YouTube and Archives, Scarcity and Abudance

A room for viewing UCLA Film and Television Archive materials in the Powell Library.

I've been in Los Angeles since early August with Elana and our two children mixing business and pleasure. Some of the time we have been tourists, and some of the time we have been doing research at the UCLA Film & Television Archive while one kid goes to day camp (the eight year-old) and one is in the care of a babysitter (the two year-old). The initial motivation for the trip was (1) to get Elana time at the archive to watch old soaps for her book project on the history of daytime drama, and (2) to spend time in LA, a place we have both been eager to explore. Elana has been here a few times before doing research, but I had only visited on a family trip in 1985, when I was thirteen. Finding research for me to do here too was secondary (though it got me to apply for and receive a small-ish amount of travel funding -- and something productive to do for part of the three weeks we have been living in LA). As it turns out, there are materials in the Archive’s collection that I have been excited and grateful to access, that will be important for my work. I made some discoveries here too. 

The research I have been doing is for my book project on early video games. I have been watching television commercials for game systems and game titles from the 1970s and early 80s, news segments on video games from the early 80s from the News and Public Affairs (NAPA) collection, and an episode of the anthology drama Insight with a video games theme from 1983 (this was a discovery - I hadn't known about this series, and I watched several more episodes while here, all of which are fascinating in various ways and maybe material for a future blog post). 

As in a previous research trip, I have been wary of “wasting” my time here looking at things that are freely available online - i.e., on YouTube. Every time I checked Google to see if the commercial I was watching is on YouTube, I said a little atheist prayer that I would be unable to turn it up online. At the same time, I would be a bit relieved upon locating versions on YouTube: my note-taking at the archive would not be the only record I would keep of my viewing. Any time I did find the same item on YouTube, I downloaded the video (using the Chrome extension FastestTube) and saved it to my research files for later reference. My folder of commercials is now swelling with videos downloaded from YouTube, many more than I have watched in archives. But of course YouTube is an archive, and increasingly it is the archive. It's a dangerous fallacy to assume that everything is online now, but it's also important to recognize how much public value there is in easily accessible materials that have only existed for a short time. I find myself in tension between these two kinds of excitement: at finding so much on YouTube, but also at finding the really good stuff that is not on YouTube. 

You probably know why finding useful, important materials that are not on YouTube excites me. Perhaps most of all, it justifies my travel here, my time spent in the archive. It also gives me something to write about that others are unlikely to have discussed already, offering a claim on originality. It fits the romantic narrative of research as a quest for rare artefacts, for revealing clues along the way to solving the big mystery. It  lets me perform a certain kind of scholar identity - I’m no mere armchair theorist, I’m a historian in the archive seeking documentary evidence. If your work requires a trip from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, that must make it distinguished and significant. There's also some of that self-satisfied elitism that comes with scare knowledge - like the masculinist record collectors, cinephiles, sports fans, etc., one-upping each other with the rarity of their acquisitions and experiences.

But there is something a bit distasteful to me about the fetishizing of scarce archival artefacts in which I fully admit I participate. In a way I’m upholding a hierarchy of materials and practices, in which websurfing and watching YouTube videos is a kind of casual scholarship - if you can call it that - that practically anyone can do, while accessing the materials in the archive is more serious and productive. In the introduction to her book Welcome to the Dreamhouse, Lynn Spigel writes of a distinction between "high" historical research in government or university institutions, and "low" research undertaken in retail environment, shopping for memorabilia and pop culture ephemera. She indicates an intention to "scandalize these divisions." (13) I would like to propose a similar point, but substituting watching videos online for shopping. 

Watching videos online isn't the only way of accessing the moving image culture of the past, but we can do a lot with what we have available. Yes there are problems. There is the bias of the present to contend with - YouTube only has what people in the past seven years have deemed worth sharing. This bias applies to archives too, and YouTube is much more democratic, its "curators" and "archivists" representing much broader constituencies than those of institutions. There is often a question of provenance and completeness and identifying information. Sometimes we don't know what we're looking at on YouTube, and I never know if I can trust the YouTuber's facts - how do they know this was on TV in 1977? There is an ephemerality, too - things that were there once are gone, things that are there now might vanish tomorrow, and the copyright regimes of the future might end the freedom of access we now enjoy. 

What I was most excited to access here were commercials for video games that I have never seen before, and I wish I could post them to YouTube - or that the archive could. This would help it broaden a mission of access to match its efforts at preservation. Issues of rights stand in the way, and as the archivist here, Mark Quigley, explained to me, advertising is often harder to clear than other forms of media because of uncertainty over who actually holds rights to materials - clients or agencies. It might not be possible to get me rights to reproduce images from these tapes or disks for publication, which I might like to do (I will probably request that the archive seek permission from the rights holders, but I'm not that hopeful). 

Sometimes archival materials come with helpful identifying data. The spots I watched were often preserved and deposited on reels submitted for awards. I often saw commercials preceded by title cards identifying the agency and the date, and sometimes other creative personnel (e.g., if an ad was submitted for an award for photography, the DP might get a credit). I don't remember ever noticing a specific date and ad agency given in YouTube tags or descriptions. Some of the ads I watched here represent video games and other electronic toys as space-age computer technologies, or as "new wave" trends for hip young people. Some of them are different from other ads I have watched. 

However, despite knowing who made them and when, I have no way of knowing from the archive's catalog or from the materials themselves whether these ads ever aired on American television. All I know is what I have found out at the archive - the catalog info and the info on the tape or disc. One reel I watched was of Canadian commercials that aired in the early 80s, but I only recognized this because I grew up in Canada in the early 80s - not because of any effort to identify the materials by nation in the catalog. Another researcher might assume they were American ads. One benefit of YouTube videos is that we know they were aired, and recorded off air, and their descriptions and comments often add more context. It is only by having been broadcast in the first place that they have made their way to YouTube: someone recorded them with their VCR and saved the recording. In some ways this information is as valuable as the data available from an official institution.

