Monthly Archives: June 2006

Greek Art: Laocoon and his sons

sublime

Greek Art: Laocoon and his sons

In his introduction to The Introduction to Visual Culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses this statue as an example of a typical sublime work of art.  It immortalizes the story of the Trojan warrior and his children fighting with a serpent that will ultimately kill them.  Mirzoeff defines the sublime as "the pleasurable experience in representation of that which would be painful or terrifying in reality, leading to a realization of the limits of the human and of the powers of nature" (p. 16).  According to Mirzoeff, Kant distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful with the former being "a more complex and profound emotion…a preference for the ethical over the aesthetic" (p. 16).  It is this preference that has led Lyotard to see sublime as a key term for postmodernism: "The task of the sublime is to present the unpresentable, an appropriate role for the relentless visualizing of the postmodern era" (p. 16).  He goes on to say,

"Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the create of culture and is therefore central to visual culture.  Of course, the representation of natural subjects can be sublime, as in the classic example of a shipwreck or storm at sea.  However, the direct experience of a shipwreck cannot be sublime because one would presumably expreience only pain and the (sublime) dimension of pleasure would be missing" (p. 16).  But what about someone watching?  Certainly, those who jumped to their deaths on 9/11 where experiencing only horrible pain and suffering, but did we who watch also experience pleasure?  I remember those tapes being played over and over, and I finally had to stop watching because the raw, live pain was too much to bear. 

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy – New York Times

Education, Media Literacy

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy – New York Times
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."

And there, in a nutshell, is the difference between the pre- and post-Internet worlds: the whole world can see what we create.  That has fundamental implications for educators whose job is to prepare students for this new world.  But most of those educators grew up under the old model of education with teachers and students together in a classroom sharing with themselves and, only occassionally, with the outside world.  I think an effective media literacy curriculum must include some kind of education related to these kinds of collaborative communities like Wikipedia. 

Reality on the Web

Media, Media Literacy, Photography, Webcams

Started reading An Introduction to Visual Culture and A Visual Culture Readers by Nicholas Mirzoeff.  I was reminded of both this morning when I read Mark Glaser's comments at MediaShift about "astroturf" blog commenters.  Unlike grassroots comments, astroturf comments are placed by those either encouraged or actually paid to post comments that support particular points of view.  The general problem, of course, is that the Web promotes anonymity and identity masking: "Often people will contribute anonymously or make up names or places where they live, or even lie about their gender, age or occupation."   This certainly opens the door for organized commenting efforts; a way for the opposition to talk back.  In this case, the issue is network neutrality, and the comments have been traced back to either big telecoms or their PR firms.  It seems to undermine the whole notion of blogging and commenting but also suggests a new "media literacy" skill. Glaser quotes a comment from Trish Grier in his post: “What this may end up doing is forcing more folks to be transparent,” Grier wrote. “It may also cause more folks to blog and more bloggers to better screen their comments sections. We’re going to have to get very savvy about what we’re reading and responding to in our comments. Online interaction has, though, always been very nuanced because of the lack of physical cues. Weeding out ‘astroturfing’ efforts will indeed add to one’s online communication skills set.”

I was reminded of Mirzoeff, who in the introduction to An Introduction to Visual Culture, discusses the destruction of reality that is part of the postmodern world.  In particular, he focuses on the increasing difficulty of figuring out how "real" a photograph is.   Thomas Campanella, in Eden by Wire, an essay about webcams in The Visual Culture Reader, comments, "Webcameras, a grassroots phenomenon largely ungoverned by norms or regulations, has been free to expand into a populist, globe-spanning broadcast medium–a shadow of the Net itself.  But such free-form evolution has come at a cost.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate truth from fiction, to determine with certainty which webcameras are conveying accurate visaul information, and which are frauds passing off still images or a Quicktime movie as just-captured reality.  This is an epistemological issue.  What is the integrity of the knowledge received from a webcamera, and how are we to verify it?" (p. 275).

Campanella doesn't answer his own question, and I don't think I have an answer either.  We sometimes get forwarded emails with funny or odd pictures and wonder which reflect reality, a moment captured in time by the photographer, and which are "fake," a moment in time manipulated by someone's imagination.  I suppose one small suggestion is to check a website like Snopes that tries to identify photos as real or fake as well as photos that are real but that have been given false backstories. But even Snopes has a few that it has been unable to identify.

Kids and Media

Education

From Growing Up Digital:

"Dr. Idit Harel…argues it is senseless to talk about being addicted to technology–you have to examine the function. 'Holding power is not because of the technology,' she says.  'It's because the media enables them to do things which they care about–which are attractive and enjoyable.  Kids with a Nintendo joy pad are not addicted to technology, they are racing a car.  They are having fun, and playing with other kids.' Kids on the Net are not using technology.  Rather they may be 'trying to solve a mathematical problem, designing or building something, or solving a puzzle–trying to figure something out" (p. 116).

