Summary

“Friendship” – danah boyd

Historically:
“Even as youth were developing a sense of autonomous generational identity with the aid of popular media cultures, their period of financial dependency and segregation from adult roles was expanding as more and more youth attended high school and higher education institutions.” (db, p.82)
   > “Despite the perception that online media are enabling teens to reach out to a new set of social relations online, we have found that for the vast majority of teens, the relations fostered in school are by far the most dominant in how they define their peers and friendships.” (Ibid.)
                > IMPORTANT: “Surveys of U.S. teens indicate that most teens use social media to socialize with people they already know or are already loosely connected with (Lenhart & Madd 2007; Subrahmanyam & Greenfield 2008).”[1] (db, p.89)
                                » Then, what is the reason for ‘social media participation’?

Answer:
“Teens have flocked to social media because they represent an arena to play out … means of status negotiations even when they are away from the school yard. (…) Teens use all that is available to craft and display their social identities and interact with their peers.” (db, p.84)
   > “Mediated teen social worlds began with the telephone and continue to today’s variegated palette of communications technologies and popular media.” (db, p.83-84)

Central issue: “We found that U.S. youth use a variety of social media to develop and maintain broader communities of peers.” (db, p.79)
   > “For most teens, friendship-driven practices, such as those described in this chapter, play a more central role in structuring new media participation than interest-driven practices[2] .” (db, p.81)
                > examine: “How social media intersect with four types of everyday peer negotiations: making friends, performing friendship, articulating friendship hierarchies, and navigating issues of status, attention, and drama. In all these cases, we consider how the unique affordances of contemporary networked publics are inflecting existing peer learning, sharing, and sociability in new ways.” (db, p.81-82)
                                » “These dynamics are often described in negative terms, as ‘peer pressure,’ but we can also consider them a powerful peer-based learning environment where youth are constructing and picking up social norms, tastes, knowledge, and culture from those around them.” (db, p.84)
                                » ! “Given the prominence of social media in both contemporary teen and adult life, learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.” (db, p.113)

Fading boundaries between the real and the virtual:
“For most teens, social media do not constitute an alternative or ‘virtual’ world (Abbott 1998). They are simply another method to connect with their friends and peers in a way that feels seamless with their everyday lives (Osgerby 2004). (…) When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds – they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers.” (db, p .84)
   > “Conversations may begin in one environment, but they move seamlessly across media so long as the people remain the same.” (Ibid.)
                > “Teen practices  when using social media mirror those that scholars have documented in other places where teens gather with peers (Eckert 1989; Milner 2004; Skelton & Valentine, 1998).” (Ibid.) + “while the site teens go to gather at has changed over time, many of the core practices have stayed the same.” (db, .80)
                                » “By providing tools for mediated interactions, social media allow teens to extend their interactions beyond physical boundaries.” (Ibid.)
                                                > Interactions involve gathering in “networked public spaces for a variety of purposes” (db, p. 79):
                                                                * negotiating identity,
                                                                * gossip,
                                                                * support one another,
                                                                * jockey for status,
                                                                * collaborate,
                                                                * share information,
                                                                * flirt,
                                                                * joke,
                                                                * goof off,
                                                                * hang out.
                                » “This form of networked public allowed broad peer groups to socialize together while other social media such as instant messaging (IM) and mobile phones allowed teens to interact one-to-one or in small groups.” (db, p.80)
                                                 > Remark:  networked publics… sometimes become networked audiences…
                                                  “The vast majority of those who collect large numbers of Friends are adults – musicians, politicians, corporations, and both real and wannabe celebrities. Teen musicians and activists sometimes collect Friends for the same purposes as public-facing adults – to connect with fans and develop a following. (…) Teens commonly send Friend requests to bands and celebrities. Teens do not believe that such connections indicate an actual or potential friendship, but they still find value in these Friends.” (db, p.96)
                                » “(…) networked publics provide opportunities for always on access to peer communication, new kinds of authoring of public identities, public display of connectedness, and access to information about others.” (db, p.85) + “Social network site profile can also become valuable tools for learning more about acquiantances.” (db, p.89)
                                                »> How tools change friendship practices:
                                                                * “Teens’ ongoing debate and negotiation over what is socially appropriate, combined with Internet companies’ efforts to monitor and regulate these practices, is gradually stabilizing a set of practices for hum youth publicly articulate their social relations on social network sites.” (db, p.95) »> institutionalization… (I discuss this process in an upcoming article).
                                                                                > “The Friends feature forces teens to navigate their social lives in new ways.” (db, p.100)[3]
                                                                                                > “By facing decisions about how to circumscribe their Friends lists, teens are forced to consider their relationships, the dynamics of their peer group, and the ways in which their decisions may affect others. These processes make social status and friendship more explicit and public, providing a broader set of contexts for observing these informal forms of social-evaluation learning.” (Ibid.)
                                                                                                                > “It makes peer negotiations visible in new ways, leading to heightened stakes as well as opportunities to observe and learn about social norms from their peers.” (Ibid.)
                                                                * “One of the ways in which social media alter friendship practices is through the forced – and often public – articulation of social connections.” (db, p.94)
                                                                                > purposes: address book, leverage privacy settings (control), public display of connections (representation personal social identity/status) [4]
                                                                                                » “(…) connections serve as a public display of taste and identity (Donath & boyd 2004).” (db, p.97)
                                                                * “Using social network site profiles to research someone’s tastes*, style, affilitation, and social connections provides valuable conversation fodder in addition to offering signs of potential friendship compatibility. Furthermore, the online communication channels provide a low-cost and casual option for initiating conversations.” (db, p.98)                               