YouTube videos can also be easier to study. One skill this trip has called upon is detailed transcription and description of speech and images. I am not ordinarily accustomed to this kind of detail-focused task. In most of my writing I have had video copies that I have personally owned of texts I am analyzing, and have often rewatched segments as necessary while writing about them. In writing about these archival videos I have only had one crack at the text, and I would pause and rewind frequently, eager to quote correctly and note details I might need to describe later on. I watched one episode of Nightline on video games from 1983 that I almost completely transcribed, only leaving out some short passages that didn't seem relevant enough to warrant the effort. I spent a whole morning just on about twenty minutes of video (when you subtract the commercials and the brief segment on a different topic). I wish that episode would be posted online. It would get a huge audience, I think, of retro gamers and more generally Gen X'ers nostalgic for the early 80s. A young Sherry Turkle appears talking about her book The Second Self -- about men in pinstripe suits replacing their lunch hour transcendental meditation with a midday session at the video arcade. A PTA official complains that kids are wasting their meal money and bus fare at the "video parlors," and that their time there isn't adequately supervised by adults. A junior high principal on Long Island calls video games "another nail in the coffin of our country." 

To wish that items like this were on YouTube is to desire to share and make accessible the media of the past. It seems wrong to feel good because this tape is only available to me as a researcher in an archive.

Most of all, what I want to point out here is that one archive is not better than another. Archives, public and online and institutional, are historically useful, depending on your interests. The scarcity of the institutional archive doesn't make it superior to the abundance of the public online archive, and vice versa. There is value in both scarcity and abundance. Historiographically, scarcity is more manageable. Abundance can be daunting and it makes our work more time and labor intensive. But it's also, obviously, such a blessing to media historiography. And while it's easy to access, the hard work is to make sense of it all.

Powell Library, home of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

My flickr photos tagged los angeles are mostly not of UCLA.

My tumblr fraktastic contains images relevant to this research project on video games; my tumblr giferrific is just GIFs.

Twitter @ Console-ing Passions 2010

As Amanda, Annie, and Melissa have blogged, there was a robust twitter "backchannel" at this year's CP conference on TV, feminism, etc., and this produced some beneficial and some not so beneficial effects. I composed most of these thoughts, some in my head and some on "paper," before reading their intelligent remarks, and those in their comments too. But I wanted to share this anyway because I do think some of my ideas are fresh even if others are a bit redundant with what's already being said. I feel strongly that twitter is adding greatly to academic discourse, and that this has been a pretty egalitarian phenomenon. I love it that I am getting to know more people this way than I did before, and that many of them are graduate students, some of whom I was pleased to meet for the first time this weekend. I don't want to come off sounding too cranky about it, but a few aspects of conference twittering in this day and age seem like they could use improvement, which is what you would expect from any emergent phenomenon. So in reference to Annie's post in particular, I would really hate if any of the criticism of twitter were to have the effect of scaring off anyone from participating.

Of approximately 130 conference participants, maybe around two dozen posted tweets during the proceedings in Eugene (others contributed from afar), and a smaller number produced large volumes of "live-tweeting," i.e., moment-by-moment reporting from the panels. I was especially impressed with the volume and quality of live-tweeting produced by @annehelen and @l_e_s, as well as @castabile, @princesscowboy and others. The benefits of this work are apparent to anyone who has trouble being in two places at once. You can hear about panel B which you skippd in favor of panel C, and can keep up witn the conference from afar if you can't make it in person. At first when my twitterfriends started doing this it looked liked way too much unwelcome information (If I wanted to know what was going on at NCA, I would have gone to NCA godammit!), but I have come to appreciate the value of having these real-time missives from the conference. Among other things, it establishes a community of interest that's more specific than the conference community, and that extends beyond the conference to others looking in from afar. And it preserves the conference, capturing the ephemeral live presentation and archiving it online. In this last sense, the backchannel functions to keep the minutes of the conference as it happens.

Much as I like it, however, and despite some attempts, I have not found that I care to do this kind of conference twittering myself. I don't like typing on a compact device like an iPod and don't like lugging a heavy MacBook around with me if it's not necessary. Worse for me and more important, I am a terrible multitasker. If I start crafting a tweet while a presentation is underway, I will have to tune out of some of the presentation to get my thoughts straight and make sure I have spelled and phrased things correctly. (To quote a tweet by @melodyisazombie, "what is the consensus on tweeting and still remaining an active listener? i cannot do both, personally.") I suppose I could become more casual about it, but this really isn't my nature. Someone said you can think of it like taking notes, but at least I make a distinction between taking notes for myself and taking notes in public. To do the latter, I have to turn on my internal censor, and it takes too much cognitive energy to keep him satisfied. (The same is true for me, by the way, while watching TV: I can't tweet while watching without stopping watching.)

Another reason I have avoided too much conference twittering is that I like the honest, raw immediacy of response in the instant, but many of the things I am thinking during a conference presentation are admittedly snarky or crabby, and I don't want to show this side of myself to the world. I still have the mind of a graduate seminar participant, eager to poke holes in every argument. But I don't think real-time, public hole-poking online is a good way to build scholarly community. I also fixate on presentation style, like when people read papers without looking up at the audience, or show slides in a room with bright lights that make them hard to see, or mispronounce words or over-rely on cliches. I certainly don't want to read tweets that pick on these things. And I also find myself given over to the occasional wild enthusiasm. I heard one paper at the conference I liked so much I wanted to tweet, This is the best paper at this conference! It probably wasn't that good.

I also have some questions about the ethics of this practice. The backchannel is conducting a fairly robust and critical discussion as the conference panel is unfolding. It concerns me that the people giving the papers might be unaware of this. They may be unaware that people are live-tweeting the conference at all. They are also likely unaware of what is being posted in real time, as it might come off as impolite to be sitting on a panel keeping tabs on the internet (maybe this etiquette will change?). I'm concerned about the practice of giving feedback to presenters who are unable to receive it, and are probably not aware of it being given. Moreover, a significant fraction of the people in the room might be unaware of this conversation going on, and it seems possibly a bit disrespectful to them to be engaging in questioning and commentary without their knowledge. Many of them, indeed, probably think it's a odd idea for people to be using twitter during the conference. Many non-users have somewhat hostile attitudes toward these new media platforms. I agree with Amanda's proposal that the existence of the backchannel be made more evident to all conference participants.

