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Lisa Gye, Media and Communications
Swinburne University of Technology
June 13, 1993 – Can you read that?
in St Kilda, a somewhat run-down, turn of the century beach suburb in Melbourne
– glorious architecture, too many cafes now that the intelligentsia have
rediscovered its charm – and my friend is in Northcote, across town, only about
15 kilometres away but worlds apart. Northcote is north of the city and while
it’s still considered to be inner-city by the real estate agents, it is only
just beginning its upward spiral towards gentrification. We’re playing a
networked game of Doom on our newly acquired 14400 modems and talking on
the telephone. “Yes, yes, I can see you”. We’re yet to discover the inbuilt
text function in the game that would allow us to dispense with the phones and
chat via the screens. I’m blown away, metaphorically. And then, literally, as
my friend seizes the opportunity to waste me.
As
we progressed to modem chats and MUDs, I became acutely aware of the ways in
which the concept of presence was reshaping my media world. No longer here or
there, we were now here and there simultaneously. Of course, synchronous
internet transactions did not constitute my first encounters with virtual
presence or telepresence. I’d watched live television; I’d spoken on the
telephone. This was something different.
As
my Northcote friend would later put it:
Apart from the dramatic reconfiguration
of spatio-temporal relations implicit in telepresence, the social and
metaphysical fallout of remote sensing is considerable. Discussion of what it
means to engage remotely with others constitutes a major focus of debate within
the thriving academic discourse of cyberculture. (Tofts, 1998: 16)
Obviously,
all media allow us to engage with others remotely. All media operate by virtue
of presence – bringing one interlocutor into contact with another or many other
interlocutors in a way that allows the participants to feel as though they are
sharing the same space or time or both. However, traditional mediums such as
radio, television and film, which at the time were the focus of most courses
devoted to media studies, had not been thought about in quite these terms
before. At the time of my initial immersion into the world of the virtual, I
was teaching radio production and criticism. It was my first academic
appointment. Most of my teaching took place in studios equipped with
reel-to-reel tape machines, mixing desks and microphones. My aims were pretty
much in line with most people teaching media production at the time – teach the
students the basics of recording, editing, writing and announcing. Introduce
them to the world of professional and community radio, place radio in some sort
of historical context. Inevitably, students would graduate to take their place
somewhere in ‘the media’. The emphasis on the media as something outside of our
selves was prevalent in media studies at the time. The media was something we
did things with – communicated an idea, told a story, exchanged information.
Rethinking radio as a medium of telepresence suddenly turned all of this on its
head because it shifted my focus away from ‘the media’ to the act of mediation
itself.
I
realize of course that I was only catching up to others who had already
understood that the boundaries between such things as the media and the audience,
writing and speech, inside and outside could not be sustained. Il n’y a pas
de hors-texte. In fact, as I was awakening to the importance of mediation,
others had already moved on. As individual mediums converged into the polysemic
digital space of the computer in the mid to late 1990’s, and as I put away my
cutting block and learned to adjust levels in Cool Edit, writers such as Tofts
were already pointing out that convergence was leading us towards a ‘dramatic
shift from mediation to immediation, from transitive exchange to intransitive
differal’ (Tofts, 1998: 116).
August 12, 1994 – Beyond the <centre> <center>
tag
Buoyed
by the thrill of updating my computer from 2MB to 4MB of RAM and encouraged by
the release of Netscape Navigator 1.0, I pestered our Information Resources
librarian to teach me the basics of hypertext markup language. Without the
advantage of WSIWYG software, my earliest forays into web publishing were made
possible by Windows Notepad, a sympathetic University webmaster and an earnest
enthusiasm for the transformative potentialities of the web.
