During my final semester at Brandeis, I took an internship in which the goal was to form a solid foundation in classroom technopedagogy through work with 2 anthropology courses: 'Museums and Public Memory' and 'Visuality and Culture'. Both courses engaged with YouTube primarily (although M&PM also used twitter) in order to share information with both the class and the broader community. Further, I was given the opportunity to serve on the planning committee for an international conference entitlted Social Justice in the Age of YouTube and Vodaphone.

Along the way, I shared many thoughts with my advisor (Mark Auslander) on ways in which technology should be used in the classroom. (I've also been chatting with Fran Kick about integrating text messaging and twitter into his leadership seminars, who may wish to think about utilizing the twitter interface to facilitate his messages, and pollster to weigh responses ;). I even spoke at graduation on the importance of media in our social lives.

As part of the requirement for the internship, I was required to type a final 'report', which I've titled Technopedagogy at Brandeis University: Reflections in Media Engagement WITH the Classroom. Below, is that report.


Beginning in December, right after the end of the Fall semester, I embarked on a project that aimed to enrich participatory media literacy on the campus of Brandeis University, particularly focusing on YouTube's capability for social interaction among scholars, community members, and general bloggers. Because of the scope of the project, I, along with the help of numerous faculty members and Cultural Production M.A. students, attempted to create an atmosphere for which media could be engaged in critically.

Participatory Media Defined and Explored

Socialtext.net defines participatory media as any electronic media that expands the power of cultural production to include people whose presence is not directly present, and acquires the ability to create social, cultural, economic, and political changes in the ways in which people communicate. Although this paper focuses on YouTube and the Internet, participatory media is not limited to newer technologies, as a specific type of literacy is required for the efficient and successful use of newspapers, cellular phones, blogs, wikis, etc. This is not a new concept in our everyday existence. Instead, in this age of the Internet and World Wide Web, these technologies are blending together and becoming so multifaceted that they are becoming an integral factor in everyday social and commercial life.

Marshall McLuhan was very interested in the way in which the media is the message, particularly with the idea of the meta-media- the media that encompasses all genres of message. In early days, this was arguably the scroll, as every type of media was printed on a scroll. Today, scholars might argue that the Internet is a, and will become THE, meta-media. I would disagree, and say that the Internet is becoming the anti-media, as there is nothing internet-y about the Internet. To read the news on the Internet is to read the news. To watch TV on the Internet is to watch TV. In few cases does the Internet actually contribute to the message, instead, it acts as a conduit that controls the amount of media. As Dominic Boyer suggests in his reworking of McLuhan in the "Cyber-age", the Internet is merely a linguistic gloss that allows communication and knowledge to move forward despite gaps in our experiential knowledge of the forces at work in the world "out there". It would be, according to Boyer, impossible to define further the sense of immense social power and pressure of mass communication in any way, given the now infinite context in which media exists.

Thus, participatory media, especially in the age of the Internet, is not necessarily about using media or how much time we spend on it (which has increased dramatically in the last six years), rather being surrounded by the media. The ways in which media and Internet are used do not just affect those who use it, rather the social contexts in which the actors who use it act, and thus even people with insufficient access to the 'media' are affected by the message. Blogs, wikis, Facebook, Youtube, Ebay, books, newspapers, TV, dvd's, Hulu, and Myspace, not only change the way we "internet" (in a verb tense), but also change the ways in which we interact face to face, and all interact with that face to face communication. What is new about participatory media is that the media is no longer needed to be pervasive in everyday life. The semi porous membrane that separates audience and public has become more than semi porous. Thus, to engage critically in the use of participatory media is to engage critically in the ability to communicate in general, in the "real" social world, whatever that may be.

Museums and Public Memory & Visuality and Culture Courses
(See attached participatory media literacy syllabus)

In the academy there seems to exist a technophobia- one that feeds on the fear of professors that students will give in to the tantalizing taste of the Internet while they profess knowledge. I specifically think of a story from a professor where a student purchased a similar blouse to the one a lecturer was wearing, and then told the lecturer that she purchased it during her lecture. The interesting thing in this story, and the millions of other adages that mimic it, is that the blame is put on the Internet, not the teachers themselves.

