Barthes’ father was killed in WWI when he was only a year old. Raised by his mother, he dealt with repeated illness issues his whole life, including Tuberculosis. These problems kept him out of WWII. They also meant that he often had difficulty procurring teaching positions throughout his career.

He was also gay, and much of his work is often read in light of this fact. His resistance to bourgeois cultural values is often interpreted as a function of his sexual identity.

Barthes published extensively, solidfying his reputation as a scholar and theorist. “The Death of the Author,” his famous 1967 essay, argued that text created by the author supplanted the author’s authority within culture. Ironically, it also led to Barthes’ great critical reception by other literary theorists. Wikipedia has long bibliography of Barthes’ work.

“Mythologies” and “The Eiffel Tower”

Barthes saw myth as a set of semiotic relationships. And though, as any reader can see, he offers a meticulous and complex analysis of the semiotic operations at work, I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple for my own benefit. He calls myth an example of “speech” primarily because he sees it as a semiotic system. The easiest place to start are his assertions about myth’s function and character — that it commits “language robbery” (p. 131) by aiming for “immediate impression” rather than allowing thoughtful analysis (p. 130). Myth can do this because, through an elaborate semiological system, it “distorts” meaning by “distancing” history from the signifier. It doesn’t destroy this meaning, needing it as a vague and fuzzy base upon which to build. Instead, distance can be filled with whatever the bourgeois deem culturally or politically expedient by appropriating what they want from the meaning underneath. (Barthes sees myth as a distinctly bourgeois, right-wing phenomenon.)

His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth’s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.

In some sense, there is a connection to be made between Barthes and Benjamin’s concept of the aura. In effect, Benjamin is arguing this same distancing between the foundation of reality and the experience of stories about reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a myth that can be understood as a decontextualization of the hard reality of the artwork.

Barthes applies this method to the Eiffel Tower as a way of explicating its differing relationships to Parisians versus outsiders. The feeling imposed by an experience — that which evokes sentimental attachment to abstractions about time, place, or event — can serve as a way of distancing the observer from the history that might be found in the pre-mythic semiological system.

But Stephen Colbert can explain it better than I can:

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.

Summary

Ducheneaut and Moore present an ethnographic study of social interactions within Everquest Online Adventures for the PS2. They use participant observation to observe players at work within an online space, exploring the ways players socially interact to complete game tasks, as well as develop peer bonds within groups. Their essential thesis is that MMORPGs can highlight ways that games can be used to teach social interaction. They explore this idea by focusing on three factors:

Player self-organization

Players learn to organize themselves into groups to accomplish game-based tasks and establish community. The game’s design demands that players learn to cooperate and coordinate their actions in order to achieve goals. Players cannot play as individuals.

Instrumental interactions

Players must take on a role, learn its function, and master its tools to be useful to a group. In addition, these interactions provide the player with a certain amount of social capital that can then be spent in other ways.

Sociability

Players acclimate themselves to the social conventions of the game community. They adopt an identity and role, build reputation, and establish effective peer bonds with other players.

In-game text chat allows players to communicate more effectively, sometimes tailoring preset chat commands to relay more detailed information as players seek out social connection and to accomplish tasks.

Ducheneaut and Moore conclude that MMOs provide excellent examples of social learning that can then be used for actual teaching and pedagogy.

Discussion

The article provides a thoroughly detailed case-study that is an excellent example of ethnographic methods as they can be applied to online communities. Games provide specific social contexts around which players construct identities and relationships. They are already constructed frameworks that can establish community quickly and easily. The social nature of gameplay in MMOs provides a rich data set for researchers to explore.

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).

Summary

This book chapter grows from a paper presented in 2002, and is available in Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet (2005), edited by Christine Hine (preview available on Google Books; also available here). Rutter and Smith discuss ethnographic research methods as they might apply to online communities and the researchers who examine them. In this chapter specifically, they studied newsgroup discussion lists. In their words, they wanted to understand “how sociability is discursively constructed in a text-based environment” (p. 81-82). To that end, they archived and catalogued messages exchanged between participants, as well as conducted F2F interviews with some of the newsgroup’s members. They also examined the available web-presence of some members. Rutter and Smith describe their work as “participant observation” working with “thick description.”

In their research, they faced several major questions about defining the community they were studying, as well as their roles as researchers within that community.

What is this place?

The authors state plainly that “online ethnography describes places that are not spaces” (p. 84). As a result, much of the research process they describe can be carried out “at researchers’ own office” and can be automated with the right software (p. 84). The lack of explicit spatiality means they do not engage with the community online that often. Instead, they work with text itself, noting patterns of usage and content. One reason for this is the “asynchronous nature” of the communication within such a system.

The messages had no natural “link” to the time and space in which they were created, only to the times and spaces in which they were consumed. The ordering, timing and association with other messages was not uniformly constructed within the newsgroup and the virtual space created for it by the participants, but in their own everyday use of these texts. (p. 85)

Rutter and Smith go on to suggest that “we need to be very cautious about the where” researchers focus upon (p. 85).

Inclusion of research outside of the office

Though they suggest they primarily focused their data collection upon the text generated within the newsgroup, the authors did supplement their research with interviews and with attendance to the newsgroup’s face-to-face convention, RumRendezvous. While the researchers wished to share their findings with the group, they had to counter-balance such a desire with the need to maintain anonymity for the newsgroup users (even though some wished to be openly identified in publication.

Ethical concerns

Any ethnographic researcher faces critical ethical questions about their research practices. The need for studying and understanding the culture is important, but so is maintaining confidentiality and privacy of the research subjects. Researchers should often participate in the culture, but they must answer how and when they should do so. Rutter and Smith explore the limits of “participant observation” within online communities.

