Ito and Trinh

Outline

Ito

Mobiles and the appropriation of place

• “Mobile phones are transforming the experience of place and co-presence for a wireless generation of Japanese youth.”

• Distant others are always socially co-present

• Place:  where you locate yourself
  • “Place has become a hybrid relation between physical and wirelessly co-present context”

• “Mobile phones have revolutionized the experience of arranging meetings in urban space”

• The mobile phone is a social accessory.
  • “Mobile messages are used to contact a recipient just out of visual range or unavailable for voice contact.”
  • “Mobile email augments the properties of a particular place, enabling contact and communication that would not otherwise be available.”
    • “Just as mobile email extends the prior and present parameters of social contact, it also extends the possibilities for contact after a gathering”

• “Even as these practices challenge existing norms of propriety and place, they set up new manners and ways of being together”

• “Mobile phones become devices for customizing and personalizing even the most generic of urban spaces”

Technologies of the Childhood Imagination:  Media Mixes, Hypersociality, and Recombinant Cultural Form

Yugioh

• Widly successful Japanese anime  and manga series
• A phenomenon among elementary-age boys in Japan from 2000 to 2002
• An example of a “media mix”, integrating different media forms through licensed character content

• “The media mix insists that we also recognize the inverse flow:  the real is being colonized by the virtual as technologies of the digital imagination become more pervasive in everyday environment.”

• Media mixes change the positioning of the media consumer

• Hypersocial exchange:  “active differentiated, and entrepreneurial consumer positions and a high degree of media and technical literacy”

• Cultural remix:  “appropriation and reshaping of mass cultural content as well as its revaluation through alternative economies and systems of exchange”

• “Media mixing also demands that we query the relation between differently materialized and located texts, exploring issues of intersextuality, multiple materialities, and a distributed field of cultural production.”

Trinh

The World As A Foreign Land

• A look at power relations in the production of tools of resistance, and an excursion into different forms of reflexivity and subjectivity (193)

• “the theorization of racial and sexual otherness …is occupying a central position within the renewed terrain of cultural critique”(185).

• “It is through the individual parts, and through the relations between fragments in the process of decentralization that change continues to engender change” (189).

• “Recirculating a limited number of propositions and reshaping stereotypes to criticize stereotyping can, however, also constitute a powerful practice”(190).

• “Diaries, memoirs, and recollections are widely used by marginalized people to gain a voice and to enter the arena of visibility”(191).

• Autobiography is a way of rewriting culture

• High culture:  creator-oriented

• Popular culture:  user-oriented

• “Displacing established values does not simply consist of moving them around, but rather of outplaying them, producing a different hearing and, therefore, rendering them impotent by their own criteria”(199).

The Other Censorship

• “To engage in critical practice is to shuttle incessantly between borders, with no one border having fixed priority over the others”(226).

• “Critical practice is often reduced to a matter of evaluation and judgment or, of declaring what is not right in the state of things”(227).

• Art is political!

• “Problems of exclusion in and of commodification in the artworld as well as in the theory milieux have always been intimately linked with sexually and racially discriminating practices”(230).

• “The colonialist creed “Divide and Conquer” will persist as long as issues of censorship, racism, and sexism continue to be treated as unrelated”(231).

• “Every artistic excursion and theoretical venture requires that boundaries be ceaselessly called into question, undermined, modified, and reinscribed”(232).

• “Art is neither an appropriation nor an approximation of beauty”(235).

Comments

In her essay, “The World As Foreign Land,” Trinh examines the relationships between power, identity and culture and strategizes a displacement of dominant Western discourse by those on the margins.  She decries the stealth expansion of cultural imperialism into the sphere of everyday life.  Her call for transformative and emancipatory cultural practices include aestheticization of authentic experience and exploitation of the decentralization inherent in new media.   In “The Other Censorship” Trinh advocates art without borders, aesthetics without limits and the criticism of inclusion. Through her maintenance of otherness she retains the necessary clarity of vision with which to distinguish oppressive forces invisible to those inured to Western culture.

As she herself acknowledges, there is tension between her role on the front lines of cultural shock troops and her role as the Annointed Other.  That the name Rockefeller is attached both to the foundation which sponsored the conference for which her essay was prepared and the center which bills itself the symbol of commerce, art and entertainment, a veritable temple of Western capitalism and culture, is too rich an irony to ignore.  The juxtaposition establishes the degree to which we all–other or not, like it or not– are wholly owned subsidiaries of Imperialist, Mercantile, Communication-as-Consumption, Media-as-Manipulation, Bling-Bling Rockette Capitalism. We are all in the crosshairs.

Trinh articulates the paradox of being the Designated Other, Counter Cultural Revolutionary and Leader of the Resistance, feted, however transitorily, by The Powers That Be.  Anticipating that her blood will be sucked, her virtue compromised, or her pocket picked while in such close proximity to powers which corrupt, appropriate, and blind, she adopts effective strategies to retain identity while siphoning power.  Trinh is ever conscious of staying battle-ready in the political skirmishes over cultural representation and remains justifiably wary of Trojan horses or seduction scenarios that could impede or derail resistance to the status quo.

The expansion of sites of contestation and the increased range of individual social capacities to decenter the Western narrative in the face of pervasive unconscious capitulation to dominant culture are positive developments in the democratizing process.  Clearly cultural resistance is political resistance. The rhetoric of revolution speaks to the experience of oppression.  Power is not readily shared or easily won. But, what is Trinh’s desired ultimate outcome?  Representation? Respect? Regime change? Sovereignty?   Will polarity be perpetuated or can dialogue replace dueling discourses?  Who will have a place at the table?  What will the table look like? 

The current dialectic of patronage/invective is inflammatory.  Does the military construct of “culture wars” merely serve as a rallying point in the process of mobilizing forces of resistance or does it imply a desired state of reversal from the opposition: “Other” as victor and “Master” as vanquished?  Even framing the questions underscores the tensions with which the subject is fraught.  One is walking a tight wire over a minefield, conscious of potential political implications which can be seized upon by the thought police.  Little wonder people of all affiliations avoid discussion on a topic which they fear will subject them to personal attack.           

As with many of the selections we have read this quarter, a linear sequential analysis seems out of sync when approaching material which challenges the conventions of academic expository.  Trinh brings it all: a patchwork quilt incorporating poetry, fable, analogy, metaphor.   A in-kind response seems more appropriate but the difficulty of being able to pull it off credibly and with the degree of clarity necessary to the task inhibits the attempt.   