Although
I was mildly enamored with surfing the web (and hey, it sure as hell beat
Gopher), all that waiting around for cheesy graphics to download was still less
fun than reading a book. What really attracted me to the medium were its
publishing possibilities. This interest was twofold. Firstly, I could
immediately see the potential for an online subject website that housed all of
the material that my radio production students might need to complete their
assignments. This has led to an ongoing interest in how we can use the web for
not only the delivery of course materials but as part of the very fabric of
pedagogy itself. [1]
Secondly,
the web seemed to me to be an extension of the ‘make your own media’ ethic that
had driven me into radio in the first place. Of all the mass media, radio is
undoubtedly one of the more accessible in terms of participation. Since the
1970’s in Australia, the community radio sector has
flourished, driven by a growing mistrust of the narrow focus and concentrated
ownership of the commercial media networks and a desire for a greater diversity
of voices on the airwaves. While pundits wax lyrical about “grassroots
journalism” and “participatory media” in relation to blogs and wikis, they seem
to forget the incredible contribution radio has made to this bottom up mode of
working. I’d always felt that radio provided students with an opportunity to be
able to become the media, rather than merely the consumers of media. The web in
its infancy seemed to me like a natural place to extend this ethic of making
rather than consuming.
My
early experiences of teaching hypertext markup language (html) to predominantly
Humanities students were exhilarating and exasperating. While many were excited
at the prospect of learning a set of technical skills that would help them to
participate in the emergent telematic noosphere, an equal number were
intimidated by the technology. [2] Apart from the obvious conceptual difficulties that html presents to novices,
Australian students had to also learn to spell like Americans (we spell center
as centre and color as colour, for example). These difficulties were further compounded
by the fact that, as a markup language, html required students to be thinking
explicitly about visual rhetoric in ways that they had not done before. What are
the semantics of colour or of font styles? What makes blinking text so annoying?
I
still teach code when I teach HTML. Students are required to mark up their first
html document ‘by hand’ using a simple text editor. This is only partly a kind
of nostalgia for the craft of media making. Learning to write code without the
aid of proprietary software releases students (albeit temporarily) from the
stranglehold that such software places on the process of creation. The old
resistances to mainstream media die hard. More importantly, from a pragmatic
perspective, knowing a little code can help them to get themselves out of the
tangle of autocode functions that seem to come bundled with programs like
Dreamweaver.
The
increasing emphasis on proprietary software in digital media studies is
creating a generation of students who work on the surface of technology without
understanding the processes behind that creation. It is not uncommon to hear
students talk about their proficiencies in Flash but not animation or Photoshop
but not image manipulation. Rather than seeing these programs as tools they are
seeing them as ends in themselves. Whack a filter on an image and whammo –
instant art! They even talk about wanting to learn ‘computer’. I usually point
out that this is akin to wanting to learn ‘pencil’.
It
is important to teach students that acquiring proficiencies is not an end in
itself. In any case, more and more students are arriving at university with
established digital media proficiencies and can probably teach their teachers
more things about Flash than they thought it was possible to know.[3] Finding a reason to use these technologies in interesting and creative ways
seems to be a far more urgent project.
April 1, 1995 – A Chance Meeting With a Lemur
In the same way that the practice of
reading privately and silently contributed to the formation of “self”, so too
will performing hyperrhetoric contribute to a new subjectivication in the
electronic apparatus (in which one will have to find a new term of
self-reference, neither “parrot” [to use Lacan’s example] as in the clan
identity of the oral apparatus nor “me” in the individualism of literacy.
(Ulmer, 1994: 38)
At
the point at which I began to question the value of teaching digital media for
its own sake, I came across the writings of Gregory Ulmer, Professor of English
at the University of Florida.
After reading Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994), I backtracked to Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (1989) and Applied
Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985)
and in doing so found an approach that positioned electronic culture within a
framework that made action possible. Ulmer’s applied approach to digital media
turned everything on its head. Rather than seeing digital media as something
that you could apply a theory to, Ulmer’s concept of electracy allowed me to
see that digital media could be used to invent new theories, new modes of
seeing and being in the world.
Digital
media is more than just a set of tools –it is part of an apparatus that refers
not only to the technologies of computing but also to the ideologies and
institutional practices assigned to or produced by those technologies. If the
print apparatus produces the currently dominant critical and interpretative
modes of inquiry in learning (critique and hermeneutics), then how might the
apparatus of electracy produce a logic of invention?
