The Vanilla Ice Problem

I'm the kind of friend who will tell you if you have something stuck in your teeth or if a zipper or bra strap is noticeably amiss. I expect that my friends will do the same for me, whenever I'm in a similar situation. In contrast, there are others to whom I would say nothing. For example, on the plane flying over to the Boston area, I saw a woman whose blouse had come open to expose her undergarments and a man who was trailing toilet paper on his shoe. I didn't say anything. These people were not my friends. We had no reciprocal understanding.

I consider myself to be a friend to the New Media Literacies project at MIT, which held its second annual conference today, and not just a superficial Facebook friend kind of a friend. My brother is a veteran public school teacher always hustling for technology and media support, and -- as I explain in the opening of my new book -- I got my start in the teaching profession in an after-school lab for K-12 students.

Certainly, the NML is one of the few groups in the country taking young people's information literacy seriously with a big-picture approach that entails doing real work about the value of critical thinking and creative production in the digital age, work that should have been done by government and the educational establishment if only federal, state, and local policymakers could avoid being distracted by panics about cyberstalking or cyberbullying from what should be their core mission.

NML director Henry Jenkins has been at the forefront of a number of advocacy efforts for digital rights in the classroom that emphasize well-documented evidence from large-scale research about the benefits of access to online social networks that sustain knowledge communities and the harm of arbitrary filtering and blocking technologies in schools and libraries.

The NML also supports talented young scholars like Talieh Rohani, who pursue educational initiatives while also maintaining their artistic careers. Based on my eavesdropping on participating schoolteachers' conversations, it seemed clear that the supportive environment of the NML encouraged them to try new learning techniques as well as new software.

This is why I find myself overcoming my hesitation to ask if certain kinds of remixing, recontextualizing, and mash-up might be problematic for multicultural classrooms, based on what I heard from the group's introductory overview for the day. For example, quoting Henry Jenkins' line that "by being conservative in content, we can be radical in approach" could be read as a defense of the conservative canon that has excluded many from literary recognition and their place in the historical record. This impression might be further supported by the group's assertion that they were emphasizing "multidisciplinarity" rather than "muliculturalism." (To be fair, in the same list the group also said that they were updating "close reading" with attention to "annotation" and "ornamentation," "allusion" with a focus on "appropriation" as an umbrella practice that included "meaningful remixing," and "structural analysis" with a cocentration on "finding & filling in gaps.")

Furthermore, although appropriation may be celebrated in remix culture, there may be some forms of appropriation that represent and potentially reify the exploitation of people of color and the repression of their calls for social justice. After all, even the most racist minstrel shows claimed to be appropriating aspects of black culture that white performers had observed. When Elvis and other white singers popularized material from the "colored" entertainment spectrum, the lack of compensation to the original creators of that music stung many black musicians badly.

This brings me to what I call "the Vanilla Ice problem." I believe that rap music presents a powerful form of social critique that often engages with controversial issues about police abuse, urban abandonment, narco-economics, and family disintegration. Rap music has also been appropriated by vacuous white performers, such as Vanilla Ice, who chant inane, innocuous lines to pap melodies in chart-topping hits. "Nerdcore" may not be as uniformly terrible as the output of Robert Matthew Van Winkle, and there are the occasional nerdcore lyrics that make me chuckle, but when the genre is further sanitized for classroom purposes by taking out the four-letter words of the kind that might be aimed at the MPAA and RIAA or the racial self-consciousness of "White Kids Aren't Hyphy" and "White Kids Love Hip Hop," I begin to wonder how much edu-rap has to offer, given its limited musical and poetic repertoire.



A case in point might be MC Lars treatment of the Ahab story of Moby Dick. I'm not saying a Moby Dick remix offends my sensibilities as a literary purist. A decade ago I saw the Laurie Anderson adaptation of Melville's classic text, and NMC researchers are right to point out, based on their collaborations with MIT literature instructor Wyn Kelley, that Moby Dick itself remixes stories and vocabulary from the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, from Paradise Lost, accounts of the fate of The Essex, and other whaling lore. But the comments on the MC Lars YouTube video for the Ahab song show many irritated listeners and indicate how derivative many consider his derivative work to be.

There are two more potential criticisms that I found myself having as the conference got underway.