 

I am a junkie desperate for a fix when looking for a power source to recharge my cell phone.  It has morphed from its inception as a safety device–a constructive umbilical cord through the existence of which my parents could gradually relinquish total control over my physical movements from place to place, the adolescent version of the nursery monitor, to being an agent of social transactions, the glue of my social connectivity. Co-presence is an apt descriptor as considerations of space and time are conquered by the omnipresence and multi-tasking possibilities a cell phone provides.  With contemporaneous photo capabilities, you can almost be in two places at once and armed with a mobile, you never have to be alone while by yourself in public.  The point Ito makes about cell usage in social gatherings is apt.  Rather than being seen as excluding those who are present, it is a way of including those who are not.  

Texting provides greater opportunities than dialogue alone on occasions when privacy is paramount or speaking would be disruptive to the setting.  The duality also provides a choice of presentation mode.  Texting can be the preferred method of communication when operating under time constraints or attempting to avoid the possible awkwardness a conversation might necessitate.  While solidifying a pre-existing social network, it may inhibit the acquisition of new social contacts to the extent that casual public conversations are curtailed when everyone is welded to their cell phones.

In her ethnographic studies of cultural practices relating to technological adaptations in everyday life, Ito brings a more complex, nuanced view of the delicate interplay between capitalism and social life than is suggested by media theorists. Although corporations launch brands across platforms in the endless pursuit of profits, consumers are not mere force-fed pawns of capitalist culture but are capable of flexing their own entrepreneurial muscles and exhibiting their own capabilities of imagination in sandlots, in zines, and in convention centers, 300,000 strong, as is illustrated by the Yugioh phenomenon.

 From corporate product launch to populist adaptation of pre-packaged culture, producers and consumers are reversing roles. The Pandora’s box of New Media is up for grabs. Authenticity and connectivity are at a premium as producers and consumers wrestle for control.  No longer the province of the highest bidder, avenues of access are increasingly open to all but are being clogged by the clutter of overload.    Between corporation and consumer, who is leading the dance and who is following is at issue as markets become more fragmented and consumers assume more activist and more hypersocial roles.

Hobbs

Outline

• Children age 18 spend an average of eight hours per day using media
• Mass media messages provide most people with their primary source of information about the world (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi)
• “Literacy educators no longer “own” the concept of literacy”(16).

Disciplinary Frameworks Shape Priorities For The New Literacies

Visual Literacy
• Aims to demonstrate how genres, codes, conventions and formats shape perceptual and interpretive processes (16).
• Visual literacy privileges the “reading” process of “viewing and interpreting” images more than the “composing process of creating and constructing images (Tyner, 1998).

Information Literacy
• A set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use it (17).

Media Literacy
• Instructional practices that engage children and young people in critically analyzing mass media messages and popular culture (18).
• Critical: refers to the recognition that visual and electronic messages are constructed text that present particular, distinctive points of view as a result of the economic, political and social contexts in which they circulate
• Pedagogy stresses
o The process of inquiry
o Situated action learning

Critical Literacy
• Emphasizes that identity and power relations are always part of the process of posing and interpreting texts (19).

A Model for Synthesizing Emerging Consensus in Mulitliteracies

• What tenets or principles do the practitioners and scholars advocating new literacies share?
o AA (authors and audiences)
o MM (messages and meanings)
o RR (representations and reality)
• “New literacies have as a central focus the development of students’ engagement with texts and their context for the meaning-making process, the constructed process of authorship, and questions about how texts represent social realities”(21).
• They differ in their “relative emphasis on the reader and the socio-historical and political contexts in which interpretations take place”(22).

Future research should:
• Explore how current uses of film and video in the classroom may be more meaningfully connected to literacy development in elementary- and secondary-education contexts (23)
• Investigate how comparing and contrasting online newspapers and television news media might support literacy development (23)
• Continue to explore why and how teachers decide to implement new literacies instruction (24)

Conclusion
• A central objective for media education: the ability to apply knowledge and skills learned in the classroom to the world of everyday (25)

Comments

Hobbs advocates a pragmatic approach to synthesizing multiple visions of multimedia literacy into an effective navigational system acquired in the classroom for real world use by K-12 schoolchildren awash in a technology-driven, media-based, information-rich popular culture. From academic theorist to educational practitioner to media-saturated learner, classroom-based acquisition and development of communicative competencies in print, visual, electronic and digital media required for full participation in contemporary society is the objective. The difficulty lies in translating theories into practice. Can consensus on K-12 multimedia literacy practices be reached through the integration of competing disciplinary frameworks? Although all four academic multiliteracy models–media, visual, critical and information—can be collapsed into three broad categories to integrate the conceptual tenets of multimedia literacies, disjunctures between ideologies, pedagogies and emphasis remain.

Culture wars rage on. Familiar battle cries resound. To what extent is the selection and choice of texts a significant component of the meaning-making process? How much emphasis should be placed on the social position and lived experience of the individual interacting with the text? What are the appropriate message genres deserving attention? To what extent does popular culture, mass media, and entertainment displace core literary and historical texts? To what extent will literacy practices include a focus on identity and power relations, an examination of inequity related to race, class, gender and sexual orientation when interpreting texts? Will media literacy pedagogy replace the teacher-centered, skill-based, textbook-dependent content-transmitted tradition-bound classroom with a student-centered, inquiry-based, multi-modal, production-ready, socially conscious action-oriented real world-based multi-media classroom?

Luke recognizes the responsibilities of the educational establishment in addressing the changed needs of a student population digitalized since infancy. Access in early childhood for those at risk of falling on the wrong side of the digital divide is also advocated. Luke urges attention be paid to issues of stereotyping, violence, and socialization raised by early childhood immersion in cyberculture. While pressing for curriculum and pedagogy changes from a traditionally print-centric educational establishment, Luke expresses confidence in educators’ abilities “to lead the way in providing balanced perspectives on a range of IT mediated learning and socialization issues.” On what grounds such confidence is based, no evidentiary record is presented. Nor does Luke spell out what curriculum or pedagogy changes in relation to IT she envisions. Somewhat disturbing is her view of crib jockeys engaged in a technological arms race to jobs twenty years away which don’t yet exist: “as parents and educators we cannot do enough to prepare the very young for an uncertain job future.” While the effects of new technologies on new generations of users may always, as Luke points out in her historical review, be subject to unjustified levels of concern, isn’t the mentality that infancy is not too early to begin vocational training for a job two decades away a cause for legitimate concern?

