Irrational Exuberance and the Assimilaton of New Media

Early in the semester, Mary pointed out the tendency writers/scholars have for being overly enthusiastic in their predictions of our digital future. No theme has shown up more consistently in our readings. Jenkins is no exception, though he knows better, "We may not overturn entrenched power (whether that of the political parties or their big money contributors) overnight." (219) Who is "we," and who is he kidding? Much of what Jenkins presents as new phenomena is simply the assimilation of new communication technologies, techniques and political realities by, arguably, our society's most successful communicators, the ruling political class. Two examples, one from the left and one from the right, should make my case. Interestingly, lawyers(the chosen profession of the political class) were at the "grass roots" of both of these.

MoveOn.org was founded by a married couple, Joan Blades (a lawyer) and Wes Boyd, from San Francisco. They had recently sold their software company and wanted to respond to the impeachment of President Clinton. MoveOn started as an email based petition drive to get Congress to "move on" from the distraction of impeachment. Since then MoveOn.org has grown into a large scale fund raising, voter mobilizing, communication organ of the DNC and supporter/endorser of progressive candidates. Though the technology was innovative at the time, the pathway from grassroots to big-time, moneyed, activist political player seems well trodden by groups like: NRA, AARP, NOW, SCLC, etc.

Jenkins also cited the CBS document-gate as an example of new media, grass roots mobilization checking the power of old media. He is only partly correct. I am friends with the man who exposed the differences in the fonts. His name is Harry MacDougald, our sons played little-league baseball together for years and we have both worked in Republican politics. Years earlier, Harry had extensively researched fonts for a court case and that enabled him to spot the fakes. I remember talking to him at the ballpark the day the media revealed him as the source of information.  He was visibly shaken-up because his bosses, he was a attorney with Womble Carlyle, were extremely unhappy with the media attention and threatening his job. Harry's conservative Republican politics were widely discussed at the time, his work on the Clinton's disbarment, and his membership in the Federalist Society. Another fact, relevant in the dissemination of Harry's discovery, never received media attention. Harry's brother-in-law is Byron York, longtime contributor to the National Review, Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Meet the Press, etc. Byron is a good old-fashioned old/new media Washington pundit, with lots avenues for moving a story from a blog by an anonymous Atlanta lawyer to the lead story in the national media.

What seems so new is also the same old story of politics, money and connections. Good thing Mary told us to be on guard against exuberance.

So?

I am somewhat frustrated by Convergence Culture.  I think because I don't sense anything is really being said.  Jenkins is taking us (me at least) on a tour of a familiar landscape. I already aware of most of this stuff and none of it, save the technology, is new. For example:

Ambiguity and cryptic/mythological/socially self-conscious/hidden messages intrigue people. This is present in gnostic gospels, claiming "hidden" knowledge (this is referenced, though undeveloped, in chapter 3). It is present in Freemasonry. It is present on Sgt. Pepper's cover. I take a cynical view of the "endless borrowings" (p. 100) within The Matrix, less philosophical discourse, more gimmickry enlisted to sell multiple viewing and DVDs.

DID ANYONE NOTICE JENKINS WROTE ABOUT ROOM 101 ON PAGE 101????

How is Janet Murray's notion of the "encyclopedic capacity"(p.118) of digital media new, except for the word "digital?"  One of the first books I ever read as a boy was Treasure Island, it had a map, and it transported me into alternative world. If anything visual and digitized worlds are less satisfying because they place concrete boundaries upon the imagination. When you thought of Frodo did you see Elijah Wood before Peter Jackson? Can you ever return in your mind to the pre-Jacksonian Middle Earth? I am more interested in questions like this than Jenkins overview.

Also how can you discuss mediated digital alternate worlds without discussing Second Life (2003)?