That's the difference between the natives and the immigrants, I guess.  For the immigrants, no matter how ingrained the new media becomes in our lives, it's still technology.  For the natives, it's how they learn about pop stars (I read Tiger Beat), talk to their friends (I used the phone or letters), and entertain themselves (I read and watched TV).  

Later in the book, Tapscott quotes Harel again in discussing constructionist experiences for kids using the web: "These aren't kids who only consume media…but they are constantly learning how to create media" (p. 151).  The question, I suppose, is how do they learn to create that media?  Are they creating within the same assumptions and paradigms or are they encouraged to move beyond, take a critical stance, and use their media creation to question the current trends?

Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing up digital.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

The Seven Great Debates

Media Literacy

Hobbs, R. (1998). The seven great debates in the media literacy movement. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 16-32.

Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you. New York: Riverhead Books. 

Definition:  Hobbs uses Aufderheide's 1993 definition of media literacy and then expands on it: "It is a term used by a growing number of scholars and educators to refer to the process of critically analyzing and learning to create one's own messages in print, audio, video, and multimedia" (p. 16).  I was reminded of a statistic from the Pew Internet and American Life Project: Some 57% of teens have created some kind of content on the Internet from a webpage to a video to a blog.  And rather than helping the teens figure out how to do this type of creation safely and creatively, many schools are simply banning it.  Some are even attempting to punish students for the things they produce outside of school.  

Seven Great Debates:

Hobbs points out that media literacy has a "broad definition and range of application" (p. 16).  This diversity can cause disagreement and thus the 7 great debates:

1. Should media literacy education aim to protext children and young people from negative media literacy? Hobbs suggests that this notion of protection may be simply rhetorical, a reaction to "the inability of adults to control children's access to the media" (p. 19).  Bazalgette says that the assumption is that students who are taught media literacy won't be taken in by the manipulations of the media: "Media education, in this scenario, is the pedagogic equivalent of a tetanus shot" (quoted in Hobbs, p. 19). Hobbs goes on to say, "Many teachers at both the K-12 and university levels have found that students are unresponsive to the idea that they are helpless victims of media influence who need to be rescued fromt he excesses and evils of their interest in popular culture" (p. 19). In fact, in his recent book Everything Bad is Good for You, Stephen Johnson makes the argument that "popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years" (p. xiii).  Indeed, the digital natives who have grown up in the shadow of the Internet and video games expect much more from their media than ever before.  Tom Friedman tells the story of the video gamer who prefers to play Koby Bryant in the NBA video game than watch Koby Bryant play "real" basketball because when he plays Koby, he can make Koby pass, something he evidently doesn't do all that much for real.

2. Should media production be an essential feature of media literacy education?  One quick note here that shows the changing times.  Hobbs writes about the limitations of video production, "For example, video and multimedia production often requires more equipment, classroom time, personnel, and teacher training than is available in many schools" (p. 20).  The availability of sophisticated but easy to use software such as iMovie allows almost anyone to create video using a laptop and a camera.

3. Should media literacy focus on popular culture texts?  In his media and society courses, Jacobs used what he called "strange texts" including the film Space Traders and an episode of The X-Files. 

4. Should media literacy have a more explicit political and ideological agenda?  Lessig says we have a "second best" world; would making media literacy more political lead towards a first rate world?  In his classroom, Jacobs wanted to create a true democracy. When media literacy focuses on popular culture in which students are much more expert than teachers, it can bring about new kinds of classroom environments.  The problem is that both liberals and conservatives have ideas about media literacy and teachers do not see themselves as forces for change: "Instead, teacher generally value the concept of promoting students' critical autonomy, which is the process of internalizing the tools of self-reflection, critical analysis, and communication for one's own purposes and motives.  The pluralism that underlies this argument invites teachers to maximize the students' potential for discovery and the realizaiton of personal, social, or political action without pushing a specific agenda on students" (p. 23).  Since the teacher often chooses the texts, however, some form of agenda may creep in with the media itself.

5. Should media literacy be focused on school-based K-12 educational environments?  Hobbs questions whether schools could really change in the radical ways demanded by media literacy: "For example, instead of reading eight classic novels in the 10th grade, how many communities will accept the practice of students reading four books, studying two filsm, and analyzing a newsmagazine and a website" (p. 24).

6. Should media literacy be taught as a specialist subject or integrated within the context of existing subjects?  I think it gets taught as a specialist subject because the content area teachers don't want to make the necessary changes to successfully integrate media literacy into their courses. 

7. Should media literacy initiatives by supported financially by media organizations? The worry here is that media organizations may not have a stake in looking at ways to really critically analyze what they are doing: "Some believe that media organizations are effectively taking the antimedia stand out of the media literacy movement to serve their own goals, co-opting the media literacy movement and softening it to make sure their public criticism of the media never gets too loud, abrasive, or strident" (p. 26).