Reading the Lankshear and Knobel book titled New Literacies, having heard it referenced all semester. I’m a little disappointed.
Basically, coming from a tradition of literacy training (which, as far as I’ve been able to get a bead on it, means “writing about reading and writing from a sociological and linguistic and sometimes cognitive perspective,” though it once meant simply “reading and writing in an educational setting”), they’re writing about memes, Adbusters, search engines, web design, and other subjects. These connections are obviously due if not overdue to come up, and they do a good job of explaining how a lot of computer instruction at schools doesn’t address these new literacies well. That’s good.
However, they’re frequently vague. Memes are dealt with in a pretty perfunctory, mostly definitional way (so far — I’m maybe 2/3 through — but the sketchy index implies they won’t be addressed again); they don’t really explore what an understanding of memes would do if it was brought into a classroom. The lack of concreteness is frustrating, although I suppose the book leaves such matters up to other scholars. (more for me, yay!)
Same with adbusting, if not more so — they don’t do a good job of explaining what it is and really don’t explain how it’s a literacy (perhaps leaving that up to your willingness to go read Kalle Lasn’s book and the Adbusters website). They don’t describe the reading of advertisements which adbusters do — taking information about corporate abuses from “alternative” texts (the Nation? Counterpunch? Indymedia? NGO stat sheets? Government data? What texts are adbusters reading, and are these available to teachers and students? Does that change how adbusting could be incorporated in schools?) to rewrite the superficial messages in advertisements, creating a new text in the hopes of causing others to reconsider power relationships.
Lankshear and Knobel don’t address the power dynamics inherent in adbusting. They don’t mention the fact that most people involved in Adbusters are at least college age if not older, and frequently have professional-grade graphic design (writing) skills which enable them to recreate existing ads down to the kerning. Adbusters are people with highly privileged skills. How would the practice of adbusting be different if brought into a low-income, rural high school classroom? An adult literacy classroom? Is there reason to bring adbusting into those classrooms at all, and what is it?
It could be said that afterschool and community media literacy programs in which students produce public service announcements or ad parodies are concrete examples. But part of the power of adbusting the way Adbusters does it is the producers’ abilities to make their parodies look professional, just like the real thing. The quality of media produced by youth media producers has different connotations. Kids know it; adults do too. How would lower-quality production value impact the kind of messages Adbusters attempts to convey? I’m bothered that I have yet to find an explanation by community/radical media organizations of how to re-frame the meanings that low-quality media production carries to keep people from dismissing it as unimportant, uninformed, or uncool. (“We’re working for a better world in which production value doesn’t matter” is a crappy explanation which makes the fundamental mistake of not addressing the existing knowledge and beliefs of those you’re trying to educate.)
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‘Kay. So that’s a beef. Other than that there’s much in the way of useful here. I intend to go read Lanham’s piece on structures of attention which they discuss at length.
I’d written something yesterday about a covert allusion in the book to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (from basic to elevated: food, shelter, security, love/affection/belongingness, esteem, self-actualization) in the context of a discussion of three founding thoughtlines of the idea of the “attention economy.” The implication of the attention economy is basically that in an “information society” (service-based postmodern economy, whatever you want to call it) scarcity is largely not material, but temporal and cognitive: all these highly educated people making up the society have only so much time and attention to pay to your advertisement, website, television show, video game, what have you.
A number of things had already caused me to consider the ways in which media thus compete with community, civic, and recreational activities. Advertisers, magazine editors, and television execs are positively frantic about the ways in which they feel they’re losing their market share of attention to youth soccer, family vacations, cel phone text messaging and the Internet, and talk about it a lot. Bowling Alone, of course, discusses how family, community, and civic participation initially lost their share of attention to TV (among other factors).
But this quote expands the competition for attention and situates it right in Maslow’s hierarchy:
“When our material desires are more or less satisfied, says Goldhaber [link mine]… such that we do not experience scarcity of material necessities like food and shelter, we are increasingly driven by ‘desires of a less strictly material kind’… [they go on to quote Goldhaber again] ‘Since all meaning is ultimately conferred by society, one must have the attention of others if there is to be any chance that one’s life is meaningful.'” (Lankshear and Knobel, p 118)
In an attention economy, these three authors are implying, the time we spend taking in media information competes not only with the group social activities we otherwise engage in, but also our development of individual relationships, of feelings of self-worth, and even of love. Attention is wrapped up in all three of those processes.
If you’re about to tell me “Oh, come on– I watch movies and television and read magazines and it’s not like it makes me some antisocial freak who never takes time to talk to his friends — hell, watching movies is what we DO together,” keep in mind that it’s not the movie that builds the relationship with someone else; it’s the conversation you have about it. It’s part of why going to the movies alone feels a little weird, right?
Considering only the way time gets allocated in the movie-and-discussion-with-your-friend event, the creators of the movie end up with more time to make meaning than you and your buddy do. (Lankshear and Knobel later bring up another model of attention economics which discusses the imbalance in celebrity-fan relationships — fans pay real attention, and a lot of it, feeling satisfied with their celebrity relationships even though celebrities only pay “illusory” attention — responding to questions on their websites, sending out mass-autographed photos, making eye contact with the camera or a concertgoer, etc.)
so — if the game board were to be reorganized, with media competing with love for attention, should we alter our strategies; how.
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Dammit, I didn’t want to get that far into that trope. It basically ends up as an argument that attention to Hollywood keeps us from loving our families and friends well, and most people are likely to regard that as so much crazytalk.
[preachy screed deleted]
Obviously I have a really hard time balancing critical consciousness (and depression) with a sense of humor, an ability to relax, and some ability to communicate with my non-ivory-tower neighbors, but it’s not like I think the latter three aren’t important. I’ve spent large chunks of the last five years living with this tenuous balance in a very central part of my life. As a result, I’m a little tetchy about any implication that I and other media literacy advocates are just trying to suck the fun out of everything. It’s a cheap argument; it only serves to corner me and make me even less fun to talk to, and I find it generally involves putting the other arguer in a position where they have no room to agree that the world is fucked up and the media do, in fact, have something to do with it.
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Oh yeah, and Jessamyn gets cited in the book by way of another citation in another book. Cool!
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James, I saw your ma on News Hour last night! Congratulations to her! That brings the number of people I know who have been quoted on public radio or TV over the past month to four (me, Jessamyn, Jessamyn’s landlady, James’s ma — did I miss anyone?) Journalistic objectivity, anyone? I’m seeing a preponderance of well-educated upper-middle-class white people getting quoted, here…
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