This was “invented” (I’m sure other people did something like it in the past, and I know lots do it now) at the Dancing the Virtual event in 2006.  We wanted to foster less hierarchical and distributed discussion.

How it works:

1. make sure people know if they are “movers” or “stayers”.
2. Stayers form a kind of rough circle of some kind (crucial here .. make sure that people have enough space to get close enough to talk .. eg someone behind a corner of two desks can be hard to hear)
3. Keep it to pairs .. people often want to just drift in, or form three, or move with their friends etc. All of these mean that the whole thing breaks down, and more than two means that at least one often ends up out of the discussion.
4. Tell everyone that when you say “freeze” or whatever, everyone has to stop talking immediately and freeze (like “chasings”).
5. Give simple instructions. People have to talk to each other—and they must talk about the concept (it could be a question etc). They can’t talk about what they were doing on the weekend, what star sign that are, etc etc. If you’re in a class or the like, and (some) people haven’t done the readings etc, they have to make it up, but they must talk about the concept.
6. Usually I go for around 3 minutes before moving people on. Better to stop each conversation at its peak (that is, interrupt it) than let it run too long. This maintains the energy of ongoing conversation.
7. When you begin, obviously announce that “The concept is ….” whatever you’ve chosen (or some people put together several concepts and get someone to draw the concept out of a hat, so to speak—this is the fancy version), and then “start!” (keep a sense of ritual about it). The concepts can be anything, but I usually of course try to make sure they are in the reading/relevant to the day etc. .. So people can look them up etc. And often we choose the less obvious (“minor”) concepts.
7. After 3 minutes say “freeze” (this will at least in part stop you going a little crazy trying to make people cease talking otherwise)
8. Get them to move around one to the next person.
9. Repeat
10. People should develop the concept during repetition, and often they might report on the previous conversation. If you go round and just listen in (and listen in, don’t join in as facilitator) … make sure they’re on topic. If not, gently remind them.
11. Often with undergraduates, I let a few repetitions occur, even one or two only, then I start developing strings of concepts through the process. So for example, a string of concepts from the one reading, or a string of related issues, maybe from example out to larger questions (or vice versa).
12. Finally (obviously) it is useful to get feedback in the larger class. I just ask what they talked about and space it out on the whiteboard. But here again I try to make them the centre of attention. There’s no doubt I make comments etc .. but I tend to write down all the things they say on the whiteboard. Where I intervene is in “diagramming” and sometimes developing what they’re saying … as in literally drawing arrows between related concepts/things they’ve been discussing etc, expanding this etc… it’s a kind of group mind I guess.

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.

Whitehead also preempts the very basis of both McLuhan’s thought–“the medium is the message.” He writes, “These extensive relations do not make determinate what is transmitted; but they do determine conditions to which all transmission must conform” (ibid.–see also Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, 52). In a similar but again perhaps more comprehensive manner than McLuhan, Whitehead further understands the “the human body” as a kind of signal transducer or modulator, “…as a complex ‘amplifier’–to use the language of the technology of electromagnetism” (119). Even more than this,  “the predominant basis of perception is perception of the various bodily organs, as passing on their experiences by channels of transmission and of enhancement” (119).

There is more to say on this on another occasion. Here I will just point once again to the undoing of the bifurcation of nature within Whitehead’s philosophy with regard to signal.

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! [New York: Atlas, 2010]

Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009]

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality [New York: The Free Press, 1978]

Some True Stories