Hobbs is a proponent for determining and disseminating best classroom practices and desired student outcomes in developing a multi-media literacy framework for 21st century learners. He acknowledges the need for systemic changes in the education establishment and in its delivery system in order to facilitate the development of literacy competencies across media platforms, including some not traditionally privileged. He recognizes the difficulties inherent in translating diverse literacy theories with political and social implications from academia into K-12 classroom practices. Hobbs deserves credit for demonstrating the complexity of the issues and the significance of the undertaking.

Better Luck Tomorrow

Better Luck Tomorrow, though on the surface setting out to de-construct stereotypes of the model minority, arguably ends up reinforcing them. Not only are the main characters true-to-type blue chip prospects for Ivy League schools with superlative GPAs and stellar ECs, but, in addition, they manage to run a crime syndicate for thrills in their spare time. However, they are not true gang bangers, just suburban wannabes. They talk ghetto but they act OC: canned food drives, beach clean-ups, homeless benefit car washes, candy bar drives. They find the swagger to go looking for trouble, but when trouble comes looking for them, they are more Cypress than South Central and more USA than Taipei. Class and nationality trump ethnicity. Though Asian American, they appropriate the suburban culture of choice. They can afford the luxury of “playing” tough as long as it is an elective. Once it turns real, they are undone.

Ben has an entry for every line on his college application: choir boy, boy scout, three-time employee of the month, JV basketball player, hospital translator, National Academic Decathlon Champion, and plenty of notable omissions: scam artist, cheat sheet trafficker, drug dealer, cokehead, thug, murderer. Clearly the entries are intended to fit the stereotype while the omissions contest the stereotype. However, as occurred with the preppie stereotypes in Cruel Intentions, despite the contestation, the underlying Asian-American stereotypes stay in tact.

The Asian-American characters are acculturated to Asian-American stereotypes and serve to reinforce them. The varsity letterman at the party who questions the legitimacy of tennis as a varsity sport is echoing Ben’s narrative introduction of Daric. His unfavorable comparison of Ben to Michael Jordan echoes the dubiousness with which Stephanie considered Ben’s future professional prospects in basketball due to his lack of stature and Daric’s award-winning article on Ben as a token Asian player. His consignment of the Asian partygoers to the Bible study class next door occurs after the display of snapshots showing Ben and Virgil in church settings. When Steve identifies their corner of the party as the Asian hangout, Daric makes a quip about the library, the mainstay Asian hangout, being closed. The societal bias against Asian Americans as athletes and the societal expectations of Asian Americans to be studious and Bible thumping are perceptions shared across ethnicities.

Gender stereotypes are even more compelling than the ethnic stereotypes. Males display proprietary interests toward females—toward both the prostitute, Rachel, and the girlfriend, Stephanie—in order to promote, with varying degrees of success, male bonding. Where group cohesion already exists and the transaction is commercial, it succeeds. Han and Daric arrange Ben’s sexual initiation and share the afterglow. However, Steve’s attempts to govern an admiration society for Stephanie backfire; he alienates both Daric and Ben, whether intentionally or unintentionally is unclear. Han uses feminine descriptors in a derogatory way, by addressing Ben and Virgil as girls or ladies.

Stephanie’s passivity in her relationship with Steve is not mirrored in regard to Ben with whom she acts more assertively. Insulted that Ben pigeonholes her a cheerleader and prom queen and completes their lab report by himself, she sets him straight as to her academic credentials: three honors classes and a 3.8 GPA. Physically, she is the aggressor: sticking him with the needle in lab, hitting him to break the jinx on their winter ball date and pursuing him after New Year’s Eve. Her snap shot intro depicts her with a long barrel gun and a dead deer; she also brandishes her make-believe handgun when telling him of her ambition to become a cop. Yet despite her obvious strength, her role in the relationship with Steve is far more submissive. Whether it is she who appears in the porno film she is reputed to have made is open to question. It is as difficult for the audience as for Ben to understand what draws her to Steve.

Homoerotic overtones can be inferred from actions of Steve and of Daric. Ben directly questions whether Steve is gay due to his refusal to escort Stephanie to the formal. Daric’s protectiveness toward his homeboys is subject to interpretation.

As in much contemporary youth media, a parental presence is totally absent from the film although Daric is the only one whose parents are living outside the country. The lack of a physical presence seems ludicrous when a child, Virgil, is hospitalized with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The use of SAT vocabulary words as a framing device with the definitions previewing the acts to follow is clever. Also recurring and also used as framing devices are practice sessions at the basketball court in the park and maintenance checks of the aquarium.

Lighting, both natural and artificial produces striking effects. The darkness of the garage where the lying in wait occurs contrasts starkly with the brightness of the back yard burial site. The red of the billiard parlor where Daric hatches the plot against Steve and persuades his confederates to participate portends the danger which lies ahead. The manner in which some shots are lit make them memorable: blue dusk at the park, a dance frenzy at the Winter formal recalling an over-populated I-pod billboard, Ben framed in the hospital elevator.

Suburbia seems to offer any number of metaphorical possibilities for erecting barriers of all sorts. The movie begins with the entry into a gated community; whether the last frame of the movie will be a shot of another gated community, one from which the only escape is parole becomes a matter of speculation once Steve’s wake-up call has laid him to eternal rest. Fences figure prominently in the imagery: the enclosure at the batting cage, the chain link fence around the pool where Ben and Stephanie discuss the winter formal, the entry gate at Steve’s beachfront home, the wall at the miniature golf course, etc. Shooting interiors through outside paned windows is effective in the scene in which a locked door separates Virgil and Han who hears the gunshot but does not know what has happened.

Non-verbal communication proves powerful in a multitude of scenes: the liquor store carding episode, the record store shoplifting episode, the winter formal dance episode. Novel camera angles provided interesting perspectives: at the batting cages, in the shopping cart. In a few scenes people switch in and out of focus. Speed varies in some scenes, especially during transitional shots of the schoolyard. Dissolves help move along the homework scene.

Like other contemporary films, temporal conventions are broken; instead of events being presented chronologically, they are non-sequential.

Virgil is as terrified of consequences as he is unable to control impulses. He fears his father, he fears incarceration, he shoots himself. Daric, uncertain of his grip on the others, loses confidence in his ability to perform damage control. Ben surrenders to not knowing how things will turn out. He gets the girl, having done in the guy, but whether or not the law will get him in the end is uncertain: ambiguity laced with irony, the favorite new media cocktail.

Lister et al. — Ch. 4

Outline

Chapter 4 New Media in Everyday Life

4.1.1
‘Everyday life’
• Implies the mundane and quotidian, the routine and ordinary (219)
‘Cyberspace’
• Disembodied and exhilarating
• “…A new kind of life and society online, a democratic public sphere unencumbered by the stultifying routines and alienating hierarchies of the real word”(269).

