Responding to classmates re: Jenkins et al (2006)

IML 501 students explored the educational demands implicit in living and working in a participatory culture via Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21^st century (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robinson, 2006).  As I detail in my response, I enter this debate with all sorts of baggage and affiliations. The following post represents my attempt to begin a dialogue with my classmates on this important subject.

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A primary skills set: Response to Jenkins et al (1996)’s Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. (originally posted to class wiki on November 3, 2010)

NOTE: This white paper is Biblic to me. I feel it’s important to acknowledge that right off so I will be correctly perceived as a very biased respondent. And for full disclosure’s sake, I am a member of the Project New Media Literacies/Participatory Culture & Learning Lab, and Henry Jenkins’s advisee. SO. All sorts of prejudice. ;-)

I can and have written at great length on this paper so, rather than rehash my old ditherings, I’d like to engage the potential of this Wiki by building off of some of the comments offered by my insightful colleagues. In no particular order:

TRISTA:
In order to obtain true media literacy, one must achieve political-economic literacy as well.

LAUREL:
This is a very provocative statement. I wonder what political-economic literacy is, though, especially considering the fact that we live in a world of diversity and change — each multi-national corporation and nation-state has its own political-economic legacy, and since we are living in volatile, technologically reactive times, we have thousands of moving targets on our hands.

Jenkins actually does speak about the importance of political discourse and civic engagement in his Convergence Culture which, incidentally, was published in the same year as the white paper. But his exploration is different from yours, Trista. Back to you…

TRISTA:
It is easy to say that we must educate youth about ethical norms within this tech-rich environment, but much more difficult to explain how to do so when each country has a different set of cultural norms and legal rules that guide ethical practice. This is the age-old ethical relativism vs. universalism debate.

LAUREL:
I wonder if we could reframe this “debate” to make it not a debate at all — no opposing sides, no zero-sum either/or. Could we instead acknowledge diversity, informing students that different cultures and countries possess different norms, encourage them to keep an open mind and eye towards those norms (which is the NML skill “negotiation” and the SEL skill “social awareness”), then begin with introducing them to ethical practice in our local context? That feels reasonable to me, I must admit — I asked a leading question. To me, it is too easy to say that everybody’s different so we cannot possibly tackle such a project. Yes, everybody’s different. Let’s build our knowledge slowly then, piece by piece.

More importantly, as the NML skills indicate, is the ability to recognize and do. So we can talk about the content of ethics, both the facts and idiosyncrasies that are culturally specific and the broader concept of ethics in general. But it’d be more in the spirit of the NMLs to cut the talk and walk the walk, let the practice communicate the content. For example, ask students to create a remix project or conduct some journalism. Then engage in critical inquiry around the finished product, inviting peers to ask questions about ownership and representation and compensation for contributions. Perhaps they can do some role-playing (NML skill “performance”) or go searching for cases in which people were or were not acknowledged for their creative labor (NML skill “distributed cognition”). There are lots of ways to bring ethics to life, to help students to raise their consciousness to ethical issues and help them to identify key questions and sites of contestation so that, going forward, they can proceed thoughtfully and know to ask questions.

TRISTA:
However, it gets even more convoluted when you add media to the equation because the annonymity and lack of consequences for your actions in the online life foster a kind of “anything” goes mentality.

LAUREL:
I’d like to push on this characterization of anonymity and lack of consequences, for we’re becoming much MORE “known” online due to voluntary self-disclosure, active membership in online communities and, unfortunately, the degradation of privacy. While some handily monikered flamers do hack and incite at will, I tend to think they are the exception, not the rule. On the TV show The Office, Dwight Shrute’s character was exactly himself in Second Life, no difference, save one: he could fly. Now that’s a sitcom and Dwight’s a nut, but I still think the writers have something there. While lots of people do enjoy genderbending and experimenting online, more often than not, I think we reproduce ourselves and, for better or for worse, our real world constraints. The internet could be anything and we turn it into exactly what we’ve already got. Everywhere we go, there we are.

