Shonell in TCR Land

During May Seminar, I took New Media Rhetoric. I LOVED the class, getting to read Lev Manovich et al. while working on new media projects on Frankenstein–what more can you ask for?

Our last assignment was to write a reflection on new media. There is so much I WANTED to say I wasn’t sure where to begin or where to end. But I did write it and hope to glean some things from it for future work. It’s presented below.

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First, the Wordle, because I'm addicted to them.

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New Media: A Reflection

After two weeks of reading about new media and of developing new media projects, my mind still returns to one basic question: what is new media?

One word that is often used in discussing new media is “remediation.” In a review of Bolter and Grusin’s book Remediation, Blakesley defines remediation as “the process whereby computer graphics, virtual reality, and the WWW define themselves by borrowing from and refashioning media, such as paintings, photography, television, and film” (“A Review of Remediation: Understanding New Media”). So we have this idea of remix, of blending old with new to develop what we today call new media.  Manovich goes a step further in his defining of new media by examining five components of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcoding. He excludes interactivity from the list because if we look at all of what interactivity can entail, we will find that it exists within other forms of media not considered “new.”

And though I agree that interactivity is something that can be seen in older media forms, interactivity is not something that should be dismissed when discussing new media. The way that we interact with media, the way we manipulate old media in order to make it new media says a lot about “self” and says a lot about culture as a whole. “In Part III of Remediation, Bolter and Grusin turn our attention to the ways that the self is remediated by digital technology. In the logic of remediation, the authentic self is constructed by fetishizing the medium, by borrowing from it to refashion an identity. The self is ‘repurposed’ and digitized” (Blakesley).  In redeveloping ourselves as creators, we redevelop our cultural landscape.

What I find interesting about new media, more so than trying to describe what it is, is looking at how new media ups the ante of interactivity (especially for the individual) by making individuals creators, or as Bruns calls them “produsers” and how this development might affect the culture.

In 2006, Time’s person of the year was you. And You. And me, too. How did the “every person” claim the honored spot? Time saw the explosive revolution of Web 2.0 and the collaborative, participatory atmospheres that were being created virtually, that not only gave the individual a voice, but also gave the collective voices the ability to affect change.

Just sixteen years ago, we had those like Stephen Bernhardt who wrote on the change of text as text moved from print to screen. In the seminal work, “The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens,” Bernhardt writes, “Because electronic text does not create a totally new rhetoric but depends for its design on the strategies of paper texts, the starting point in this analysis is not ‘How do screen-based texts differ categorically or essentially from their paper-based counterparts?’ but ‘What is a framework for understanding dimensions of variation in texts across the two media?’” (411)

Today, we have courses like New Media Rhetoric. We have new literacies just from the various ways in which we write on the internet. We have multiple identities and must learn how to navigate through the many selves we embody. We have more collaboration than ever before and must examine how we collaborate and how that affects productivity, identity. We have full educational programs online, with classes being taught in Second Life.

Although we do have our solitary geniuses, as Lev Grossman states in his 2006 Time piece, today’s world is not just about the next Einstein, Edison, or Jobs. “Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy” (Grossman). The Internet and the various forms of new media are allowing the everyday individual the opportunity to participate in information creation that speaks of their wants and needs, that can affect change. “As we shift from an industrial society to an information society, from old media to new media, the overlap between producers and uses becomes significantly larger” (Manovich 119).

In The Economics of Attention, Lanham quotes Peter Drucker who states that our ‘basic economic resource’ is now knowledge rather than labor, capital, or natural resources (4). And although many theorists consider information and management of knowledge as “fluff,” stuff and fluff are changing places. So, what does this mean?

Fluff, aka knowledge, is important.

And if knowledge is important, we might also say that those who create the knowledge are important, too. This becomes problematic for me in a way. I’m excited at the prospect of the voiceless perhaps now having a voice because of their interaction with new media, but at the same time, I worry about the influx of information, of knowledge and whether we’ll be able to discern what knowledge is important and what knowledge isn’t important. Will we be able to discern this? Will we be considered racist or sexist or any other “Ist” because we want to make the distinction? This is a major issue, and it will become even more so the more new media grows and the more people become produsers.

