The Newness of New Media

I created this blog in late July, 2008 to teach an introductory course for the University Writing Program at UC Davis. To examine the terms and goals of the course more specifically, please see the blog archive on the right-hand side of the page. When the writing course ended in September, so did my efforts to keep the blog up-to-date; I had to move on to other projects and a different course and let the experimental tenor of introductory writing with blogs settle a bit before I could write my own reflection. The overall evaluation by the students and me seemed to have been that the course was a success. They managed to stay focused and, for the most part interested, in writing for six weeks during the late summer. However, since the course ended, I have realized that in many ways, I do not know how to determine what constitutes a “successful” writing course with new media. Is it a success, in other words, if they write consistently, if their peers and I also consistently evaluated them, and if most students registered a detectable improvement in their writing?

When the course began, I had to inform and, in some cases, assure students of several aspects of the course. They would be experiencing a different form of pedagogy in my class than in other lower-division writing courses on my campus. In general, I have always found that teaching students about writing is extremely challenging. At a predominantly science-focused research university, much of the quarter is devoted to statements about why and when they may need writing in the “real” world, or how they might be better scientists if they write well, or (on a good day), how they may begin to see the world differently with their new approach to writing. This is no easy task in nine weeks, particularly when (at times) I do not believe in the very categories—such as the “real world”—on which such incantations depend. I have grown to accept that for many students, UWP 001 is merely a “requirement” and they may never return to the papers they wrote, the readings they encountered, or the discussions we had.
However, rather than blame students for not caring enough about writing, another graduate student and I began thinking about ways to teach writing through media that the students might already use, or at least media with which they may be familiar. Indeed, on the first day of class, I learned that many of the students do blog and many of them utilize this medium for their “daily” or “random” thoughts. We wondered, then, what would happen if we took this medium more seriously, which is to say, if we ask students to write formally in blog posts to which their peers and I would comment. As I mentioned, I had to assure students. By the end of the first week, it was clear that they are much more comfortable with their writing if they think the audience ends at the instructor. They do not want to be accountable to an outside audience and frankly, neither did I in some moments. Up to this point, my teaching has been a fairly private practice. My best and worst moments as an instructor are usually between the students and me. When the blogs pushed both our writing and teaching practices into a more public and evaluative space, I began to feel differently about the course: it was not simply a “better” or “worse” feeling, but it was different.

In part I think this difference has to do with time, and with what new media has the potential to do to the temporality of a class (or of any activity, really). I can look over our posts from August and September and remember the contexts in which they were written, the discussions and readings that ignited them, and sense of accomplishment and frustration I felt in reading them, then. They exist now as an archive of something that happened three months ago and yet they are still public, and new readers may encounter them as if they are happening now, as if the conversations were alive this week. Is that not what an Internet surveyor experiences when she or he happens upon something? I know I have “newly” encountered items online that other people knew about months ago, but because I found them by browsing in a simulated real time, that information felt new and fresh to me. What does it mean, then, for me to leave these posts here and now? Again, they are somewhat out of context and out of time, and yet in your present, they are here for the encounter and response.

Week 5 Keywords, Readings & More

The first four weeks of the course went by relatively quickly, particularly with our covering many complex topics.  I am impressed with how our class discussions have evolved: many of you are learning how to read critically and even integrate such analyses into your topics for last week's post.  I will have all posts read, commented on, and graded by tomorrow morning. Please be sure to read carefully the comments on your post, as well as my comments for other members of your group.

For this week, read "A Soldier's Legacy" and this article from The Onion.  To accompany these articles, you also need to read the following keywords:

Representation

Queer  

Make sure you have all of this read by class on Tuesday.  As you work through these two very different readings, particularly with "representation" and "queer" in mind, examine the different media from which the articles come.  Think back to your posts for last week and be ready to discuss how The New Yorker is different from The Onion.  A more difficult question might be, how are they similar?  Recall our discussion of parody last week and think about how this technique is employed by The Onion.  Think also about the ways in which each article is concerned with other media, such as Wikipedia and the comment features on countless Internet sites.  The second article may be particularly useful for the group working on Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