While this seems to suggest that the lecture is boring, this is not at all the idea that I am expressing. What I truly want to get at is that professors, by eradicating the use of laptops, computers, and the Internet in their classroom, are merely fueling the fire of the distracting Internet. Professors should be, must be, on the front line, teaching students how to engage in the media. While many people remark that the liberal arts education is not about receiving ideas, but creating ideas, teaching participatory media in the classroom engages in how not to receive ALL ideas. That is, by teaching how to use media in the classroom, we can train students to block the cacophony of ideas to focus on one specifically, the message being physically created.
In the last semester, I have engaged with two anthropology classes to introduce participatory media into the classroom, both of which focus on the politics of representation. This, of course, has not gone without resistance. Faculty members outside of the two that I worked with have voiced fears and complaints of turning away from books, the "only firm ground in this technology-saturated, and obsessed, world." Simultaneously, and students have resisted too, although some not directly. The overall lesson that was learned is that students prefer NOT to use participatory technology in the classroom, as it tends to urge them to actually use the technology, as opposed to being used by it. Furthermore, it is resisted because the classroom becomes a fluvial entity that flows outside of the academic time regime and into spaces and times which it is thought not to belong.

In my interactions with the classes that specifically engaged in YouTube, watching videos and talking about their production, I found that YouTube has a firm grasp on using students, as opposed to being used by them. Many of their videos were boring, much like the way that most of them write, and although engaging with the content they were to talk about, seemed to alienate their personalities from the assignment. YouTube was merely a paper to be read on a screen. However, many of these students recognized what a good video blog was, and some (by the end) were able to create some content like this. Most, however, were left in the rut of just reading. As many students commented, YouTube was more exciting to them as a tool for consumption, as opposed to one for being able to create interactive intellectual experiences. They would rather watch the Numa Numa dance, as opposed to a video blogger discuss multiple consciousness, the politics of representation, or why a certain museum exhibit was inherently racist. Quite simply, they knew YouTube as a means for consumption, and had been disciplined by its layout to put primacy on consumption, as opposed to production.

Thus, we must use social media in the classroom, integrate it into the academy, and even use it to break down the walls of the ivory tower (as will be seen in the next section). To continue to ignore the role of social media in cultural and knowledge production is to reinforce the stereotype of the guarded ivory tower as out of sync with the real world, and will only serve to crank out complacent cogs in the machine of life, as opposed to critical, liberal democratic citizens. We must introduce social and participatory media into the classroom not because the world uses it, but because the world uses social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities it, and they as actors in it, might create.

Cultural Production Interdisciplinary Symposia

Should we not aim to break down the walls of the academy? To disturb the notion that those within hold some type of more valuable knowledge than those outside? And what about the walls of the individual academies, should we not also try to navigate those as well?

These were the questions that formed many of our goals in creating the Cultural Production YouTube channel (youtube.com/culturalproduction). Throughout the semester, we sought to post clips from the various lectures, discussions, and symposia that the Cultural Production program took part in with other departments and programs. Our primary goal was to engage with a community that was not directly (physically) accessible to us.

It was envisioned that we might use YouTube to create a social arena in which scholars and practitioners could create a social network where ideas could be explored via comments and video responses to posts by individuals and to various lectures. For the most part, however, our attempts failed to elicit viewings, let alone comments.

Our most successful content in terms of viewing was that which focused on controversial issues, distinctly the roundtable on memorializing Guantanamo and those from various events and discussions on the Rose Art Museum. One possible reason could be the timeliness of the events that the content was based on. In many cases, our discussions were around academic symposia that did not focus on timely content, rather on analysis of one theme. From surfing content on YouTube, I am led to believe that there is a time frame of relevancy, whereby the charisma of a video runs dry, and that time frame being based on the amount of people viewing the content. To be distinct, if a headline of the daily newspaper would be "MAN FIGHTS BEAR IN CENTRAL PARK", then we could assume, and should expect, that people would be going on to YouTube to see videos of it. Therefore, to become relevant to those outside of the academy, we should engage with their timeline of timely content. I would suspect that a cultural analysis of the Swine Flu might receive a large number of hits in this milieu.

Also, in regards to what successful academic content would be, it seems as if a talking head is not a model that yields success, nor is a read paper (as learned from the various classes). Instead, for academic content to truly be of interest to those who are not seeking that content specifically, it needs to feel organic in some sense. One example would be the round table discussion on what a Guantanamo memorial would even look like with Julian Bonder, Michael Ratner, and Mark Auslander. A similar example can be seen at the Piloctetes Center YouTube channel's various roundtable discussions. This content seems to flow and include a less pedantic tone than that of an academic paper being read aloud.