I also disagree that there’s an “anything goes” mentality. I think, since we are sensitive to the norms of polite society, we recognize transgression, and steps are taken. Flamers lose their site privileges. Community members talk back. Jenkins (2006) documented a case of election corruption in Alphaville, the capital of The Sims, and the real life mayoral opponents were distraught by the machinations. The editor of the fake city’s real, online newspaper was punished by the corporation that owns The Sims for reporting on this blemish in its digital utopia. As we mentioned briefly in class, a NPR contributor was hauled into the federal criminal justice system for posting a threatening quote on his FB page. So I don’t think “anything goes,” especially since, embedded in these online contexts, are real life people who care and take action (both online and offline).

TRISTA:
To explain the competencies one must have, it is best to first explain why they must have them. In his effort to encourage media literacy and outline social practices in the participatory media world, perhaps Jenkins should first address human literacy.

LAUREL:
Interesting… and actually, that’s what I brought to the NMLs, a pairing with training in social and emotional learning (SEL). My students in Senegal appreciated both sets of skills and their intersections. In my opinion, SEL is fundamental — it is the base upon which one can build NMLs, because SEL forms the individual, NML refines the learner.

KIRSI:
Jenkins almost paints a world with no wars, political or economic crisis or loneliness. It is a world with free and easy artistic expression and civic engagement. At least the information technology would facilitate it. The rest depends on human ability and will.

LAUREL:
I think this is a bit too naive a vision to pin on Jenkins. Human nature is human nature. But we certainly can establish structures that support expression and engagement.

KIRSI:
When knowledge about new media and its safe use replaces fear and uncertainty, Jenkins’ advice will serve as a guidebook to the new era of education.

LAUREL:
My view is that this advice, this recommendation of NML training, is the means by which we facilitate knowledge about new media and its safe (or, I’d say, responsible) use. So implementing this training represents a new era in education as well as leads us to a new place.

In contexts of diversity and change, it’s impossible to know everything that is and will be relevant. One CANNOT know. We have to let go of “knowing” and seek “discovering.” This is research, and it relies on distributed cognition. What we need to know is: what questions to ask; and how to find their answers (because one answer/route is way too facile for our sophisticated selves).

The unknown has always scared us. We’d rather take the uncomfortable we know than the ambiguous unknown. But if we trust our deep ability to negotiate difficulty, to optimize novelty, then there’s very little to fear. We will keep ourselves safe, not because we know what’s out there, but because we know how to react protectively, no matter what.

ASTRID:
Interestingly, he points out that playing lowers the emotional stakes of failing.

LAUREL:
Thanks for mentioning this, Astrid. It is an important part of Jenkins’s argument and educational philosophy. As they say, you gotta risk big to win big. If students are afraid to step out of their comfort zone, how will they be able to author the innovations we need down the line, or make the discoveries and connections school requires in the present?

ASTRID:
Still we would need to draw the line between fiction and non-fiction, between creating a simulated sensory experience and objective serious reporting. Where does journalism end? How far can we expand the concept of journalism without loosing credibility? These questions need to be addressed and evaluated.

LAUREL:
I wonder if it’s necessary to draw the line… I wonder if we all know anyway, and make too much of didactically explicating the difference, give our students/readers too little credit…

What is the definition of journalism? Does its definition depend in any way on its objectives? In Convergence Culture, Jenkins encourages us to think beyond the device (or form) and focus, instead, on the media (or content). While cassettes may be obsolete, the hunger for recorded music lives on. So perhaps the traditional venues for journalism may give way (and already are, perhaps, as print news empires collapse), but the need for reliable, timely information persists…

As for credibility, well, that’s a subjective assessment and a moving target. Could a credible professor lecture in jeans 40 years ago? Maybe not. But with the shifting of cultural norms around attire, our credibility standards shifted too. My sense is that journalism is always a bit behind the curve, a bit conservative. I doubt journalism will lose credibility for embracing the newfangled; I find it more likely that it loses credibility for failing to adapt quickly enough and appearing irrelevant.