New Media

This is a TED Talk from late last year, featuring Pranav Mistry, who is now officially one of my heroes. Though I’m not quite convinced that the portable, gesture-based systems he’s discussing here can quite catch on, nevertheless, it’s still pretty awesome and elegant. One day, I hope to work with and, more importantly, PLAY!!! with technology like this.

CeME just needs a grant… or a big investor…

The short clip of the train riders playing pong on the train floor is extremely fascinating to me. It’s a case of pulling participation out of the digital and placing it squarely in the physical world. And that is a growing interest of mine. I want to make the digital and physical converge in interesting ways. Ideas abound. But, I want to make something happen.

Below is the paper proposal I’ve written up for CMP10. At the end you’ll find a YouTube video of a LBP level I’m discussing.

This paper argues for the synthesis of media studies with theories from professional writing to establish richer frameworks for the critical evaluation of participatory cultures and the mediascapes that materialize around them. As media production, distribution, and consumption are increasingly remediated through readily available consumer technologies like computers and mobile phones, a number of theories have been adapted or put forward to establish frameworks for critical and cultural analysis of media content. The most important observation to emerge from this scholarship is that such content is no longer simply an object of study, but a site of practice for the audience in convergent media systems (Jenkins, 2006 & 2009; Booth, 2008). The technologies available to consumers and the material work or play they support unmask the audience’s reception of media content by fostering audience activities with that content. Meaning is recast not only as interpretation, but as motives and goals enacted by the audience. The distribution supported by the participatory web places the products of the audience’s work or play into their own dynamic streams of activity, as well.

By fusing methodologies from professional writing and information design — deconstructed information architectures (Johnson-Eilola, 2006); activity theory (Engestrom, 2000; Spinuzzi, 2003) — with media convergence (Jenkins, 2006), we can map a method for analyzing convergent media experiences as emerging from activities that persistently repurpose and rehistoricize media content through computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). In doing so, we can bolster critical media studies scholarship by understanding the underlying capabilities and limitations that support convergence within the audience’s work.

I demonstrate the value of this hybrid method by tracing the audience work and play surrounding the level creation tools of Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet (2008). Specifically, I will focus on the licensing of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986 & 1987) as downloadable content offered by Media Molecule for players to use for their own creative projects. Content provided on the company’s website will be analyzed in conjunction with video of player-created game levels that make use of this content by recreating and adapting events from Moore’s original story and its film adaptation (2009). This will be bolstered by an activity theory analysis of Little Big Planet’s level and character creation tools to understand the design (and hence narrative) capabilities afforded to the player. Examining both the visual and narrative themes of the game design as well as the graphic novel, in conjunction with the work analysis necessary to create player-generated levels, will unveil new insights into the concept of audience practice as meaningful cultural engagement.

In recognition of the growing call for audience empowerment in media experiences, the final section of the paper will take up the common professional writing strategy of offering design solutions so as to better foster participatory engagement in media systems by looking at Little Big Planet and its community as an example of the successes of such systems.

DALLAS W SMYTHE (1907-1992)

Smythe was a Canadian-born scholar who worked as an economist in a number of government agencies in the United States in the early 2oth century. He was vocal about his socio-political stances, which often left him at odds with authorities, including difficulties getting published when he turned to teaching at the University of Illinois during the 1950s. See his Wikipedia page for more, or see this encyclopedia entry.

The International Association for Media and Communication Research gives an award named in honor of Smythe for quality scholarship dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and political economy.

Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (1981) is Smythe’s most widely known and excerpted work. He has a number of journal articles credited to him. An essay collection is also dedicated to him, and is, ironically enough, extremely expensive.

“On the Audience Commodity and Its Work”

Our excerpt, taken from Smythe’s 1981 book, seeks to recast critical Marxist theories about mass media, grounding them in a more “objective and realistic” theoretical framework (p. 231). In his estimation, previous efforts were, at best, incomplete because they did not consider “real life processes” (p. 231) that determined the relationship between media, advertisers, and audiences. He develops the concept of “audience power,” which he defines as an audience’s ability to “buy goods and spend their income accordingly” (p. 243) so as to perpetuate capitalism and therefore reify state-held power (p. 233). To accomplish this, Smythe argues that free- or leisure-time is really only an illusion that hides actual work and the commodification of virtually the entire life of any given individual who lives in a capitalistic society. By focusing conscious attention on the spectacle contained within media, “the real situation is mystified out of existence” (p. 241). Instead of viewing advertising as a necessity for creating and broadcasting media, Smythe views “non-advertising” content as a trojan horse really designed to sneak advertising into the homes, lives, and thought processes of audiences — what he terms a “free lunch” (p. 242-3). The effect, as he puts it, is to “reaffirm the status quo and retard change” (p. 243).

Questions and Connections

Several questions stick out to me:

• Is his approach any more realistically grounded than those he dismisses?
• How does his theory compare to other cultural materialist theories of media?
• How does the participatory internet alter or affirm his notion that industrialization destroys creativity (p. 233)?

Smythe is a determinist, but not in the same way as McLuhan. Whereas McLuhan sees all (or at least most) human agency as irrelevant in the face of technological form, Smythe sees technological form as an extension of market capitalist ideology, and as the site of a “social process” through which the relationship between people and commodities is formed. Instead of being the actor with the most agency, technology becomes the conduit through which agency is controlled. He’s similar to Williams in this point, yet the audience is just as unable to affect this process as they are in McLuhan’s scheme. The use of the “free lunch” is distracting enough to hide the areas in need of critical examination.

Thus, I find him oddly reminiscent of Gramsci, in spite of his insistence that he’s more “objectively” and “realistically” grounded than Gramsci and others. Really, he seems primarily intent on providing empirical evidence of media as a hegemonic process. Yet, he does seem just as guilty in over-generalizing his theories, particularly with respect to print journalism pre-WWI.

