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U-blog, I-blog |
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I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
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what if we have already learned all of McLuhan's lessons? In reading a stunning lecture McLuhan delivered to educators in 1959, I started to wonder what a retrieval of McLuhan can really add to educational reform. Not that his radical vision‹discovery based education, problem-based education, educating students in the mastery of global new media, etc.‹has been realized, but that many radical educators are still pushing many of the same kinds of reforms. Joshua Meyorwitz essay about taking mcluhan seriously ends with this observations: "In the long run, educational theorists and practitioners have taken McLuhan and "medium theory" rather seriously after all‹even if they have not been fully conscious of it" (106). So, what is the value in recovering his ideas? The rhetorical weight of being able to say to those who resist "look it was obvious to McLuhan in 1959 what needed to be done, and we still haven't done it!" ? A "theory value" is often attributed to doing this kind of recovery work, but McLuhan's reputation is so problematics, the dynamics are considerably different than the great Bakhtinian recovery of the 1990s. Is the recovery worth the risk? Although Ulmer chose to use Derrida as his relay, there would seem to be a relay-value in working through McLuhan's texts, as they more adequeately spur me to write like tv than do Ulmer's texts. McLuhan, as I noted in an earlier post, can be thought of as an early practitioner of alternative academic writing. I also wrote about Jeff Rice discovering, after the fact, that his pedagogy essentially matched up with McLuhans--raising the very problem I have started this entry with. Maybe some of the value will be in looking at contempories who have been influenced by McLuhan but continue to be overlooked in educational circles. scott McCloud's work on comics, David Byrne's films, music, and multi-media composition, david carson's photografiks, etc. The grand sweeping move would be to re-configure the humanities based on McLuhan, vygotsky, Montessori rather than Frye, Bruner, Newman -- although such a totalizing move seems antithetical to the McLuhan project of probe and exploring rather than theorizing and explaining McLuhan himself preached "understanding," but I like the notion that we can only have "simple knowing," -- see the introduction to gramophone, film, typewriter. The anti-theory arguments have always had a certain appeal for me; theory hope continues to prevail.
Learning to Love PowerPoint Edward Tufte has gotten more of the attention this fall than David Bynre for their paired essays in Wired, but my students definitely have sided with Byrne and learned to love (at least for a while) PowerPoint as they put together music video in this o-so-flexible meta-program (paraphrasing Byrne). A bunch of views, representing both sides and more, are collected at the community blog, metafilter. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, a professor of technical communication at Clarkson U, reminds us all to not think of technologies in such simple cause-effect terms, but instead to think of the "complicated inteplay among users, technologies, and contexts." The blog City of Sound likes Byrne's essay, but refers to it as "hilariously pretensious." Maybe--Byrne's tone is always very tough to figure out. This last post, from the wonderful online 'zine about information architecture, is probably the first place any student should go if he/she wants to see someone (Juan C. Durstetler) summarizing, and then commenting on, the Tufte/Byrne debate.
National Institute on Media and the Family (110) If you are looking for a pattern in media effects, you might want to check out the National Institute on Media and Family's website. You can find well developed studies on media habits, content analysis of teen oriented music, ratings of video games, etc. I know some of you are thinking about writing about the effects of violence in music on children/youth, but the effects of lyrics likely have to be considered along with factors like other media consumption and the child/youth's personality.
Comic Book Art Reviewed (110, 399) My father sent me a link to a review of "Comics for Grown-Ups," by David Hadju, published August 14, 2003 in the New York Review of Books. This review essay is relevant to all my current pre-occupations. It is an example of a formal review for my English 110 students who are working on reviews; and Hadju happens to use the music industry as an illustrative parallel for the serious comic book industry. In Visual Culture and Language, we just finished reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. While McCloud doesn't get a mention in this piece, his mentor/role model Will Eisner does, and Hadju echoes the argument McCloud makes--that comic book art needs to be taken seriously. To top it all off, Hadju reviews Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, and says this graphic novel is part of a growing trend in music, graphic novels, and the Internet: the "recording" of daily life, the mundane, the nothingness of our lives. Yup, he means blogs.