4.1.2
• For some observers new media offer new creativities and possibilities, for others they reinforce and extend social constraints and power relationships (220)

4.1.3
Cyberspace
o “The sense we have of a space behind the monitor screen, or the network ’in’ which we communicate with distant others or from which we receive images, information and services”(221).
• New media quickly cease to represent exciting new features and are incorporated into the fabric of everyday experience (222)

4.2.1
• Telecommuting
o Working exclusively or predominately from home while connected to the office or clients via PC or modem
• “The Net is not just a spectacle for passive consumption but also a participatory activity”(225).

4.2.2
• Popular new media are commodities
• “Technologies, far from being merely technical, are at once material and symbolic” —Bingham
• ‘Black boxes’: a particular configuration of entertainment and/or information technologies packaged as a single, commercially successful product
o It is not only particular technical features included in any new black bow device that determines its commercial success; its symbolic status is also crucial (227)

4.2.3
• Computer technology is instrumental in profound transformations in contemporary culture and beyond
• Cyberspace us seen as a realm in which social divisions based on bodily and material attributes and positions (age, gender, class, race, etc.) can be transcended (228)
• The meanings and uses of popular new media such as the web or video games are by no means fixed
• “Computers enter into the development of personality, of identity, and even of sexuality” —Turkle (234).

4.2.4
• The negotiation of access and construction of meaning of stand-alone PCs

4.2.5
• Edutainment: the use of entertainment, toys and games as a medium for learning
o Derogatory—a trivializing, ‘dumbing down’ or commercialization of knowledge and learning
o Edutainment has now been adopted by the educational software industry
• “Knowledge is not only central to economic development, it becomes raw material and commodity”(241).

4.2.6
• “Networks could be seen as more like public theatre than ‘old’ media”(245).
• “An online home, on the other hand, is a little hole you drill in the wall of your real home to let the world in” —John Seabrook (264).
• Bricolage: the appropriation and manipulation of the meanings of commodities by youth subcultures

4.3.2
• An optimistic, positive reading of cultural change: new media technologies are free from the repressive ‘master narratives’ and hierarchies of the modern era (249)
• Identity become a ‘moveable feast’ (252)

4.3.3
• Cyberfeminism: term covers a diverse, even contradictory range of feminist theories on technological change and gender
• Cyborg: ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’ (255)

4.4
• Videogames are the first popular computer-based medium”(260).

4.4.1
• Videogames are generally presented as a problem to be solved (262)
• Losing oneself in the medium can be creative and liberating, this immersion can be hypnotic, seductive, ‘mindless’ as well (263)

4.4.2
• It is estimated that 49 percent of adult online gamers are female (Datamoniter 2000)
• Pokemon is an example of an ‘entertainment supersystem’

4.4.3
• What is the cultural significance of play?
• According to Huizinga, though essential to culture play is always separate from ordinary or real life (269)
• Ludus: denotes modes of play characterized by adherence to strict rules
• Paidia: ‘true’ creative play
• “Playing is both escape and engagement”(271).

4.4.4
• Videogames do represent a significant new medium: mass media as games (273)
• “We see videogames not as ephemeral digital toys but as offering distinct, perhaps unique, opportunities for engaging with and making sense of the complex and intimate relationships—networks even—between people and computer media technology”(277).

4.4.5
• “Established conceptual frameworks for studying media and culture in everyday life, whilst productive, do not fully address the questions raised by digital media technologies”(279).

Comments

Sonia Livingstone’s 1998 account of the confusion adults felt when they heard eight year olds refer to their off-line adaptation of a favorite multimedia adventure game as “playing the Internet” embodies the generational divide between those of us who grew up “playing the Internet” and the adults whose new media commentary is embedded in a Before Internet/After Internet perspective. For a post-Internet generation, the framing of “everyday life” and “cyberspace” as “distinct, even irreconcilable concepts” rings of historical fiction, not science fiction. The Jetsons approach to new media by old timers privileges those for whom cyberspace succeeded outerspace as the new frontier. Having grown up in cyberspace, the theorizing does not always resonate with experience. One feels like the subject of a photograph who, when presented with the snapshot fails to recognize the landscape. The excitement surrounding the introduction of what were new technologies is not necessarily shared by those young enough to have not been without. For us, new media is everyday life and the rapidity of technological change is as normal as the ten-week quarter. New media is not superimposed on our everyday lives, in large measure, it defines our lives.

A recurrent theme in new media theory, regardless of topic, is the dichotomy between the cyberculture ideology of democratic empowerment and the postmodernist ideology of commercialized mediasphere. “Appropriation of the fittest” might be an apt descriptor of the endless cyberspace chase scene in which authenticity of relationships and construction of identity are the commodities of choice in both the commercial and non-commercial sectors, with the burgeoning of chat, brands, franchises, MUDs, home pages, and on-line gaming. Convergence on connectivity directs the mad scramble for attention and allegiance.

Although entitled, New Media in Everyday Life, Chapter 4 did not succeed in maintaining a strong continuity of theme throughout the chapter. The ethnography of one family’s shared computer use seemed relevant and illustrative of practice, the chapter lacked a unified presentation. Diverse viewpoints were presented, examples of Microsoft’s X-Box marketing strategy was contrasted with the do-it-yourself post-punk media culture, but critique, as it related to the specific topic seemed more generic than domestic-specific.

Jenkins “Welcome to Convergence”, Ch. 6 Photoshop for Democracy

Welcome to Convergence

Outline

Convergence: the flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties…across media platforms

• Convergence occurs as a top-down process shaped by corporate decisions…and a bottom-up process shaped by consumer participations.

• Convergence may occur inside the black box but it can occur inside our heads.

o Examples: Pokemon, The Matrix, Global Frequency

• Digital Revolution—displacement of old media by the new media

• Convergence—the interplay between old and new media

• Interactivity is a property of technologies
• Participation is a property of cultures

• If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then the new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media

• If old consumers were isolated the new consumers are more socially connected

• If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, the new Consumers are now noisy and public

• If old consumers were seen as compliant, the new consumers are resistant, taking media in their own hands

• Prohibitionist vs. collaborationist logics

• Battle over Intellectual Property

Comments

Jenkins defines convergence as “the flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties…across media platforms.” He emphasizes that convergence isn’t just about a little black box; convergence is about the “interplay between old and new media.” He discusses the transition that has occurred from old consumer to new, emphasizing the participatory process of user-generated, piggybacked media and the challenge so collaborative a model has posed to a prohibitionist, intellectual property corporate regime.

