These are the links for my talk to the School on basic tools for Ed Tec. This is the powerpoint/pdf on SlideShare (another useful tool). It’s also embedded below.
This is very much an intro—about where you might start. Nevertheless, it’s surprising how much you can get up to these days with some basic skills. Many of these tools are very powerful, and the links below will usually take you through to sites that allow you to use these tools in sophisticated ways—without much in the way of “training” (that sometimes dreaded word). Most of these tools have short training videos, etc online. All of these tools are (I think) open source.
They tend to be tools that assist classroom and person-to-person education (and usually research), rather than replacing them. Some of the later links are to useful blogs, and other sources that will get you on your way with such things. Finally, some people will be pleasantly surprised how useful these tools are in developing approaches in the traditional disciplines. Indeed, I love to point out that it’s almost certainly disciplines such as History, Geography, English (and Librarians) that are leading the way these days.
Twitter (my username is <andrewmurphie> but I’m really not so interesting to follow on Twitter); Twitter (and often Facebook at the same time) clients: in a browser I like Brizzly; Tweetdeck is a good stand alone client.
Howard Rheingold has always provided some of the most lucid commentary on education and related issues, and his recent explorations of infotention are compulsory reading(watching). He sums up one of the key points here. The tools I list here are all tools that allow you to forget the tools and concentrate on more important issues, I hope. Via a tweet, this is one of Howard Rheingold’s basic philosophies:
Mendeley is a great reference and research network software package (free) and Papers is another (not free but possibly better) … both these are good for managing large stores of pdfs, although Zotero can do this too.
Whatever this is, it seems to involve “affect”, in all it’s dimensions. But what’s affect? There’s a great Affect Theory Reader coming out this year, edited by Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. It’s great for lots of reasons apart from the fact I co-wrote a chapter for it, along with Lone Bertelsen (who’s written some great things on affect and photoworks, our chapter is ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities And Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain ). And it’s not as though there’s not a lot of other wonderful material around on affect.
However, I thought I’d put something up here that tries to sum up the basics from a number of viewpoints before heading toward my favourite takes on affect. This is in part because I know so many people working on affect who find it difficult to reconcile the concepts involved with the normalising requirements of their various disciplines, which tend at times to cage affect in one or other of these definitions (or worse, a reluctant acceptance of a minor role for affect, at best). At the same time, both as a concept and in itself, affect seem to shake up a lot of these disciplines, even those working most closely with it.
I should note that what follows below is very much an out-take from a very early version of chapter for the reader. Greg and Melissa will undoubtedly cover this introduction to affect much more subtly and powerfully in their introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Until then, what’s below is pretty much a set of notes to add to all the other takes around. I think I wrote most of this section, but Lone might have written some too. I’ll say up front that it’s not terribly well referenced, though I have at least tried to get the names in the right places.
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Affect
‘Affect is a process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being and, given this, we would certainly be better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of scientific paradigms and to deliberately turn ourselves toward ethical and aesthetic paradigms’ (Guattari, 1996: 159).
This is certainly the definition that I prefer, but what does everyone else think?
Well, three things can be said about the recent move towards thinking about affect, and not only in cultural theory (also in neuroscience, for a start). First, it’s shown that affect is crucial to culture (and not only to culture). Second, affect is much more powerful and central than we may have thought—in everyday life as much as in theory. It is increasingly seen as key, for example, even to concepts/processes such as reason, or agency. At the same time it forces us to rethink these. Third, no one quite agrees what affect is, and, with quite a few notable exceptions [see lots of links at the end], it often tends to become defined according to disciplinary requirements, and often with only minor alterations to previous ways of thinking about how the world works, and how we know the world and act within it.