Music in Wired (110) The October issue of Wired features the "Superproducers," and my education in contemporary music continues. The Neptunes, Nigel Godrich, the Matrix--these producers and producer-teams are hailed as the brains behind the current musical major-domos. The piece ends up being photo-heavy and text light, but what the producers say might provide an interesting spin on a hot new idea in composition circles. The idea that writing in a digital era is actually a bit like being a DJ (mixing and spining others ideas, rather than making an original composition) takes on a new twist in a writing classroom. Students might be the DJs, but instructors might be the producers. "We find direction for the artist a lot of the time" says Lauren Christy of The Matrix. "Producing is diplomacy," says Nigel Godrich. "If you have an idea you really want to follow, sometimes you need to trick them into doing it. You have to be political and shrewd and cunning." On file-swapping, the issue is has a couple of juicy graphics on the real problem in the music industry--CDs being too expensive. Also a story about "BigChampagne," a company tracking all of your downloads--not to bust you, but to help somebody sell something to you.
CDs I listened to on the way to Mpls and back (110) "The Eminem Show." I have heard songs and seen Eminem on SNL, but not listened to a whole CD before. The first cut, "White America," floored me--wonder why that didn't get radio play ; ). Eminem's racial politics struck me as angry but insightful; his gender politics were hard to listen to. The relentlessly autobiographical nature of his work might be consistent with hip-hop, but also caught me by surprise (I know, I know, get my head out of the sand). X-treme blogging, broadcast to millions: we are clearly a society that is willing to listen to, and share, personal stories, on a grand scale. The White Stripes, "White Blood Cells." Fun and jangly--new to me, but like a lot of music I have listened to. A bit of Velvet Underground, Kinks, and an obscure Canadian band named the Enigmas. Didn't get a strong feel for where they are coming from lyrically: after Eminem, the pop-sound just didn't carry a strong, clear message. The Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots." I was getting close to the Twin Cities, so my concentration started turning to the road. Mello and interesting--I'd like to figure out what the techno-japanamation connections and interests are for this group. David Byrne, "Uh-Oh" and "David Byrne." I listened to "Uh-oh" twice on the way back--Byrne is all-over the place musically on this collection, but he always goes to such interesting places! Some danceable big horn pieces, some quiet sharp pieces. I'm starting to pick up some important motifs in his work: getting stoned while watching television (not sure how literal he is being--television can stone the straightest of us), postmodern playfulness ("Twistin' in the Wind" as follow up to "Road to Nowhere")--as if this one wasn't obvious! The self-titled had no horns that I picked up, and seemed to be relentlessly inter-textual: reworking some of his old work, reworking the Velvet Underground, reworking the Beatles. Harder to listen to than "Uh-Oh," but definitely will be getting some further attention from me.
Top 10 Lists We will be looking at top 10 lists in English 110 (kinda catchy) as a way to think about genre, and as an ice-breaker for the semester. Hard to talk about top 10 lists without talking about Letterman--still funny after all these years. Because this is a blog, I should probably link to another blog that has some lists. I found this one via a google search for "lists make good reading." The author of the list might be australian, seems to be a writer, and likes music. That's good for us. I've linked to Mark Bernstein's article "10 Tips for Writing the Living Web" before, but it is worth re-linking in this context. What do you think of a top ten list that can't be easily scanned in 30 seconds? Or does this pieces support scanning and reading? And finally, in my list of top 4 sites about top 10 lists, a really good lesson on how to write funny top 10 lists by Jeff Justice, Certified Speaking Profession.
RIAA lost a battle This story in PC World says that Boston College and MIT won their request to reject subpoenas issued by the RIAA --these universities aren't interested in protecting their students' right to download music, but they are interested in protecting their students' privacy and identity. A little closer to home, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has spoken out against the RIAA's shot gun approach to protecting copyright.
Views on PowerPoint Wired, Sept 2003, offers two teazers articles--David Byrne (from Talking Heads--see other music notes) and Edward Tufte (visual communication guru) on PowerPoint. The two pieces are set up as point-counterpoint fashion, but in fact, they don't address or respond to one another and they compliment each other. Byrne started using PowerPoint as satire--he would make presentations about making presentation, he would us the ultimate corporate tool to satirize corporate communication. He understands McLuhan--the medium is the message--as I have said elsewhere on this blog. But slowly, he says, he discovered more earnest (though not boring) and valueable potential in making graphic art with PowerPoint. He is releasing a book/DVD with this art in September, as well as new music. Tufte has long despised chart junk, and considers PowerPoint the ultimate tool for producing chart junk. If he had responded directly to Byrne, he would have agreed that PP is best for producing art, for playing around, and not much use for supporting straight-forward corporate presentations. Tufte's piece is a teazer for his book on PowerPoint, its excesses, and the negative cognitive impact it is having in schools and corporate America. These pieces aren't available online--yet. I'll check on them later.
