 DIY Video Summit and had come to embrace the "identity correction" style of The Yes Men in works such as "H2: Bummer," which Ito showed.
Although less obviously formulated as a critique, McIntosh's "Buffy vs Edward," shown above, was for Ito an interesting test case of fair use that also pushed limits. (At this point, she briefly returned to remind audience members of the social dynamics of a WiFi enabled lecture hall that supports "new mechanisms for filter and focus" that might even affect audience members checking e-mail or web surfing during her talk.)
However, Ito insisted that such opportunistic learning always came with a "social wrapper." She pointed to the case of Snafu Dave and his journey as a college student from Math to Computer Science to Design in an educational trajectory that never quite addressed his passion for comics. She also highlighted projects like p2pu and Howard Rheingold's Social Media Classroom, as well as Wesch's digital ethnography group Mediated Cultures, as exemplary programs. All of these examples provide "reciprocity and feedback" to teachers and learners together.
Ito also emphasized the issue of reputation and alluded to her own work and the work of others on AMVs or "animated music videos" in which "all are learners and teachers," and certain conventions provide opportunities for recognition, which one AMV maker compared to the "AcademyAward for best picture." Because online learning is about embodied selves not "a brain interacting with technology," Ito argued that it was important to understand "sites for publicity and competition." For Ito, it is "not enough to be open and welcoming."
In closing, Ito recognized danah boyd in the audience and credited her for work done in graduate student blogging that created a career for herself in a burgeoning field. (In workshops like this one that I have given to graduate students about creating an online presence, I have argued that boyd might be an examplar that is too difficult to emulate, because dissertation blogging and frank talk about academic procedures is more likely to be punished rather than rewarded.)
Ito concluded by saying that we were still in the "early days" of these cultural shifts and that her "examples may seem trivial" and her plans might seem unrealistic for educational systems driven by an "insistence on individualized assessment." Her final words were devoted to a plug for dmlcentral, where I have served as a blogger this year.
In recent weeks the regular calls to quit Facebook because of its steadily worsening privacy policies have become louder and more frequent among those who student digital culture and use social media to sustain their own networking practices as activists and academics. In a recent blog posting, Geert Lovink has encouraged Internet artists, activists, and theorists to participate in Quit Facebook Day, which had scheduled a mass deletion on May 31st and signed up over 36,000 fellow quitters. Meanwhile, at the tactical media BANG Lab at UC San Diego, Facebook accounts were also being deleted. BANG artists encouraged Facebook uses to adopt the image above as a profile photo while preparing to exit the site forever.
Speaking of Dan Cohen, I wanted to provide an update on the Hacking the Academy book project, about which I expressed some skepticism here. One week later it does look like Cohen seems to have done the impossible in soliciting enough material to create an actual book to be published both by a scholarly publisher and online in an open access format.
Kate Bladow of ProBono.net showed some of her group's projects designed to make court procedures more transparent to low-income clients. Although Bladow might not have been the most polished of Ignite style speakers, she made a powerful argument about access to legal services in a time in which more citizens are choosing to represent themselves in court. She described how court forms continue to be the most important documents in justice system processes. (For more about e-government, access to forms, and Weberian bureaucracy, see the great work on the "virtual state" done a decade ago by Jane Fountain.) Bladow explained how "online interactive interviews" could solve some of the problems created by incorrectly filled out forms and showed several examples from LawHelp Interactive and discussed how materials could be retasked and crowdsourced for low-cost efficiency. So far the system has generated over 12,000 correct and legible forms in the New York area alone. In areas such as Kentucky and Oklahoma, courts are experimenting with eliminating confusing forms altogether.
At the Gov 2.0 Expo, Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization devoted to political transparency, explained how Sunlight Labs has sponsored two design contest in successive years. Last year the group encouraged programmers and artists to create mash-ups using data that Sunlight had harvested, and this year sponsorship focused on software applications derived from government data on data.gov. Johnson showed a gallery of winners from Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. He apologized for displaying non-interactive versions of the winning web content with his screenshots in his "static" electronic slideshow.