Finally, I want to reference an obscure book that was very influential to me in my late teens or early twenties, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander.  Mander, an ex advertising executive, argues that television cannot be redeemed as a technology. He writes about the power it has to create passive acceptance of ideas, centralized control and its relationship to authoritarianism and democracy, and commercialism. One thing he wrote though never escaped me. Mander talked about the way mediated experience privileges reality. When I watch the Gators play on Saturdays I think I am watching a football game, but I am not. In reality, I am sitting on a sofa in a dimly lit room staring at a black box with blinking lights and sound. The medium has the power to alter reality for me. That is something to think about, to be wary of.

Since reading Four Arguments my view of all video has changed. When the screen goes black between scenes or commercials, sometimes I see my reflection, sitting there staring at the TV, it gives me the creeps. Other times I have driven or walked up to a friend's house at night and seen several people staring at the TV while the blue light throbs through the windows and am disquieted. I am thankful for Jerry Mander's book and wish Jenkins was a little more critical.

Speed Kills

Within knowledge communities the "knowledge" being constructed can move (grow??) forward at a rapid pace. If you stand still it passes you buy. The leading edge is constantly moving forward and you, therefore, face a dilemma.  Do I jump to the front, leaving gaps in my understanding that I hope are either superfluous, or will be filled in later? Or, do I lag behind to have a fuller understanding of the transitions, the evolution of the thought, and to look for alternative outcomes ? 

I see this at work in my personal use of technology. I have used Macs for around twenty years, but I don't take advantage of the Mac communities, read Mac World, or any of the various electronic resources available to help me keep pace with the newest innovations.  Instead, I jump in when I need a new computer, peripheral, software, or application. On the downside, I never take full advantage of the available options. On the plus side, I don't spend as much money or time on my computers.  I see time as the only irreplaceable commodity in life and have chosen to invest it elsewhere. Still, there is a trade-off. The negatives of ignoring rapidly changing information are limited when we are talking about entertainment or consumer choices, but what about politics, trends within one's profession, or more closely related to our class, academics? In these activities, where the stakes are higher, completeness should probably trump currentness.

Extending this idea of high speed accretion (is that an oxymoron?) to the work of scholarship, what are the implications of a wired, "spoiler," knowledge community focused on any of the areas we study; i.e. writing, pedagogy, multi-media, technological literacy, digital-divides, etc.? For example, a network of in-class educators doing less than rigorous "teacher research" and sharing their findings over the web.  Because of the speed, I see these knowledge communities as vulnerable to privileging the "new" over the best.  There is already this temptation in the academy, and epistemology in general. New ideas are exciting. Scholars want to make their bones. New approaches are a pathway to academic success. Traditional journals provide a cooling off function. Through them ideas are vetted, scrutinized, and advanced in a measured, informed, manner. It is a very conservative approach. The differential pace of an online open-source collaboration and traditional scholarship has an impact on outcomes. Are those outcomes useful to scholarship? In what ways?

Questions arise involving institutional memory, power, privilege, control, access, gatekeeping, rigor, validity, relevance and more. Our discipline sees knowledge as constructive and collaborative, but that doesn't mean slipshod, random or undisciplined. Can the research, knowledge building, arm of the academy ever be as "democratic" as the idealized "knowledge communities" convergence is creating?

Imposing Distortion

There is not enough space here to treat our readings thouroughly. Wysocki's chapter on beauty really resonates with why I am in graduate school and why I care about rhetoric. She is scraping at an alienating rot within our culture, and ourselves, desperately in need of reconciliation.  It is a difficult subject matter to tie into writing pedagogy. I imagine the line of reasoning she takes is too erudite and abstract for meaningful discussion within an undergraduate composition classroom, though I recall Mary touching on some of these issues through her assignments in Visual Rhetoric. That being said, I agree with Wysocki's basic argument that it is irresponsible to teach visual rhetorics in a moral vacuum. Images can be so loaded with meaning and at the same moment vague and ambiguous. A teacher needs an informed philosophy to help students critique visuals.  The main thing I appreciate about post-modernism is the ability to state your case without being told to "sit down," by the empiricist. So, as a student of rhetoric and composition, a person who values artistic expression, and as lover of God, I am going to try to address this subject.

