Category Archives: Digital studies

Responding to Galloway

  By admin | December 9, 2010 - 8:06 am |
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This paper kicked off our foray into digital studies and, for me, inspired skepticism and a (un)healthy amount of scorn. The following post details my issues with this piece, specifically its use of language.

Babble or Babel?: Response to Galloway’s (2000) “What is Digital Studies?” (originally posted to class wiki on September 2, 2010)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the hour. Maybe it’s my low-level but persistent desire for a SnakPak of pudding.

WHATEVER the reason, I have very little patience for this treatise. I really want to call it “acado-cyber-artsy-wanking,” but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use the word “wanking” in polite circles…

That’s the “Babble” interpretation, that Galloway is talking polysyllabic circles around subjects of very little import. One might suggest that Alex channel his yearning for wordplay in a more productive manner, perhaps by writing a poem. That would take care of such (albeit beautiful but) superfluous sentences as, “The ping frisks the homogeneity of computer networks to find the specificity of an object, the machine” (paragraph 3).

Riiiiiight.

What I’m getting from this is an articulation of the nature of digital components.

Html is not a metaphor. (Okay, but who cares about html anymore? Isn’t it all about Flash and Java and PHP and C++ and the next big thing that I’m too Luddite-ish to know about?)

Online content is ephemeral. (Okay, but won’t cached data live forever? And since people all over the world might have seen and/or printed and/or stored any data that appeared once, isn’t the longevity of online content QUITE considerable? (And might that inspire me to re-think the scoffing-ness of my tone?))

Protocol requires a singular way, and that makes it hegemonic. (Okay, I guess you could call it that (and do so with this sentence that would set scholar-haters’ teeth on edge and hurt most laymen’s heads: “…digital networks are structured on a negotiated dominance of certain textual forms over other forms. Protocol is this hegemony” (paragraph 8).) But then, isn’t a standardized anything, by that definition, hegemonic? And yet isn’t it very, very practical? What if everyone had a different idea of what was an inch/gallon/pound AND we lacked a translating tool? Because that’s what protocol is, in Galloway’s assessment, a means of interfacing dissimilar objects. How would we ever achieve understanding WITHOUT that bridge? We had to standardize railroad ties, Alex. We had to settle on alternating current. I guess decisions are hegemonic because they make dissenters go along with the popular opinion. I guess grammar is hegemonic, imposing rules on wily verbs and telling speakers they’ve gotta do such-and-such to make sense. But you know what? That’s the kind of hegemony we need in order to make connections. Otherwise it’s the Tower of Babel — which I’ll get to in a minute. But first:

Here’s Galloway’s exploration of interactivity:

“Interactivity is potentially an interesting category” (paragraph 19).

Period. And THAT’s the ballgame! Whaaaaaat??? That’s it? Alex Galloway, who _are_ you?

All right. Let’s calm down and think for a minute. Let’s give Galloway (and Dr. Kuhn!) a little credit here, and assume for a second that I don’t know everything (heresy! but a sporting exercise) and perhaps this is a “Babel” problem, not a “Babble” problem. Maybe I simply don’t speak Galloway’s language. And language is what this boils down to his opinion, that, “…like cinema before it, the whole of digital media is essentially a *language*…” (paragraph 4).

It’s an interesting idea. I think the visual is a language, so for digital media to represent its own language… Okay, maybe. Maybe it’s an offshoot of visual and textual, maybe it’d look like this in a family tree:

MOMMY VISUAL + DADDY TEXTUAL
Baby Digital Studies!

But that isn’t what Galloway is arguing. He says that digital studies isn’t linguistic and that text isn’t its primary metaphor. This is a head-scratcher since the online world is rife with text (I’m typing the junk right now!) and it was all coded with text (which we call scripts, which stem from languages, which, if nothing else, represents the text-based frame that the creators conceptualized and (hegemonically!) passed on with their suggestive labels). So… what am I not getting here? What language am I not speaking? Cinema studies? Art theory? Computer science?

I welcome the opportunity to learn those languages and better appreciate this “non-linguistic semiotics” (paragraph 4)…

Textual talk back

  By admin | December 9, 2010 - 8:05 am | ,
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In order to enrich our comprehension of the course’s assigned texts, we wrote short reaction papers and posted them to the class wiki. These posts, prefaced by contextualization and post hoc reflection, are accessible via the links below.

Sincere: Sunukaddu

  By admin | December 9, 2010 - 7:51 am | , , , , , ,
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These articles, presentations, and videos attempt to introduce the world to Sunukaddu‘s people and practices. As I state in my bio:

“This past summer, I had the thrilling opportunity to work in Dakar, Senegal, with innovative non-governmental organization le Reseau Africain d’Education pour la Sante (RAES) program, Sunukaddu. To this teen workshop in multimedia health communication I brought a pedagogical model and method that positioned new media literacies (NMLs) and SEL skills as fundamental to meaningful learning, and asset appreciation as key to sustainability. Collaboratively as a Sunukaddu team, local staff and I generated: a daily schedule that reflected a scaffolded methodology for optimizing participatory learning; a programmatic schedule that introduced key communication characteristics, strategies, and platforms, as well as useful theory; full lesson plans that respected our theoretical, temporal, and curricular goals; and a sense of togetherness.”

