A few pages into Barbara Monroe's Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing and Technology in the Classroom, I felt like my readings for English 467 had come full circle. We're back to defining race, but Monroe uses the term in a new way: "Race, as I use the word in this book, refers to people of color, specifically African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians, all of whom as groups have been historically excluded from the matrix of power and wealth in this country" (21). While this isn't a definition I personally would ever use, it does point to two important understandings in defining race. First, race is not static. It is always changing and is always different depending on one's perspective. Second, we can gain power over this often divisive word by using our agency to define it in the ways that benefit us. Monroe uses it to point out those who "have been excluded." We could also use it as a term that denotes commonality rather than difference, as in celebrations of ethnic (racial?) heritage. I think that this may mean my original definition of race still works for me, although I've now had the chance to explore and complicate it in various ways. Race is a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm. And regardless of the origin of the word, it doesn't have to be used with treacherous intentions.
I am reminded--as was Monroe on page 30--of Paulo Freire's goal of critical consciousness and liberatory pedagogy. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire advocates helping the oppressed (whoever they may be) by teaching them to help themselves. They must be able to see the structures they have to work within and then cultivate a desire to do so. Anything less is pantomime. I particularly like thinking of race, rhetoric, and technology as addressed by Freire through bell hooks. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks points out the openness of Freire's work and life (and examines and ultimately comes to terms with his sexist language). It seems to me that this treatment of the oppressed speaks directly to the issues of access we've been discussing all semester. hooks admonishes us (teachers, in a broad sense) to work as cultural healers, utilizing and modeling tactics for disrupting hegemonic power in ways that are sustainable and productive.
One example of such a tactic comes in Monroe's second chapter, "Putting One's Business on Front Street." In this chapter, Monroe discusses a globally networked learning environment (GNLE) in which 27 Detroit High School sophomores and 27 University of Michigan upperclassmen interacted within a mostly electronic mentor/mentee relationship. Her attention to local and cultural contexts was exciting, and it was fascinating to read actual excerpts of the students' correspondence.
The cultural differences were interesting and a bit frightening. For example, Monroe concluded that the DHS students who "performed" their mentors' introductory emails by using "falsetto voices and with much body English" and "making fun of a person by overdramatizng his speech and gestures" were working within an environment that was "celebratory," "good-natured fun" (44-45). While I realize that I might be rankled by these students' treatment of their mentors because my culture is closer to that of the mentors than the mentees, Monroe could have done a much better job of explaining the culture clash at this juncture. As someone interested in navigating the complexities of culture and race in particular audiences, she should have been attuned to the audience of her book.
I think the study itself could also be critiqued because it is somewhat dated. The correspondences were conducted in the 1996-1997 academic year, and the book was not published until 2004. Dynamics at DHS with access and technological understanding have certainly changed in that time, and it would have been interesting to see some acknowledgment of that. (But, this is a common critique of technology-based books and a problem that is not easy to overcome.)
The parts of this study I was most interested in were the female-female partnerships that were so successful, and code-switching done be mentees, and the "Implications for teaching." I find that analogies pertaining to sex-based oppression often help me understand "the race problem" better than I would otherwise be able to. As such, it came as no surprise to me that the female-female partnerships were generally successful. The discomfort surrounding the sharing of romantic details was an interesting cultural difference to ponder, though. Monroe's discussion of the students' code-switching likewise provides food for thought on the complex discourse communities these students navigate, despite the fact that standardized tests often label such students as "failing." So far as implications for teaching go, I was particularly interested in Monroe's note that English teacheers should be aware of "race-based cultural differences when designing their curricula" (64). Monroe gives the example of using rap music as a pedagogical tool. While some might think this would be appropriate for a school system with a high African-American demographic, DHS found that it posed problems for the religious African American communities that many of their students came from (65). Care must be taken in making such moves.