1) In defining the scope of their work, the group was careful to emphasize their engagement with "learning" rather than "education," which they defined as being about "institutions." Yet it might be worth asking why institution should be a dirty word? I might agree that "generativity," "participatory design," "flexible and multiple uses," and "open content" may be worthwhile, but I also think that institutions provide structures of civic permanence that foster ongoing and stable citizen participation in communities. As Geert Lovink has observed, the pyrrhic organization of many artist and activist groups based in the Internet often makes them difficult to maintain.

2) In giving examples of their work with young people, the group showcased examples of what Ian Bogost has called "the rhetoric of failure": Darfur is Dying and Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Yet I might argue that this pessimistic rhetoric is fundamentally different from what the NML panel called "creating challenges" by creating a "fail and fail often" educational model that is designed to strengthen the individual rather than critique the system.

In other words, in appealing to philanthropic funders and school administrators, perhaps the group has done too much to de-emphasize the subversive character of Internet culture.

And if I'm wrong about this criticism, I'll look forward to the NML telling me that I have spinach in my teeth.

Update: Henry Jenkins responds here, and Jenna McWilliams responds here. Both postings are well worth reading for those interested in these debates.

As Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course, I'm a little worried about being depicted as dismissing texts that are written by "dead white male" authors, which Jenkins' scare quotes around the words may unintentionally imply. Nonetheless, these are thoughtful and respectful rebuttals that indicate serious engagement with this important cultural conversation about race, class, appropriation, and technology. I regret not knowing more about the critical race studies reading of Moby Dick that the NML was apparently promoting; perhaps they could do more to highlight a more nuanced approach to multiculturalism in their next conference.

As it that weren't enough, McWilliams also has a response to Jenkins' response.

Additional Update: More discussion is taking place at the Heart of the Maze.

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.

It Will Find Us and It Will Videotape Our Kittens

Dear Reader,

What are you doing here today? Don't you know that there is a more interesting dust-up going on over at Ian Bogost's blog? Apparently there is quite a scrap about the true meaning of the digital humanities and the future of the humanities itself taking place over at his posting called "The Turtlenecked Hairshirt." I know that this is an argument that Bogost has been rehearsing for a while; he was even practicing it over a recent dinner, but it does have some of the most delightful invective about disengaged humanists who hide in obscure subfields that I have ever read.

Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.

We don't make reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world, even as we purport to give it voice, to speak of its ills through critical esoterics no public ear could ever grasp. Instead we colonize that world—all in the name of liberation, of course—in order to return its spoils to our fetid den of Lacanian self-denial. We masticate on culture for the pleasure of praising our own steaming shit.

We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists' clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

Obviously, I am not above talking about French pop music, boy scout patches, signage to hospitals, cheek kissing, and Vanilla Ice. But the writing teacher in me knows that Bogost is right that all of us need to work harder to make our work readable, accessible, and something with which the public can actually be engaged.

Your Loyal Author

Bad Rap

I love both YouTube and online banking, so why do I hate this TurboTax rap so much? Perhaps because I've never really gotten over the musical badness of Vanilla Ice or perhaps because TurboTax has thwarted popular free government-sponsored online tax programs for the poor. Happy tax day, everyone. Don't forget to file.

Update: Apparently electronic filers with TurboTax had a bad surprise this year, as a software slowdown created late filing for many returns.

THATCAMP SoCal

Today's THATCAMP Socal at Occidental College brought together a number of people working on digital humanities projects in the area. I have often argued that Southern California is a site of "regional advantage" in the digital humanities, so it was nice to see that dynamic on display during the day's "unconference," although Virtualpolitik friends Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Steve Anderson were unable to attend at the last minute.

The day started with general introductions and planning for sessions. In the first session on "Geographic Systems in the Humanities," UCHRI's Barbara Hui talked about her Litmap project, where she has provided definitions and explanations of the theoretical concepts behind the work, which includes a mapping of The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, which connects a reading of the book with an ability to visualize the map of the narrative. Hui recommended Beginning Google Maps Mashups for novices starting to work with Google maps. Her mashup uses AJAX and PHP too. Many in attendance talked about the era before ESRSI, when there was a "steep learning curve" in mapping projects, and recommended resources at Lookback maps. Hui plans to attend the O'Reilly conference Where 2.0 at the end of the month.