The winner for redesign of a government website went not to one of my Foley winners, but to a heavily used but not-so-bad-to-begin-with website: IRS.gov. The Redesign of IRS.gov from We Are a Good Company emphasized the rhetorical presentation of the website. As they put it, "The IRS presence on the web could be a powerful tool to educate people about their taxes, helping the average American understand how and why they pay taxes."
For best visual explanation of a complex process, the laurels went to How Our Laws Are Made. Johnson also explained how his own idea for an explanation of Senate rules only got one entry, albeit a praise-worthy one.
The motion graphics and dynamic typography project Cool Kids at the White House, which shows who has meetings with whom, was built with Adobe Flex, which I have also used in my own work. But I was a bit surprised to hear Johnson apologizing to Adobe, because his provocative manifesto Adobe is Bad for Open Government, which he defended on air, raised a number of excellent issues about openness and readability.
You can read more about this year's winners and runners-up here. Johnson also announced the new Design for America contest, which encourages developers to exploit content at Recovery.gov, USASpending.gov, and a number of other data sources.
If there are two things that the Internet loves it is cute pictures of household pets and comparisons to Adolph Hitler, so it is perhaps not so surprising to see the website Cats That Look Like Hitler, where owners of so called "kitlers" can send in pictures for fellow Führer feline fanciers to admire.
Okay, so I'm a rhetorician who specializes in digital media. In my case, that means that I'm interested in both rhetoric in digital media and rhetoric about digital media.
The "Tell-All Generation" has already inspired groans from some of my colleagues. First of all, even though it is topping the list of the most e-mailed stories this morning, it's like many most e-mailed stories, old news. The article deals with a study of Berkeley students that we were talking about here on Virtualpolitik last month, just a few days after it was published online. Second, it repeats certain commonplaces about their being a "digital generation" that inspires skepticism from those who study histories of media adoption and rebuttals from researchers like Sonia Livingstone. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it on his Twitter stream: "Another profoundly stupid @nytimes trend story about the 'digital generation.' This time, it CARES about privacy."
The "Preaching Jihad" story is one of a number of stories that have appeared recently about Anwar al-Awlaki a charismatic US-born preacher, explicator of Islam, and advocate of jihad who has used the Internet to disseminate his message to the English-speaking public worldwide and has been linked to inspiring attacks planned for Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square. He is described as a creator of "prolific online lectures" who brings radical Islam to the disaffected through a perverse form of distance learning. Anwar al-Awlaki has also been featured in a number of other news stories in recent months about the possibility that he might be assassinated for his views in items from Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek. Having opened the Virtualpolitik book with an account of a misguided congressional intelligence hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," I tend to be wary of the ways that new technologies get associated with criminality in our popular culture, and I wonder if the Times is pandering to that stereotype with lines about how this man has supposedly "harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda" while not presenting any counterarguments to regulating his religious and political speech. For example, it discusses al-Awlaki's "now-defunct Web site anwar-alawlaki.com" without any exploration of what might be an interesting story about why his Free Web Hosting account might have been pulled down last November. I'm certainly not arguing that there are no limits to online speech, particularly when it incites violence, but it might be interesting to have at least some discussion of how hosting services decide about what constitutes banned "hate speech" on the site.
Finally, there was the story about Internet voting that was buried on page seventeen. It doesn't have a prurient interest in teen sexuality or an telegenic Osama Bin Laden replacement boogie man to make it worth more attention. It also is typical in framing the issue of Internet voting primarily in terms of protecting the security of the polling place rather than imagining politics differently with some new algorithmic possibilities and more opportunities for political participation, as Chris Kelty has argued.
Although some bloggers loved Star Trek in Second Life, now its creators are saddened to announce that "Star Trek Museum to Close." The letter of complaint that explains the closure and rails against the economic model that discourages fan participation has a number of interesting features.