"Storytime on the Reservation" was also intriguing, and this is the chapter where Monroe returns to her original--problematic, in my opinion--premise that "electronic media--mainly, movies and e-mail--can bridge the gaping maw between home and school literacies" of students. I'm old-fashioned, I know, but I resist the idea of basing a child's education on anything other than good reading. Electronic media can be supplements, and a medium like the Kindle is synonymous to books. But substituting movies and e-mail for books seems to be a very bad idea to me, and one that Monroe doesn't support well enough for me to change my mind. She does mention that this is cultural, and this is part of my resistance. In a primarily oral culture, movies might be a better medium for instilling critical literacy. I concede that this could work ... but the movies would have to be carefully chosen given the nature of Hollywood today, and while e-mails and texting are fine means for getting students to write, I still think they must be able to code switch to SAE to reach their fullest potential. In short, I don't think it's responsible to encourage teachers to switch to using movies and email as their main pedagogical tools without providing a good deal more explanation and support on how to make these tools work for instilling critical consciousness in students.
In this end, though, I think my critique stems from my having goals that are different from teachers at the schools that are discussed. The local needs and goals are far more important--though many politicians don't realize it--than ensuring all students speak and write SAE flawlessly. In answering Cindy Selfe's call to come up with more methods for critical engagement, I think Monroe does a fine job. It's my own cultural situatedness that prevents me from accepting her suggestions. (Although I'm not saying my caution is an incorrect response, just qualifying it.) I wonder at her audience for this book, and I hope she'll write the new book that is suggested by her closing statement that we need to "teach all children, not just children of color, to become interethnically literate" (125).
Works Cited
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Tran. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1968. Print.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. Print.
Selfe, Cindy. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Print.
Showing posts with label tactics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tactics. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
How the Irish Became White
I've been reading Krista Ratcliffe's Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness for another class (English 483: Studies in Rhetoric and Style) and stumbled upon her interesting discussion of race. She defines it as: "a fictional category possessed of all-too-realistic consequences" (13). This seems to jive with previous discussions of race on this blog and in this class.
She also brings up the book How the Irish Became White, which is of great interest to me based on heritage and my general interest in race and culture. I haven't read the book, but here is an interesting review. The book apparently discusses how the Irish, an oppressed "race" in America, became "white" by juxtaposing themselves against Northern freed blacks. By joining "whites" in subjugating "blacks," they assimilated and became thought of as white.
This is also an interesting topic in terms of Certeauian thinking ... what tactics and strategies do we use to re-produce ourselves in order to construct particular social identities and meet particular social goals?
She also brings up the book How the Irish Became White, which is of great interest to me based on heritage and my general interest in race and culture. I haven't read the book, but here is an interesting review. The book apparently discusses how the Irish, an oppressed "race" in America, became "white" by juxtaposing themselves against Northern freed blacks. By joining "whites" in subjugating "blacks," they assimilated and became thought of as white.
This is also an interesting topic in terms of Certeauian thinking ... what tactics and strategies do we use to re-produce ourselves in order to construct particular social identities and meet particular social goals?
Monday, November 16, 2009
Presidents, Star Wars, and Harry Potter: Convergence
It's been a while since I've given serious thought to the convergence of media, but Henry Jenkins strikes me as someone with a pretty good understanding of it. Jenkins points out right away that "people today talk about divergence rather than convergence, but (Ithiel de Sola) Pool understood that they were two sides of the same phenomenon" (10). Jenkins also largely talks about convergence in a way different than the understanding I was first taught. He is interested in how media bring people together in a "participatory culture" and he quickly puts to rest the "Black Box Fallacy" that we will someday have a centralized technology through which run all the media we need. However, he doesn't devote much space to the dangers of corporate media convergence. For example, when the newspaper I worked at was purchased by a different company, the scope of things I could write about changed. Because media ownership is concentrated in a few companies, the issues and people who get shown in the media are an increasingly elite group. Jenkins does address this crisis in his discussion of the 2004 CNN presidential primary debate: "[W]e can see which submitted questions got left out, which issues did not get addressed, and which groups did not get represented" (278). While this is true, people whose access is limited to television cannot see those things. They are victims of media convergence.