I wrote about my experiences with Sunukaddu for eLearn Magazine (“Making Education (Double) Count: Boosting Student Learning via Social and Emotional Learning and New Media Literacy Skills“), Henry Jenkins’s heavily trafficked blog (“High Tech? Low Tech? No Tech?“), and the blog for Global Kids Online Leadership Program (“Sunukaddu, A Voice for Youth in Senegal“). I also presented my work at the National Communication Association’s 2010 convention in San Francisco (“Leveraging New Media Literacies & Social-Emotional Learning to enrich teen education in Senegal“) and at the Global Education Conference (“New Media Literacies: The core challenges of implementation and assessment in international contexts“), a free, online event that took place in multiple time zones and languages over five days, hosting 15,028 unique logins and presentations from 62 countries.

An presentation on Sunukaddu and bridge-building with Los Angeles-area high schools was videotaped and posted to the web (I speak, Pecha Kucha-style, from 1:04:30-1:08:30). Nonetheless, when it came to presenting Sunukaddu via video alone, despite the fact that Sunukaddu taught participants how to shoot and edit video!, my translation was less articulate.

My learning process with FinalCut Pro, Compressor, and Snapz proved challenging and riddled with potholes. What began as a single remix that used footage sampled liberally from students’ documentation of the program, students’ final projects, and colleagues’ own remixes became three, relatively straight-forward videos. These three were intended to function as an introduction to NMLs, a preview of Sunukaddu’s integration of NMLs with SEL, and a final synthesis.

Sunukaddu: Our Voice, version 1 (originally posted to class wiki October 21, 2010)

Sunukaddu: Our Voice, version 2 (originally posted to class wiki November 11, 2010)
PART 1: New Media Literacies

This is a short film produced by Vanessa Vartabedian of Project New Media Literacies. I have left it in its original form except for excising two interviews — one with Henry Jenkins, one with Lana Swartz — which I inserted into PART 3.


PART 2: Sunukaddu
I took Vee’s advice and utilized the girls’ singing as a soundtrack to introduce Sunukaddu concepts and stills. I hope that it makes sense, how one NML and one SEL skill are at play in each still I flash. At any rate, it’s a work in progress…


PART 3: New Media Literacies + Sunukaddu

This is the end of the first version of my remix. I think that this part is the strongest component of the original and can stand on its own. I also think it’s an uplifting way to end, with Shakira’s “Waka waka” song and the explanation of NML’s specific utility for all people. The fact that the map focuses on Africa while Henry is talking is simply a very happy coincidence, but one which I exploit.

Interpreting Stone

  By admin | December 9, 2010 - 7:43 am | ,
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Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s (1996) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age is a significant addition to the historical record, shedding light on the development of such important early digital havens as Atari Labs and CommuniTree, as well as (unintentionally) demonstrating the ephemeral nature of the current and cutting-edge — when it comes to technology, new products on the market are, in a sense, already “old.”

Desire and technology in the workplace: Exploration, reification & transgression (originally presented to the class on September 30, 2010)

Demonstrating uncommon insight for her time, Stone (1996) expounds on the novel affordances offered by computers:

Computers are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theater, and their output is used for qualitative interaction, dialogue, and conversation. Inside the little box are other people” (p. 16).
“Ubiquitous technology, which is definitive of the virtual age, is far more subtle. It doesn’t tell us anything. It rearranges our thinking apparatus so that different thinking just is” (p. 168).

Stone (1996) also examines the concept of multiplicity. She claims:

“The nets are spaces of transformation, identity factories in which bodies are meaning machines and transgender — identity as performance, as play, as wrench in the smooth gears of social apparatus of the social apparatus of vision — is the ground state” (pp. 180-181).

Contemporary actor/performance artist Sarah Jones embodies multiplicity in her appropriation of diverse characters within a one-woman show. Her performance demonstrates corporeally what the Internet can deliver virtually.

Sarah Jones as One Woman Global Village

Gender and sexuality

  By admin | December 9, 2010 - 7:40 am | ,
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We were merely asked to emulate the design principles of Barbara Kruger and Shepard Fairey and to choose a book from the syllabus to present. Nothing in those assignments suggested a particular topic nor required consistent examination of that topic throughout. But upon reflection, I find that all of my work did focus on a common theme: gender and sexuality.

In my Kruger-esque design, I reflect on women’s and gay men’s oppression by traditional masculinity. The Fairey-inspired piece explores Hillary Rodham Clinton’s embodiment of the march of progress for feminism and women — and the backlash this shift has provoked. Stone‘s text illuminates collisions between the virtual and corporeal, examining both new media’s potential for facilitating gender-bending and sexual experimentation and its implications for reforming workplace dynamics and community participation.