For this week's assignment to write a semiotic analysis, I want you choose something you encounter everyday, take a photo of it to include in your post, and write.  If you are not able to take a photo, then find a similar image online, but make sure you cite your source and even write about the difference between taking a photo of something you "really" encounter, versus writing about an image captured by someone else.  As you write, keep in mind the work we did in class, particularly how we separate form from content.  We will talk more about strategies for writing this post in class on Tuesday, but you should choose your subject as soon as possible and begin writing before Tuesday.  When grading this post, I am going to pay close attention to your argument.  I have noticed that for last week's post, many of you fell into a trap of describing your group's method without setting up a clear argument about the relationship between medium and audience.  The key for this next post will be to craft a coherent argument about your object of analysis.  Do not write a description of the object--with the photo you include, the reader could do this on his or her own.  Rather, give the reader an analysis, using the critical reading strategies we have employed in class.  You should also incorporate keywords from our book to help you develop your argument.   

Put it in Perspective

Using Google Earth, I “flew” to Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Once I hovered at a certain vertical distance above the airport (1.16 km), I captured this still image. A friend wanted to view the architecture aerially in order to see its outline that appears to be an eagle.

















Although this architectural likeness to a mighty bird is well known, I still cannot see it in this image, or even in others, such as this from Wikipedia.







To be more precise, I do see it, but where is the eagle’s head? In the following post, I will focus on the virtual mapping medium, Google Earth, with keen attention to the ways in which this medium attempts to capture its audience. More precisely, I will argue that the creators of Google Earth want their audience—their customers—to believe that the medium itself accounts for reality and requires no imagination. However, I will demonstrate that instead, Google Earth actually relies on the audience’s imagination in order to see certain images from an aerial perspective. Finally, I will briefly discuss the possibility that the audience may not be prepared to imagine in a medium that is itself predicated on virtual (near, approximate) reality.

In the example of the Tempelhof’s architectural simulation of an eagle, I want to see the bird’s head; I have an expectation that all bodily parts will be present. In other words, when viewing this image, I am not prepared to use my imagination--the image, I think to myself, must be self evident. Jonathan Crary writes of capital's effect on the image and one's imagination. "Capitalist modernization had several major consequences: one of these was the marginalization of the sense of the image as interior, as the mental product or creation of an individual. The sweeping devaluation and incapacitation of a human ability to generate one's own images (or imagination) is inseparable from the ascendency of already manufactured external images, which increasingly become the impersonal raw material of psychic life and determine the formal conditions of all so-called mental images" (New Keywords, 178-79). To put this in the context of Google Earth, has my reliance on media forms, which are saturated with images, actually retooled my ability to imagine? To see an image of the world from a certain aerial perspective is a relatively new phenomenon for me, given that I am not a pilot, an aerial photographer, a bomber for the military, an engineer at NASA, and so on. To what extent has this form of modernization in capital--after all, it is Google Earth and, even though I occupy none of the positions listed above, I can spend a few minutes downloading a simple program--affected the faculty of my imagination?

When I sent my friend this image, I used the email command directly in Google Earth. My email program opened automatically, attached the still shot of the airport and this paragraph:

Google Earth streams the world over wired and wireless networks enabling users to virtually go anywhere on the planet and see places in photographic detail. This is not like any map you have ever seen. This is a 3D model of the real world, based on real satellite images combined with maps, guides to restaurants, hotels, entertainment, businesses and more. You can zoom from space to street level instantly and then pan or jump from place to place, city to city, even country to country.

Get Google Earth. Put the world in perspective.

Instantly, I became a broker for Google Earth with my email turned advertisement. The words that accompany this medium must be read closely in order to understand how this medium attempts to capture its audience. The split infinitive “to virtually go” punctures the act of going, traveling, or simply moving, with virtuality, or with the time of the immediate and the space of the approximate. For virtual signifies the proximate or near, the almost, and technologies that traffic in the virtual rely on the possibility of ceaseless updating. “To virtually go” thus inserts the virtual and immediate into the processual act of going. The grammatical error suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that we can only almost go anywhere—in other words, we cannot go everywhere, even with Google Earth.