Another ethical issue that I see is the reliability of the the twitter format for summarizing conference papers. Many tweets are admirably accurate and pithy, briefly getting to the heart of the matter. But they can also be superficial or fragmentary. If you're not physically present and you get only the twitter version, you can easily form impressions that are different from the meanings intended by speakers. This happened to me a lot as a participant from afar during SCMS, when I would read the statements tweeted from the conference and wonder how, without the context of the full paper, I could really understand assertions that sometimes struck me as off or just incomplete. (I said as much in my comment to Jason's post on his SCMS presentation.) After the first two days of massive CP tweeting, I went back and combed through my paper to try to eliminate any phrase that I thought might make me look bad if decontextualized in a tweet. It's good if being tweeted makes us speak with greater clarity and persuasiveness. But mixed with a bit of disappointment that no one tweeted from our panel was a bit of relief.

Which brings me to another matter: those doing the twittering are the ones to determine which parts of the conference are covered by twitter. Some panels were attended by many of the twitterati. This gave the false impression, for instance, that the conference was dominated by discussions of Mad Men. At the same time, there were a number of panels that were covered little or not at all by the twitterati, thus giving no sense of their contents to the world outside the conference, and no archival presence online. My own panel was on Distinguishing Television, with Elana Levine, Phillip Sewell, and Caryn Murphy. I thought it went really well but as far as the backchannel is concerned it never happened. I noticed this especially at SCMS this year -- the TV and new media scholars seemed much more interested in conference twittering, and the majority of the conference, which is devoted to film studies, was largely unrepresented. If conferences are to be documented this way, it might make sense to organize the documentation to cover the whole of the proceedings. But conference twittering is not really organized, and this is part of what is exciting and fresh about it. I'm not sure institutionalizing conference twittering will preserve the things we like about it.

I see an easy solution to some of these problems, and it's not very novel. Make it a convention of conference presentations that all work is posted to the internet in full and made accessible to anyone simultaneous with the presentation. This way the live-tweeters will be relieved of the more secretarial dimension of their work, the better to engage on the level of questions and replies. And this way the partial understandings and misunderstandings can be minimized. This shifts the model of conferencing from presenting to presenting-plus-publishing, but it could serve to promote higher quality presentations (because they have to be in a publishable written form to be presented), or even better to limit the time spent reading papers and maximize the time spent engaging in scholarly exchange, and also to better archive the contents of a conference. Many scholars already publish conference papers on sites like Scribd and on blogs. But if conferences can centralize the publishing on their web spaces this makes things easier and more logical for many participants.

Conference tweeting might be most salutary and effective in revealing a need to make all of the knowledge produced at conferences available beyond the four walls of the presentation room. Here's hoping this happens soon and in a way that expands our open access to all scholarly work.

New Media Seminar, Fall 2010

In the fall 2010 semester I will be teaching a graduate seminar, and I wanted to use this space to share some of my thoughts and plans.

Some context: I get to teach graduate seminars only once every two years, which doesn't seem like all that often. I like the idea of matching the topic to my current research interests, which explains why I'm not going to repeat the seminar I taught last time on indie culture (which I thought went pretty well). I'm still interested in indie culture, but I have been looking at new areas of study. I see the opportunity to teach graduate students as an occasion to read work that I want to know better. Some of it might be material I have read before but not studied carefully, and some of it will be new to me as it will be to everyone else in the seminar.

Elana and I have been working on a project on convergence-era television and cultural status, and this research has piqued an interest in the history of media technologies. So much of what is interesting about TV in recent decades is a product, in part, of the integration of digital TV technologies. Thinking about the intersection of television's contemporary social and technological identities has made me want to know more about the history of communication technologies, and to think about new media (in the current sense of digital media) in light of this history.

I am posting this here for a few reasons. Most importantly I want prospective seminar participants to have a sense of what they are signing up for. This will be a reading-intensive course with a fair bit of time spent on the past rather than the present of new media. I also wanted to pull the curtain back a bit to reveal the process of developing a course. When I was a student I would have been happy to learn more about instructors' thinking behind teaching certain topics and shaping a syllabus. And I am also eager to invite your feedback, whether in the comments or elsewhere, to help me find the right shape for a course on a topic, New Media, that always threatens to get out of hand. I'm happy to hear from students past and future, as well as others who have taught or studied these topics. Feel free to suggest more readings, to let me know about your experiences teaching this material, or to warn me off of spending a week on Marshall McLuhan.

Some of the work I have in mind to consider in this course will fit into the typical conception of new media studies. Benkler and Lessig are clear instances of scholars engaged with questions about changes brought on by digital communications. But some of the work I want to look at is much older, and considers media which are no longer new in terms of what changes they wrought on society and culture. I'm not sure how much of the material that interests me will fit into the course. I don't know if work on oral vs written cultures will make the cut and I don't know if spending too much time on telegraphy and telephony will unduly tax the patience of media studies MA candidates who are probably more interested in today's internet than the Victorian internet. But these are all topics I want to know more about.

Below are some likely and possible readings. The ones I'm especially eager to include in the course are marked with a *. In the past one assignment I have given in a course like this is a book review, where students in groups of between three and five all read the same book. We then have one seminar meeting that's a kind of book club, where we have panel discussions of each book. The items I'm considering for this assignment are marked with a #. Of course there is much more here than one can teach in a single semester, so much of the work below won't make the cut. And because I'm interested in TV first of all, that is the medium that will likely get the most time during the semester.

Charles Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minnesota, 2007).

*Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale, 2007) / Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2009).

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

*William Boddy, New Media and the Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford, 2004).

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 2000).

#Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity, 2009).

James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), or possibly just Chapter 8, "Technology as Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph."

Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1989).

Claude Fischer, America Calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940 (California, 1994).

Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (MIT, 2007).

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media 1740-1915 (MIT, 2003).

Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2008).

Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, eds., Rethinking Media Change (MIT, 2004).

#Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (California, 2004).

*Derek Kompare, "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television," Television & New Media 7.4 (2006), 335-360.

Lawrence Lessig, Remix Culture: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008) / Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin, 2005).

#Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU, 2007).

*The Essential McLuhan (Basic, 1996).

*Michèle Martin, "The Culture of the Telephone," in Patrick D. Hopkins (ed.), Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 50-74.

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990).

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009).

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002).

*Benjamin Peters, "And lead us not into thinking the new is new: a bibliographic case for new media history" New Media & Society 11 (2009), 13-30.

#Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown, 2009).

*Lynn Spigel, Make Way for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, 1992).

Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds.,Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke, 2005).

Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New York: Berkeley, 1998).

Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003).

#Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers, 2009).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The New Media Reader (MIT, 2004).

*Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 2003).

Fall 08

Long time no blog!

A semester has begun. Today was cool and rainy in Milwaukee, summer no more. I am teaching two courses:

Intro to Mass Media, our 101 course with hundreds of students (previously).

And Indie Culture, a graduate seminar.

I like reading a syllabus. Every time a Republican compares Sarah Palin's experience to Obama's, my first thought is, well she's never written a syllabus.

One more thing: via my delicious network, "Is Wikipedia Becoming a Respectable Academic Source?"

Intro

Beginning this Spring semester I am taking on my department's 101 course, "Introduction to Mass Media," with 324 students and six TA's. (Yes, the course should be renamed to reflect the fact that we don't think of the media as "mass" like we used to.) Although I was trained as a film scholar, I teach in a journalism and mass comm department (there's that "mass" again) where I consider myself a scholar of media, and in particular American entertainment media. (My scholarly interests are fairly well reflected in the topics I have covered in this blog.) Most of the department's majors specialize in journalism or advertising and PR, though some choose to focus on media studies. But because this is the intro course, it attracts lots of 1st and 2nd year students from across the university looking to fulfill a general education requirement. My approach to teaching 101 is to expect that no one knows anything. (Of course this isn't true; some students will know lots, and everyone has their life-long experience of media. But I never expect anyone to know anything in particular.)

I decided several months ago to teach 101 without a standard textbook and instead to assign readings (and viewings and listenings) on electronic reserve and the interwebs. The book previously used in my department and many others, Media and Culture, by Campbell et al., is one I don't care to read myself from start to finish, so I can't justify making hundreds of strangers do so.* When I was an undergrad I would choose courses so as to avoid having to read textbooks (and take multiple choice exams, which I also still dislike, though I will use them to save my TAs' labor). This is one big reason why I majored in English lit as an undergrad, which offered courses where the only readings would be novels, poems, stories, and plays. Getting a B.A. in exchange for reading this pleasurable stuff seemed like a much better bargain than having to deal with textbooks, which often seem to have been written not for actual readers, people who care for language and ideas and stories and who often prefer reading to many other activities, but for the author's notion of what an undergraduate student is like. I know there is probably no better way of introducing undergrads to many topics and fields than assigning textbooks, but it usually pains me to read them, to encounter their didactic tone, their politically correct smattering of special topics in colorful boxes, their elevation of information over understanding and argument. (Yes, there are many good textbooks and this is a very broad negative generalization. Indeed, here are some I like.)

Like many academic texts, Campbell has a breathtaking retail price: about $90. Textbooks have been getting much more expensive, doubling the rate of inflation. That $90 price tag doesn't make textbook prose any better; it goes toward magazine-style color layout, supplementary materials like powerpoint shows and test banks and online video clips and quizzes (protected as a walled garden, of course), and the salaries of the cheerful reps who drop by professors' offices to persuade them to assign their employer's product. I hate conservative nostalgia, but I find it hard to believe that in shifting from college textbooks that were basically just words on a page to textbooks that are multimedia extravaganzas we have improved our education of undergraduates.

Alternatives that I considered didn't seem all that different from Campbell in price or quality, to the extent that I could judge without actually reading them, which I don't care to do. Textbook publishing is not unlike big pharma in marketing products not to consumers but to professionals responsible for prescribing or assigning them to consumers who lack the agency to make their own choices. The doctor/professor doesn't need to care too much about the product's price or weigh this as a factor in comparing the product to competitors. Thus the "enhancements" the publishers offer, the online content and the PP slides, are things that make the prof's life easier (and maybe help teach better) and that make the text seem appealing to him or her. Who knows if the students want or need these things. And anyway, maybe it's the prof's job to create slides and online content. I'm not sure, I just don't think the students should be paying extra, and I suspect that the publishing house's profits are more important in making the decisions that create these enhancements than their commitment to higher education. I'm no economist, but it seems likely that if the consumer were more empowered in this scenario, the prices would be more reasonable. My decision not to use a textbook was in part a product of my hostility toward academic textbook publishing as a business, as was my decision to write about it here. (Some universities have started textbook rental programs to lessen the burden on students, but this may not be a practical option for many campuses--search "textbook rental" and you'll see what I mean.)

Just as significant as these issues in my case, though, the intro to mass media books don't approach their topic in a way I would want them to. Campbell and others organize their material by medium and format. There are chapters on film, television, the internet, newspapers, magazines, advertising, etc. I don't think the contemporary media should be taught as discrete topics in this way and would prefer not to have one week on cinema, one on television, etc. Media are converging in so many ways and this organization scheme doesn't reflect this reality

I've been collecting readings suitable for this kind of course and it's been a bit of a challenge. I prefer to assign readings I myself would like to read, but of course they also need to be appropriate for beginning undergrads at UW-Milwaukee. I wanted readings that would be accessible to readers with no background knowledge yet serious and rigorous enough to introduce ideas worth teaching. I have found a mix of scholarly and popular writings that I think do this pretty well. Some are challenging, and to really get them the students will need to read slowly, carefully, and more than once. But many are what I would consider easy, which I think is a good thing. I don't know if reading articles from Time and The New Yorker and New York Times will seem easy to the students; probably very few of them read these publications. My biggest challenge in teaching is to imagine myself in the role of the student, to understand what they understand and don't understand, and how understanding varies among them.