For a long time our house sales and donations have been inadequate to pay the huge Linden Labs bills. On top of that, Linden Labs has made it more difficult to attract people to the museum. We cannot be in the Showcase because we use copyrighted material. Our events, which brought hundreds of new visitors a week, and donations, have been disallowed, while yard sales, nude beaches, penis stores and fake contests are allowed to flourish) and it is especially difficult to sell homes with all the limitations and expense of advertising.Without visitor donations and house sales, it is impossible to pay the bills. I have hung on as long as possible to try to save the museum, all the hard work by the staff and volunteers, and all the homes.Besides the monetary cost of running this place, taking care of the museum, fixing and finding things, helping visitors and residents, advertising, bookkeeping, all require a huge amount of time and energy, and I cannot afford the expense or the many hours per day any longer. To be honest, I am really looking forward to having more time for my real life ;-)To all of you who have been helpful around the museum, supported the museum with your tiers and rents, and generous with donations, you know who you are and how appreciative I am. I sincerely thank you again. To others, my only advice is to donate to the places you love in SL, or they may disappear too, as so many have.With our home-world gone, Tsora and I will most likely be retiring to our little corner of the universe, the Vulcan colony in Eridani, and do look forward to your visits.
In some way it constitutes a classic virtual world "goodbye" that acknowledges the demands of the real world, gives credit to community and collaboration, and -- frequently -- places blame for the surrender to a corporate entity.
In this case it is interesting also to note the role that copyright played in the project's lack of viability, an issue that Henry Jenkins has written about frequently to describe the frustrations of fans who want to appropriate content for new platforms, uses, and audiences.
Obviously media-production is important in the three online videos from finalists Clark Montessori Jr. & Sr. High School in Cincinnati, OH, Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, MI, and Denver School of Science and Technology in Denver, CO. I'm currently writing about the relationship between reality TV and online video, so this contest in which compelling videos earn viewer votes that might bring President Obama to their campus to give the school's commencement address.
The three finalist videos all use music, editing, personal testimony, and other conventions recognizable from the mix of professional and vernacular videography that indicates many successful Internet commodities.
Another nice piece by Evgeny Morozov, who I've written about before here. In "Think Again: The Internet," Morozov tackles the seven deadly virtues of Internet wishful thinking by debunking each one of the following propositions.
The Internet Has Been a Force for Good.
Twitter Will Undermine Dictators.
Google Defends Internet Freedom.
The Internet Makes Governments More Accountable.
The Internet Boosts Political Participation.
The Internet Is Killing Foreign News.
The Internet Brings Us Closer Together.
What's interesting about his rhetoric is that he doesn't name names in his criticism of Internet boosterism and political techno-utopianism. As he puts it, "They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong." Yet he doesn't say who the "they" are.
Thanks to Geert Lovink and Jeff Brazil for the link!
Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen has certainly embraced Web 2.0 of late. Check out his exchange with VP friend Siva Vaidhyanathan about the "Googlization of Everything" here. Of course, I would tend to agree that it is questionable to assert that all Internet behavior promotes civic engagement, and it may not always be wrong to say that Social media and the internet do not spread democracy.
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.
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.
S. Craig Watkins was the opening keynote speaker at the first Digital Media and Learning Conference sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation this evening, where he presented research about working class black and Latino youth and their use of media and technology that might have seemed counterintuitive just a few years ago, when a prominent study in 1998 was showing them on the disadvantaged side of a growing "digital divide."
In a talk titled "Living on the Digital Margins: How Black and Latino Youth are Remaking the Participation Gap," Watkins argued that these youth populations have become not only "early adopters" of computational media but also "resilient adopters" who must adapt to situations in which equipment is broken, access is blocked, and public spaces are surveiled.
Watkins was introduced by conference organizer Henry Jenkins who argued that the tone of the conference should be one appropriate for "new opportunities to struggle" rather than one of techno-utopian celebration in a conference that was to be characterized by "provocations" that opened with Jenkins calling up the spirit of John Fiske, who had shown how the same Rodney King tape that exposed police brutality could also be used to protect the abusers in court. He also argued that it was important to understand digital access in something other than binary terms, because young people didn't exist solely "in" or "out" of the digital. For those who had not heard him speak in recent years, he also reiterated his assertion that "participatory culture" should be distinguished from the business model "Web 2.0." Citing the work of Paula Petrick, he looked back to "Web -10" during the 1850s and 1860s, when young people created amateur presses contributed much to American civic life, along with the phrase "L.O.L." He also noted, as Cass Sunstein has argued, that digital architectures create "enclaves" that may exclude others.