I am not a feminist (not that I can define one), but, as a Christian, I share many "feminine" values. In terms of her critique, I agree with Wysocki completely, though I am compelled to go even further.  Her emphasis on Arnheim's  "egocentric" approach to the visual is right on point. (153-158)  Art is a mirror into which mankind lovingly gazes. I also agree with her take on Kant's reworking of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as nature, morals and taste.(160)  Kant did much violence when he limited inquiry to the material world, placing the divine out of our reach.

I believe humans are Created with a thirst for what we call Beauty, Goodness and Truth. This is self-evident in any examination of mankind and our practices. We want to see, and to be, good and beautiful. Aesthetic considerations and actions largely define our humanity.  Sadly, what our souls long for they also destroy and exploit. Yes, we are idealistic, but I also believe we are severely distorted through sin.  Sin, as revealed in the Bible, is a violation of God's rule stemming from an elevated sense of self and egotistical pride. This "fallen" state affects all areas of life; i.e., emotions, personality, relationships, thinking, appetites, community and more. Certainly we can agree that rage, paranoia, betrayal, depression, addiction and war are not in our personal or collective best interest, yet they each emanate from the self-centeredness of man. From a Christian worldview art also suffers distortion, corrupted by the same selfishness. God forbade the graven image because the image is not Him as he exists, only a pale egocentric reflection of human desires. The idolater builds an incomplete and impotent version of God, a god to do his bidding, one he finds in the mirror. Likewise, we have received "beauty" as a distorted conception rendered by the musings of philosophers in love with their own self-reflected glory. Their categories narrowly define beauty while ignoring reality with all of its complexity, dissonance and upheaval, preferring forms they can describe and control, idols of the mind. So, in the mirror of self-glorification, the reality of a human being is reduced to a prescription. As Wysocki says, "We are not encouraged to ask about the woman in the ad as a woman, only as a shape."(152) These are not benign abstractions, but horrible lies and painful distortions with real consequences for actual people. These concepts reduce living-breathing, eternal, valuable persons to consumables.  These consumable "products" not only transform persons into objects, but also degrade the sensibilities of the consumer. How many men have grown tired of their wives as they approach menopause? How many woman have cut and starved their bodies to obtain an artificial ideal? How many men and boys have sexual ideals rooted in pornographic fantasy rather than in shared intimacy? How many gifted, visual people have employed their talent for the commercial manipulation of the masses, instead of the exaltation of what is noble and good?  I believe God sees all of this and grieves. The egocentric mirror of fallen man produces hollow and exploitative art.  Real beauty isn't so reductive or constrained.  It is sublime and edifying, complex and anchored in reality. Truth, for the Christian, is not an ideal but objective reality.  Beauty, like all of life, must conform to the Truth. Eyes informed by Truth see feminine beauty as it exists along the arc of a woman's life in a myriad of expressions that go beyond the physical to include the spiritual, the relational, the intellectual, the emotional, while always maintaining acute awareness of the eternal soul within the body.

Who is afraid of New Media?

I couldn't agree with Wysocki more, or less, or more.  One one hand, she brilliantly "flips the script" on much of our class discussion when she writes about the valuable critique teachers of writing can bring to new media, "...to help composers of texts think usefully about effects of their particular decisions as they compose in a new media text." (6) Our class discussions often focus on new media in terms of its utility, complexity and questionable benefit to the task of teaching writing. For good or bad, invasive new media are assaulting and changing our established methodology.  A reactive gesture that merely adjusts writing instruction to the onslaught misses opportunities and obligations. I hear her saying that although new media may be exotically compelling, using modes that are visually, aurally, interactively and in other ways stunning, they are still a philistine presence in our well-established and thought out discipline, and badly in need of rhetorical critique and accountability.  New media needs a scholarly spanking to be shown who is boss. The thinking and scholarship invested in composition and communication studies needs to be applied toward all new media. Socrates has been speaking across the millennia to inform our rhetoric and writing.   Surely, he has something to say to the web page, the social network, the online journal, the audio essay, etc.  Just because it is new and and uncomfortable to stretch, doesn't mean it isn't the job of rhetoricians.