A list of the many ways in which affect has been defined might include the following … Simply affecting or being affected. Affection. Emotion. Feeling. Background feeling (Damasio). Mood (which can be different to background feeling). Affective tone (Whitehead). Motivation. Interest. Many of these are often seen as separate (and often subordinate to other cognitive processes), as in ‘The generic character supposedly shared by pleasure, pain and the emotions as distinguished from the ideational and volitional aspects of consciousness’. Then there are false displays of emotion (‘the scientific term used to describe a subject’s externally displayed mood’) as opposed to real hidden feelings (in these terms one fakes “affect” so that, for example, one could be discharged from a psychiatric institution). Or, affect can be the opposite, the “real” thing, ‘the inner motive as distinquished from the intention or end of action. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, bk. III. — L.W.’. In this, feelings can be considered as different to emotion, in that feelings are a hidden series of feeling-thoughts in some kind of relation to more public and basic, obviously embodied emotion such as anger or disgust (e.g. in Damasio). For some, affects can be categorised (for Silvan Tomkins there are eight affects [maybe nine?], for example, though for him these are different to emotion, which is much messier). Others differentiate “categorical affects” (Daniel Stern) from those that possess infinite variety (for Daniel Stern these are “vitality affects”). For some, the question is one of how to control affect (notably in recent psychology in what is called “Affect Control Theory“).
Freud defined affects as somatic as against the psychic, or as against the ideational representative, with many problems lying between the two. Ideational representatives could be repressed without too much transformation, but for affects it was a different story. What happens to them in repression, and how do they return? This question is answered so vaguely in Freud as to cause the more recent psychoanalyst of affect, Adam Phllips to remark that there was a missing theory of affect in psychoanalysis.
For Spinoza, of course, the question was of the power to affect and be affected (see Greg Seigworth on affectio etc .. see also Greg’s work elsewhere, for example, “From Affection to Soul,” in Charles Stivale’s Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts). For some, these two “powers” in Spinoza are always intertwined (see the first page of Joel McKim’s interview with Brian Massumi). Of course, this power associated with affect immediately suggests a political approach to affect, a politics as appropriate to everyday life as it is to larger political events. Indeed, it links the shifting play of capacities and capabilities to the individual tolerance (or not) of intensities on the one hand, and to an interlinked general world on the other. This power to affect and be affected, as a power of transformation within the wider world has motivated Deleuze and Guattari’s affects as becomings, or even becoming-animal (the “surprising kitty” above even).
This is where things get complicated, however. Although I think this just adds to our understanding. For Deleuze and Guattari, affects, as becomings and mutual contagions, can operate independent of emotion or feeling. Writing about the work of painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze writes -
But there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects; that is, “sensations” and “instincts,” according to the formula of naturalism. Sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage of one sensation to another, the search for the “best” sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contradiction or dilation …) (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation:39)
For some cultural (and other) theory, the politics of affect is separated from this broader set of events, taken only to be that of feelings, emotion, or even only a question of the agreeable/disagreeable. There’s nothing wrong with the ideas here, in many ways. On the contrary. It’s just that the affect being discussed is not quite the same as the affect being discussed elsewhere. Again, this wouldn’t matter, except that some kind of disciplinary competition sometimes seems to emerge, which likes to bracket off one part of the whole process as “affect”, while ignoring or diminishing the importance of the rest. This is completely unnecessary (although very much explainable via a multi-disciplinary theory of affect). In any case, this only emphasises the fact that we need to know which definition of affect we are taking up. And obviously, although I head to a specific, if broader, understanding of affect, I also think that affect studies works better as an appropriately multiple assemblage, rather than a discipline.
If I move away from “emotion” in what comes next, it’s only because I think in the end that this move is what some approaches to affect avoid doing, and what still needs most explaining. For this I return to Deleuze, and of course Massumi.
Although the approach to affect as emotion, feeling or pleasure has value, Deleuze above suggests something very different – a possible politics that takes into account instinct, in the sense of filling the flesh. And perhaps when Foucault, at the beginning of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, famously asked questions about why we constantly live out a micro-fascism within everyday life, the answer is at least in part to be found in this passage of sensations, both with and without feeling, or even with or without our “agreement”.
This is a question then, of intensity.