But Jenkins also encourages readers to think of media in a new way (although I wish he'd have done more with this). He defines media as: 1) "a technology that enables communication" and 2) a "set of associated 'protocols' or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology" (13-14). This second definition runs parallel to Bray's definition of technology as including social/cultural rituals that affect how people live. This general idea of making transparent the ways in which technologies shape our lives is an important point.
In the chapter entitled "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars," I found the discussion of interactivity and participation to be illuminating. Interactivity is a referent to technologies being designed to elicit and take into consideration user feedback, while participation is more open-ended. Loosely speaking, interactivity could be aligned with strategies (using Michel de Certeau's understanding of the word) and participation could be seen as a venue for tactics.
(Although as Jenkins astutely notes, that isn't always what happens. "Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as somehow 'resistant' to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-up means to keep others down" (293). Having served as moderator for the comments section of a newspaper website in a small town, I have more experience with the nastiness of consumer participation than I ever cared to experience.)
I also enjoyed--and I'll admit, I giggled a little at these terms--Jenkins' deployment of the words prohibitionist and collaborationist in reference to how corporations and other dominant entities respond to fan participation. Prohibitionist, in particular, hails an era of socially accepted rebellion that makes one think these dominant entities may be fighting a losing battle in their quest to close down fan participation. Jenkins' use of Star Wars and Harry Potter to show the interactions of fans and trademark/copyright holders was exciting, largely because those two alternate universes are so popular that they really have become a part of popular culture and as such were fertile sites for this conflict. Popular culture is another term that Jenkins defined very helpfully as "what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture" (140). This is also the point at which passions arise; when a particular story becomes so important that folk culture lays a claim to it, things really get interesting.
And, in fact, I can prove it. This appropriation of storylines and worlds by folk culture results in a sense of ownership by those who consume and/or re-produce these products in such a way that an avid Star Wars fan (ahem) would be a little insulted by a scholar who claimed to have done significant research on SW subculture without learning that the plural of "Jedi" is not "Jedis."
In "Why Heather Can Write," Jenkins does an excellent job of showing how new media can function as a space for children (and adults) to learn in new ways and to teach each other. The stories he tells about Heather Lawver are nothing short of amazing, and they make me wonder about the pedagogical possibilities of fan participation and media interactivity. I'm with Jenkins in thinking the "potential seems enormous" in having "a growing percentage of young writers ... publishing and getting feedback on their work" (187). This is why it is so important for composition scholars to look at the ways that young people are writing and interacting with the world around them and to react to those interactions. This is a field in great need of more work. Even Jenkins makes the mistake of citing studies that show that young people get their news from satirical late-night shows without problematizing the situation. The people who do these studies act surprised that "Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers" (236). In my opinion, this isn't because The Daily Show is the best news source ever. It's because most people who watch The Daily Show also consume the news from a variety of sources and are aware of the biases of those sources. Because Daily Show viewers are predominantly young, surveyors assume they don't consume traditional news outlets as well. But they do. They may not carry around print copies of the Wall Street Journal, but they're informed consumers and re-producers of popular media.
I'd like to end with a reflective note on Jenkins' use of sub-narratives in some of his chapters. In the Star Wars chapter, for example, he ran other stories in the (enlarged) margins. These stories concerned related, but not explicitly connected, topics such as camcorder history, anime, and The Sims. Although the design of the pages made these sub-stories a bit difficult to read, I really enjoyed the hypertextual element they provided and the network they began to weave for readers who are looking for new and exciting avenues of thought.
Work Cited
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P, 2006. Print.