Effects of the mirroring and blending of real and virtual:
   > “For many contemporary teenagers, losing access to social media is tantamount to losing their social world.” (db, p.79)
   > “Because the peer groups that teens connect with on social network sites are the same as those they socialize with in everyday life, decisions about whom to accept and whom to reject online directly affect their offline connections.” (db, p.100)[5]

Side-remark: “While there is a stigma for not being able to make friends at school, developing friends online is further vilified by cultural fears that meeting people online is dangerous. (…) Not only do unfounded fear limit teenagers unnecessarily but they also obscure preventable problematic behavior (Valentine 2004).” (db, p.91)

» CONCLUSIONS:

Observations concerning the relation technology-behavior:
“What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. (…) the ethics of reciprocity embedded in networked publics support the development of friendship and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks.” (db, p.112)
                > “While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.” (Ibid.)

Observations concerning social media as learning environment:
“Social media, and especially social network sites, allow teens to be more carefully attuned, in an ongoing way, to the lives of their friends and peers. Social media are integrally tied to the processes of building, performing, articulating, and developing friendships and status in teen peer networks. (…) While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections.” (db, p.113)
   > “Social media also play a crucial role in teens’ ability to share ideas, cultural artifacts, and emotions with one another.” (Ibid.)
                > “Youth are developing new norms and social competencies that are specifically keyed to networked publics, such as how to articulate friendships, how to be polite to their peers, and how to create, mediate, or avoid drama.” (Ibid.)

[1] Remark:
                * “Teens often use social media to make or develop friendships, but they do so almost exclusively with acquiantences or friends of friends.” (db, p.89)
                * “Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, (…), often build relationships with others online through shared practices.”  (db, p.90) (see also, footnote [2]).
                * “In addition to these interest- and identity-driven motivations for building connections, some teens connect with strangers precisely because they are strangers,” because they allow discussion about “(…) intimate matters (…) that would be difficult to bring up in the local context for fear of [embarrassment] and damaging (…) local – and persistent – reputation.” (db, p.90)

[2] Thus, boyd deals with a different kind of online activity than the interaction discusses by James Paul Gee in relation to ‘Affinity Spaces’.  see:
   “Although sites such as LiveJournal or web forums share much of the functionality of MySpace or Facebook, they inhabit a genre in closer alignment to interest-driven practices.” (db, p.81)
                Nuance: “While the dominant practice of teens in MySpace and Facebook conform to hanging out, friendship-driven genre, kids sometimes also use these practices as jumping-off points to messing around and more “geeked out” interests.” (ibid.)

[3] e.g.: “The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works (…) [it is a way] in which social media take what is normally implicit and make it explicit.” (db, p.103-104)
   > Causes social drama, because:
                * “(…) teens do not necessarily think of their friends as hierarchically ranked, but the technology forces this ranking.” (Ibid.)
                * “(…) teens might feel closer to different friends in different contexts and along different dimensions.” (Ibid.)
                * “(…) people might feel close to some friends becaue they get them invited to parties and close to other friends because they help them with their homework.” (db, p.104)
   > Nonetheless: “(…) social media also can be used to try to ease tensions among friends, (…) to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship, (…) to negotiate attention, (…) to reassure (…) friends.” (db, p.110)
                »> Conclusion: “So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships.” (Ibid.)

[4] Note: “On social network sites, ‘Friends’ end up serving as a part of a person’s self-representation on the site as well as the foundation of access control to certain features (e.g., commenting) and content (e.g., blog posts). Teens use Friends to enact their identity (Livingstone 2008) and imagine the social context (boyd 2006).” (db, p.94) ** imagined communities
   »> “Social network sites use the term ‘Friends’ to label all articulated relationships, regardless of intensity or connection type (e.g., family or colleagues).” (Ibid.)