For Brian Massumi, one of the best thinkers of affect in the contemporary world, and upon whose work many of us draw extensively, along with Félix Guattari, affect is indeed first equated with ‘intensity’ (Parables for the Virtual:27). This is an intensity in which there is ‘a crossing of semantic wires’, which begins to explain why affect theory sometimes trips over itself (Parables for the Virtual:24). This intensity is not only a matter of what affect means, but what it does. Affect is intensities coming together, moving each other, transforming and translating under or beyond meaning, beyond semantic or simply fixed systems, or cognitions, even emotions. This is not to denigrate any of these. In fact, it gives more precision to our understanding of the contexts of all of them. In Aristotle’s terms, affect is, for Massumi ‘the excluded middle’ (24), and thus a consideration of affect undermines much of twentieth century thought and habit based upon Aristotle’s opening gambit (for example in the founding of common principles for ontology—beings and Being with an exclude middle in-between and so many other basic divisions). Even the sometime troubling division of active from passive affections in Spinoza’s philosophy can fall apart in the light of this previously excluded middle -
Spinoza’s ethics in the philosophy of the becoming-active, in parallel, of mind and body, from an origin in passion, in impingement, in so pure and productive a receptivity that it can only be conceives as a third state, en excluded middle, prior to the distinction between activity and passivity: affect. (Massumi: 32)
Suggesting that we still largely lack a ‘cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect’ (27), Massumi attempts to provide one. Affect, as intensity, is of a different order to personal emotion,
Reserve the term ‘emotion’ for the personalized content, and affect for the continuation. Emotion is contextual. Affect is situational: eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational. As processual as it is precessual, affect inhabits the passage. It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- and postpersonal, an excess of continuity invested only in the ongoing: its own. Self-continuity across the gaps. Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together. In event. The world-glue of event of an autonomy of event-connection continuing across its own serialized capture in context. (Massumi:217)
Affect is then immersed in the way in which the changing world constantly trades its forces, with us always immersed in this trade, whatever story we tell ourselves about it, and whatever disciplines or concepts we form to talk about it, or try to tweak this trade. Intensity arises as the infinity of real relations, and their real potentials, actualize in specific events and processes. For example, in the infinite number of possible connections between neurons, just to name one part of the world in which affect resides (without suggesting affect as an origin in itself). Over time, this infinity actualizes as specific connections (thoughts) that are never quite removed from their potential for infinite other connections. In short, affect is the emergence of actual relations on the one hand, and their falling back into virtual relations (relational potential) on the other. The entire complex situation is summed up as follows (in this unapologetically long quote, because it is here that emotions and cognitions are situated in the broader trade of intensities):
Emergence, once again, is a two-sided coin: one side in the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation). What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly. For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another. (Tactility and vision being the most obvious but by no means the only examples: interoperative senses, especially proprioception, are crucial.) Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality [Stern again], or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareable in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect [so affect is also the autonomy of things - that which gives them autonomy]. (Massumi:35)
Affect is therefore more than “important” – in many ways it is the world in motion, in emergence and disappearance. Affect is central, before and after our assumptions of stability, subject or object. As Deleuze notes in The Fold -
…nothing authorises to conclude in favor of the presence of a body that might be ours, or the existence of the body that would have happened to affect it. There exists only what is perceived…. (Deleuze, 1993:94)
Even perception comes after affect. Deleuze suggests that if we were to stick a pin into our hand and move it about, the pain would not be that of “a pin” but of a sharpness intercepting our flesh – at least at first (see my article on the Virtual and VR systems, Deleuze, 1993:95). Perception is an aftereffect of affect. It “evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ” (95).
As I have begun to suggest above, affect also, for many thinkers, comes before, during and after, “cognition”, if indeed cognition is not just a special, misrecognised case of affect. Deleuze suggests, for example, that for Spinoza ‘The whole problem of reason…will be converted by Spinoza into a special case of the more general problem of affects’ (Daniel W. Smith, 2006, in Duffy:151). Although affect comes before bodies, constituting them perhaps in an ongoing manner, insofar as they are alive perhaps, it also inhabits them, if as a passage through them. As Eugene Thacker notes, ‘affect is a differential force accommodated by the mode of a body at a given moment – what a body is capable of. … the way that both feeling and self are constituted through and through by modes of individuation, or what Deleuze calls “nonsubjective affects”’ (Biomedia:186). Just as importantly, Thacker notes (188) that the more complex a body, the more we might say it is able to sustain the intensity of relational autonomies, the more complex the affects. Thacker also points to the kind of ethics involved—an ethics of good or bad forms of composition. And this might also be what a well-composed, and open concept is meant to assist.