One the other hand, I don't quite get where Wysocki is going with her argument about raising consciousness about the interface,"texts where we keep their materialism visible." (19)  Composition that is self-conscious about its form is Warholian in its ironic newness, and in its stimulating and self-important manner.  Twisting texts in the ways she describes does indeed change the thinking processes involved, privileging the form over the content.  For rhetorical criticism and for and investigation of  new possibilities, of course, enhanced awareness is useful.  Just like when critiquing an argument we look at its claims and warrants.  She seems to want to go further, looking not only at new media but even the written word in terms of the paper and ink it is written with.  Something is lost here.  We possess a well honed means of communicating complex thought through words on an invisible interface.  That means has value and purpose.  Slowing down to notice the margins, and font on each .pdf Mary assigns limits my time and ability to address the ideas.  I know Wysocki is after something, an awareness and equivalence that puts new media on a level playing field for criticism perhaps?  While I am comfortable welcoming new means of communications, I am not interested in the deconstructing written text to the point of distraction, or even meaninglessness.


On the final hand, I agree with Wysocki's call for "...producing texts using a wide and alertly chosen range of materials." (20) Digitally comprehensive composition instruction can only be a good thing in a culture where people are already "reading" and "writing" multimodal compositions everyday.  They are just doing so in relative ignorance.  Writing teachers, willing to embrace these new modes and methods, are in a great position change that.  They simply need an expanded view of what they are already doing, teaching literacy and knowledge through composition, and increasing awareness and meaning through practice.

Images

Robot           http://io9.com/5013950
Draw Good  http://drawinghowtodraw.com
Bob Dylan   http://withloveandswallow.blogspot.com

Speech-osition

I am presenting this week, so instead of writing about the readings I want to relate some thoughts about the intersection of writing composition and speech.  My undergraduate degree was in communications, Political and Public Speaking.  Even though there were only three classes where speaking was the goal, almost every class required getting up an giving presentations.  The big research projects were often papers and accompanying presentations.  In this academic context there is not as much difference in the two disciplines as one might imagine.

A formal speech reads like an essay (with pauses for applause).  Go online and read a Presidential Speech.  You will find it well organized, attentive to audience and context, internally supported by presented evidence, and written in clear prose.  This is true about speeches given by acknowledged masters of oratory like Reagan or candidate Obama, (he doesn't use his stirring, soaring style as President) and less skilled speakers like the clumsy Bush, or exceedingly verbose Clinton, who created amazing sound bites buried within interminable speeches.  In fact, President (W) Bush's speeches would get surprisingly high marks from English teachers because he was always purposeful, clear, and driving to make his point.  Presidential speeches, like essays in The New Yorker, represent the highest forms of public composition, with the same types of rhetorical considerations and attention to detail.  They communicate, and argue, and engage their audiences.  They do, however, differ in one particular and all-important detail, delivery by sound.

In an oral presentation the voice of the speaker carries a weight that is hard to match, even by the most skilled writers.  The immediacy, the subtle emphasis, the silent pause, the intonations, the give-and-take of the audience, the energy of a room full of people staring at and listening to one, create qualities impossible to capture with a pen.  These strengths, however, are mitigated by attention span, small vocabulary, sentence and paragraph complexity (read thought complexity).  Advantage here goes to the writer who engages the reader's mind directly challenging its ability to wrestle with the text until they decipher its meaning, even if they have to re-read the text many times.  The weakness of speech is the strength of writing and vice versa  Combining, the two in a meaningful way, means playing to the strengths of both. Whether assigning aural composition or preparing for conference presentations seeing the two as complimentary and friendly is an asset.