My new semester doesn't begin for three weeks, so I am pasting my syllabus-in-progress below. You will see if you keep reading that I have organized the course into five units corresponding to five affordances of media: to sell, to entertain, to document reality, to be civic culture, and to be art. I came up with these on my own; I'm sure others would come up with more or fewer or different ones. I am aware that these are in some ways redundant and overlapping, that many examples of media are artistic, commercial entertainments that document reality and promote civic culture. (I have been watching The Wire beginning with Season 1 in the past few weeks and I think it does all of these things pretty well, though I might add a sixth especially for it: to confuse. I'm collecting links about the show in my del.icio.us.) Ordering the course this way will allow us to revisit certain kinds of media from different perspectives. It will also allow me to spend more time on areas I know well and have an interest in (movies, TV, the internet, music) than I would be able to do if I were teaching from a standard textbook.

But teaching this way, compared with teaching from a textbook like Media and Culture, probably means that the students will encounter less information. Many of the readings will be more specifically about a single topic like The Walt Disney Company or 19th century American newspapers than the chapters in an intro textbook. The typical intro textbook has no shortage of facts and details. I hope that I will be able to impart greater understanding and knowledge, however, than I would using a textbook.

Any suggestions are welcome in the comments. In particular, I am still looking for readings that will introduce students to Hollywood as an institution and to movies as an art form (I left my own area of greatest expertise for last as I have been working on the syllabus), and readings that consider reality TV as something other than just trash.

Intro to Mass Media

Day 1: Course Introduction (W 1/23)

unit i: media to sell

Day 2: Today's Media Companies and their Strategies (M 1/28) Read David Croteau & William Hoynes, "Introduction" and "Chapter 4: Strategies of the New Media Giants"

Day 3: Media Company: Disney (W 1/30) Read Janet Wasko, "The Disney Empire"

Day 4: Media Franchise: Batman (M 2/4) Read Eileen Meehan, "'Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!': The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext"

Day 5: Advertising (W 2/6) Read Inger L. Stole, "Advertising"

Day 6: MTV (M 2/11) View "MTV 1983 (Part 1 of 2)" (85 min.) and please don't ignore the commercials, promos, and VJs; Read Ed Levine, "TV Rocks With Music" and Janet Maslin, "TV View; A Song is No Longer Strictly a Song, Now It's a 'Video'"

unit ii: media to entertain

Day 7: Entertainment (W 2/13) Read Neal Gabler, "The Republic of Entertainment"

Day 8: Hollywood I (M 2/18) View Singin' in the Rain; Read Douglas Gomery, "The Triumph of Hollywood"

Day 9: Hollywood II (W 2/20)

Day 10: Television Drama (M 2/25) View TBA (a 1-hr television show); Read Michael Z. Newman, "From Beats to Arcs"

Day 11: Videogames (W 2/27) Read Steven R. Poole, "The Origin of Species" and "The Player of Games"

unit iii: media to document reality

Day 13: Representing Experience (M 3/10) Read Anthony Lane, "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica"

Day 14: Photography (W 3/12) Read John Szarkowski, "The Photographer's Eye"; Mia Fineman, "Say Cheese!: A History of the American Snapshot"; Alex Williams, "Here I Am Taking My Own Picture"

Day 15: Sound Recording and Music (M 3/24) Read Michael Chanan, "Record Culture"

Day 16: The Moving Image (W 3/26) View Early Lumière Films; Early Edison Films; The Black Imp; The Gay Shoe Clerk; The Great Train Robbery; Read Eric Barnouw, Documentary, pp. 1-51

Day 17: Reality TV (M 3/31) View TBA (a 1-hr television show)

unit iv: media as civic culture

Day 18: Media for Citizens (W 4/2) Read Peter Dahlgren, "Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture"

Day 19: Newspapers and their Public (M 4/7) Read Michael Schudson, "The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press"

Day 20: News Culture and New Technologies (W 4/9) Read Michael Schudson, "National News Culture and the Informational Citizen"

Day 21: Digital Publics (M 4/14) Read Howard Rheingold, "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community"

Day 22: Media by Citizens (W 4/16) Read Wikipedia, "Citizen Journalism"; Steve Outing, "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism"; Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" and "Citizen Journalism Wants You!"; Jeff Jarvis, "Networked Journalism"

unit v: media as art

Day 23: Art and New Technologies (M 4/21) Read Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Day 24: Movies as the "Seventh Art" (M 4/28) Read Hugo Münsterberg, "The Function of the Photoplay"; maybe view Chaplin clips online and Léger & Murphy's Ballet mecanique?

Day 25: Advertising and Pop Art (W 4/30) Read Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media"; Time, "Pop Art - Cult of the Commonplace"

Day 26: Music Sampling (W 4/23) Read Mark Katz, "Music in 1s and 0s"; Listen to Paul Lansky, "notjustmoreidlechatter"; Camille Yarbrough, "Take Yo' Praise"; Fatboy Slim, "Praise You"; Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (for some of these to play in their entirety, you need to sign up for an account at imeem, which is easy and fast)

Day 27: Remix Culture (M 5/5) Read articles from Wired 13.07 in the section "remix planet" (yeah, all of them--they're short!)

Day 28: Course Summary (W 5/7)

full citations

Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction (February 1958).

Erik Barnow, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1974).

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (trans. Hannah Arendt)

Michael Chanan, "Record Culture," Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995).

"Citizen Journalism," Wikipedia.

David Croteau and William Hoynes, The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest (Pine Forge, 2005).

Peter Dahlgren, "Media, Citizenship, and Civic Culture," in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds., Mass Media and Society 3rd ed. (London: Arnold, 2000), 310-328.

Mia Fineman, "Say Cheese!: A History of the American Snapshot," Slate (17 October 2007).

Neal Gabler, "The Republic of Entertainment," Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage, 2000).

Douglas Gomery, "The Triumph of Hollywood," Movie History: A Survey (Wadsworth, 1991).

Jeff Jarvis, "Networked Journalism," BuzzMachine (5 July 2006).

Mark Katz, "Music in 1s and 0s," Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004).

Anthony Lane, "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica," The New Yorker (24 September 2007).

Ed Levine, "TV Rocks With Music," New York Times (8 May 1983).

Janet Maslin, "TV View; A Song is No Longer Strictly a Song, Now It's a 'Video,'" New York Times (23 January 1983).