Viewing Jenkins’ lecture was more stimulating than reading the assigned text. Watching him deliver his message with the multi-modalities of voice, gesticulation, expression, inflection, and visual aids was a more layered experience than decoding Chapter 6. His enthusiasm regarding the populist potential of convergence is contagious. It is easy to overlook the dark side of media conglomerates and their penchant for buying up the little guys when caught up in his gleeful version of an agile David destined to overcome a lumbering Goliath Similarly, his contrast between the old model of passive consumer and the new model of activist consumer seems overstated. Maybe some people are “new consumers taking the media into their own hands” but a large number use new media in old ways.. He recognizes the power of popular culture to generate communities of interest, the referential value of mass media in user-generated content and the ascendancy of bottom-up, decentralized, non-hierarchal, collective intelligence cultures to collect and disperse information over all media platforms. The potential for such cultures to wield power as media consumers and producers and the scope of that power are subjects of considerable interest. Jenkins presents a compelling picture of the changing balance of power and blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers in brand relationships and content production.

Photoshop for Democracy

Outline

• “The core of viral marketing is getting the right idea into the right hands at the right time”(206).

• Jenkins Question: “In each case, entrenched institutions are taking their models from grassroots fan communities, reinventing themselves for as era of media convergence and collective intelligence. So why not apply those same lessons to presidential politics?”(208).

• “The current diversification of communication channels is politically important because it expands the range of voices that can be heard…”(208).

• The new media principles: access, participation, reciprocity, and peer-to-peer rather than one-to-many communication

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

• Trippi describes the Dean campaign’s early successes as a “tipping point”: this was where the politics of television gave way to the politics of the Internet”(210).

• “The Web’s low barriers to entry expand access to innovative or even revolutionary ideas at least among the growing segment of the population that has access to a computer”(210).

• “Broadcasting provides the common culture, and the Web offers more localized channels for responding to that culture”(211).

• The new outlets aren’t displacing the old ones; they’re transforming them.
—Jesse Walker
• “The Internet reaches the hard core, television the undecided”(213).

Blogging
• Blogging is a form of grassroots convergence

• “Blogging may on one level be facilitating the flow of ideas across the media landscape; on other levels, they are ensuring an ever more divisive political debate”(216).

• Spin: refers to campaign efforts to slant the news in its direction

• “The mixture of different media systems made Campaign 2004 unusually complicated”(218).

Fans, Consumers, Citizens

• Campaigns were learning from fan culture

• “Many bloggers explicitly define themselves in opposition to mainstream media and what they see as its corporately controlled content”(220).

o Photoshop

• “Activists, fans, and parodists of all stripes are using the popular graphics software package, Photoshop, to appropriate and manipulate images to make a political statement”(220).

Entertaining the Monitorial Citizen

• Question raised by Jenkins: “Does making politics into a kind of popular culture allow consumers to apply fan expertise to their civic responsibilities?”(224).

o The Pew Study
• Pew showed that young people were getting information from entertainment media instead of news media
o Demonstrated that people who got their information from such sources were on the whole less informed about the world than consumers of traditional news (224).

Playing Politics in Alphaville

• Ex: Alphaville election→connection between game play and civic engagement

• Vote Naked

• “Consumers and fans are beginning to take pleasure in their newfound power to shape their media environment…”(234).

• Jenkins question: “When will we be able to participate within the democratic process with the same ease that we have come to participate in the imaginary realms constructed by popular culture?”(235)

• A range of different ways that activists used popular culture to encourage voter awareness and participation in the 2004 presidential campaign

• “We vote naked not in the sense that we feel an intimate engagement with politics but in the sense that we feel raw, exposed, and vulnerable”(236).

• What I find disturbing, however, is how easy the Internet has made it not just to Google the fact that I need when I need it, but also to get the mindset I want when I want it. —Andrew Leonard

• Knowledge cultures depend on the quality and diversity of information they can access

• “We may be able to talk across our differences if we find commonalities through our fantasies”(239).

Comments

Jenkins analyzes the groundbreaking use of new media during the 2004 presidential campaign. He recounts the multitude of media that were employed during that campaign and to what effect and highlights the ways politicians have responded to the impact of blogs, photoshop parodies, etc. He discusses how new media outlets have democratized politics by subjecting mainstream media coverage to greater scrutiny by individuals and interest groups, forcing more accountability. Ordinary citizens are now able to share their personal opinions on a large scale through the Internet He suggests that politics can benefit from the lessons of fan and consumer culture. He examines how a videogame, The Sims, can engage players with the political process and encourage them to be more politically active in the future. Jenkins used contemporary and familiar examples to make his points about the potential for greater political participation by the citizenry. The research about young people getting their news coverage from entertainment programming like The Daily Show is something I had heard before. I don’t find it as scandalous as others. I think when people watch Jon Stewart they know what genre of program they are watching and what messages he is trying to send; I don’t think the same kind of filtering is practiced when people watch traditional news. They expect that to be objective and unbiased and are, therefore, more prone to accept it uncritically. At least The Daily Show requires it viewers to process what is being presented. Jenkins tries to offer solutions to the polarization of politics. He wants people to be able to focus on the similarities and not just the differences. Easier said than done. Jenkins deftly diagnoses the downside of identity politics. The ease with which one can commune with only those of similar viewpoints makes it that much harder to interact with and reach consensus with those in “the enemy camp.” New media could change the political landscape. Individual empowerment through digital democracy and the new technological ability to instantly inform and mobilize at the grassroots level could eventually help shift power away from a polarized two party system.

Freire & Maceado (1987) – Ch. 1, Luke & Freebody

Freire & Maceado (1987) – Ch. 1

Outline
• “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world”(29).

• “The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context”(29).

• “…reading the word, the phrase, and the sentence never entailed a break from reading the world…reading the word meant reading the word-world”(32).

• “Mechanically memorizing the description of an object does not constitute knowing the object”(33).

• “I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge and therefore a creative act”(34).

• “…reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it…”(35).

• “To sum up, reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read”(36).

Comments

The Importance of the Act of Reading is echoed by Reading and Colonization.  Luke and Freebody’s assertion that “Reading is about reading cultures and worlds” is resonant in Freire’s testimonial that reading “is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world “describing his own progression from “reading the world” to “reading the word.” He describes the continuously interactive and dynamic process of interpreting the word from the world and the world from the word:  “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world.”