[5] Elaboration: “Properties of social media can alter the visibility of these acts [i.e. social drama], making them more persistent and more difficult for participants to get a complete picture of what’s happening or interpret the acts accurately.” (db, p.105)
   »> REMARK: I wonder whether this is true. Perhaps the properties of social media are indeed increasing the persistence of activity, but I don’t think the dispersion of the activity or the difficulty to acquire a complete picture are actually increasing compared to offline situations. Perhaps the persistence – the fact that things are recorded and archive online – even amounts to a certain degree of decrease of confusion or lack of overview.
                                > True of course: “While it is unclear whether or not the Internet has changed the frequency of gossip, social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. (…) there is greater potential for gossip to spread much farther and at a faster pace, making social media a catalyst in teen drama. (…) Social media provide another stage on which dramas can be played out.” (db, p.105)

Source: scribd.com

Presentation “Social Reading: Re-revealing the Social Layer of Books” delivered at Revealing the Reader: A Symposium (Melbourne, 29 Jun. 2012).

Abstract:

Developments in digital technology have supported the increasing convergence of media (Jenkins, 2006) also within the field of book publishing. Digital books like the Amplified Edition of On the Road (Penguin Group USA, 2011) are presented as augmented reading experiences featuring additional content and seamlessly integrated audiovisual material. In part, the development of media convergence in digital books is influenced by audience reception. Through sales and a myriad of social media platforms, readers indicate that they expect digital books to be more than “digital representation of the print experience, they need to find their own position in the market and in the eyes of readers.” (Gladiuk, 2010, p.22) One reader boldly states: “You should get all this extra stuff, it’s possible now.” (Edwards, 2011) The features and services of social media platforms are also among the possibilities of digital technology. The aim of this paper is to explore the question of how the technological features of social media are affecting digital reading practices? This question is addressed by presenting a rhetorical exploration of the promotional material of currently active social eReading platforms. The exploration consists of a structural analysis based on the model of the Dramatistic Pentad (Burke, 1966) and content analysis based on thematic clustering. Observations from a participatory case study of reading practices enabled by the eReading platform Copia are presented as empirical validation. The paper shows how affinity spaces (Gee, 2005) surrounding books are incorporated as prominent elements of digital books. This represents the introduction of a social layer within digital books. As such, the social layer reveals the readers as “a community in the pages of a book” (Subtext Media, 2011) and stresses the interpersonal role of reading. Finally, the paper considers how this enables the development of new expectations among readers regarding digital reading experiences.

Source: cultureeducation.ugent.be

Pinterest also caters for librarians…

teachingliteracy:

20 Great Ways Libraries Are Using Pinterest

world-shaker:

A really great list (with supporting resources). Here are the first four:

  1. Pinning book covers. Many librarians are capitalizing on the visual power of Pinterest to show off book covers, especially those from new books, special collections, and kid-friendly material. It can be a great way to attract readers to books they might not have otherwise checked out.
  2. Showcasing historic archives. Libraries often have much more than books in their archives. Take the San Francisco Public Library, for instance. They’re using Pinterest to show off amazing historic images of the city, from photos of old library branches to some unbelievable WWII images of the bay.
  3. Creating reading lists. Pinterest makes it simple to create visually appealing reading lists for just about every topic under the sun. Some common lists include books made into movies, librarian recommendations, and kid-friendly fare.
  4. Sharing new acquisitions. Want to keep patrons in the loop about the library’s latest books and media? Pinterest is turning out to be a great way to do that, and many libraries are logging on and sharing their latest and greatest. Fullerton Public Library is one such library getting on the Pinterest bandwagon, and they have boards for new acquisitions in fiction, non-fiction, young adult, children’s, and downloadable media.

Source: onlinecolleges.net

I’ve been so kind as to type out and add a transcript to this quite lengthy interview with McKenzie Wark about the life, persona and ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Look at the video or quickly browse through the text. You’ll see that there are several things in there that relate to a lot of things that I have add to my blog.

McKenzie Wark, good morning! Welcome to Radio National Breakfast.

- Good Morning.

One of Marshall McLuhan’s most famous sayings ‘the medium is the message’. What did he mean by that?

- What he was trying to do is to get you not to pay attention the to content, but the form of media. But before you even start to talk about what someone says or what’s in a program, or
anything like that, to think about how something like radio or television has effects just as a form in its own.

Why did he think that was important?

- He thought that particular media had particular ways of shaping our awareness and our ability to know the world. So he thought that (..) print media shaped a certain kind of sensibility and awareness, a certain kind of understanding of how the world could be put together and how it worked. And he thought that there had been a shift from print to what he called electric media. So he is sort of a the cusp  of the (..) not the beginning of broadcasting but of the generalization of broadcasting. And he thought that really that was not only going to change consciousness, but our ability to understand and interact with the world.

So it’s the sixties, TV enormously popular. It had been vetted down and had exploded in terms of its (..) widespread use. Newspapers where still there, as they had been for more than a century. A dominant purveyor of information, but as you put it - as he put it - a sort of turning point is. Is that they era he lived in?