The virtuality of going seems to belie Google Earth’s call to “put the world in perspective," an act which, in some ways, is about containment. The imperative of course cites the cliché used to describe a situation in which someone has lost touch with reality, or perhaps exaggerated a situation and needs to be brought back to ‘earth.’ To put something in perspective is also to relate it to an external object or situation in order to see it more clearly; perspective and orientation are, therefore, relational. The phrase also signifies the possibilities of actually putting the world in a certain perspective by accessing its combination of satellite images and 3D models. The epigraph charges the user to believe that one can view the “real” world through Google Earth, even though it is one compiled by inherently past 3D models, satellites, maps and guides to capital exchange. Moreover, we “put the world in perspective” by viewing a radically off scale rendering. The possibilities that Google Earth affords are at once astounding and also utterly banal and limiting. While it can feel exhilarating to view the world aerially, the depth of field or perspective that the user inhabits in Google’s earth is only a reproduction of dominant human perceptive modes; moreover, these modalities exist on a human scale: from “space to street level.” Why does the technology not allow us to see the universe at once, or even the world from an insect’s perspective?

Landscape, as a concept and a topographical form, is rendered virtual, even imaginary, by the mediating technologies of the computer screen and this is how my experience of Tempelhof's image gets more complicated. Through its own virtuality, the technology of online mapping systems—including Google Earth—has created the illusion that people can choose to experience topographies in two ways: directly, viscerally, naturally; or indirectly, virtually, aerially. In other words, Google Earth constructs a binary relationship to the landscape, and the result of which is that users or navigators in virtual space might actually come to believe that n/Nature exists in a pure state. The virtual fabricates the real. This move is evident in the advertisement for Google Earth, which is insistent on topographical “realness,” “real world, based on real satellite images.” Except, in the very first sentence, we learn that users “virtually go anywhere on the planet.” Google Earth purports that simultaneously and instantly, one may converge, what at one time would have been only imagined, with the real—jumping from country to country in seconds, for example. However, zooming, jumping and panning are not instantaneous acts—they are in fact gradual processes linked to technology.

Google Earth is caught in the tension between reality and virtuality. Google Earth allows people to visit almost real spaces in almost real time. With the first line from the epigraph, we might be tempted to believe in the instantaneity of the technology because Google Earth streams the world. In the strictest sense, streaming refers to technology that allows for a rapid transmission of data—namely audio and video—across the Internet, without the user having to download and save large multimedia files on their local drive. The temporality of streaming is important to consider in this context: the technology allows users to begin listening or viewing before the entire file is transmitted. The first line, “Google Earth streams the world” is quite inaccurate because we only view images with this mapping system—there is no audio or video to stream.

Unsurprisingly, the apparent “streaming” of the data on Google Earth is always uneven, with permutations of different images from different times, some recent, some ten years old. This suggests ideological decision-making at work: which spaces are worthy of updating and which ones are not? Or, for which spaces does updating pose a threat and are thus deliberately kept in the past? The topographic images in Google Earth are kept for one to three years before being updated. The company admits that “The information in Google Earth is collected over time and is not ‘real time’ in nature.” The word choice here reminds us that, in fact, the real of time and space for the Google User is computing—not flying over, jumping between, or traversing vast landforms. The topographies we experience most viscerally are in fact those of the screen, the manipulations of a mouse, the contours of the keyboard with its letters, numbers, and arrows. With Google Earth, then, we do not experience real time in natural streams. And yet, all time is “real,” so that even with Google Earth’s concession of temporal drag, we can imagine streaming a bit differently than the technical definition I provided above. Data streams, whether live and up-to-date, from five minutes ago or five years ago, are always in almost but not quite real time. In other words, there is always a remove from the present that allows for a gap—a space or tension—that is necessarily in between the moment of viewing and the site or subject being viewed.

Google Earth actually is a technology in which the user never does intersect with the real of time or space, despite its insistence on reality. Although Google Earth allows ‘travelers’ to speculate—to explore, find new territories, to gamble on, to theorize—via the work of the imagination, it codifies the user into stale, out-of-date topographies and synthetic 3D images. Google Earth holds the real in reserve and we never quite intersect with it, but instead we explore what a house looks like from above, but two, three, or four years ago in some cases. A New Yorker cartoon parodies the seduction of aerial viewing.

















The screen has replaced the mirror. But even the joke gets it wrong because neither the technology itself, nor the temporality of the technology allows for viewing the top of one’s head, for we would not be able to see the “real” head in “real” time. Google Earth’s perceptual drag actually (and ironically) reveals itself in the insistence on streaming and realness—the repetition of the “real” uncovers an anxiety about its virtuality. As the potential audience of Google Earth, the man with the new haircut and I must simply imagine.