Upon reading Freire’s account, I could not help but wonder why sequentially, this week’s reading was assigned after the due date of our own written auto/biographies instead of before.  Both articles, in fact, broadened my perspective and made me want to go back and expand on my original piece in light of new ways of considering the experience of literacy.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of contextualized learning and dismissal of rote memorization should be taken to heart in the development of AP curriculum.  Freire seems to integrate the psychological and sociological models of reading more effectively than Luke and Freebody.  He references both the political and creative implications of literacy and acknowledges the centricity of the student in the process, rather than the teacher. 

Luke & Freebody

Outline
Reading and Colonization
• “…reading is a social practice using written text as a means for the construction and reconstruction of statements, messages, and meanings”(185).
• Reading is tied up in politics and power relations of everyday life (185).
• Colonial education: “the goal of literacy education was the successful introduction of the student into a cannon of classical English literature”(186).
• 19th century and early 20th century:
o Two-stage model: “the basics” followed by “the classics”

Reading and Social Epistemologies
1. Reading and writing are social activities
2. All texts are motivated—there is no neutral position from which a text can be read or written
3. We learn about appropriate reading and writing positions within the relationships that take responsibility for our learning
4. Institutionally purpose-built repertoires of “selves” are represented to us either explicitly or otherwise in all of the texts we read and write (193-4)

Cross-Cultural and Historical Examples of Reading
• “Different cultures and subcultures frame up who, what, and when people read for particular social purposes”(195).
Redefining Reading: From Psychological to Sociological Models
Formalizing and summarizing the contrast between psychological and sociological perspective on reading
• “Our principle purpose here is to disrupt contemporary common sense notions about reading”(207).
• “This move is significant in terms of how we see difference and diversity in the classroom”(208).
• “We argue for a social practice hypothesis: that one learns to do with reading what one is taught to do and what is valued and encouraged and useful in cultural, interpretive communities, and sites”(212).

The Elements of Reading As A Social Practice
• “The issue is, what kinds of reading practices and positions should schools value, encourage and propagate?”(213).

• “To reshape the selective tradition, there are several imperatives:
1. That we attend to critical pragmatic, text-meaning, and coding elements of reading at all stages
2. That we move away from a focus on psychological models toward those sociological models
3. That we integrate the analysis and study of new text forms of multimediated postmodern culture
4. That we focus instruction on how community, workplace, and everyday cultural texts and discourses work, linguistically and politically”(221-2).
• “The issue is how we want to shape reading, how we want to form a selective tradition of materials and practices”(222).

Comments

In Shaping the Social Practices of Reading, Luke and Freebody advocate a shift in paradigm from the psychological model of reading to a sociological model of reading.  Acknowledged in the caption to Table 12.3, comparing the features of the two models, though not fore grounded in the text, is the proposition that “the models provided here are not mutually exclusive and may overlap in some significant ways.”   Given the diversity of cognitive functioning documented by current research, discounting the psychological framework of the individual brain is as counterproductive as ignoring the sociological implications of content and stance in reading curriculum and pedagogy.  Society can ill-afford to ignore either.  Of equal import to the unique identity of each reader who is, after all, greater than the sum of his demographic parts, and the selection of material to be showcased is the power relationship between teacher and pupil as was effectively demonstrated in the excerpted classroom and kitchen table exchanges.  As long as a “sage-on-stage” persona is adopted by the educator, the student is at the mercy of that higher authority.  A “guide-at-side” model recognizes the collaborative element of education and empowers the student to approach learning more authentically, rather than under an assumed identity.  Traditional methods of assessment and the significance given to grades and test scores have a corrupting influence at every level of education since they serve as gatekeepers for future educational and professional opportunities. 

What is ambiguous about the chapter is its practical application, given its political implications. Who calls the tune?   The chapter acknowledges the power of education to indoctrinate and urges adoption of pedagogical practices which promote critical literacy, practices which have been exemplified in our prompts and which should underlie education at all levels. However, given the culture wars already being waged in America’s classrooms wherein Kwanza can be celebrated in one but not Halloween, evolution can be presented in another, but not creationism, promotion of the sociological model will generate controversy and its contemporary adjunct, litigation. A public acknowledgment of “the rightful significance of sociopolitical contexts and issues in reading instruction” would have most school board members ducking for cover. Without further clarification the chapter raises issues of cultural relativism.  Or is it advocating a totally free marketplace of ideas? What does that look like? Without an agreed-upon canon– for which inclusivity and diversity could be the model instead the hide-bound Western-centric Great Books catalogue–or even an agreement for the necessity of a canon, it remains unclear under the sociological model, despite their acknowledged importance, what texts should be taught.  Or is all that is necessary knowledge on the part of the reader of how to approach the text?  But does not the reader have to engage first? 

It is disappointing that within the chapter a credible counter-argument for acculturation as a legitimate end of contemporary education in so diverse a society is not presented and critiqued.  The   example of highlighting the ambiguity of legal terms in a lease agreement seems to support an argument for the necessity of acculturating citizens to standard equitable concepts of reasonableness, negligence and quiet enjoyment.  To the extent that individuals from varying backgrounds constitute a single society governed by rule of law, a shared commonality of understanding is necessary for the regulation of social conduct within legal boundaries.

Princess Mononoke

Extrapolating to film, generally, and Princess Mononoke, specifically, the central question of Chapter 12, becomes, “What kind of views are and can be produced by Miyazaki’s film and the lessons for which it is purpose built? The answer resounds throughout the film: pantheist, pacifist, feminist, and environmentalist.

The film’s protagonist, Ashitaka, is portrayed as a pacifist warrior. Each encounter in which he resorts to violence is in defense of self or others. In each instance before taking any defensive action, he puts his adversary on notice with a cease and desist order. He importunes the boar-turned-demon, Nago, “Calm your fury, Almighty Lord, whatever you might be. Leave us in peace.” When he does shoot, it is to save the village. In his encounter with the samurai when he happens upon “a battle, no, a massacre,” he again prefaces his actions with words to try to avert confrontation: “You stop. Let me pass. I am warning you.” Even though the Samurai had persisted in their aggression after being given fair warning, he expresses regret at the defensive actions he was forced to take, “Two men died because of me.” When Ashitaka finds himself under threat by San when she launches as assault upon Lady Eboshi Gozen’s stronghold, Irontown, he admonishes, ”Wait! I don’t want to fight you. I am a friend.” Later when San is in the clutches of the demon boar, Ashitaka attempts an appeal to reason: “Calm your fury. Let me have the girl.” Even when pressed to avert a massive threat to human life and imminent environmental destruction, Ashitaka warns Jigo that his refusal to relinquish the head of the Forest Spirit will have fatal consequences: “Don’t force me to kill you.” Words, rather than arrows are Ashitaka’s weapon of choice. Ashitaka is able to restore the head of the Forest Spirit without having to dispatch Jigo or his confederates. Ashitaka is a reluctant warrior for whom the use of force is a last resort, justifiable only in defense of life and only when resort to reason has failed. His vow to see with eyes unclouded by hate is kept. His expressed desire is for the forest and the humans to live in peace.