It is very difficult for the online ethnographer to maintain a stable presence in a virtual environment when people cannot see that you are there. This is made worse with the constantly changing composition of many virtual environments as new people arrive and others leave – mostly unannounced. Ethically, how are we supposed to negotiate informed consent? Do we opt for maintaining the letter of the law with regular postings that announce our research identities and our presence as researchers or do we, after a general announcement of our presence, slip into a more naturalistic mode? (p. 89)

What role should the researcher play within the community? How does working online complicate this question further? The authors note that they never completely extricated themselves from the community. It’s availability online make the community both persistent and easily accessible.

This persistence also raises a question of how to deal with online communications that are openly accessible for public viewing. Does this also mean that those communications are public in a social sense? Or does their context make them something else? Rutter and Smith argue that they should be treated closer to private communications.

Connections to other readings

Obviously, Rutter and Smith connect with many of our readings for the semester. They explore questions of methods and methodology central to the work of Baym, and more implicitly, Rheingold.

Limits and questions

Though the article makes mention of methods that are deeply entrenched in the need to articulate and understand the contexts of social practices, it doesn’t offer much concerning how the researchers connected their offline research with patterns they saw in online communication and communities.

How do they see participants in these communities? Individuals fulfilling individual needs? Or community members playing specific roles?

How does offline context affect online practice?

How do users understand spatiality within online communities?

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.

So, how the hell did “McLuhan” come to be a more dominant word in this cloud than did, say, “experience”? And no, I don’t have any idea what the “media” is doing out there by itself. Maybe that somehow represents New Media…?

Click the image to go to Wordle.net to see a bigger version.

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.

One intricate theory McLuhan references several times in this clip elaborates on the difference between “hot” and “cool” media. The idea is famously explored in Understanding Media. Essentially, “hot” media are those who focus the audience’s attention primarily upon a physical sense that overrides the audience’s conscious participation. “Cool” media demand more participation by diffusing their experiences across a broader range of senses. Thus, the audience has to work hard in order to generate much sense from media. Below are some McLuhan-related links.

CBC Radio/TV archive of McLuhan

Wikipedia entry on McLuhan

U of Toronto Program

RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-1988)

Williams was a British scholar of literature who joined the British Communist Party while at Cambridge. He later served in the British armed forces during WWII, including fighting in Europe after the Normandy invasion. He maintained his Leftist political stances throughout his life, clearly influenced by Gramsci. He is often considered a major figure in the 20th century development of cultural materialism as a systematic analytic (see IU link below).

Selected Bibliography

Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1975)

Williams connects society and technology in a more multi-faceted relationship than does McLuhan. He criticizes the viewpoint held by McLuhan as one that seals technology’s development in a vacuum, in effect “abstract[ing] technology from society” (pp. 5-6). Instead, he wants to situate technology as a force developing within socially and materially determined “purposes and practices” (p. 7). Thus, television in particular represents the confluence of multiple technical innovations from different sectors that are synthesized in order to meet the demands of cultural/social development. Specifically, economic development and social development have to meet in order for such a technology to arise, gain a foothold, and become a social force. Through “a long history of capital accumulation and working technical improvements,” communications technologies are created as a direct response to material needs operating within cultural matrices (p. 12).

Thus, communications technologies like television owe something of their existence to the material constraints of the cultures in which they arise – economic considerations, especially. Williams states, “A need which corresponds to  with the priorities of the real decision-making groups will, obviously, more quickly attract the investment of resources and the official permission, approval or encouragement on which a working technology, as distinct from available technical devices, depends” (p. 12). Drawing clearly from Gramsci, he constructs a material history of television as not just one of technical design, but also of necessary social design at work within centralized power structures in Western culture of the 20^th century. In other words, TV or radio might be analyzed as entertainments arising from the demands of consumers. Yet, they also arise as products “officially” sanctioned and supported because they can effectively operate within the status quo power structures entrenched within those cultures. And their use evolves along these lines. In current terms, we would see Williams’ theory as an ecological one drawing from a Marxist foundation.

Wikipedia entry

Raymond Williams Society

Keywords excerpts

Indiana University page defining “cultural materialism”

John Higgins’ critical examination of Williams and his theories

CONCLUSIONS

McLuhan’s theories on media echo the literary concerns contemporary to him. Scholarship turned toward the nature of language as a tool for carrying meaning. McLuhan offers a very similar take on television. He could be seen as a postmodernist except for two major divergences from postmodern thought. First, McLuhan seems to assume a strong sense of causality in the relationship between technology and society, echoing to a degree Saussurian structural linguistics rather than later post-structural theory. Second, that line of causality seems to flow from technology to humankind, and not necessarily the other way. In other words, power and influence is embedded within technology, leaving humankind seemingly at the whims of the technologies they use. People are not agents at work within media complexes, but are rather the subject of media.

Meaning is devalued in this formula in favor of structurally unraveling the consumer’s/audience’s relationship with media, and to step outside the media complex in order to analyze it from a disinterested vantage point. And that relationship can be described almost entirely in terms of a medium’s structure, rather than the audience’s experiences. Such  an epistemological vantage point is necessary to achieve true media literacy.

Williams critique of such a viewpoint becomes salient in the modern media market, especially given the relationships scholars like Henry Jenkins have theorized in response to the rise of participatory cultures. McLuhan only pursues media and technology as socially constructive forces, and not as constructed forces. His primary (only?) concern is understanding technology as a causal force, and not necessarily as a contingent cultural development. The result is that elements of McLuhan’s philosophy still resonate in much media scholarship, but not as a comprehensive analytical framework. As scholarship is now firmly entrenched in describing as many facets of cultural objects as possible in material terms, wider ecologies have taken shape.