- Well, he went to Cambridge in the nineteen thirties. You know, he was born in nineteen eleven, so it’s the centenary of his birth. He dies in ninetheen eigthy, no longer with us. So he’s not really a sixties guy. By the time the sixties happened he’d already published several books. He was established as a professor of English. But that’s when there’s if you like the McLuhan Boom. Is about (..) ninetheen sixty-seven, sixty-eight. And he sort of intersects with a certain self-awareness about media and he was someone who, you  know, who wasn’t a, you know,  sort of twenty year old hippy, but seemed to be speaking about the world that that moment addressed.

And what was his theory about media, about mass communication?

- Well, of course it’s in the famous phrase (..) the medium is the message, which he later turned to media is the massage. And both of those sense of it have particular resonances. So the first thing is to pay attention to form: how does the actual form of a media work and what does it do to you? That’s medium is the message. Medium is the massage, this little pun on it, is to do with (..) for him everything is tactile, that he really wants to understand the relationship with the body to media before you start to sort of intellectualise it and think about content and all that stuff.

Well, he spoke exactly on that topic in a (..) play that disembodiment of television, in one sense it’s incredibly  precient, ahead of his time, and on another level you could almost unkindly say he’s a little bit unhinged. But that’s what he would have to say whilst he was being broadcasted live on television.

**McLuhan, 1977**
By the way, at this moment, right, we are on the air and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re in a dis-kind of being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their private identity. (…) Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being masked man. By the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia. And so revivals on all hands, in every phase of live today. Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are, or were.
**

Or were. We all know about revival and nostalgia, but not all of us would ascribed it back to mass media or mass communications. What’s the link he’s referring to then?

- Well, the first thing about McLuhan is: he wants to talk about media as environment. And for him environment means the part of what’s around you that you can’t actually see, that you sort
of forget is there. So he’s saying that media is environment and you forget you’re interacting with that environment until it kind of hits you in the head. So that’s kind of the first bit.

What do you mean? We don’t know we’re watching television, or.. ?

- I think most of the time ‘NO, we don’t know what television is when we’re watching it’. So, we know we’re watching a show called such-and-such and it’s funny or it’s a drama or whatever.
But what does it mean to be watching television? What does it mean to be listening to the radio? What does it mean to be having a cellphone converstation while walking down the street
and you’re talking to somebody else who’s waling in a different street who’s also on a cellphone? We’ve kind of forgotten that that’s an environment and he’s saying there that one of the things about that is the disembodiment. Your voice is elsewhere. You’re talking to an elsewhere. And if it’s a cellphone, elsewhere is talking back to you. So there’s, if you like, a completely separate environment with voices and minds interacting that’s completely different  to where those bodies are, as bodies could be somewhere else, you know, completely unrelated to that. So how do we dwell in those two spheres at once? And he then wants to say there’s a disconnect there, it makes it hard to have a consistent and coherent identity. You know, I was at a baseball game once and I was sitting behind this guy who took a cellphone call and was obviously flat out lying to his boss about where he was. And the voice had obviously said something like isn’t there a ball game going on. He said it was on television. He claimed to be  watching it on TV while he was working or something. This is what I could understand. Also firstly it’s weird that I can overhear this conversation. Secondly, isn’t it kind of weird that someone’s making up this story. There’s someone (..) he’s someone else, he’s someone else as the disembodied voice to who he is as the embodied person sitting there with a giant beer and a hotdog watching the yankees game. 

One disembodied voice, talking about another disembodied experience with another third party - disembodied, listening in.

- Right. And that’s a fairly (..) We might not have done that, but we might have done things like it, you know. And we forget to sort of stop and think about what are of these environments  we’ve entered. And then the last link is that (..) he thinks there’s something unsettling about that and maybe it’s why we go looking for (..) the ghosts of identities, of past identities. Of trying to sort of hang on to something that would make sense of this.

And this is what he says about identity in the digital world. Remember, this is nineteen sixty-eight, decades before computers became widespread. In a way he’s almost forecasting Facebook. Let’s have a listen.

**McLuhan, 1968**
In the new electric world, where everybody is involved in everybody, where everbody is involved in complex processes that are going on in the total environment, the old identity cards that used to constitute private identity, the old means of finding out ‘who am I?’, right (..) will not work. People (..) now have to encounter themselves in the inner world (..) Kierkengard or the existential style, in order to know who they are. The old methods of merely external (..) identity by marks of occupation, national origine, age grouping and so on, these will not serve any longer as means of distinguishing private identity.
**

Precient on one level, although national identity is still a big part of our lives.

- The thing about McLuhan is that he’s really an orator. He’s in a sense a modern artist whose medium is the spoken word, who is ?? towards eloqution for example. But he’s mistaken for being an oracle, which is a slightly different thing. It’s actually nearly (..) not quite what he’s doing. No, he’s an orator, he’s creating these preformances that make you think. So what’s striking is that he seems to be talking about our world, but are probably people in nineteen sixty-eight who thought he was talking about that world. Like (..) in a sense, that’s the beauty of what he does. It’s that you sort of go: ‘ah, I can think with that!’ You know what, that’s slightly strange but I can think with that, I can do something with it. So in this case, does he not seem to be talking about Facebook, Twitter, you know, this whole world. Although, you notice that’s actually not usually an oral world, that writing has come back into play in a way that he didn’t really anticipated at all. We’ve kind of reinvented (..) a kind of scriptural world (..) that he didn’t anticipate at all.