But Jenkins also encourages readers to think of media in a new way (although I wish he'd have done more with this). He defines media as: 1) "a technology that enables communication" and 2) a "set of associated 'protocols' or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology" (13-14). This second definition runs parallel to Bray's definition of technology as including social/cultural rituals that affect how people live. This general idea of making transparent the ways in which technologies shape our lives is an important point.
In the chapter entitled "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars," I found the discussion of interactivity and participation to be illuminating. Interactivity is a referent to technologies being designed to elicit and take into consideration user feedback, while participation is more open-ended. Loosely speaking, interactivity could be aligned with strategies (using Michel de Certeau's understanding of the word) and participation could be seen as a venue for tactics.
(Although as Jenkins astutely notes, that isn't always what happens. "Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as somehow 'resistant' to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-up means to keep others down" (293). Having served as moderator for the comments section of a newspaper website in a small town, I have more experience with the nastiness of consumer participation than I ever cared to experience.)
I also enjoyed--and I'll admit, I giggled a little at these terms--Jenkins' deployment of the words prohibitionist and collaborationist in reference to how corporations and other dominant entities respond to fan participation. Prohibitionist, in particular, hails an era of socially accepted rebellion that makes one think these dominant entities may be fighting a losing battle in their quest to close down fan participation. Jenkins' use of Star Wars and Harry Potter to show the interactions of fans and trademark/copyright holders was exciting, largely because those two alternate universes are so popular that they really have become a part of popular culture and as such were fertile sites for this conflict. Popular culture is another term that Jenkins defined very helpfully as "what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture" (140). This is also the point at which passions arise; when a particular story becomes so important that folk culture lays a claim to it, things really get interesting.
And, in fact, I can prove it. This appropriation of storylines and worlds by folk culture results in a sense of ownership by those who consume and/or re-produce these products in such a way that an avid Star Wars fan (ahem) would be a little insulted by a scholar who claimed to have done significant research on SW subculture without learning that the plural of "Jedi" is not "Jedis."
In "Why Heather Can Write," Jenkins does an excellent job of showing how new media can function as a space for children (and adults) to learn in new ways and to teach each other. The stories he tells about Heather Lawver are nothing short of amazing, and they make me wonder about the pedagogical possibilities of fan participation and media interactivity. I'm with Jenkins in thinking the "potential seems enormous" in having "a growing percentage of young writers ... publishing and getting feedback on their work" (187). This is why it is so important for composition scholars to look at the ways that young people are writing and interacting with the world around them and to react to those interactions. This is a field in great need of more work. Even Jenkins makes the mistake of citing studies that show that young people get their news from satirical late-night shows without problematizing the situation. The people who do these studies act surprised that "Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers" (236). In my opinion, this isn't because The Daily Show is the best news source ever. It's because most people who watch The Daily Show also consume the news from a variety of sources and are aware of the biases of those sources. Because Daily Show viewers are predominantly young, surveyors assume they don't consume traditional news outlets as well. But they do. They may not carry around print copies of the Wall Street Journal, but they're informed consumers and re-producers of popular media.
I'd like to end with a reflective note on Jenkins' use of sub-narratives in some of his chapters. In the Star Wars chapter, for example, he ran other stories in the (enlarged) margins. These stories concerned related, but not explicitly connected, topics such as camcorder history, anime, and The Sims. Although the design of the pages made these sub-stories a bit difficult to read, I really enjoyed the hypertextual element they provided and the network they began to weave for readers who are looking for new and exciting avenues of thought.