With these definitions in mind, and taking our lead from Massumi, Thacker, Guattari and others, I can say this about affect. Although I obviously do think affect can be most usefully defined in a certain manner, I am more interested in considering the complex set of processes and events that all definitions attempt to address. This is, if you like, to emphasise the entire constellation of events that most theories of affect address, if with different emphases. It is then to ask how everyday life, and politics within everyday life, move through and are moved by this constellation. It asks what difference it makes to think in terms of this broad constellation, why it might be more useful ways to think in these terms than others. One can use this constellation as a way of expanding upon what Félix Guattari termed an “ethico-aesthetic” approach to everyday life. The ethico-aesthetic paradigm is useful because its precisely because it brings the aesthetic—affect—sensation into the question of practice and experience in everyday life. This in part involves what Guattari calls “sensory affects”—which accord with what he calls “simple refrains”. However, there is also something like a generalisation and overturning of the question of taste in the acceptance of the autonomy and infinite multiplicity of relations (registered in what Guattari calls “problematic affects”, which accord with “complex refrains”). This is also a matter of relational potentials (the virtual—cf Massumi). If ontologically we take the whole constellation as a kind of “worlding” that pre-exists and post-exists the more usually constrained versions of our ontologies and ethics, let alone our disciplines and methods, we need an ethico-aesthetic paradigm rather than a “systematic” scientist paradigm (for example, based on a cognitivist notion of dominant rational agents choosing what the world will be next, if in competition with others choosing—this is definitely Lone Bertelsen’s point!). Such paradigms can neither comprehend the constellations of affect, nor work with them except to bracket them out, or subordinate them to a scientistic, cognitivist or rationalist form of control (even occasionally within “affect studies”).
We end up living with these restrictive paradigms a lot, and that’s a pity. Yet perhaps all approaches to thinking more seriously about affect have the potential to free us up from such limited modes of living.
Aug 2nd, 2009
by ib.
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I wrote this for our first year course in media, and it’s also an outline of some of my basic thinking … as well as a lot of links
I’m giving a lecture to the good people in ARTS1091 this week on the media and Climate Change, so I’ve been a little more attentive than usual to how the issue is panning out in the media right here, right now. This is emerging as a research interest for me (habit, everyday life, media and Climate Change). Although it’s a research interest for just about everybody else and their dog at the moment.
It’s interesting and perhaps revealing to take a fairly random snap shot. So this is a kind of ‘Climate Change this week’ (with a bit of my collection of links concerning events so far). Focusing on my own reading about the issue via a range of media (from online newspapers to Twitter) I’ve found it interesting to realise how much “heat” Climate Change as an issue generates now in media terms—across all media.
There are links throughout, and also quite a long list of links at the bottom of the post.
Science and Media; Climate Change, Media Ecologies and Us
Now for some quick generalisations—all of which have many exceptions.
First , there is the fact that journalism is often not great when it comes to science, and science often has a fairly basic idea of how the media works.
Second, thinking about the media’s involvement in the complex and urgent issue of Climate Change is one of the most best ways to understand a heap of things about the media in general. I’ll be suggesting in the lecture that they have some basic things in common as well: we’re deeply immersed everyday in both the weather and media “ecologies”; we talk about them all the time; we like to predict what’s going to happen; but both are getting more complex and unpredictable by the day, with deep social and political implications. And this means we really understand neither very well. Nor do we quite know what to do about them. In combination they’re dynamite to established social and political worlds.
The result of all of this … e.g. for quite a while, I’ve seen and read a lot of scientists valiantly trying to put their case in scientifically precise but media-obscure (and sound-bite unfriendly) terms. The issues are of course complex, and communicating this complexity has its own value. It educates the media and “punters” (people like me) into science (a hidden benefit of Climate Change in general!). And there’s little doubt in my mind that the mainstream media, as much due to cut backs, with journalists and editors losing their jobs, as due to editorial policy or anything else, is currently weak when it comes to most scientific issues, at a time when one would like to see the opposite. I’m not saying there isn’t some good science journalism around—there’s heaps. Just that, often when it matters, there are a lot of misunderstandings across these two very different worlds. This is partly because what counts as a “fact”—to put it bluntly—is very different for a journalist or a scientist (or editor, or politician, or businessperson, or you or I). It’s obviously a question of different “interests”, in more or less an innocent sense (to begin with anyway).