Eileen Meehan, "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" in Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Hugo Münsterberg, "The Function of the Photoplay," in Philip Lopate, ed., American Movie Critics (New York: Library of America, 2006), 10-17.

Michael Z. Newman, "From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative," The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006), 16-28.

Steve Outing, "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism," Poynter Online (15 June 2005).

Stephen R. Poole, Trigger Happy (Fourth Estate, 2001).

"Pop Art - Cult of the Commonplace," Time (3 May 1963).

Howard Rheingold, "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community," The Virtual Community: Homesteading On The Electronic Fronier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993).

Jay Rosen, "Citizen Journalism Wants You," Wired online (14 March 2007).

Jay Rosen, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience," PressThink (27 June 2006).

Michael Schudson, "The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press," Discovering The News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1980).

Michael Schudson, "National News Culture and the Informational Citizen," The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996).

Inger L. Stole, "Advertising," in Richard Maxwell, Ed., Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001).

John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966/2007).

Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Polity, 2001).

Alex Williams, "Here I Am Taking My Own Picture," New York Times (19 February 2006).

Wired 13.07 (July 2005), "Remix Planet" section.

*Every time I open Media and Culture to a random page, something irks me. For instance, the first thing that caught my notice the first time I flipped through was the skyscraper of culture on p. 16 (the Chrysler building of culture, to be precise) describing which cultural texts are high (Hamlet, Aïda), which are middle (Harry Potter, John Coltrane), and which are low (Rolling Stones, Gawker.com). The accompanying text reads, "Throughout the twentieth century we tended to think of culture not as a social process but as a set of products sorted into high, low, or middle positions on a cultural skyscraper." [Really? Who is "we"? Who is it that "thinks of culture" at all? And who would think of it as a skyscraper?] "Look at this highly arbitrary arrangement and see if you agree or disagree. Write in some of your own examples. Why do people view culture this way? Who controls this process? Is control of making cultural categories important--why or why not?"

Why would I want to reinforce this idea, even if only to criticize it? Many students find it hard to grasp the attribution of an idea to others which you will question, so whatever you say gets copied down like it's what you want them to know. I don't avoid attributing ideas, but I'm careful about when I do so and choose important ideas that I really want them to consider. Here they are being asked not just to consider a perhaps unfamiliar idea, but to revise the authors' highly arbitrary attempt to illustrate it. For real. I find this whole idea shallow and reductionist; I hardly dismiss the notions of cultural hierarchy and distinction, but why would you want to represent it as such an orderly and straightforward array of items? And this particular hierarchy is so problematic, given that Hamlet and Aïda are not so simply high, that Coltrane and Harry Potter are such bad examples of middle, that the Stones are as good as it gets to many people who think of themselves having good taste, that the typical reader of this book will never have heard of Gawker and that it's a bad example of a "low" blog anyway (here are some alternatives: Drunken Stepfather, Perez, Double Viking). This list seems to have been written by someone who doesn't really know and care about literature, drama, jazz, rock, and blogs. (The authors call their hierarchy "highly arbitrary" but it's clearly not really all that arbitrary except to the extent that any such thing is arbitrary, and they must have chosen these particular items in this particular order for a reason.)

Most important: sociologists and culture critics have been saying for years that such hierarchies are collapsing toward a "nobrow" culture, and that elites are now much more likely to be culturally omnivorous than they were in the old days. On this point, see James B. Twitchell's chapter "Adcult and the Collapse of Cultural Hierarchy" in Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture; John Seabrook's book Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture; and Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore" American Sociological Review 61.5 (Oct., 1996), 900-907.

(This entry was edited on 1/10 to clarify that my hostility is toward academic textbook publishing as a business rather than academic publishing in general.)

Giving it Away

The WGA strike at Century City, Los Angeles, 11/9/07
(Photo by Charles Kang, used with permission)

The real purpose of this post is to say that the posting here will be light at best for the next few months, for the usual reasons. I'm not on strike, obviously. I'm focusing my writing on the thing that will bring me the rewards for which I am most eager. That is writing for publication in what the journos have taken to calling dead trees media. Blog writing for me is like webisode writing for the WGA strikers. It's not a matter of getting paid, since academics are rarely paid very much for any of their writing. It's a matter of reward. The rewards of blogging are not so great, and they are as much personal as professional. This isn't meant to diminish them. But writing this blog is basically work I do for free because I like it. I don't expect this blog to help my tenure case and I'm not sure it should. It might help my academic reputation in certain circles, but this depends on who reads it and what they think of blogs and of this blog in particular. I blog (happily) at the risk that it will damage my academic reputation. I doubt that film and television scholars will take to citing blogs as authoritative anytime soon in large numbers (citing them as evidence of what people were saying at a particular time is another matter). Maybe some day an academic blog will not be the thing you set aside when you're absorbed in your real work. But that day still isn't here, unfortunately. CU L8R.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers. I'm terrible at these things but they're lotsa fun. I love when Clint Eastwood says, "blow your head clean off." That's #44 if you feel like ffwding.

Flickrvision is awesome.

Wikipedia: Films Considered the Worst Ever. Like much of Wikipedia, this entry has a strong bias toward the recent and the present, but this is still fun to look over.

Piz, a fictional character on Veronica Mars, is now a music critic for Pitchfork, as fluxblog points out. This has something to do with Piz's offer of an internship at p4rk in this week's ep and the show's being mistaken about the location of the website's offices. Also, Veronica is indeed dunzo. It was once great, and I have missed that Veronica for many months already. But seriously people, come September there will be dozens of new shows to watch, and at least a few of them won't suck.

Jonathan Gray in Flow: TV shows are boys and girls even before they're born.

The Onion: Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things.

"Indie Minute" is a newish column at College Humor: "It's pretty corporate to be indie- just because everyone is doing it. So, if you really want to be indie, you have to start shopping at Hollister, eating at Red Lobster and seeing movies at Showcase Cinemas." (via 'fiddle)

Jason Sperb at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope has written a review of an essay by Julia Lesage in Jump Cut about web 2.0 tools for film and media scholarship (especially social bookmarking and blogging.) I left a comment there, so click over if you want more thoughts on that.