Other mapping projects were described by Holly Willis, who talked about the Departures project at KCET. Ronan Hallowell discussed the REMAP project and how geotagged photos might construct a compelling history of Los Angeles in a scholarly social network supported by Ning. There were also plugs for University of Virginia's Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
and Literaturatlas.eu, a literary atlas of Europe or "literary metaspace." Others mentioned the UCSB geowiki that uses Second Life and information from a Zelda constructed map to show how cognitive mapping and other forms of game mapping, which might include frustrations as well as thoroughfares, could be shown. Finally, Jackson Stakeman showed parts of it only eats itself. Participants went off to their divided session thinking about the idea of "Graceful Degradation" in their own web design strategies.

Willis demonstrated the much anticipated 2.0 release of Sophie, a multimedia authoring tool created by Bob Stein, formerly of the Voyager Company and the TK3 reader. Sophie was created in Squeak first and now is available in a Java version, which was released on January 15. Having used earlier versions of the software, I appreciated improvements in the timeline and layers, although I cringed when presenters described it as having an "interface like PowerPoint." Willis also reminded attendees of the memory of the late Anne Friedberg, who had argued for "possibilities for authoring that are rich and exciting" and wondered if possibly "we don’t have the imagination yet to author in this environment." Willis took participants through the hierarchy of "books," "pages," and "frames" that organizes the software and showed how "halos" that allow rotation off the grid, "chain halos" that could be seen as "how text works," the systems Javascript interpreter, and the materials for a "comment page" that provides a window to the web. Although she apologized for the fact that some editing and Flash embedding were disabled right now, she talked about the robustness of HTML five. With an applet that still takes five minutes to load, the group talked about the limitations and virtues of the programming language Small Talk, upon which Squeak is based, and discussed how Java runs differently on different machines. They also ruminated about the "Alice and Wonderland" of this software, which could created a "book inside a book." As the session wound down there were more philosophical questions about "what is the difference between a book and a website" and the issue of providing an "extended reading place for extended thought." There was also speculation about "emotional responses to a book." People mentioned Frans Masereel's Die Stadt before moving on to a technical discussion of import and export annotation sets. As a reading experience, designers speculated that it would probably be easier to adapt for Android than for iPad users. Sophie is currently supporting five projects in the digital humanities.

I led a session about "curating our teaching," which ostensibly dealt with a very practical subject -- creating online teaching portfolios and thinking about dos and don'ts for the job market, but was meant to facilitate a broader discussion about self-presentation, institutional rhetoric, and the digital humanities. I think it did do that, but it was also part of one of the more remarkable parts of the two-track sessions at the conference, where participants had entirely gender segregated themselves, as this Twapper record of the conference Twitter stream shows. With only one exception the male participants were upstairs at "Data Visualizations + DH Platform" while I led the feminized" session on "Electronic Portfolios." Our group also talked about how "playfulness" can be misread by the serious academy and looked at examples like this video welcome by VP friend Mark Marino.



As we all moved upstairs for the final session on "Digital Pedagogy and Multimedia Literacy," Joshua McVeigh found himself leading an impassioned discussion about the video "3.5 til infinity," which was created by students at Stanford, who were on a trip to study natural selection and Darwin's legacy in the Galapagos Islands. It turns out that there are tons of "Darwin raps" of various kinds on YouTube. I often find myself wary of what I call the "Vanilla Ice Problem" when so-called "nerd rap" is celebrated by the digital humanities community. Stakeman raised a somewhat different issue about "too much focus on student product" in certain digital humanities discussions. As he put it, ""the digital humanities needs to do some sit-ups to get some more strength."

This led into an argument about how to grade such works and whether it was better to rely on rubrics that evaluate the final product by set criteria or a looser overview of process. I found myself disagreeing with rubric opponent Edward O’Neil as the IML multimedia rubric was discussed. Stakeman showed his own work with IML 346, where students were encouraged to take on Jersey Shore nicknames to protect their privacy as FERPA-protected students in an online environment. He also talked about the logistical problems of orchestrating the "first wave" of student input, which often consists of what he called "night before commenting." See a thread here. Although many used Commentpress to facilitate online class discussions there were also fans of Digressit in the room.

The last examples came from the universally praised Neon Tommy from Annenberg Digital News, which aggregates the work of highly skilled journalism students, and the possibly less successful mashups from content from Brave New Films, where students were encouraged to create opposing viewpoint videos based on "pasting and juxtaposition" like "Vietnam and Afghanistan."