In the middle of all this, complex points don’t always help a debate about the reality of Climate Change within the public sphere. We know this debate should be over by now, but it doesn’t quite seem to be. The sceptics arguments are like zombies that keep coming back. Here a ‘quirky’ (if not corporate funded think tank fed) sceptic, with a few pat answers in nice sound bites, and what is usually some very shonky “science” will often win hands down (in media terms). This is if they can get a “seat at the table” (the first aim of sceptics and organization promoting them—see SourceWatch, by the way, for an account of who is behind many of these organizations and individuals) and “create a bit of doubt” (the second aim—especially when most of us don’t want to change things too much in our everyday lives, and politicians will use any excuse, emotionally, not to have to face the political changes required), selling a few books in the meantime.
Other discussions that I’ve come across in the past week:
* The military thinking hard about climate change in terms of the challenges to security it provides, leading to a ‘new security paradigm‘ (the article is interesting on the way that the military can think very imaginatively about the long term). This article is on the interesting OpenDemocracy site.
* A bit more off beat but related to the above—’ten thinking traps exposed‘. It’s worth reading this, just to get thinking about the way in which media tend to reinforce common habits of thought, instead of working as critically as people sometimes claim. Of course, this is what is used by savvy persons wishing to muddy the possibility of action on issues such as Climate Change. Here’s a more specific article by George Lakoff on framing the Climate Change debate. More generally again, I think this is kind of interesting—‘why you’re stuck in a narrative’, about our need to turn everything into a story, and when this might be counter-productive. This seems very basic to media production, journalism and media engagements.
* Also off the beaten track perhaps, but I think relevant, is the question of affect and politics. I just found an excellent course online, with great links (this is not about climate change however—just generally about affect and politics .. but I digress).
Of course, the real problem everyone faces is how to reconcile all these complex issues and investments with the size and urgency of the problem (one that could easily be reaching a ‘tipping point’ of no return in which feedback amplifies the problem very quickly). The obvious issue is what to do—now—and how to do it (or for some, how to stop or delay something happening, if it damages their business interests, their jobs, or their political power). This is where things get really complicated, but very interesting. This is echoed in the media uses involved.
There are lots of groups, sites, collective, activists, concerned scientists, think tanks, industry lobbyists, individuals serious and wacky, institutes, research centres, political parties, local councils, etc etc … all trying to grapple with these problems. And all of these want access to the media. Some example of events/groups (some of the events here and soon):
* The United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change conference in December this year will bring all of these together. When I went to the front page just then I found a picture of the Australian Prime Minister, accompanied by a discussion of the importance of Australia’s commitment to action on climate change.
* 2 Degrees: Art, Activism and Climate Emergency—4.30-6pm, Wednesday 12 August, 2009 .. Gallery 4A, 181-187 Hay Street, Sydney (between Pitt and George Streets
* The exhibition Transclimatic about Climate Change and Design.
A more bizarre experience this week was the ultra-conservative LaRouche group campaigning at the front gate of UNSW, with placards reading “Carbon Trading Caps are Genocide”.(If you want to know what/who LaRouche is—and it’s a group that many people find worrying—check out Sourcewatch.org).
Thoughout all this it’s clear that the main questions are shifting towards what we can do, and this question in turn towards social organization (and new forms of this). Social media are proving to be particularly effective in this regard.
Industry, Democracy and Climate Change
There are of course problems when it comes to social change and Climate Change, as we all know but try to keep to the back of our thoughts.
I was reading Italian activist Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s book on Félix Guattari this week. Both Bifo and Guattari are/were long concerned with the environment. Bifo seems to capture both the history of our current dilemma and the complexity of the questions now involved when it comes to what we can do—with this, about the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992.
The alternative between returning to a livable dimension of the natural environment and maintaining the rhythm of development and consumption to which Western public opinion has become accustomed is a chokehold that the political class is absolutely unable to loosen. (Berardi, Franco Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography London:Palgrave, 2009:25)
That’s it in a nutshell. I was talking to a friend on Friday about this (they will have to remain nameless) but we were suggesting that, especially in the light of the “financial crisis”, there is now a reluctance to criticise social conditions/economics assumptions etc on the part of many (including many scientists), when it comes to Climate Change. We “must” have the Capitalism we’re used to, the lifestyle we’re used to, our old habits, and make major adjustments at the same time. There is of course much anger about this series of attachments on the part of many others (generally speaking, the younger the more so perhaps).