While
many of the hypertext theorists I had been reading at the time had been
prepared to argue that hypertext, as a technology of electronic writing, was by
its very nature revolutionary – embodying a poststructuralist view of language
– Ulmer was arguing that we need an electronic theoria.[4] That is, writing electonically does not automatically take us outside literate
practices or involve the development of new rhetorical strategies. Any cursory
glance at the metaphors used in computing – the desktop, folders and files,
webpages, and so on – signal the ways in which electronic writing is tied up with
the practices of print literacy. What was (and arguably still is) needed to
achieve the transition was the invention of new modes of writing specific to
the electronic environment itself, taking into account the full potential of
literacy as it converged with a new apparatus, and remembering that the
technology of electronic writing is only one aspect of the apparatus. This was
heady stuff!
I
continue to try and teach mystory as a new electronic genre in a subject that I
teach called ‘Electronic Writing’.[5]
Because it is not caught up in the hype of ‘new media’, it remains relevant.
The invention of a mode of discourse for the electronic apparatus is most
definitely a work in progress.
February 29, 2001 – Like Minds Think Alike
My
mother has recently acquired an email account. She insists on writing letters
to me that are in no way different from the ones she would have written by
hand. They’re long and full of family gossip and trivia. They’re also strangely
formal – she signs off “Yours sincerely”. She’s extremely intolerant of my
tardy and epigrammatic responses. Pointing out that I get about 100 emails a
day does nothing to assuage this intolerance.
The
acceleration in communications made possible by email in the past decade has
wrought significant changes in the ways in which all academics work. Aside from
the incessant chirping of “You’ve got mail” brought on by student requests for
assignment extensions and appointment requests, the ability to have regular and
ongoing contact with colleagues at a distance has transformed the way we undertake
both scholarship and pedagogy. Collaborations that were once drawn out and
difficult are now able to happen with ease. The evolution of email list culture
has reconfigured my approach to digital media studies considerably. I not only
teach students about lists in relation to questions of telepresence and
textuality but we now also actively use lists for the purposes of teaching.[6]
As
well as the direct impact list culture has had on the classroom, my engagement
with lists has brought me into contact with like minded colleagues from around
the world. The network of scholars engaged with digital media studies is not
vast. As a nascent area of study, we often find ourselves ghettoed off at more
mainstream academic events on the ‘tech’ panels. Academics studying digital
media come from a broad palette of more established disciplines – critical
theory, media studies, literary studies, art, political economy, information
technology, philosophy and so on. What binds us is our interest in the ways in
which digital media are reshaping our media landscape.
This
was the impetus in 2001 for the establishment of the Fibreculture discussion
list. Initially set up by Geert Lovink and David Teh, Fibreculture was
established to provide a forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and
arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context. In particular,
Fibreculture was and remains interested in the philosophy and politics of new
media arts, information and creative industries, national strategies for
innovation, research and development, education, and media and culture.
Fibreculture
now has over 1000 subscribers.[7] I have acted as a ‘facilitator’ for the list for the past four years. As well
as moderating list discussion, this has involved organizing face to face
events, publications and perhaps most successfully playing a role in the
establishment of the Fibreculture Journal. As a result of my involvement in
Fibreculture, I have developed a keener understanding of the role of networks
in a globalised, distributed environment. It also gives me a chance to practice
what I teach.
The
kind of engagement with networked digital technologies that Fibreculture
facilitates highlights the ways in which the object and subject of study in
digital media studies have increasingly merged. I use distributed networks to
talk and think about distributed networks in the same way that I now use wikis
and blogs in the classroom in order to engage the students in discussions of
wikis and blogs. This kind of self reflexivity is quite unique to digital media
studies. Students of literature, for example, were never expected to produce
canonical texts for future students of literature. Similarly, students studying
film criticism were not always expected to go on and make films. No doubt some
did but the object of study in most traditional academic contexts was neatly
severed from what was produced. These kinds of divisions are now not so neatly
contained. Critics of this kind of approach may want to accuse us of sticking
our heads up our own asses, to use a famous Australian expression. However, I’d
prefer to think of it as an engaged criticism that refuses to leave the outside
world out of the classroom.