Chris Cagle (whose own blog is Category D) has responded in a separate post at Dr. Mabuse with some thoughts about blogs, including a taxonomy of the functions of academic film blogs: 1. Scholarship; 2. Popularization; 3. Heterodoxy; 4. Film Culture. Scholarship refers to blogging that is basically the promotion of traditional work, or that takes its form. Popularization presents scholarly work to a non-expert audience. Heterodoxy uses blogging as a way of exploring scholarly concerns that don't find a place within established institutions of scholarly discourse. And film culture engages with cinema on lay terms, i.e., on the same terms as non-scholarly blogs.

I would add another kind of taxonomy: in general blogs combine two features, prose and links. As prose, blogs can take the form or reviews, polemics, expository writing, etc. Scholarly blogs can adopt the prose style of scholarly These forms can include links, but blogs can also function in a way that makes the links the main event. Blogs function as filters when a blogger makes a habit of scanning news, blogs, calls for papers, viral videos, whatever, and blogs the ones he or she finds interesting. Some people find this stuff more useful than others (I can't get enough of it), but just about all bloggers do it sometimes. I see filtering as potentially scholarly (calls for papers) and potentially "film culture" (passing along news items) and often a cross between the two, especially when one studies such things as viral videos and the contemporary media industries. (You might think of this entry as filtering since its main purpose is to point out a pair of blog posts elsewhere.)

In addition to these categories, I think it's useful to see the function of blogging in terms of what it offers us that other forms of publishing do not. Scholarly blogs do several things better than journals, conference presentations, and books:

• they respond to current events as they happen and follow no schedule but the blogger's
  
• they have the potential to speak in a more authentic, spontaneous voice
• they allow for the cultivation of an individual's persona and allow for the reader to follow that persona day by day
• they are networked to other writers by hyperlink
  
• they have comments and links that allow for instant reader feedback
• they are not subject to any formal process of editing or review
• they are available to anyone who is interested for free
  

As scholarship or conversation or filtering or personal journal, blogs by academics have the possibility to do things that traditional publishing can't do. But one thing that really excites me about blogging is that it can bridge the gap between scholarly and popular writing. As it happens, people who study media professionally and people who write about it professionally or just for kicks have many common interests. Blogs allow us to explore them together, and this has the potential to extend media scholarship beyond the often insular world of academia and assert its relevance. It also allows the scholar to write in a less formal style, and it's fair to say that scholarly writing stands to benefit from this.

The OMG of the week is this French YouTube video of people throwing cans in the trash. The "it's fake!" response doesn't diminish the OMG effect very much for me. So what? See also Guy catches glasses with face.

Big Love will air three flashback shorts in anticipation of its new season, first on On Demand and later on the web and on the regular HBO. My question for all such things is, if they are inessential for understanding the narrative of a series itself--and they have to be inessential because HBO is not going to risk the vast majority of viewers' incomprehension--why should I watch? I watched the BSG miniature New Caprica episodes and didn't know what to do with them. This kind of storytelling seems to be so much more driven by the desire to try out new distribution systems and media platforms than by a need to tell certain kinds of stories.

A review and appreciation of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at PopMatters makes clear just how impressive this work is, a shot-by-shot fanvid remaking Raiders done by kids in the early 80s without the aid of a VCR. They relied on memory and research and found many creative solutions to problems of recreating a blockbuster using the resources available to amateurs.

And two blog threads I meant to link to earlier in the week...better late than never:

1. I haven't read all the comments, but a number of posts at Kristina Busse's blog about fandom, fanfic, gender, and related topics make clear how passionate media scholars are about their objects of study (see especially the one that got it started about a gender divide in fandom studies and a subsequent one about the validity of fanfic that gets pretty bitchy at the end of the comments).

2. Chuck has been tracking a discussion about whether film blogs are a threat to critics/professional writers or even whether they are just changing things for the worse (1, 2). Similar discussions have been going on for several years in various quarters. Foodbloggers have changed the way the public gets info about restaurants, especially in big cities. Litbloggers are killing book review sections. Lawprof bloggers jump on Supreme Court opinions the moment they are issued, bettering the analysis offered by journalists and rendering law reviews, which have slower publication schedules, irrelevant. If this is a fight, my money is on the bloggers. They write for free and with great passion, are networked to each other, engage directly with their readers, and have few of the limits on their creative output that constrain mainstream media. Indeed, the mainstream media may succeed by co-opting many of the bloggers' forms and functions.

Characterization in American Independent Cinema

A couple of years ago I wrote a PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called Characterization in American Independent Cinema. In it, I argued that characterization in cinema is a process of social cognition, much like our ordinary process of making sense of others in our everyday lives, and further applied this approach to thinking about characterization to an analysis of how indie films make character a central appeal of their storytelling. I'm now in the middle of turning this into a book. In the process, I am losing much of the theoretical discussions of characterization and adding some new parts about independent cinema's forms, institutions, and culture. I hope to make the cognitivist characterization portions into another book someday that is broader than just indie cinema (and broader than just cinema, for that matter), after I get the chance to do more systematic research into issues in social psychology that I still need to know more about. I decided to focus more on the indie stuff now mainly because it seemed that way more people are interested in it, and it excites me more to write a book that people want to read.

Occasionally people ask me to send them chapters of the diss, and I thought it might be a good idea to publish it on the internet, especially since the more theoretical portions aren't going to see the light of day in any other form in the near future. So I have uploaded the chapters to Scribd. Here are links, with brief additional info:

Title page

Chapter 1: Introduction (Headings: pg. 1 Independent Cinema and Character; pg. 4 Character, Person, and Self; pg. 17 A Cognitive Theory of Characterization: Intuitive and Counterintuitive; pg. 21 Character and Characterization; pg. 27 What About Subjective Narration?; pg. 34 Making Sense of American Independent Cinema [I would start reading here if you're into indie cinema but not so much into cognitive film theory]; pg 36 Auteurs, Spririts, etc.; pg. 39 Hollywood/ Off-Hollywood, Art Cinema/Independent Cinema; pg. 43 Viewing Strategies; pg. 66 Conclusion.)