Texting and that sort of thing.

- Yeah, like Facebook is mostly writing with pictures. Yes. So he was (..) he speaks to different times.

He spoke there in that grab to the sixties and was a major media celebrity during the sixties. Magazines, television, they loved him. In the seventies his influence, at least insofar as his appearances in newspapers and television wind. Why was that?

- Yeah, it is interesting that he didn’t come to a Australia until nineteen seventy-seven. You know, this is when the big touring acts, they wouldn’t come here until they could no longer fill stadiums in the united states and so on. He didn’t really survive the seventies. It think there was a (..) there’s a few reason for that. His popularity with the advertising industry and media executives was all based on a misunderstanding. You know, he really wasn’t there to help them, you know, sell products or sell show or anything like that. It was just he was the only person who is really interested in them and didn’t want to moralize about them, you know. They had someone they could talk to, who is wipsmart, but who wasn’t really going to help them do what they wanted to do. And I think the second thing about McLuhan is that, you know, he comes out of Cambridge University in the nineteen thirties, out of what is called the New Criticism. So there was a quite conservative side to that, there’s a quite.. even reactionary side to McLuhan. And he really did not quite, sort of, get or survive the kind of political transformations that really come home to roost in the nineteen seventies.

So as he was a devout catholic. And did that influence his work?

- McLuhan was a catholic convert, interestingly. And it’s not overt in his work. He very very rarely touches on overt political issues. His whole style was a sort of not judge, it’s just to try to find a way of creating this sort of word probes that help you think about things. But, yeah he was a catholic convert, he went to mass every day to be in communication with the eternal. They would come back to his centre and think about, you know, electric media and all that sort of stuff. And I think those things are related. I think faith was enabling for McLuhan. It’s part of the world view, it enables him to see our world in a quite specific way. The other thing about McLuhan is that (..) you know he sought out Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis after the war in exile in North-America and these were deeply reactionary, if not proto-fascist intellectuals at that particular stage. He understood the genius of their poetry, but he was kind of quite comfortable with the reactionary side of modernism. And he tries not to be overt about that. He sort of steers away from any overtly political statements.

Because he knew it would be impolitic? (..) Hard to say perhaps.

- The whole thing about who McLuhan works is to not say the obvious. Like that’s why he’s interesting, is that people would always ask him these questions and you notice he’ll never actually answers the questions. He always goes of somewhere else. But he does it in a way that works. You sort of go ‘what?’,’you know, I had these whole preconceptions about what mattered about media or a technology or about identity, oh but you’ve gone over there..’ and then you have to sort of start to grope in your own mind for a way through that. So I think he just avoided things that weren’t interesting to talk about publicly, but I think in his private life  this is a quite conservative figure. He’s not your classic sixties figure in that sense.

Certainly! Not your classic any figure! Does the description you’ve just made, does that mean he wasn’t a great scholar? He was a great orator, but not a great scholar? Or is that unfair?

- It depends on what you expect a scholar to do.

To build the existing corpus of knowledge.

- I think universities need charismatic outsiders from time to time to shake things up and show how it can be done otherwise. Like it’s one of the functions of the accumulation of knowledge. But it’s not the regular, routine stuff, which is adding sort of brick by brick our understanding of one thing related to another. There’s a sort of impersonality about scholarship. But now and then it needs this other figure. (..) As soon as he had a (..) stroke and they just shut down his centre at the University of Toronto. But the Canadians like to claim him as the great Canadian, but at the time the just sort of him out as soon as they could, you know. But it’s partly rightly that he performed a function for the accumulation of knowledge. But you wouldn’t want to craft the whole school of people who tried to sort of imitate that and be, you know, a thousand Marshall McLuhans would drive you crazy. And it would drive him crazy, because that would turn it into cliché.

Which he would have hated.

- Yeah, cliché and act-out, this is another later book that he does.

What would he make of the world today, were he alive?

- Who knows what McLuhan would think of, you know, the hundredth anniversary of .. it just is, we don’t know what to make of him yet, you know. It’s like, I don’t think he would know what to make of us. But he’d be curious about it. That’s the other thing about McLuhan, his ability to be curious about things (..) that we kind of take for granted. I think the return to literacy in digital media would have struck him as kind of curious and counter-intuitive. He thought electric media was about (..) orality and the visual and things like that and that we’ve got, if you like , a secondary textuality in texting and Twitter and Facebook that’s built on top of all of these audiovisual media. That, I think, he would find really quite striking and predicted, but if you think about it a logical development.