September 4, 2004 – I Thought it Was a Phone
I’m
on a conference panel (predictably with the word ‘technology’ in its title) at
a youth media conference in Newcastle, regional Australia. Sharing the panel with me are two
young people from Manchester, England,
Fee Plumley and Ben Jones, collectively known as the Phone Book Ltd. The Phone Book Ltd, they tell me, is a
creative media agency and they have been exploring mobile phone content since
2000. In the lead up to the presentations, they offer to Bluetooth some content
to my phone to show me what they are going to talk about. I have to sheepishly
admit to not owning a mobile phone. They look aghast but given that I am at a youth media conference I’m becoming somewhat accustomed to this.
Fee
and Ben’s presentation has me transfixed. They talk about their projects;
phonebook, arttones.net and the-sketch-book.[8] I’m simultaneously alert to the creative possibilities of this new medium and to
my own nagging dislike of the mobile as the latest technology of privatization
and customization. My interest in the creative possibilities of this new medium
temporarily wins out.
In
particular I am drawn to thinking about how mobiles might escape from the
predominantly corporate matrix in which they appear to be embedded. And this
escape, in the ideal scenario, would be facilitated by users rather than
manufacturers. Innovation with new media very often only begins in earnest once
a new invention leaves the production line and falls into the hands of
consumers. History is littered with examples of users whose ingenuity has
reshaped technologies away from their intended purpose. The telephone was
originally conceived as means to disseminate culture to the masses and was
developed as a broadcast device, not as a communications device. In line with
inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s intentions, operatic concerts in Boston and Cambridge were transmitted over phone lines in
the late nineteenth century. Phonographs, on the other hand, were conceived as
a recording apparatus for dictation rather than as a mass distribution device
for music. According to Carolyn Marvin, the appearance of a new medium becomes
an occasion for a ‘drama’ played out between different groups and hierarchies
within a society as each attempts to assimilate the new media into their
existing rituals and habits (Marvin, 1988: 6). This then leads to
experimentation as users work through their particular visions and imaginaries
in regards to the new medium. Could the mobile be taking this well worn path?
I’m
yet to be convinced. Perhaps it’s a sign that my engagement with digital media
over the last decade has led me to develop a degree of cynicism towards the
hype that accompanies new technologies and their promises of a better world for
everyone. Perhaps it is also an increasing concern I share with others over the
turn that digital media seems to be taking away from the collaborative and the
networked towards an increasing emphasis on the personalized and the
individualized. Australian critic, Daniel Palmer, notes that mobiles are part
of a broader phenomenon that he calls ‘participatory media’. However, this is
not the participatory media of grassroots journalism and DIY media. It is
participatory ‘in the sense that its “modes of address” function to blur the
line between the production and consumption of imagery’ (Palmer, 2005: npn).
This produces ‘the key forms of mediated visualising practices that make up our
shared visual culture’ and that ‘all forms of media participation need to be
considered in relation to defining characteristics of contemporary capitalism –
namely its user-focused, customised and individuated orientation’ (Palmer,
2005: npn).
The
repercussions of an increasingly individuated, personalized and customized
media culture are profound not only in terms how we approach these developments
critically, as scholars and as practitioners but in terms of their effect on
the whole project of teaching digital media studies and teaching generally, for
that matter. The changes that are taking place in the mediasphere generally and
digital media in particular can be seen to be mirrored in the academy.