Work Cited
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P, 2006. Print.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Bodies in a technologized world
This week's reading provided me with at least two sources that combine several of my own interests. "Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl: Slant from Paper to Pixels" and "Their Logic against Them: Contradictions in Sex, Race, and Class in Silicon Valley" both combined technology and gender in engaging ways. Race certainly plays a role in both of these pieces as well; in the former, the women in question are immigrants, and in the latter, Mimi Nguyen names her ethnicity in the title. Midway through her article I started to wonder ... Can we ("we" being a social/cultural collective) only work on normalizing one perceived personal anomaly at a time? Nguyen tells us that in punk rock's transformation, " the race riot I wanted was clocking in at a very very distant third" behind revolutions regarding gender and sexuality (179). While I understand while we focus on markers of difference, wrong though that may be, I wonder why we have to separate these marked characteristics. Didn't the revolution of attitudes toward sexuality in punk rock do something for perception of race as well? I cannot prove that it did or didn't, but I wish I could read more writing that lets these markers mingle and be messy. These essays reminded me of a class discussion from a week or more ago in which Dr. Haas told us that one belief among black feminist thinkers is that being a female doesn't mean that one knows anything about what it's like to be a black female. Which makes perfect sense, and which is probably something most people don't consider.
Nguyen's discussion of in/visibility was also fascinating. She tells us several times that "in/visibility is a trap" and goes so far as to suggest that the promise of the Internet for "abstract citizenship" depends on one's own narration of one's own body (182). You're only allowed the protection of that abstraction so long as you do not narrate yourself as marked in any way. Once you've done that, there is a sense that visibility becomes an obligation, as evidenced by the hate mail Nguyen received. Thus, while technology can be an equalizing factor, it can just as easily be a means to mark a person and punish them for any perceived refusal to play "by the rules."
I also want to touch just briefly on the passage in which Nguyen discusses her difficulties in finding Asian/American feminist work because every search engine turned up pornography when given her search terms. She criticizes the notion of visibilty being power, paralleling Peggy Phelan's point that "almost-naked young white women" would be running things if visibility were equivalent to power with her own point that Asian women would also be much more powerful. My answer to this is simple: Who says young white women aren't running at least a high percentage of Western culture? I'd say there are an awful lot of young white women with an awful lot of power. Maybe the larger problem is the way that young white women (and Asian women, and any women) conceptualize themselves.
Early in this class, I put forth a possible definition of race: " a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm." I knew at the time that this was a broad definition that would have to be revised, and I think now that I should add something like "a construction of particular rhetorics about a person's physical being, used ... ." And after trying out this addition, I realized that this definition would include gender as a sub-category of race. I think this is interesting, and I'm not ready to toss out that notion yet.
In "Their Logic against Them," Karen J. Hossfeld does an incredible job of showing how the integration of immigrant women's various markers works both for and against them in the factories of Silicon Valley. She also demonstrates how "managers fragment the women's multifaceted identities into falsely separated categories" as a strategy to keep the women subservient. For example, women are so conditioned to believe that being a worker and possessing femininity are mutually exclusive that they make practices to restore femininity a priority (43). Like Nguyen and others, Hossfeld also separates "gender logic" and "racial logic" in order to address the ways in which these logics are used, but she also shows that they always are connected. Just as the managers use fragmentation to employ colonizing strategies, the women use their "unified consciousness" to turn those strategies into tactics to benefit themselves.
The most shocking piece of information I read in this essay--in this whole book--was that "because employers view women's primary job as in the home, and they assume that, prototypically, every woman is connected to a man who is bringing in a larger paycheck, they claim that women do not need to earn a full living wage" (47). While I wouldn't have a problem believing that this is a subconscious motivator in the workplace today, the overt articulations of this feeling in this chapter were outrageous. Such evidence really makes me think hard about affirmative action. As I've previously said, I think affirmative action has been a good thing, but I wondered if it had outlasted its necessity. With cases like this at hand, it's safe to say that affirmative action is still very much necessary.
I've not touched upon any of the other chapters in this text yet, and I feel that I'm not giving them the time they deserve. I thought that Logan Hill's chapter on access to technology was enlightening, although I disagreed with him in a number of places about the ways and reasons that race and technology are connected. Kumar's discussion of the plight of the H-1B worker was another point in favor of affirmative action (although I don't know if affirmative action applies to non-citizens). And the examinations of lowriding, hip-hop, and karaoke cultures were all fun ways to apply some of the ideas we learned from our reading of Michel de Certeau last week. The people within these cultures are certainly poaching products and re-producing them as tactics to gain power and reinscribe their own cultural ideals.