Is there anyone who reminds you of Marshall McLuhan alive today?

- It’s sort of the whole point that no one does, although I’ve had the kind of awful thought that McLuhan was the theory, Rupert Murdoch’s the practice. That (..) and you know, McLuhan would say he’s interested in us nosses, not noses, not in counting nose or leading by the nose or antyhing like that. He wanted knowledge. But, you could sort of pass it for, you know, if you’re a very kind of creative mind (..) for ways to build media empires. And obviously, I have no idea whether Rupert Murdoch every read a line of McLuhan in his entire life, but (..) love him or hate him you got to admit he had this extraordinary intuitive grasp of create power out of media.

—

McKenzie Wark also wrote: A Hack Manifesto [currently version 4.0] and Gamer Theory [currently version 2.0]

Source: youtube.com

Listing Social Reading sites… [part 3]

My previous list only contained social reading websites or applications focusing solely on books. The following list gives a brief overview of social media that are focusing on books as well, either directly or indirectly.

  1. Reddit [books section]
    - What’s new online? Todays headlines — Chosen by readers, not editors -
    RedditBooks Logo
  2. Pinterest [suggested board: books worth reading]
    - Connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests -
    - We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people -
    Pinterest Logo
  3. Tumblr [tag: books]
    **No slogan as of today**
    Tumblr Logo
  4. Book#Hashtags [designated hashtags for Twitter]
    - … find and join conversations about the books you love -
    Twitter Logo
  5. ..

… again, to be continued!

Presentation “Media, literacy and the literary system: How social media are affecting literary professionals” delivered at Literacy and Society, Culture, Media & Education (Ghent, 9-11 Feb. 2012).

Stories and canonical breaches: Bruner’s basics

Culture became the major factor in giving form to the minds of those living under its sway. A product of history rather than of nature, culture now became the world to which we had to adapt and the tool kit for doing so.

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 11-12

Narrative … mediates between the canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires, and hopes. It renders the exceptional comprehensible and keeps the uncanny at bay—save as the uncanny is needed as a trope. It reiterates the norms of the society without being didactic. And … it provides a basis for rhetoric without confrontation. It can even teach, conserve memory, or alter the past.

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 52

Narrative is not just plot structure or dramatism. Nor is it just “historicity” or diachronicity. It is also a way of using language. To a striking degree, it relies upon the power of tropes—upon metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, implicature, and the rest to explore the full range of connections between the exceptional and the ordinary. Indeed, Ricocur even speaks of mimesis as a “metaphor of reality.”

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 59-60

I believe that we shall be able to interpret meanings and meaning-making in a principled manner only in the degree to which we are able to specify the structure and coherence of the larger contexts in which specific meanings are created and transmitted.

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 63-64

The values underlying a way of life, as Charles Taylor points out, are only lightly open to “radical reflection.” They become incorporated in one’s self identity and, at the same time, they locate one in a culture.

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 29

Well-formed stories, [Kenneth] Burke proposed, are composed of a pentad of an Actor, an Action, a Goal, a Scene, and an Instrument—plus Trouble. Trouble consists of an imbalance between any of the five elements of the pentad: an Action toward a Goal is inappropriate in a particular Scene … an Actor does not fit the Scene … or there is a dual Scene … or a confusion of Goals.

Jerome Bruner (1990) Acts of Meaning, p. 50

He defines ten sides to narrative:

  1. Narrative diachronicity: The notion that narratives take place over some sense of time.
  2. Particularity: The idea that narratives deal with particular events, although some events may be left vague and general.
  3. Intentional state entailment: The concept that characters within a narrative have “beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on”.
  4. Hermeneutic composability: The theory that narratives are that which can be interpreted in terms of their role as a selected series of events that constitute a “story.”
  5. Canonicity and breach: The claim that stories are about something unusual happening that “breaches” the canonical (i.e. normal) state.
  6. Referentiality: The principle that a story in some way references reality, although not in a direct way; narrative truth can offer verisimilitude but not verifiability.
  7. Genericness: The flip side to particularity, this is the characteristic of narrative whereby the story can be classified as a genre.
  8. Normativeness: The observation that narrative in some way supposes a claim about how one ought to act. This follows from canonicity and breach.
  9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Related to hermeneutic composability, this is the characteristic whereby narrative requires a negotiated role between author or text and reader, including the assigning of a context to the narrative, and ideas like suspension of disbelief.
  10. Narrative accrual: Finally, the idea that stories are cumulative, that is, that new stories follow from older ones.
Jerome Bruner (1991) The Narrative Construction of Reality (pp.6-20)

Source: oaks.nvg.org

On critique and the role of the professional critic in a social media culture.

In this post I attempt to make a rudimentary rhetorical analysis of an opinion piece on arts criticism. The piece was written by Michael Kaiser, and published on the 14th (november 2011) under the title: “The Death of Criticism or Everyone Is a Critic”. It can be read at: huffingtonpost.com. The Dramatistic Pentad is employed to perform the analysis.