Increasingly, at least in Australia and as a direct result of fee for
service education models, students are able to pick and choose subjects on the
basis of what they are interested in rather than as a coherent program of
study. As Darren Tofts has noted:
There is an increasingly aggressive
attitude of individual discretion with which students will determine whether or
not it is worth coming to a particular tute or enrol in a particular subject on
the grounds that, in advance of any study, it is already irrelevant to their
particular needs. This attitude is commonly articulated in the perception that
learning is expendable and selective, a perception disclosed in the repertory
statement, “I couldn’t come to class last week. Did I miss anything
important?” (Tofts, 2004: npn)
The
key words here are of course “in advance of any study”. The presumption that
students are already in a position to make assessments about their education
without the benefit of being educated leads to the institution of a kind of
Academic Idol in universities. Courses that are relatively undemanding, fun and
focused on student interests are popular; courses that require a degree of hard
work and commitment are only chosen by those that don’t have better things to
do. Now I’m not saying that learning should not be student centered but
customizing your program of study so that you are never forced to confront
difficult questions, never challenged in your beliefs, as though you were
choosing a cable channel rather than a life path, is a little worrying. As
Tofts explains:
The emphasis on interactivity and user
choice in digital media (whether on or offline computer-based media, digital
television, mobile phone content) is a sign of what Richard Sennett has called
the “tyranny of intimacy”. Participation, once the province of community, of
social interaction, is the new currency of individual engagement with real time
media. (Tofts, 2004: npn)
Inevitably,
we will see greater personalization and greater customisation in our engagement
with media of all kinds as media converge into the digital. And as a natural
consequence of this we will be forced to attend to the social ills that result
from this further individualization of media culture. At the risk of sounding
hypocritical, I’m able ponder these concerns while accessing Gracenotes as I
upload my CD collection to my iPod or downloading a recipe on the networked
laptop in our kitchen. But that really is the point. Digital media are now so
embedded into the fabrics of our everyday lives it is getting harder and more
urgently necessary that we continue to reflect on how we are changing as a result
– as individuals, as cultures, as societies and as another species sharing the
planet.
I
am not sure how these forces will play themselves out into the future. I could
never have predicted, sitting in my room all those years ago watching my avatar
in DOOM bite the dust and be reborn again and again, that digital media may
have led me circuitously to where I am now – wherever that is. Perhaps as James
Joyce, himself a prescient theorist of new media, would have had it, we can
only watch the riverrun … ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ (Joyce,
1975: 628)
Author's Biography
Lisa Gye lectures in Media and Communications at Swinburne University and is interested in the ways in new media technologies impact on creative and academic modes of expression.
http://www.swinmc.net/lisa/contact.html
Notes
[1] I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere so I won’t
elaborate here. See, for example, Gye, L., 'Halflives, A Mystory: Writing
Hypertext to Learn', Fibreculture Journal, Issue 2, 2003 http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_gye.html [back]
[2] I remember one student who, upon seeing a mouse for the first
time, picked it up and pointed it at the screen like a remote control,
perplexed as to why nothing seemed to be happening [back]
[3] I remember my astonishment when my then 11 year old son showed me
an animation he had painstakingly created in Powerpoint. It hadn’t even
occurred to me that you could use that program for anything more interesting
than boring corporate presentations. [back]
[4] The earlier work on hypertext of scholars such as George Landow and Jay David
Bolter were good examples of the kind of euphoric optimism to which I'm
referring here. See, for example, Bolter, Jay David, 2001. Writing Space:
Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print Boston: Lawrence
Erlbaum, Assocs. Interestingly, both Bolter and Landow and many others like
them toned down their initial enthusiasm for the revolutionary powers of both
postructuralist theory and hypertext in their later writings on the subject. [back]
[5] According to Ulmer, “As a conceptual neologism,
"mystory" is the title for a collection or set of elements gathered
together temporarily in order to represent my comprehension of the scene of
academic discourse. It is an idea of sorts, if nothing like a platonic eidos,
whose name alludes to several constituent features (generated by the puncept of
"mystory")”. (Ulmer, 1989: 83) [back]
[6] My colleague Esther Milne, with whom I teach Issues in
Electronic Media, has written extensively about the relations between letter
writing, email discussion lists and SMS. Examples of her research can be read
in M/C Journal, “‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’ Texting in the Nineteenth
Century” http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0401/02-milne.php and Fibreculture
Journal “Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy,
Disembodiment” http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_milne.html. [back]
[7] More information about Fibreculture can be found at
http://www.fibreculture.org [back]
[8] For more information on the phonebook ltd projects, see http://www.the-phone-book.com [back]
References
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Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber,
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McLuhan, Marshall. & Fiore, Quintin. The
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____. ‘The Paradox of User Control’ in Digital Art and Culture Melbourne
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____.
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________.
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