The book referenced above is:
Other interesting reading: My Mulan, a short piece on the Disney movie by Mimi Nguyen
Nguyen's discussion of in/visibility was also fascinating. She tells us several times that "in/visibility is a trap" and goes so far as to suggest that the promise of the Internet for "abstract citizenship" depends on one's own narration of one's own body (182). You're only allowed the protection of that abstraction so long as you do not narrate yourself as marked in any way. Once you've done that, there is a sense that visibility becomes an obligation, as evidenced by the hate mail Nguyen received. Thus, while technology can be an equalizing factor, it can just as easily be a means to mark a person and punish them for any perceived refusal to play "by the rules."
I also want to touch just briefly on the passage in which Nguyen discusses her difficulties in finding Asian/American feminist work because every search engine turned up pornography when given her search terms. She criticizes the notion of visibilty being power, paralleling Peggy Phelan's point that "almost-naked young white women" would be running things if visibility were equivalent to power with her own point that Asian women would also be much more powerful. My answer to this is simple: Who says young white women aren't running at least a high percentage of Western culture? I'd say there are an awful lot of young white women with an awful lot of power. Maybe the larger problem is the way that young white women (and Asian women, and any women) conceptualize themselves.
Early in this class, I put forth a possible definition of race: " a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm." I knew at the time that this was a broad definition that would have to be revised, and I think now that I should add something like "a construction of particular rhetorics about a person's physical being, used ... ." And after trying out this addition, I realized that this definition would include gender as a sub-category of race. I think this is interesting, and I'm not ready to toss out that notion yet.
In "Their Logic against Them," Karen J. Hossfeld does an incredible job of showing how the integration of immigrant women's various markers works both for and against them in the factories of Silicon Valley. She also demonstrates how "managers fragment the women's multifaceted identities into falsely separated categories" as a strategy to keep the women subservient. For example, women are so conditioned to believe that being a worker and possessing femininity are mutually exclusive that they make practices to restore femininity a priority (43). Like Nguyen and others, Hossfeld also separates "gender logic" and "racial logic" in order to address the ways in which these logics are used, but she also shows that they always are connected. Just as the managers use fragmentation to employ colonizing strategies, the women use their "unified consciousness" to turn those strategies into tactics to benefit themselves.
The most shocking piece of information I read in this essay--in this whole book--was that "because employers view women's primary job as in the home, and they assume that, prototypically, every woman is connected to a man who is bringing in a larger paycheck, they claim that women do not need to earn a full living wage" (47). While I wouldn't have a problem believing that this is a subconscious motivator in the workplace today, the overt articulations of this feeling in this chapter were outrageous. Such evidence really makes me think hard about affirmative action. As I've previously said, I think affirmative action has been a good thing, but I wondered if it had outlasted its necessity. With cases like this at hand, it's safe to say that affirmative action is still very much necessary.
I've not touched upon any of the other chapters in this text yet, and I feel that I'm not giving them the time they deserve. I thought that Logan Hill's chapter on access to technology was enlightening, although I disagreed with him in a number of places about the ways and reasons that race and technology are connected. Kumar's discussion of the plight of the H-1B worker was another point in favor of affirmative action (although I don't know if affirmative action applies to non-citizens). And the examinations of lowriding, hip-hop, and karaoke cultures were all fun ways to apply some of the ideas we learned from our reading of Michel de Certeau last week. The people within these cultures are certainly poaching products and re-producing them as tactics to gain power and reinscribe their own cultural ideals.
The book referenced above is:
Nelson, Alondra, Thuy Linh H. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines, eds. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Print.
Other interesting reading: My Mulan, a short piece on the Disney movie by Mimi Nguyen
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