What I Learned Over Summer Vacation: Reflecting and Wrapping Up my Independent Study

So! This summer has proven itself to be a very long end to a very long school year. As such, I managed, despite all of my best efforts otherwise, to wind out the year with the same work ethic that had carried me throughout (read: a not so great one). However, despite my frazzled-ness, I feel like I have accomplished something this summer, particularly with the independent study readings that I have completed. In short, I’ve learned a lot, and I would like to end this series of blog entries with a reflection on just what exactly I have learned and what I will be taking with me into my own studies.

My original purpose for doing these reading hours was to better situate myself (and my brain) within the conversations and works that have provided the foundation for digital media studies for a field. Originally, my goals were quite lofty–a book per week, really–but once I finally started reading McLuhan, extending his work into a couple, then three, weeks, I eventually realized that ten books wasn’t going to be possible with two other classes.

In the end, I’ve read McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, essays from Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and, finally, Feenberg’s Questioning Technology. (I also happened to read Turkle’s The Second Self for 880 this summer, and while I had planned on addressing that text here, it seemed a bit like double dipping and I was concerned as to whether or not it’d be okay to do that.)

Reading these texts taught me a lot–both about how one goes about conducting readings hours (and how one shouldn’t) which will be a valuable lesson as I continue on in academia as well as how digital media studies has been viewed in the past and now.

Overall, the readings I did could be, I think, split into two categories: social theory and technology theory. Of course there was and is a great deal of overlap between the two categories.

And rather than going over the highlights of my reading experience, author by author, I want to try to synthesize briefly what I have learned and how these two categories work together in conversation.

I think all of the theorists I have read this summer would agree that digital media/technology is not a neutral entity. Nor are they simply tools that are used by humans/agents to contribute or do something in the world. Rather, they are positioned in relationship to society and agents within society in a much more complex manner. While some might argue that the power of technology exists in and of itself and others might maintain that social agents hold the power to wield technology within and/or against the system, power and technology remain complicatedly related.

Ultimately, I haven’t settled yet on where I think the power of technology lies–beyond it to be controlled by agents or within it to be in/of itself. I am inclined to side with Feenberg, to view technology as a tool of the people to be harnessed towards democratic purposes. However, I can also see how the fears and wariness of technology and its technocratic potentiality that are seemingly expressed by Heidegger might dampen the democratic potential. And then, of course, there’s McLuhan…and I don’t know where I would put him within this argument. While he argues that we cannot say that technology is only a means to an end, he also calls it an extension of man…but perhaps man was only ever a medium anyway…

In short: I’m still working it all out when it comes to who is in control of technology. But perhaps the best approach will be, quite simply, to put ourselves in control. To place ourselves in the position Feenberg has proposed and to not allow for determinism to become central to our social beliefs on the function of technology.

But then what would the social theorists say to that proposal? If power is a web that exists as Foucault describes it… Well, actually, if it exists as Foucault describes it then democratic uses of technology might be the perfect entry point into disturbing power structures even as we enact them… perhaps we will have to reinterpret them. That is, create new tactics, as de Certeau defines them, to work within and against the structures that have already strategically been put into place (maybe including technology itself? I don’t know).

Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, particularly cultural capital, would/could position technology/digital media as a new way in which one can become part of the economy. Increased technological skill could translate into increased symbolic capital; or perhaps we view it in the opposite sense–that which is produced and/or occurs online is of less symbolic capital than traditionally sanctioned forms of symbolic capital.

In the end, of course, I am left with more questions than I am answers. However, I feel like I have learned so much about the theoretical conversation that undergirds digital media as a field, and that I have garnered the knowledge and vocabulary–the capital, really–that is necessary for me to not only begin to enter into the conversation but to know where next to look and what questions I’ll want to ask next.

Feenberg’s ‘Questioning Technology’

I. Primary Question and II. Project of the Book and It’s Overall Aim
Feenberg’s primary question revolves around “the fate of democracy” as it is “bound up with our understanding of technology” (vii). This is also related to what he defines as “the purpose of this book”: “to think [about] that vital connection” between the future of technology and democracy (vii).