File Sharing and RIAA The hotest issue in music that isn't directly about music is file sharing. I just read in Wired (Sept. 2003), the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is cooking up a variety of technological solutions (to supplement their legal actions) in order to foil file sharers. SUCK, for example, will be an RIAA program that looks for large collections of MP3s, then starts downloading files in order to jam the host system and likely draw the attention of the host's Internet Service Provider. I also read a profile in Rolling Stone (Aug. 21, 2003) of one of the four students the RIAA sued and settled with, Jesse Jordan. Jordan settled for $12,000, but file-sharers around the US are sending Jordan money because they hate what the RIAA has done, and is doing, to their sense of "fair use." Jordan shares his experiences on chewplastic.com--a weblog worth following if you want lots and lots of views about file sharing.
Dixie Chicks The Dixie Chicks have been stirring up the political world in 2003 and definitely seem worthy of some attention for a course about writing and music. A really comprehensive but unoffical Dixie Chicks site: lots of emphasis on their roots. CNN.com published a good piece about the two prongs of the D.C.'s controversy: Natalie Maines saying to a concert crowed: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas" and then the band posing on Entertainment Weekly clothed in words only. Lead Singer Natalie Maines speaks out about speaking out. Short article--I'd like to hear more about her views! Here is a very focused analysis of the political workings behind Dixie Chick boycotts, and a report of the strong fan support they have received. Counterpunch, the newsletter/website that published this editorial, looks like a site worth paying attention to. Erika Waak wrote an essay for The Humanist called "Celebrities Counter the War." The piece starts with a summary of the responses to the Dixie Chicks, then looks at responses to Michael Moore, the Oscar winning director who critized Bush at the Oscars, Sean Penn, Annie DeFranco, and others. This essay is a good example of academic commentary because it doesn't simply look at one incident (the Dixie Chicks); it looks for a pattern in a number of similar incidents. If this link doesn't work, go to InfoTracs and search for "Erika Waak".
Eminem I suppose if anyone wants to think seriously about the state of music in 2003, Eminem's work has to be considered. An Interview from 2000--he says, among other things, "I feel like when something's bothering me, the best way to get it out is to write a song about it, I think when I do that, people can relate to me more. The more I tell them, the more in touch they are with me. " Sounds a bit like writing a weblog, or reality tv. An Interview from 2002-- about his movie, 8 mile. The Infotrac Expanded Academic Index has about 250 articles on Eminem. Ray Grundmann's essay in Cineaste, partly about 8 mile, but more generally about Eminem's fame and controversy, is an example of academic commentary on popular culture and music. If the link doesn't work, go into Infotrac and search for Ray Grundmann as author.
Kairos Issue on New Media Volume 8, issue 1 of Kairos (2003) has a New Media Cover Web. I've browsed a few pieces so far, but just finished watching a flash movie called "Writing Spaces: Performances of the Word," by Veronica Austen. Austen describes her piece as a poetic essay that explores the visual aspects of electronic writing, and she says she hopes to explore the multi-modal components of e-writing in future work. The piece contains many clever elements of kinetic writing--she is a creative writer with a great sense of word play and visual-word play. I hope the piece can serve as a touchstone for my own experiments with Flash, and for work my students do. Like Austen, I think the piece (or future pieces) will work even more effectively with a sound-track, probably with more variety of components (photo images, scanned images, elements other than words , letters, morphemes, phonemes, and syllables in motion). I think these kinds of pieces probably need to be about as long as a music video (Michael Jackson videos not included); I did start to leaf through a book part way through (how ironic is that?!).