In other words, the tenor of the conference was to reflect the attitude of many recently published academic titles about digital participation. In a Chronicle review of some of them by Siva Vaidhyanathan, he praised "a number of smart recent books that gently and eruditely warn us of the rising costs and risks of mindlessly diving into new digital environments—without, however, raising apocalyptic fears of the entire project."
They constitute an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
In Watkins' work on "the young and the digital," he extends his analysis of hip hop culture to look at the "flexible, open, and imaginative" use of mobile phones for games, music, and communication in which the Twitter feeds of members of these communities may reflect the activities of a "new town square" that invites "commentary and critique," as well as DIY activities, personal expression, peer-based learning, and taking pleasure in the spaces of leisure. To flesh out his own observations of informal interactions involving cellular devices, which were illustrated with beautiful phones and personalized display screens, he pointed to the Kaiser multi-year study of young people's screen time throughout the day in 1999, 2004, and 2009, which culminated in the report on Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, which showed people of color as heavier media consumers and more active users of social networks than their white counterparts, which only accelerated after their mass migration from MySpace to Facebook.
Watkins highlighted a number of specific points in his talk:
1) The role of cultural capital in the life of black youth cannot be underestimated, given the importance of "taste cultures" and attention to "one's self-presentation" in which one is expected to be devoted to "keepin' it real in the digital age" as minority populations work through their online "fantasies and identities."
2) Abilities to master valued "soft skills" and handle "code-switching" also matters to employers and admissions officers who may not be making judgments based on "hard skills" like traditional literacy or numeracy.
3) The politics of race and space still matters, and young people's engagement in creating and critiquing with digital media deserves attention. (He cited how victims of Hurricane Katrina used social network sites to reconnect and maintain relationships after the disaster.)
4) Public memorials and grieving may also be part of how digital engagement is measured. (He illustrated this point with the story of the death of Justin Mendez and his subsequent memorialization.)
However, Watkins also argued that is was important to pay attention to "digital gating and sorting." For example, even as Facebook becomes more diverse, according to the company's own metrics, it is still associated with the aspirations of white college students and the metaphors of respective virtual spaces may still be racially coded as young people leave "trashy" or "crowded" MySpace. As he explained the "mobile paradox" in which young people of color are online but not via desktop or laptop, he worried about the absence of intergenerational participation and adult supervision in many young people's Internet experiences and the effects of a rise of "sexting" in the population he was studying. Although he understood this as a logical response to the restrictions on use posed by libraries and community centers and a way to "remake geometries of power" in "home, school, and public spaces," he was concerned that they might be "hanging out" and "messing around" but not be "geeking out," in the words of a recent MacArthur report on "Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media" and not always successfully navigating between "friendship genres" and "interest genres" to be guided to civic participation.
Geert Lovink points out yet another horrible "Government 2.0" conference designed to propagate public relations rather than reexamine the relationship between direct and representative government in the Internet era: Social Media for Government. With the inauguration of Obama, these pitches aimed at government contractors willing to pay high-priced registrations for cheerleading sessions seem to be proliferating with little imput from academics, activists, or other potential critics.
One can attend "Maximizing Your Communication Efforts By Integrating Social Media (Blogging, Podcasting & Other New Media) With Traditional Channels," which continues the command-and-control model of the Internet with a presentation by the Department of Defense's Jack Holt of DoD Live to answer self-aggrandizing questions like "Did you know that the top government and organization podcasts downloaded from iTunes are from DoD?" and "Did you know that when you talk to one blogger, you are potentially talking to 2 million virally-linked people per blogger?"
Or one can sit in on "Web 2.0 Tools for Internal Information-Sharing and Knowledge Mangagement" from the State Department's Powell-era Office of eDiplomacy, which administers Diplopedia, their internal wiki.
Or one can check out the PowerPoint slides at "Balancing Security With Information Demand While Participating In The World Of New Media" from "the world's dominant Air, Space and Cyberspace force," the U.S. Air Force (USAF)." I particularly like their order of social actors to consider: "Airmen, stakeholders, the media and insurgent adversaries." Notice how "the media" is put next to "insurgent adversaries" in the discursive logic of the "message control" of Captain David Faggard.