Thoughts?

Click to go to Ducheneaut's PARC information page.

Nic Ducheneaut completed his PhD in 2003 at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

He works as a senior researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He primarily studies online game communities.

You can find a summary of his current projects here, and an extensive list of publications here.

He has a LinkedIn account and a Twitter feed. However, his Twitter stream is locked from general view.

Click the image to go to Moore's MySpace page.

Robert J. Moore formerly worked at Xerox PARC, and has also worked extensively as a game designer. Clicking the image will take you to his MySpace page, which seems to be his primary web-presence.

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Click image to go to Rutter's CRIC homepage.

Links**

Rutter’s page @ Center for Research on Innovation and Competition. He’s a researcher for the Manchester Institute of Innovative Research.

RCCS book review of Virtual Methods (2007)

Rutter’s Digiplay Initiative, focusing on games studies.

Digiplay Twitter

Introductory Chapter of Understanding Digital Games (2006), edited by Rutter and Bryson.

**I could find virtually no web presence for Gregory W. H. Smith outside of references to this article and a book titled Analyzing Visual Data (1992). (more…)

Below is my proposal for Social Media Theory. Yeah… I can really pull this off…

Research on Twitter has exploded over the last year as the social networking service (SNS) has become increasingly popular. Since its inception, the service has proven a remarkably agile tool, especially when networked with other SNS sites. Connecting different SNS sites ad hoc has allowed Twitter to thrive as a communication channel. Relying on previous work that establishes the need for adaptable and articulated connections among different social media (Potts, 2009), this paper extends such work by examining the rather different user interfaces (UI) of two third party Twitter applications, Tweetdeck and Twhirl, in light of Activity Theory (AT) and the concept of affordances. Borrowing from the synthesis of AT and affordances offered by Baerentsen and Trettvik (2002), I argue that when combined with third-party clients, Twitter facilitates communication channels as articulated activities. Instead of fostering either synchronous (like IRC) or asynchronous networks (like blogs and message boards), these streams become persistent (McNely, 2009).

From this basis, I will argue that third-party clients more effectively exploit Twitter’s affordances by making the streams, and thus the user’s experience, modular and emergent. They allow real-time modularity in content by facilitating the near-instantaneous exchange of both written and visual information, as well as quick linking to secondary sources of information. By comparing the UIs of Tweetdeck and Twhirl, along with that of Twitter’s own web-based UI, we can assess the how these clients allow the user to adapt Twitter streams to their own communication needs and praxis. The flexibility given to users via such clients serves as a tremendous signpost to the nature of and need for modular experiences in communication channels as information content evolves. Not only do the social networks themselves need to be articulated and modular, but so do the UIs through which users engage with these networks.

References.

Baerentsenj K.B. and Trettvik, J. (2002). An activity theory approach to affordance. Published in the Association of Computing Machinery’s Proceedings of NordiCHI, Arhus, Denmark, pp. 51-60.

McNely, B.J. (2009). Bachchannel persistence and collaborative meaning-making. Published in the Association of Computing Machinery’s Proceedings of SIGDOC ’09, Bloomington, IN, pp. 297-303.

Potts, L. Using actor network theory to trace and improve multimodal communication design. Technical Communication Quarterly 18(3), pp. 281-301.

Here it is!

MARSHALL McLUHAN (1911-1980)

McLuhan was a Canadian scholar who trained primarily in literature, but became widely known as a media theorist and scholar. He began his career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then went on to spend more than 30 years at the University of Toronto. The university’s Program in Culture and Technology is named after McLuhan.

Selected Bibliography

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message” is the summation of his belief that human society evolves in ways that can be directly traced to the rise, use, and impact of technological innovation. Echoing, though not necessarily subscribing to, post-structural theory, McLuhan argues “the latest approach to media considers not only the ‘content’ but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates” (p. 204). However, he diagnoses culture and society as largely “numb in our new electric world” (p. 207). In his assessment, mechanization has given way to electric speed as the primary operating force within technology. This transition is especially distressing to McLuhan, and he cites it as the cause of society’s numbness: “Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate” (p. 207).

In order to fully assess such technology’s impact on society and culture, McLuhan argues that the scholar must remain detached from the medium and its “lines of force” because “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary” (p. 206). His language always seems to phrase media as a force that operates within culture the way, say, gravity operates within nature. He suggests structurally traceable cause/effect relationships from media to audiences, relationships that have profound effects on the ways audiences (mis)understand meaning. In essence, electric technology overpowers meaning, substituting a kind of spectacle arising from the technology rather than the message’s origin.

Below, McLuhan assesses a 1976 presidential debate between Carter and Ford in light of his theories on media. He argues that neither candidate has any clear understanding of how to operate in a televised medium.

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I have yet to really figure out if or how Torben Grodal’s Embodied Visions (2009) might prove useful from an applications standpoint. But, from a rhetorical one, the book continues to exquisitely express my thoughts on games far better than I have ever been able to. Chapter 7 releases narrativity from the structural confines in which narrative theory tends to situate it and instead articulates it as a functional process inherent to human experiences via neurological mechanisms.

The basic story experience consists of a continuous interaction between perceptions (I see a monster approaching), emotions (I feel fear, because I know or sense that monsters are dangerous), cognitions (I think that I’d better shoot the monster), and action (the actual motor act of shooting that changes the motivational emotion — fear — into relaxation). …

[T]he ability to hold the story (including possible future elements of that story) in our consciousness — an ability that is important for prolonged action patterns — is independent of language: we can perform this holding operation at the nonverbal level of perception-emotion-action. (pp. 161-63) (more…)