True Stories, David Byrne I watched David Byrne's True Stories the other night. I watched it a few years ago when I was teaching a class called Social implication of Computers, but I haven't seen it recently, and not in the context of thinking about McLuhan. So many resonances: * the mosaic approach: many stories, only one story line (also a kind of database-narrative synthesis along the lines Manovich discusses); the musical number, "Puzzling Evidence" is itself the mosaic approach to cultural analysis in very condensed form. * communication as tactile, phatic, a global consciousness: the "radio head" character grabs people's noses to pick up their signals, and sings about a kind of global consciousness (his band is even cleverly titled "Los Globos"--for all you Los Lobos fans out there!) * the electric age as creative, as reducing the space between work and play, as a new religion, illustrated by the Computer Guy and Spalding Gray's character (the visionary businessman who brought Vericorps to Virgil, Texas). * the turn to voodoo, the new primitivism in the search for love * the world's laziest woman: surrounded by technology, immobolized by it but not necessarily saddened or distressed by it, and ultimately TV leads her to Lewis Fyne, her future husband (because love is for sale). I could go on, but I also have to think about tone and irony in this piece. I was just reading about McLuhan's satire as cynical, a bit angry, and James Joyce's satire as more carnivalesque and celebratory. Byrne's tone in the movie generally seems whimsical, but as the Computer Guy is explaining how creative the "new scientists" are, you see about 5 of them in the shot, all wearning almost identical clothing. And Spalding Gray's character seems to take considerable pleasure in the massive changes he sees going on around him, but he says to Byrne something like "you wouldn't want to raise kids in this world, would you?" And the one story line that gets resolved is Lewis Fyne's quest for marriage after he sings "people like us don't want justice, don't want truth, we just want someone to love". Byrne has certainly been labeled "angry" at times in his career, and I'm not exactly sure what he thinks of the affable Bear, Lewis Fyne. The Name of this Site is Talking Heads: refers to "Vericorps" as the "industrial heart of Virgil," a label which misses the point of this "true body." Nice review, though, from an obviously pro Talking Head site.
Collection of essays about music The online journal Enculturation devoted a spring '99 issue to writing/music/culture. The essay on Marvin Gaye looks interesting and almost approachable for undergraduate students, although most of the essays are pretty dense and theoretically informed. I'll have to come back later for more details.
Writing About Music A quick google search for writing about music turned up a number of good sources. Here are two. The Dartmouth composition center has extensive suggestions for writing about music, and suggests that students are typically asked either to write a short review or a longer, researched essay (what I would call "commentary"). Samples of student work are included-- Dartmouth students have to write about really serious music topics! From Robert Seiler at the University of Calgary (I got my Master's degree there!), a really helpful set of notes that first emphasizes the importance and complexity of listening to music, and then summarizes Aaron Coupland's suggestion that music be experienced on the sensuous plane, expressive plane, and sheerly musical plane.
Moby, the Prolific One I've missed my blog. Phone line was out for about a week and a half, I was moving, the end of the semester was crazy--I have new admiration for those who can blog amidst adversity. And then, to start my summer blogging in preparation for fall courses on music, new literacy, and other miscellaneous topics, I read a May 24 weblog entry from techno-muscian Moby saying he has averaged 1.375 blog entries per day since 2000.
Seeing through McLuhan's eyes (275) Two random notes on seeing the world through McLuhan's eyes, or at least seeing the way the world talks about and uses technology. 1. I was sitting in a Dr's office and saw a talk show; the guests and audience were debating whether it was appropriate or not for a publisher to have made "bubble gum cards" or "trading cards" of victims and heroes of 9-11. Most people liked the idea of commemorating the lost and the heroes, but were disturbed by the medium / genre, and disturbed that someone could make a profit off the venture. A spokesperson for the card company said, "in this case, the medium is not the message," but of course he was wrong. The medium continued to be the message, and even though the manufacturer wanted to send a different message, the history and power of the medium / genre could not be overcome with one gesture. 2. In Wired, April 2003, designer Bob Greenberg succinctly a kind of media ecology: the ways in which new media "remediate," change, push-around other media: "MTV combined film and music with faster editing and graphics, which really grabbed a younger demographic. It was really an extension of film language, adapted by television. The web is a new language, the first new one to come along since the introduction of film. The difference is that it's global and it's local and it cuts across age groups. That's why the impact of the Web will be much greater. The Web is MTV on steroids." In tetrad terms: Enhancement. When asked what the downside of "the web changing everything" is, he says: "I particularly notice the loss of the individual creator. There used to be one person sitting in front of millions of dollars of equipment--now there are eight people working collaboratively. This is one reason I collect outsider art‹to remind myself of the importance of singular vision. You have to have a point of view. " In tetrad terms: Obsolescence. |
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