Pentadic analysis

“One of the substantial changes in the arts environment that has happened with astonishing speed is that arts criticism has become a participatory activity rather than a spectator sport.”

In his opening sentence, Kaiser makes an observation that establishes the focus of the article: the scene - the arts environment - has changed due to a changes regarding a specific act - arts criticism. The transformation is described as an evolution from passive consumption - a spectator sport - to prosumption - a participatory activity.

“Every artist, producer or arts organization used to wait for a handful of reviews to determine the critical response to a particular project.”

Kaiser continues by stressing the importance of the act - arts criticism - and its product - reviews - as agency for the act of art production. Critique or critical response is presented as a instrument for measuring audience reception. (This closely relates to what I noted about registration of audience reception in an earlier post.)

“And while very few critics for a small set of news outlets still wield great power to make or break a project (…) a larger portion of arts projects have become somewhat immune to the opinions of any one journalist.”

The first paragraph ends with a reformulation of the observed transformation, which redirects the focus from the act - criticism as a participatory activity - to the agent - the art critic - and the agency - authoritative status. By shifting the focus towards the disappearance of singular authority, Kaiser can both celebrate and problematize the observed changes later on in the text.

“First, far fewer people are getting their news from print media. (…) for those arts projects aimed at younger audiences, hard copy newspapers are no longer a central element of a marketing strategy. Younger people get virtually all of their information online, through news web sites, social media and chat rooms. And older people are increasingly getting their information online as well.
Second, because serious arts coverage has been deemed an unnecessary expense by many news media outlets looking to pare costs, there are fewer critics and less space devoted to serious arts criticism. (…)
And third, the growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors. In theater circles alone one can visit talkingbroadway.com, broadwayworld.com, theatermania.com, playbill.com and numerous other sites. Many arts institutions even allow their audience members to write their own critiques on the organizational website.”

Before further developing his problem statement, Kaiser continues to elaborate his observation. In three stages, he explains how digital media (and particularly social media) have caused the transformation with regard to the role of the art critic. Media (both old/print and new/digital) are presented as agency with a specific purpose for each of the agents in the scene: the audience, the critic and the producers of media and art. The table below shows which purposes Kaiser attributes to the different agent-agency relations. When looking for changes with regard to purpose, it becomes apparent that the purpose remains unchanged in all but one of the agent-agency relations. In summary, Kaisers observations suggest that only in the case of the audience a change in purpose can be noted. As the agency changes, the purpose and the act change. Stated differently, the interactive nature of digital media invites people to use media differently - prosumption - to serve altered purposes - both consumption and production of critique.

Changing purpose (agent-agency relation)

“Most serious arts critics know a great deal about the field they cover and can evaluate a given work or production based on many years of serious study and experience. These critics have been vetted by their employers.
Anyone can write a blog or leave a review in a chat room. The fact that someone writes about theater or ballet or music does not mean they have expert judgment.”

In the final paragraph, Kaiser problematizes the results of the transformation. This paragraph is a reverse engineered version of the first paragraph. Kaisers starts by characterizing the serious arts critic as an expert: someone who is awarded an authoritative status - agency - by his employers (print media producers), which represents a formal recognition of the critics acquired professionalism (through study and experience). This suggests that arts criticism requires more than just the means to spread a message - media as agency. Arts criticism also requires the authority (or credibility) that comes from dedication and experience - status as agency. Kaiser’s description places the arts critic in a dichotomous relation with the audience. The audience that lacks the dedication and experience, and thus the authority that professional arts critics possesses.

“But it is difficult to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques.”

Kaiser continues by reformulating the problem in terms of audience reception, thereby shifting the focus from the arts critic to the art producers. Because social media allow ‘everyone to be a critic’ and obscure the authorative identity of the critics, arts criticism loses its potential to serve as an instrument for measuring audience reception - agency for art producers.

“No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best.”

Kaiser concludes by praising the democratizing effects of digital media with regard to arts criticism, thus stressing that he is neither a technophobe, nor an anti-democratic. While recognizing the affordances of the transformation(s), Kaiser also expresses his concerns with regard to the quality of art production. As such, he suggests that his take on these matters is not short-sighted and that his concerns are genuine and sincere. In other words, Kaiser implicitly claims that anyone who truly cares about the quality of art production should also care about the preservation of the role of the arts critic. The arts critic is a professional curator: a person who is thoroughly skilled in determining what the appropriate standards are for distinguishing Fine Art from Pop art, thus maintaining Fine Art’s high(er) quality.

Kaiser’s representation of the transformation and its effects can be schematized in the following manner.