Feminism permeates the storyline, even to the point of dethroning the rightful title character, Prince Ashitaka, around whom the entire story revolves, in favor of a less prominent, but clearly female, character, Princess Mononoke. Girl Power carries the day. Females are invested with power and strength. In the Emishi village it is the Wise Woman who, sensing danger, orders everyone back to the settlement. It is she who provides the salve for Ashitaka’s wounds, she who addresses Nago, she who foretells Ashitaka’s fate and invites him to meet it. It is Kaya, Ashitaka’s little sister, who flouts the taboo against leave-taking, to bid Ashitaka farewell and present him with the crystal dagger. Iron Maiden, Lady Eboshi Gozen, is a cross between Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher: governor, industrialist, military commander, and philanthropist. Committed to technology and humanitarianism, she oversees development and production of iron, the protection of the means of procurement for raw materials needed in its manufacture, the defense and security of the enterprise, the care and feeding of the workers, the protection and empowerment of the marginalized and oppressed. A matriarchal society, men assume subsidiary roles and “don’t bother us unless we want them to.” Females Moro, the Wolf Goddess, and her adopted human daughter, San, meet Eboshi’s aggression head on. They are unwavering in launching their defense of their homeland, the forest, against encroachment by humans who are impervious to the environmental destruction wreaked by their plundering of natural resources. Sworn enemies of Eboshi, both Moro and San risk their lives to save the forest, Moro, falling like Nago, to the iron bullet of Eboshi, San invading Ironland commando-style. Another source of female strength is the fine oak tree, mother to the tree spirits, so benignly and engagingly portrayed.

Just as Eboshi is portrayed multi-dimensionally, as both an aggressor against the forest gods but as a defender against human injustice, so, too, is San portrayed complexly. Unremitting in her quest for vengeance against Eboshi, and distrustful of humans, though one herself, San, nonetheless, connects with Ashitaka and protects him from the creatures wanting to devour him. Her future, however, is in the forest while Ashitaka’s future is in rebuilding Irontown.

Feminism is promoted and females assume powerful and multi-dimensional roles, even in the lower rung positions of sharpshooters and bellows workers. With the exception of the prince, men do not fare as well. Man’s inhumanity to man is fore grounded and men are seen as either weak or brutal. The old Emishi man in the tower was impotent against Nago; the Emishi council were subservient to the wise woman. Samurai were barbarians, engaged not in combat, but in massacres. The Emishi themselves were a hidden tribe, victims of ethnic cleansing. The cunning Jigo was ruled by greed, and though eager to cash in on untold riches by delivering the head of the forest spirit to the emperor, was more than happy to let someone else do the killing for him The ox driver saved by the prince was portrayed derisively, as a buffoon who in his injured state was not an economically viable entity to his wife. The male boars fared worse than the female wolf when mortally wounded. They became rampaging demons.

Although the animals were ferocious in defense of their environment and open in their hatred of humans, it was humans who were the aggressors. Visually, the forest was a place of mystical communion with nature. The deified beasts and forest spirit generated more devotion from the viewer than the iron altars of human technology or the material gods of the monk, Jigo. The beauty with which the natural world was infused made it an object of visual worship.

Viewers of Princess Mononoke are positioned by the reading of the film to assume a pro-female, pro-environment, pro-pacifist, pro-forest spirit stance. They are left with the hope that with Prince Ashitaka’s unclouded vision and San’s continued vigilance, Irontown can be rebuilt to coexist in peace and harmony with nature and all other living creatures.

New Media Symposium

ParaSite New Media Symposium
Friday, October 26th, 2007
10am – 6pm
Nestrick Room, 142 Dwinelle Hall
UC Berkeley

Followed by a reception and live music mash-up and art performance at the Berkeley Art Museum RIP.MIX.BURN. BAM.PFA exhibition, 7 – 10pm

A UCB graduate student symposium on new media and its relationship to other arts and disciplines. Is new media “parasitic” upon the strategies of other media or something like a “para-site” for their exploration? How does new media appropriate, absorb, diminish, further, reinvent, or exist side-by-side with the forms that it inherits? Keynotes by Anne Friedberg (USC) and Scott Bukatman (Stanford). Other participants include Jeffrey Skoller (UCB), Jennifer Bean (UW), Shannon Jackson (UCB), Peter Krapp (UCI), Ken Goldberg (UCB) and Greg Niemeyer (UCB).

Please contact Brooke Belisle (bbelisle at berkeley dot edu) or Irene Chien (ichien at berkeley dot edu) for more information.

Organized by the New Media Working Group. Sponsored by Film Studies, Consortium for the Arts, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley Center for New Media, and Berkeley Art Museum.

http://filmstudies.berkeley.edu/parasite/parasite_flyer.pdf

Frank Miller’s Sin City

When Sin City was first released in theatres I did not join the stampede at the box office. All I really knew about the movie, besides its R rating for violence and its adaptation from the graphic novels, was that Rory from Gilmore Girls, Alexis Bledel, was featured. Even that was not enough to spark an interest. Despite my six years invested in seeing her through high school and college, I had no real desire to see cartoon violence come to cinematic life or Rory come of age. Even after I heard raves from my friends and critical accolades from the professionals, the film had not made it to my short list. Holding nothing back and in the interests of full and fair disclosure, it was a film I had made a conscious decision to avoid. I did not look forward to having to watch it and I was not disappointed. If I had happened upon it on TV, I definitely would have changed the channel after the first few minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I found the film to be visually stunning. It is quite a stimulating production. I just have not made the adjustment to being assigned to watch films and being required to approach them intellectually. The world of films has been a rare protected domain over which I previously exercised complete autonomy of selection and in which I gave full reign to emotions. I need to disengage emotionally and assume a dispassionate aesthetic stance in viewing films. To become film literate, I need to be desensitized to film violence. Maybe a steady diet of Clockwork Orange and Pulp Fiction would do the trick.
In terms of multimodality, Sin City definitely appeals to many senses. Sin City is not just a visual experience. It’s images, sounds, smells textures, and tastes, all wrapped into one sensation-filled package. Your ears drink in the characters’ narration of their own stories while your eyes feast on the action. The use of narration in such fashion was reminiscent of Orson Wells’ The Third Man. The sense of smell is evoked as Marv continues to repeat that Goldie “smells like angels ought to smell.” Lighting effects create tactile responses to the textures depicted. Even in black and white, a dress could be seen to sparkle. Taste was not ignored; cannibalism figured into the story. The movie had a distinctly sensual orientation..
While the black and white imagery evoked the world of film noir, there was a new media twist. Certain characters were “branded” with a specific attribute and a special color denoting that particular attribute whether shoes, eyes, lips, or an article of clothing. It was an effective way of focusing attention on the characteristics framed by color.
Although different directors were involved in creating the different sequences of the story, it was the nonlinearity of the narrative rather than the multiplicity of directors that contributed to the fragmentation of the storyline. Like Crash and Love Actually, it would be a film for which a second viewing would better elucidate the complexity of intersection between the lives of the various characters. On first viewing, the overlap between and sequence within the different stories is difficult to follow.
However impressively Sin City stimulates the senses and challenges the intellect, it is not a film I would choose to watch again until my brain has gained mastery over my gut and I can watch scenes of extreme violence with more detachment.