Conclusion

Through this internship, a particular emphasis has been put on content delivery, as opposed to content consumption. Indeed, a focus must also be put on personally regulating consumption if we are to create both critically engaged students and progressive pedagogy in the classroom. While I failed frequently in my internship to accomplish this goal, the objective can, and will, only be met by repeatedly failing and coming ahead with new ideas about technology and media in and around our teaching. What we must remember is that we are not competing against technology, rather the ideology that surrounds technology, and success occurs when students begin to question that ideology.

So, for those of you who don't know, I did work this semester with a fine group of students designing a multimedia installation at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, which is housed in a mill on (one of the supposed) waterfalls that started the industrial revolution.

The idea that I had from the start of the semester was that we would gather interviews, photos, poems, and artwork from the surrounding community to compile into a triptych video (using final cut) to go on display at the museum. As Elln Hagney, Mark Auslander, and I spoke more and more, we developed the idea of projecting it onto the waterfall itself, juxtaposing the creative economies that occupy Waltham now on top of the industrial economy that gave rise to the town. My conceptualization was of echos- the echos of time, the echos aura, the echos of people- projected onto the waterfall, which never echos but is always sounding anew (just like you can't step in the same river once, the waterfall is neither initial nor echo). There is, of course, a lot that I could say about this concept, but my intention is to focus on the exhibit.

As the weekend for the exhibit quickly approached, the students in Mark Auslander's Museums and Public Memory course gathered information and helped with creating the individual frames of the triptych in iMovie (the intent was to give students experience in utilizing FREE media software for making innovative exhibits), with myself compiling the final triptych in Final Cut with the keen eye of some students watching my every move, and a fellow grad student telling me why I couldn't get the audio working right. As we worked, we manipulated various scenes and their audio to create a flow between the collection of interviews, photos, art works, and poems that we recieved. As we were working, I added the sounds of a mill (with the approval and scrutiny of a great group of students) behind the audio so that the mill (representing old labor economy) and the art (representing present creative economies) were joined by the waterfall (neither past nor present). Brilliant you say, I agree.

Elln Hagney (the greatest museum worker that had ever lived, at least at the CRMII) had done a great amount of work setting up a festival to go around our exhibit. It included performance artists, a possible appearance of the Olde Time Bike club (whatever their name may be, I've forgotten), and other great events. We were completely set, but then...

You guessed it, rain. It loomed over our initial date AND our rain date. So, with much grumpy-ness, the class agreed that they would like to have a celebration inside of the museum.

At about 4am the morning of, I woke up realizing that the projection we had designed was for outside. No big deal, except for the brilliant metaphor that I had created about past, present, blah blah blah no longer worked. More bothering was that we had machine sounds in a place that had THE MACHINES, and no waterfall. That morning, I re-vamped the entire project (unbeknownst to the class).

I created a second version of the projection that was slightly higher def. so that it could be projected on the brick wall, and using a second projector, onto the floor. I then replaced the black background frame of the triptych with a waterfall. I had happily restored the metaphor (excitedly, because it takes a lot of thinking to come up with metaphors).

I then extracted the machine noise. Why, you ask? First, to make way for the waterfall sound. But, in essence, I had been reading a lot of Baudrillard (serving size: 80 pages a day (based on 200 page a day diet) and feared that the hyper-real (the machine noises) were trumping the atmosphere that the projection was being shown in. I was absolutely lucky. The installation of this media exhibit was actually able to pull in the museum (which for those of you who know me is an important aspect of my work). While the projection was running on a continuous loop, the machines could be running- it was amazing- providing the machine noise, acting as part of the installation. The students were stoked, and the work most certainly paid off (even though media work never seems like work for me).

The lesson I learned- sometimes, it pays to have rain days. While it may seem that you're pulling a contingency plan out of your arse, you'd be amazed by what your mind thinks without you thinking.

Longest title ever.

1) You read a lot. duh. I read a lot. 700+ pages a week first semester (yes, I was a geek and kept track). The thing that one needs to remember to do is write just as much or more. I think that I spent too much time reading, and not enough time writing.

My plan for the next quarter (since I'm no longer at a school with semesters) is to keep a journal of things I've learned. Each day, I'll try to sythesize everything I've learned that day into a cohesive essay. Of course this won't always work out, but it will be a quick step in retaining more information without having to really dig into the catacombs of my mind (which is quite scary sometimes).

I'm sure all of you would appreciate it if I kept it in a public blog (like this one). We'll see...