Kaisers argumentation on transformations caused by digital and social media

Conclusions

This opinion piece by Michael Kaiser suggests that cultural literacy (expertise) means acquiring good (cultural) taste. Expressing judgment based on such cultural literacy helps others to acquire this same ‘good’ taste. As such, both the standards for ‘good’ quality and the quality of culture itself are maintained. In other words, the analysis of Kaiser’s text helps us to understand literacy and culture (in its ‘material’ form) as social constructions that concern identification and division based on attributed value.

Source: The Huffington Post

Wie is er aan het woord? - Joachim Vlieghe (EMSOC)

“Unlike their relationship to mainstream media, unlike their relationship with content and activities that adults provision for them, smaller scale peer publics are the ones that children participate in not just as consumers but as producers and distributors of content, knowledge, taste and culture.”
(Mizuko Ito, 2010)

Wat maakt iemand tot een geletterd persoon? Het antwoord lijkt voor de hand te liggen: het gaat om kennis en vaardigheden. Terecht volgt dan de vraag om welke kennis en vaardigheden het gaat. Ook hier lijkt het antwoord vanzelfsprekend: datgene wat wordt aangeboden in het onderwijs. Een pienter geest merkt voegt daar vast nog aan toe dat het echter niet volstaat om louter de eindertermen na te lezen. Elke school kan immers zelf invulling geven aan de eindtermen door een eigen canon van ‘belangrijke’ werken samen te stellen.

Net zo belangrijk als de vraag naar inhoud (wat) is de vraag naar wie ze bepaalt? Op het eerste zicht lijkt het misschien vreemd om deze vraag te stellen. Benadrukken dat de overheid, de scholen en de leraren beslissingen nemen met betrekking tot de inhoud van het onderwijs lijkt immers weinig bij te dragen aan het debat over geletterdheid. Waarom herhalen wat evident is? Het feit dat er een überhaupt discussie gaande is, betekent echter dat de antwoorden op de voorgaande vragen lang niet zo van zelfsprekend zijn als ze lijken. Dergelijke vaststelling ligt aan de basis van de discussie waarin ook ouders en werkgeversorganisaties zich steeds vaker mengen.

In het debat worden kosten noch moeite worden gespaard om de eigen deelname te legitimeren. Iedereen meent recht te hebben op zijn of haar zegje. Wie merkwaardig genoeg ontbreekt in het debat zijn de kinderen en jongeren om wie het nagenoeg altijd draait. Ook Abbie Boutkabout van STAMP-media (nvdr. het Vlaamse persagentschap voor jongeren) kwam onlangs nogmaals tot die vaststelling tijdens de twee Staten-generaal van de Media. Het is inderdaad hoogst bedenkelijk om kinderen en jongeren uit het debat te weren. Het voorwendsel dat ongeletterde personen onmogelijk kunnen bepalen wat geletterdheid is net omdat ze niet geletterd zijn houdt immers een groot risico in voor iedereen die meent deel te mogen nemen aan de discussie. Discussiëren over ‘wat geletterdheid is’ betekent onvermijdelijk dat we onze eigen positie als geletterde personen op het spel zetten. Wat als we aan het einde van de discussie plots helemaal niet zo geletterd blijken te zijn als we wel dachten? Houdt ons recht op deelname aan het debat dan op?

Voorvechters van het spreekrecht van kinderen moeten – alle optimisme ten spijt – vaststellen dat de erkenning van dit recht op zich onvoldoende blijkt om kinderen daadwerkelijk aan te zetten tot discussie. Allerhande verklaringen worden gezocht voor deze vaststelling; gaande van een gebrek aan interesse tot een gebrek aan communicatieve kennis en vaardigheden. Deze verklaringen zijn interessant desondanks, of net omwille van de tweedeling tussen geletterde volwassenen en ongeletterde jeugd. Zo rijst in de slipstream van de legitimatievraag een nieuwe vraag met betrekking tot geletterdheid: waar komen de interesse, de motivatie en het vermogen van de volwassenen vandaan voor het voeren van maatschappelijke debatten?

De mogelijkheden van kinderen en jongeren om deel te nemen aan maatschappelijke discussies lijken zich vooral buiten de school te bevinden, terwijl communicatievaardigheden net bovenaan de onderwijskundige agenda staan. Maar schijn bedriegt. Terwijl volwassenen het hoge woord voeren in het mainstream debat, vat de jeugd onderling zelf de discussie aan. Met de komst en explosieve groei van de sociale media  wordt steeds duidelijker dat kinderen en jongeren helemaal niet stilzwijgend aan de kant zitten. In de kantlijn hebben zij een nieuw ruimte gecreëerd. Daarin is discussie mogelijk waarbij de legitimering van individuele deelnames niet bepalend is voor de geldigheid van de stellingen. Integendeel, de legitimatie van de deelname wordt continu onderhandeld door datgene wat door de deelname naar voor komt. Enkel zij hun deskundigheid tonen kunnen door anderen als expert worden (h)erkend.

Hoog tijd dus om zelf de daad bij het woord te voegen en deze gedachten verder te onderzoeken.