Week 4 Keywords & New Project Plan

Image

Audience

Discourse

Sign

In thinking more about the projects and the final weeks of the class, I have made some important changes to the plan we discussed last week.  To do these projects right and well, I want you to have more time than two weeks.  Therefore, we will break up the final four blogs, presentation, and final exam to help you each (and collectively) work on the project.  You will remain in your respective groups and yet post individually.  Additionally, the posts will be more focused and directed than your first two formal blogs, as follows:

Post 3: Medium (due by Friday, August 29 at 12:00 pm)

Post 4: Audience (due by Friday, August 29 at 12:00 pm)

Post 5: Focus on one keyword from week five and do a semiotic analysis (more on this later, due by Friday, September 5 at 12:00 pm)

Post 6: Formal reflection on the course, writing in a blog medium, and the final project (due Friday, September 12 at 12:00 pm)

Notice that you have two posts due this coming week.  I will be looking for very focused analyses of your group's platform/software application and the issues of medium and audience.  For example, what is the medium in which you are performing your "experiment" or group project?  Be careful not simply to describe it, but analyze the medium: name more than its features, for example, by providing theories for why such features exist.  Why does Second Life allow for, or even encourage, people to manipulate skin tone?  Can users manipulate gender to such an extent?  By asking such questions, you should engage with other keywords, so that you are developing a theory about the relationship between these virtual media and identity, for example.  For the second post due this coming week, ask yourself questions such as: who is the intended audience for YouTube/AmericanSingles/Second Life (respectively)?  What evidence can you provide accordingly?  

Again, you will be posting individually, but you must use the experiences you have had in your group to help you analyze these questions of medium and audience.  I also encourage you to post early and ask for comments from other members of your group before the final deadline.  In other words, help each other with the writing process as well, and as always, I am available to read over anything and help you improve before posts are due.   I will also post examples/models for you by Tuesday on the issues of medium and audience for my project on Google Earth. 

For now, there is no additional reading for the week, outside of your keywords.  

 

Week 3: Keywords and Assignments

Identity
Citizenship
Globalization
Home
Diaspora

We will have five keywords this week instead of four, in part because they are so intricately tied that we cannot read “home” without “diaspora,” for example. Please read them in this order and make sure you have finished reading and thinking through all keywords by Wednesday. Additionally, please read “Run! Hide! The Illegal Border Crossing Experience” from the New York Times. We will begin discussing it in class tomorrow. Notice that we are seemingly moving away from the “technology” focus, but the operative word there is “seemingly.” In conjunction with our keywords for this week, we will be relying on others we have already discussed, such as “virtual.” Your posts will also be different this week, but stay tuned for more on that. Finally, I will finish posting comments and grades for last week’s posts by this evening.

Just an Idea

I have delayed my foray into writing narrative posts until well into the second week of class. I realize this is a somewhat risky venture because "modeling" is often encouraged in writing courses, and that would seem an important pedagogical tool in an experimental writing class in which students must write in a virtual medium. My deferral was not an act of procrastination, but rather a provocation for students to encounter blogging in a writing course on their own terms. I wanted to push to the surface the various challenges, frustrations, mistakes, grammatical and syntactic pitfalls, as well as the benefits and pleasures of writing without paper. At this point in the course, I contend that the first posts students wrote were generally better than the first formal papers I receive in an introductory writing course--perhaps this is a stroke of luck, but my hunch is that while I do have wonderful students, it may be more complicated than that. The posts are not flawless and I found myself making familiar comments on the posts (though the process felt different because my words were not relegated to the margins of the page), such as "be more specific" and "develop this point." However, most students were attentive to and deeply aware of their audience, and that almost never happens in the first paper.

Today in class, we discussed these issues and more; afterward, I realized that they are ready to see my attempts at a formal narrative post. Perhaps more accurately, I am ready for them to see my attempt. As I argue above, giving students "A" papers on which to model their own writing is a widely accepted practice in courses with heavy writing components; however, the key is that often, other (perhaps the instructor's previous) students serve as models. Maybe there are good reasons for the instructor not to compose an example of the writing she or he advocates, but in a class in which I am asking for them to accept a wider readership--one that extends beyond me--then it follows that my writing flows into the ether as well. Here it goes:

I am concerned with Lawrence Grossberg's explication of "Ideology" in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in many ways because it assumes a fairly advanced knowledge of Marxist and Hegelian philosophy and the itineraries of more contemporary philosophers and theorists, such as Gramsci and Lukacs. There must be another way of writing about ideology that does not rehearse its very terms; that is to say, Grossberg's contribution to this anthology is in many ways highly ideological in its deployment of "high" theory, for example. I want to begin, however, with the lucid and useful points from his narrative. Notice from the OED definition to which I have linked that ideology begins with an idea; it is the "science of ideas." Grossberg mentions this too on p. 175 that "[i]deology [...] was the study of the origin and development of ideas." As he then traces, albeit somewhat confusingly, ideology later gets opposed to reasoned, rational, and realistic thinking. If someone is "ideological," he or she has been afflicted with illusory and imaginative thoughts that are not grounded in experience. Moreover, I appreciate his point on pp. 177-78 that late 20th-century politicians have returned, perhaps unknowingly, to this 18th and early 19th century conception of ideology as a form of idealism rather than rationalism. Notice how Jeffrey Hart accuses President Bush of being "ideological" in this article from The American Conservative. Toward the end of this article, Hart argues that Bush's justifications for invading Iraq were misguided, "some of his statements being so disconnected from actuality as to qualify as pure ideology." Pure ideology stands out significantly here because Hart is calling on a much earlier history of this term to denote unreasoned or impassioned thinking.

While my first impulse was to side with Hart that Bush is misguided, I quickly realized one of the dangers of reading and research online. These practices can offer an extremely narrow view depending on my key word search. "Bush" and "ideology" took me to this article, then pressing "ctrl F" took me to the paragraph in which I actually quite agree with Hart. However, I then investigated from what resource this article comes, and that is when things get more complicated. This article resides in a journal entitled The American Conservative. In its Mission Statement, the journal promises to reinvigorate conservatism: "We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man's taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God." To borrow from Hart, this statement is "pure ideology" in its most insidious form, for it declares "conservatives" as logical, reasoned arbiters of "truth" who must also rely on their faith in God. Not only is this declaration illogical, it also demonstrates what Grossberg means by "It is always the other side--and never one's own--that has an ideology" (177). In other words, people often fail to detect their own ideologies and instead accuse others outside of their political, religious, national, familial (the list goes on) affiliation of being ideological, as Hart clearly does. Thus, the editor of The American Conservative fails to see how his "taste" for family and faith in God is ideological.

I want to take up further his word choice of "the familiar." From the sentence in which this term resides, I do not understand what he means. However, by examining his Mission Statement more closely, one can see a display of, dare I write conservative and, therefore, racist, forms of U.S. nationalism. He writes, "We believe that America has gained and still does from new immigrants. But we also, after two decades of intense immigration, believe that the nation needs a slowdown to assimilate those already here." It would seem that the "familiar" is a safe term for American, by which he means Euro-Americans whose families immigrated to the U.S. 200 years, not two decades, ago. Scott McConnell and the other authors of this statement could not have provided a better example of ideology, for this term can refer to a perception, judgment or prejudice that establishes a group's sense of what is right, normal, acceptable, and deviant. Conservatism, in other words, is an ideology that--for its adherents--appears universally applicable: faith in God does or should extend to every upstanding American citizen, for example.

Finally, I am writing this post in the moment of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Tomorrow in class, I want to broach this complicated keyword by examining discourse in the U.S. about the Olympics. Try Googling "olympics 2008 nationalism" and notice the top hits: they are articles and commentary on China's display of nationalism; by examining a few of these sites further, one might notice the general tone they strike. Overall, these digital authors seem to critique China for its overt nationalism during the games. Is this not the point of a city's and country's bidding for host of the Olympics? Are not the Olympics precisely about nationalizing sports to compete and defeat other nations in seemingly innocuous "games"? The hidden claim seems to be that China is being "ideological," which is another way of arguing that China is taking nationalism too far. The students and I will examine the ways in which the U.S. instead gets the gold medal in the game of nationalism.

Critical Reading, or Reading Critically

Keywords for this week:

Empirical

Narrative

Culture

Ideology

Please read these four keywords from our book by tomorrow, before class. As with all of the entries we will read, they are not long, but they are more complicated than they seem. We will discuss them this week in class.

The article for this week will be on Google and the ways in which it has (or not) changed our ways of reading. You should begin reading this right away and make sure you have finished it by Tuesday.

I enjoyed reading your posts this week. We will discuss them more generally tomorrow: what you all did particularly well and also what I hope to see you work on for your subsequent posts.