There is a looseness, a freedom to new media and its creation, and this is a wonderful thing; however, I think it’s a good thing for us to ask the question, how do we become effective, purposeful creators of new media—for self and for society? American media scholar Henry Jenkins is principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML) [http://newmedialiteracies.org], a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins et al. wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture, and in that paper, they identify “a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture” (“Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture”); I would argue that this list is not just for young people. In a society that is becoming more and more digital every day, it is important for all people to acquire skills that will enable them to actively participate in their world. This list of skills, many of which connect with the five components of new media that Manovich discusses, includes:

• Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking - the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
• Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
• Visualization - the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends

(Jenkins et al. 56)

Having the ability to create new media is great, but I’m of the belief that if we are to be creators, we need to be creators with a purpose. There is more than enough “fluff” being made that has no real purpose other than it can be created. Instead of developing fluff to continue to overpopulate the Information Superhighway, we need meaningful “stuff,” knowledge to help our individual selves and to help our cultures, our society. In order to do that, we need to understand what new media is and how we can use it. And while we’re doing this, we also need to understand who we are and what we are so that we can develop content that has meaning and benefit to us and to others.

There are definite aspects of new media that I am interested in exploring further during my doctoral work and beyond. Some of them have been briefly mentioned in this reflection.

I’m interested in exploring the (re)construction of identity through new media. In real life, a person’s identity is manifold. This does not change with that person interacts with new media and becomes creator of new media content. But I do believe that these identities are remixed just like the media. For example, I “play” on Second Life, and I initially came onto Second Life to “play,” to be someone different than who I am in real life. That didn’t end up happening, however. Yes, variable characteristics of Shon Bacon become a part of my SL persona, but my SL persona remixed those characteristics with other traits she was interested in developing, that would help her benefit with her SL experience and would help her communicate more effectively with others in-world. Many of these changes I have undergone are a part of how I see body construction, how I see myself (as a RL person and an SL person), and how I plan to interact with others in-world. In talking with others, I’ve learned that who a person believes he or she is in real life is very important to understanding how he or she changes that real life persona within Second Life.

I’m interested in exploring the results of a participatory culture on the importance of the knowledge generated. As I stated earlier, we are a culture that is flooded with information. There used to be creators and users. And with this, there was a distinction, for good or bad, between good information and bad information. Good information was developed by the creators, the experts of a given field, and bad information was developed by the users. Now, as produsers establish their importance in culture, we will either have to deal with a world full of clutter, in which we are drowning in information, or we will have to—again—discern what information is important and what information is not. And in doing that, we have to make sure not to step on toes and think of the collective.

In addition to the above, I also want to explore how we can use new media to reach marginalized groups, particularly those within the classroom, and to help these groups become better students. For the last eight years, I have taught basic writing, freshman composition, and various courses within a mass communication department. My favorite class to teach, however, has been Basic Writing. It is a class that even decades after Mina Shaughnessy finds itself with a negative stigma, and no one has more stigma placed upon them than the basic writing student. Many times, these students are seen as lesser than and are kept away from being creators, of using technology to better themselves as writing students. In the past, I have used blogs and forms of social media to introduce students to the importance of audience and voice and style; now, having taken this course, I’m interested in seeing how students’ writing might improve with using new media to talk about their journeys as people, as students, as basic writers.

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Works Cited

Bernhardt, Stephen. “The Shape of Text: The Texture of Print on Screen.” Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. 409-27. Print.

Blakesley, David. “A Review of Remediation: Understanding New Media, by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. 6(2). Web. 18 May 2010 <http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/6.1/reviews/blakesley/remediator.html>.

Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Web. 24 May 2010 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html>.

Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Sponsored by The MacArthur Foundation. Web. 20 May 2010 <http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf>.

Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2006.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Print.