Even this quick snapshot, however, shows us that in the end everyone is going to have to change habits, question assumptions, etc: politicians, business people, scientists and media. And soon ..
.. and of course much of this in the end relates to issues of habit, of affect, of how we come to do what we do in everyday life, whether we are politicians or just living our suburban life.
Recently I was discussing, with colleagues, the sometimes vexed question of media literacies. In what sense should people be literate today—in what mode, or in what medium? Does literacy in one mode or medium mean you lose literacy in others. For example, do web literate “youth”—and “youth” is a term I don’t like at all because it implies a bunch of people who are all the same—lose their ability to read, or even worse, to concentrate. Is attention now a literacy? There are, today, a series of media panics about literacies, although this probably tells us more about the world at large than literacy per se.
We decided the central question concerning media literacies was variability, but what does this mean? For me, several things perhaps—
This does not mean fixed differences between established media, but ongoing variability in a very dynamic climate. The models that are a crucial part of literacy dynamics, and often the established businesses— newspapers, television channels, are all collapsing or changing dramatically. At the same time lots of new models, businesses, experience frameworks arise of course, although most of these are destined to fail (!). Everything is in constant variation. As Marx had it, famously, all that is solid melts into air: audiences, reception, production processes, narrative, software, business models, communications processes, advertising models etc. It’s very exciting but also pretty scary. All this this perhaps implies the need for a new “metaliteracy” - an ability to adapt. This is the single biggest thing to my mind. Our happier, more successful students have generally been those who’ve got this and gone with it.
This does not mean, however, that you don’t have to develop current literacies. Quite the opposite.
The first move here is acceptance (resistance is futile but surprisingly many students, not to mention staff, desperately resist many aspects of media literacies) and …
The second move is commitment to higher level literacy skills and knowledges over a range of areas. in short, the more you develop multiple literacies, the more you will be able to adapt as they change. It’s a bit like learning languages. One is work but we do it “naturally”. For those of us not growing up in bilingual homes, learning the second is hard work. However, once you’ve got two or three languages down, it’s much easier to adapt to more. Media literacies and knowledges are like that. You need to know how to make a competent video—in short, today you need visual literacy in production as well as in visual analysis—but you still need to know how to read and write text (and edit it, as well as publish in a range of forms!). You need to be able to put a good tweet together, but also be able to talk to a range of people face to face.
A problem: we think we get this. We are all these days used to “choice”—but this means, “if I don’t like doing this, I’ll just do that, etc”. Choice works in our favour—we get to choose. This is to some extent now changing.“Variability” will sometimes mean this, but it will just as often mean the opposite. That is, as above .. you will have to be good at more things that change, that are moving targets, that are demanding, and concerning which you have no choice. You must be more literate in more ways.
It’s about knowledge as well, across a range of areas.. You need to know about complex media set ups these days, but you also need to know about politics, climate change, urban conditions, social policy, the history of ideas, etc … all of these are also highly variable, subject to context. Most of the people (e.g. people like Jon Stewart) who do well these days are people who understand media variability and also, simply put, are broadly literate. They know lots of “stuff” (yes even non-media “stuff”). They can communicate, and work with this “stuff”, across a wide range of situations. So media literacies means more than knowing what the latest video is on YouTube (although this is definitely part of it). All forms of literacy—essay writing, reading, video production etc—are not just “outcomes” .. they need to be established (stage one) so that you get to the interesting stuff—knowing and working with content, real relationships, business, whatever (stage two).
Beyond this points are all the obvious. The media as we know it are changing very dramatically, as is the nature of media work. Perhaps a fair bit of the industry (to be fair, less often media workers, but more often the structures within which media work takes place) still has its head in the sand, or thinks it can self-spin or re-regulate its way out of the problems. Yet that still leaves those with their heads above the sand doing really interesting stuff.
Media Studies is currently caught betwixt and between all this.