Kress

Outline

Why? And why now?
• A revolution has dislodged “written language from the centrality which it has held in public communication”(182).
o “Reasons range from changes of a social and cultural character to those more to do with technologies of information and of transport”(183).

• Information initially stored in written form is ‘translated’ into visual form

• We need to rethink ‘language’ as a multimodal phenomenon (184)
1. Relation of ‘mode’ and of the material stuff
2. Relation of semiotic mode to the medium of transmission or propagation

The body’s potential for engagement with the world: mode, materiality, and medium
• “None of the senses ever operates in isolation from the others…That, from the beginning guarantees the multimodality of our semiotic world”(184).
• So-called Western societies have for too long insisted on the priority of a particular form of engagement

• Material(ity): the ‘stuff’ which a culture uses as the means for the expression of (its) meanings
o ‘Materiality’ can also have a non-physical, appearance (185)

• The transcription of writing is a multimodal system
• Language in the spoken word is yet another multimodal system

• “The issue of the medium, that is the issue of transmission and dissemination”(186).
• “If mode affects what can be said and how, media affects what can be and is addressed and how”(187).

Some Key Examples
1. All texts are multimodal
2. There are texts which exist predominantly in a mode rather than the (multi-) mode of language
3. There are systems of communication and representation which are acknowledged in the culture to be multimodal (188)

• Web of cultural practices: practices performed by humans, so that humans have to be trained, educated, or socialized into performing them (190)

• “Insist on the semiotic, communicational, and meaningful aspects of objects”(191).

Potentials and limitations of semiotic modes
• “The visual mode has not been developed into as highly articulated a state as spoken or written language are”(194).
• “The two modes—language and the visual—simply start from different concerns, are embedded in distinct ways of conceptualizing, thinking and communicating”(195).
• Specialization: one representational mode, language, is used for a pedagogic purpose, to direct, remind, organize

Grammar and Multiliteracies: the example of the visual
• “Mulitliteracies is not merely the assumption that we communicate through and with a range of quite different modes”(199)

The semiotics of social relations of viewer and image
• Relations of power are coded by the position of the viewer in vertical relation to the object
• “There are regularities of structure, and regularities of a “grammatical’ kind in different modes”(202).

Comments

Multi-modality is on a roll. Recognition of the multi-modality of speech, as posited by Kress, is enjoying currency in popular culture as the inauguration of a weekly “Body Language” segment on Fox News’ top-rated The O’Reilly Factor attests. Footage of verbal exchanges or pronouncements involving newsworthy figures is aired in conjunction with commentary from a body language expert, analyzing whether the words spoken are reinforced by or in conflict with the kinesthetic movements of the speaker. Each twitch, grimace, tongue thrust, finger wag and shoulder shrug is scrutinized as the medium of the body is subject to the same level of analysis once reserved for words alone. The complexity of the spoken word and the search for its meaning in every nuance of production is a theme espoused by Kress and popularized, after a fashion, for the general public. While application of academic theory is generally laudatory, something seems to have been lost in translation given the sideshow quality of the segment. The human lie detector seems more snake oil than substance.
Recognition of the multi-modality of human intelligences, as referenced by Kress—along with his acknowledgement of society’s power to confer privilege according to the value placed on each modality’—is a cottage industry among academics but with regrettably little effect on the educational delivery systems mired in established practices. Howard Gardner put multiple intelligences on the map, Daniel Goleman is the guru of emotional intelligence, Mel Levine has provided a new generation of school children with an owner’s manual to the brain, spelling out what skills need to be developed to perform specific academic chores.
Where Kress expounds on issues of multi-modality which have received widespread treatment, his commentary is accessible. Where he departs from the beaten track, it becomes problematic. I cannot decide if I do not understand what he has to say or if I disagree with it. Many of his premises seem flawed, dated, or over-generalized. When he refers to music and visual media being viewed as means of expression rather than communication, he is off-target. To bifurcate the expressive features of any art form from their communicative aspects hardly seems possible. Just as, in making the case for the perceived primacy of the word, he over inflates the shared perception of its ability to express the entire range of human experience. Many times have I felt personally and heard expressed by others the inadequacy of words to give expression to sentiments incapable of description. I do not feel that I inhabit the world he describes. Perhaps in championing the cause of multi-modality, he is attributing more primacy to the word than is warranted in order to make a more persuasive case for the necessity of a paradigm shift.
To me Kress seems to be going from one extreme to another. By taking “literacy” so far outside the realm of print medium and expanding its meaning to incorporate all senses and cultural associations, the terminology is rendered meaningless; by encompassing everything, it means nothing in terms of a shared understanding of meaning. So, too, would the spoon tray if placed on a dining room table today. One family might use it for discarded artichoke leaves, another for used teabags, another for the tamale wrapping, another for olive pits, and another for lobster shells. What had cultural significance before becoming a museum piece would incite a free-for-all today. How does that fit into Kress’ construct? Or would it prove his point?
The example of reading a water bottle also invites a subjective range of reaction across the entire sensory, cognitive and emotional spectrum, from critical evaluation of label content to emotional evocation of childhood memories, national allegiance, or pastoral flights of fancy. While marketers of brands have certainly found consumers susceptible to manipulation in forming ties to products, exactly what model of communication and use is Kress advocating or is he simply recognizing the complexity and multi-modality of existing behavior patterns?
For someone for whom the production of meaning is of such significance, Kress is experiencing transmission problems. Whether the defect is in the transmitter or in a faulty receptor lacking in cultural context is at issue.