Jeremy Ames of the Environmental Protection agency boasts in "Reaching A New Demographic Through The Use Of Social Media – On A Shoestring Budget" that their federal agency has embraced a viral marketing technique "common in the private sector" by sponsoring a YouTube contest. ( Although they claim "this was the first such contest done by a federal agency," a government-sponsored YouTube contest for making a video about flu prevention may have been the first.)
The program piloted the Radon Video Contest using the popular video sharing site YouTube.com. Rather then developing new messaging for YouTube, users were asked to create their own 30-60 second radon PSAs based on general guidelines. The winners received a $2500 prize and the change to have their video shown on EPA's website. Over 30 entries were received, which have been collectively viewed by over 8,000 YouTube visitors.
There is more thinking from a "power law" perspective about the web to be had in "How To Maximize Your Mission's Mandate By Using The Latest Social Media" from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has launched a variety of "science-based, attention-grabbing initiatives to dialogue with youth" that feature videos, games, and Flash animation. The speaker points to NIDA for Teens and their "d'cisions webisodes" as exemplary content. My problem with the site, a screenshot of which can be seen above, is that it differs little from a site for young children, with its emphasis on brain teasers and comic book stories. Even after drilling down into the site in search of the research resources that might make it appealing to high school students working on school reports, I was disappointed to only see simple NIDA and NIH pamphlets that lack the kind of scientific studies that the college preparatory audience would need.
Along with spokespeople from nearby local governments like Washington D.C. and Virginia Beach, there are also many representatives from for-profit companies like iStrategyLabs and IQ Solutions who seem to be well positioned at the conference to make the pitch for capitalizing on policy maker's current love for proprietary technologies and easy black boxed solutions.
Sacramento is a Dirty Word (Although Supermajority Should Be)
If you don't know political advertising in California, then perhaps you have never heard the way the word "Sacramento" is said on TV here. It's generally hissed out in contempt, with more condemnation than the word "Satan." Everyone hates Sacramento politics, even those who serve in office there.
However, yesterday's teach-in with famed Berkeley professor and cognitive linguist George Lakoff was aimed at undoing the rhetorical train wreck that has been the response of interested parties to the drastic budget cuts to the state's public universities that only reinforce the simple binaries in which either "UC administration" or "Sacramento politicians" are the enemy. Instead, Lakoff argued that UC faculty need to be speaking to PTAs and going into conservative districts to remind people outside the university that money invested in higher education goes back into the economy by a factor of four.
State Senator Loni Hancock was also on hand to explain the three structural factors that cause California politics to be so dysfunctional in governing even with a clear majority of sixty-three percent: 1) the initiative system that creates unfunded and even contradictory mandates based on the popular vote, 2) term limits that relegate institutional wisdom to lobbyists, and 3) the supermajority, and 3) the supermajority 2/3 rule for budgets and taxes that only exists in two other states: Rhode Island and Arkansas.
Yesterday's meeting was aimed at lowering this hurdle, which is higher even than the Senate's sixty percent fillibuster proof barrier that has inhibited legislation on everything from healthcare to climate change at the federal level. Hancock argued that many might be tempted to go with a less elegant form of attacking the problem, such as the multi-initiative and heavily obfuscated California Forward project, which has received a lot of support from philanthropic foundations, but Hancock cautioned that it will only cause more 2/3 thinking, since it will add the legislature's capacity to collect fees to this unwieldy political structure.
Instead members of the meeting were encouraged to support the more direct Californians for Democracy, which would simply remove the words "2/3" from two spots in the state constitution, those that specify the approval threshhold for the budget and for approving raising tax revenue. (The latter is a particularly vexing issue for political observers, because there is no prohibition on having a simple majority lower taxes, so there is continuous downward pressure leading to greater budget deficits.) Hancock thinks it is more likely to get voters to sanction the budget provision rather than the tax provision, however.
Lakoff said the word "supermajority" was objectionable to him as a linguist, because it sounds like it means even more democracy, even more government by the majority, but in fact it turns out to result in government by minority, where individual deal-makers can swing the vote in exchange for takeaway pet projects for their districts.