2) Life is short. Too much work, no fun= boring life. Again, simple, right? Wrong. What's wrong with no social life, isn't that what grad school is all about? WRONG again. The stuff that I remember the most, the information I best retained, came from shooting the breeze, BSing, or enjoying a relaxing adult beverage. So, no fun and boring living actually equals less information consumption.

So, how does one make time for it all? By cutting out the waste, trimming down the fat, and doing a little more work and a little less filler. In the first semester I had a set plan. I got to school at 8, messed around until 8:30, read until 11, and worked on homework until 12 if I had any. Then class for until 3, and then repeat until 7. I started to fall from this routine, and it seemed like more of the day was occupied by academic (ie reading) life. I waste a lot of time during the day. If you trim that down, you'd be amazed at how much you can get done.

3) The times I was most "on the ball" during class discussions is when I exercised my "Articles+1" rule. I would read the articles for class, and then find 1 extra that was in the topic but not assigned (usually through JSTOR or AnthroSource). You get a leg up and find new avenues to go. My other motto for the first semester, along with the +1 rule, was that if I finished all of the readings for all of my classes, I wasn't reading enough. Strange, right? No. Become a critical individual and an intellectual sponge. Some readings for some classes will suck, and you won't want to read them. Don't just not read them though, replace them with something else (doesn't have to be anything even related, just make sure you're absorbing something). This leads me to my next point.

4) Be wrong about things. Liberal Arts degrees are about critically thinking about how arrogant you are. I assume things in discussions all of the time. I'm wrong sometimes (don't make it all the time, or you look like an idiot). But, some of the most complex things I've learned have been because I thought I knew what I was talking about, but ended up having no clue. It sucks, and is an ego blow, but the amount of information that you absorb so that you don't look dumb another time is amazing (thanks to Brian Friedberg for being such an efficient BS detective.)

5) "Essential Knowledge" is not only kept in non-fiction, or theory, but it lives in fiction too. Fiction is an amazing portal between the world of reality and the world of social theory. Live it, love it. It gives you neat quotes, great references, and new views on social situations that you may have thought through at some point. Fact of the matter is, don't just read information, read stories. It'll also help your writing (note to self).

For the last week or so, I've been reading a lot of critical theory, especially the Frankfurt posse. So, I just wanted to share a passage with you from Neumann's Behemoth...

In a monopolistic system profits cannot be made and retained without
totalitarian political power, and that is the distinctive feature of National
Socialism. If totalitarian political power had not abolished freedom of
contract, the cartel system would have broken down. It the labour market were
not controlled by authoritarian means, the monopolistic system would be
endangered; if raw material supply, price control, and rationalization agencies,
if credit and exchange control offices were in the hands of forces hostile to
monopolies, the profit system would break down. The system has become so fully
monopolized that it must by nature be hypersensitive to cyclical changes, and
such disturbances must be avoided... In short, (real) democracy would endanger
the fully monopolized system. It is the essence of totalitarianism to stabilize
and fortify it.

Also, to add to the conversation, we can lok at Gurland's Technological Trends and Economic Structure and the discussion of post-wwI Germany's failure to sustain economic recovery...

The capitalist automatism [its automatic adjustment mechanisms, for example
the business cycle] no longer operated to overcome stagnation and unemployment.
Monopolistic price-pegging prevented the aggregate value of commodities from
being expressed in less money-units. Creation of additional buying capacity
(through investments, more employment, higher wages, and increasing productive
demand) encountered the resistance of 'vested interests' as expressed in
invested capital's claim to at least 'normal' return on capital outlay. Either
the investors' the creditors' or the commodity-owner's' claim for just return
was to be turned aside, or the crisis was to go on and on (and on and on and
on).

If we read Gurland and Neumann through Marx, we see that they agree that the accumulation process is inherently unstable and generates concentration and centralization, which eventually leads to stagnation. Also, in line with Marx's thinking (IMHO), we see that the increasing dependency of capitalistic enterprise on other enterprises and the interlocking of economic fortunes between industry creates a monopoly to be had not by commodity control and production, but rather a monopoly held by the capital government over the economic factors that control the monopolistic abilities (and the commodity) itself. Essentially, the "leaders" are caught up in the economic system which they should stand outside. Marx, I think, would suggest that the monopoly should be held by the proletariat, as opposed to the Bourgeois, whereas in our economy the government is part of the Bourgeois,  and seeks only to reproduce its own wealth. 

Perhaps power is the new commodity fetish. Power in that sexy Foucault-ian way, where it is defined as the ability to define your reality as THE reality. Reality as a commodity fetish... now that's a fun idea...