Chapter 2: Typing (This chapter is about how we categorize characters into myriad types; Headings: pg. 77 Traits and Types; pg. 85 Stereotypes; pg. 93 Social and Genre Types; pg. 99 Typing in Process: Passion Fish; pg. 112 Conclusion. Some of the ideas in this chapter turn up again in an article I wrote for a special issue of Film Criticism on complex narratives, "Character and Complexity in American Independent cinema: Passion Fish and 21 Grams" [pdf].)

Chapter 3: Mindreading (This chapter is about how we predict and explain the behavior of characters by inferring mental states such as beliefs and desires--some experts call this mindreading. Headings: pg. 116 Mindreading: Character Psychology Inferences and Judgments; pg. 121 Folk Psychology; pg. 135 Causal Attribution; pg. 151 Heuristics of Social Judgment; pg. 157 Conclusion: Mindreading in American Independent Cinema.)

Chapter 4: Emotion Expressions (This one begins with a quotation from Fritz Lang that I really like, which reads in part, "Film has revealed to us the human face with unexampled clarity in its tragic as well as grotesque, threatening as well as blessed expression." Headings: pg. 163 Character Emotions; pg. 164 The Face; pg. 169 The Voice; pg. 172 Emotion Expressions: A Closer Look; pg. 176 Problems in Expression Recognition; pg. 182 Emotion Expressions in Film; pg. 186 Facial Expressions in the Construction of Character: Welcome to the Dollhouse and Hard Eight; pg. 196 Conclusion: Combining Appeals. Some of the ideas in this chapter, along with some of the preceding one, found their way into an article in Film Studies: An International Review, "Characterization as Social Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse" [pdf].)

Chapter 5: Characterization in Style (I argue in this chapter, among other things, that all audiovisual technique in a narrative film can be understood to have a characterizing function. I doubt that my advisor really buys this idea but he never put up a fuss about it. Headings: pg. 203 The Challenge of Style; pg. 204 Style and Character in History; pg. 212 Characterizing in Style: Story and Self; pg. 226 Levels of Characterization in Style; pg. 242 Style and Character in Todd Haynes' Safe; pg. 260 Conclusion.)

Chapter 6: Infinite Variety: Variables of Characterization (In this chapter I offer a typology of characterization variables along three axes, depth, complexity,and change. I argue, counterintuitively, that independent cinema characters or characterizations are often shallow rather than deep, straightforward rather than complex, and static rather than changing. One way of creating interesting characters is by keeping the audience at a distance from them, forbidding us access to their psychology, and refusing to have them follow the typical Hollywood hero's trajectory toward self-knowledge and revelation. Headings: pg. 268 Round and Flat; pg. 274 Narration and Characterization; pg. 277 Variable 1: Depth; pg. 294 Variable 2: Complexity; pg. 310 Variable 3: Change; pg. 324 Conclusion.)

Conclusion

MiT5 wrapped up yesterday and it was an exhausting but really exciting weekend of scholarly exchange. I kept some tabs on events as they transpired on Twitter, which was fun (though some attendees seem to have resented the divided attention of laptop-enhanced participants). I have been enjoying reading blogs about attendees' conference experiences, including those by Derek, Jill, Chuck, Axel, and Jason.

Perhaps I'll write some more about the conference in the coming days. In the meantime, there are a few photos at my Flickr.

Update 5/1: Jean Burgess (who I heard give an excellent paper at MiT5 about Flickr and vernacular creativity) blogs about issues around Twittering the conference and the "continuous partial attention" that this requires:

As far as I could see over people’s shoulders, and certainly in my own case, most of the time the twitterers were using their laptops and the internet to annotate, share, get background on, critique, and fact-check the papers they were listening to - and yes, they were also sometimes ‘playing around’ and socialising.

The question to me is not only whether this parallel communication is a distraction from the conference presentation--it is and it isn't--but whether it's disrespectful to the person giving the paper. I don't think it is. My mind wanders all the time during conference panels. I find it hard to attend to every word of three or four papers consecutively, so I zone out for moments, scan the conference program, doodle, think about other things. Having a computer in front of me filled these times in addition to allowing me to annotate, share, etc. I don't see the harm in that. All the computer does is makes people's already partial and intermittent attention visible.

And: My paper is now available in PDF form at the conference website. Or you can download it right here: "The Community as Artist: The Show with Ze Frank."

MiT5 kicked off this afternoon and I made it to parts of two plenaries and the entirety of two breakout sessions. Among several good papers I heard was Derek Johnson's on historicizing transmedia storytelling and media franchises. Derek was challenging Henry Jenkins's use of the term "transmedia" while Henry Jenkins was in the audience. That was my favorite part of the day.

My paper on web video and community-based authorship is tomorrow. As for today, here are some more impressions, bullet-point bloggy-style.

-Studying media in transition is shooting a moving target. So many of the speakers here seem to be trying to grapple with ongoing events, with shifting terrain and inchoate discourses, and some even concern themselves with forecasting future trends, which seems to me to go beyond the scholarly mandate of media studies. Studying an ongoing process is not easy, and it makes me wonder whether it might make better sense to wait awhile before writing about what's happening now. This actually makes me feel good about my major non-new-media project on independent cinema, which I think of as a book about something that has already happened rather than something that is developing as I write. (Of course independent cinema continues to develop, but it's also something that has taken shape over the years and assumed a fairly stable identity.)

-There are more open laptops here than I have ever seen at a conference, and from what I can tell from snooping over people's shoulders, most are being used in multitasking fashion, to read e-mail or have encounters in Second Life or scan RSS feeds while at the same time paying attention to a speaker. Just like my undergrads Facebooking in class.

-M.I.T.'s buildings are numbered as well as named, and so looking for your next panel means searching for E-15 or 4-253. This is confusing.

-At dinner I had clam chowder. I'm the kind of person who orders clam chowder in Boston, cuz that's what you do.

For more on MiT5, see Jill's blog. She's keeping track of various Twitter and blog responses to the conference. More to come.

[update 4/28: Jason has a more thorough discussion of the two panels we both attended yesterday.]