Here are some places to go for weeks 8 and 9. Via these links, you can explore issues such as the future of journalism, new forms of media discussion and activism. There is also a small case study set of links concerning climate change.
Bold links are the most useful. Also, if you use Diigo or Delicious to tag sites you find, it’s useful if you also tag these sites as “mdcm3000″ and perhaps, for example, “digitaljournalism” or “climatechange”.
More specific links below, but, broadly speaking, it’s worth glancing through my links on these and related topics at:
This concerns more than journalism—in fact communications in general—but it’s relevant to journalism. Mark Pesce on new forms of power and communications (very succinct and powerful summary of the issues).
Here is an interesting example of where some more specialist magazines are going online—it also shows how there’s so much more to communication and “journalism” than “journalism”, and how some of the extended roles of newspapers are now dispersing throughout newer media.
It’s a video from a forthcoming series put online by the science magazine Seed, on contemporary design. Well known artist Natalie Jeremijenko (born Australia, now at Yale), talks about Environment Design. There are lots of other great videos on design there as well.
Great post by Mark Pesce which powerfully outlines the fundamental issues involving contemporary communications—as these challenge established forms of power and social conventions.
Mar 22nd, 2009
by ib.
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Here’s a practical and subtle example of crossed signals - between still photography and video. We sometimes tend to think of “trans” anything as a relation between two distant and well-defined entities. Yet all kinds of interesting complexities emerge, and lovely shifts occur, in work with closer, smaller and hazier relations - such as those between close cousins video and still photography.
Ages ago I wrote an article called “Auditland” which I never published. In it, I wondered a lot about the new micro-controls over education. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about these in relation to other aspects of education—the ease with which many of these controls are assumed as natural, the strangeness of the debates that surround education (for example, in which the Christian right in the US objects to cognitivist-based “mastery learning” because it doesn’t “break the will” of the child), but most of all I’ve been thinking about the relation between models, technics and what happens when these are brought into the mess of everyday experience.
So I’m interested in the power of models, their messy arrival in actual events, and in the power of education as a way that models come into the rest of society.
So this blog is about models of education for the most part, although I’ll also link up to interesting discussions and so on about other things to do with education.
The question I’m currently thinking about with regard to our media programs “network literacies project” (being convened by the amazing Mat Wall-Smith who is a great theorist as well as technician and educator), is again one of models. I can put this simply if I don’t have to answer the questions that arise. There are lots of models of education, but the most prominent since WW2 has undoubtedly been the “cognitivist” model. Human brains are like computers, with inputs, symbolic processing, and outputs, and human systems, such as education, should follow this. Thus the supposed need for everything to be defined in terms of learning outcomes, attributes etc. This seems to line everything up particular well when you bring education and technology together. However, what happens when you introduce feedback, when you can’t predict where the system will go? In short, how many of the standard models of education are thrown in the air, precisely by open access and new media interventions in the experience of learning? Michael Bauwens sums the event up well as “the maturation of network cultures as counter-institutions”.
I find this throwing in the air of the old models pretty exciting. It’s also something of relief. Here I will only quote a great book on Gregory Bateson by Noel Charlton:
He believes it possible that we can recover “the grace” of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on the planet. The route to this realization is iva personal engagement with the more-than-rational processes of the natural world and of human art. Poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, “the best of religion”, and “natural history” all offer to us the possibility of renewed access to the wisdom that we, as species, have gained during millions of years of evolution—now overlaid and rendered unavailable to us by our “self-conscious purposiveness” … he means that we have learned, through the centuries, to identiy single goals for our purposes. We have come to think of causality as a series of straight-line, “knock-on” effects that be managed by a single human “self”, in its own personal interests—without allowing for all the interpenetrating influences and effects flowing between each of us and the wider living world. (Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth, p1)
I’m not sure if I’m currently as optimistic as Charlton or Bateson, and I should quality the “spirituality” here as meaning something—in Bateson’s terms—to do with reconnecting to the world at large (Deleuze and Guattari said the problem is that we don’t believe in the world anymore). However, what excites about many aspects of education (and technology, networks, open access, new concepts, methods and models) is that there is so much movement towards inter-connection, relationality, complexity. It’s a great time to be involved in education.
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