Feenberg writes that “in all such democratic interventions [e.g. the introduction of human communication via networks originally designed for the distribution of data], experts end up collaborating with a lay public in transforming technology. The process is intermittent and conflictual today, but it is reasonable to to suppose that social control of technology will eventually spread and be institutionalized in more durable and effective forms. What are the implications of this prospect for democracy? That is the political question of technology” (xv).

III. Major Rhetorical Moves
In the first chapter, Feenberg sets up the theoretical conversation surrounding the politics of technology as he views it has been discussed in the past. The main figures whom he seems to focus on are Habermas and Heidegger. Of these two theorists, Feenberg writes “both…rely on the Weberian hypothesis that premodern and modern societies are distinguished by the degree to which previously unified domains such as technology and art have been differentiated from each other” (15). Moreover, he argues, according to these theorists this distinction makes technological progress possible because it elevates the technological object/process over the subject who uses the technology (15). Ultimately, the problem Feenberg seems to have with their theories is the “basic problem [of] essentialism” (17). Feenberg argues in this chapter that the absolute categories—even of subject an object—that these theoretical predecessors have developed have ignored and/or elided key elements to the theorization of technology’s social role. Specifically, Feenberg says, their work overlooks the fact that “real action always has a socially and historically specific context and content. What do they actually mean by the enframing of being or the objectivating, success oriented relation to nature? Can abstract definition such as these serve as the foundational purpose to which they are destined in these theories?” (17). Not unlike Foucault’s theories of knowledge and history, Feenberg calls in this first chapter to recognize and theorize technology not in any abstract sense but rather to pay attention to its rhetorical situation. This, it seems, is a key contribution on Feenberg’s part to the theorization of technology and its role in society.

I was also very intrigued by the relationship between technology and democracy that Feenberg seeks to develop in this book. Feenberg seems to situate democracy as oppositonal to technocracy. Feenberg writes that he aims to “articulate [the] conception [of] a third position that is neither technocratic nor [a] romantic [vision of democracy]” (76). According to Feenberg, “the crux of the argument is the claim that technology is ambivalent, that there is no unique correlation between technological advance and the distribution of social power” (76). The ambivalence, he writes, “can be summarized in…two principles” which he feels undoes the technocratic model’s foundation: “1. Conservation of heirarchy,” which states that social hierarchy is reproduced and maintained even as technological advances are made, i.e. power structures and institutions remain, and “2. Democratic rationalization,” which maintains that “new technology can also be used to undermine the existing social heirarchy or to force it to meet need it has ignored” (76). These principles, according to Feenberg, begin to illustrate the points of the “counter-argument in favor of democratization” and the rationality behind “informal public involvement in technical change” (76).

Feenberg holds that to develop the rationality of democratization one must compare the theories of determinism and constructivism; ultimately Feenberg lands on the side of the constructivist viewpoint, writing: “Constructivism argues, I think correctly, that the choice between alternatives ultimately depends neither on technical nor economic efficiency but on the ‘fit’ between devices and the interests and beliefs of the various social groups that influence the design process” (79, emphasis his).

Overall, really, Feenberg seems to be arguing against the arguments that have been proposed by previous philosophers regarding technology, specifically Habermas and Heidegger, that position technology as autonomous entities—who exist beyond/outside the control/agency of society and individuals—and as that which, in their independence and ultimate utility (I’m thinking here of Heidegger’s reference to technology as a way/means to the truth), will lead naturally to a technocracy. Feenberg wants to counter this vision of technology, arguing for its democratic possibilities. As he writes in his conclusion to the text, “if we define technology exclusively in modern capitalist terms, we ignore many currently marginalized practices that belonged to it in the past and may prove central to its future development” (223).

IV. Intersections between Author’s Interests and my Own and V. Questions
I particularly enjoyed reading Feenberg’s work as it, first, took up one of the social aspects of digital media that I find most exciting—its democratic potential, and second, I felt it was a wonderful text to end with as it responded to some of the theory I have read this summer (e.g. Heidegger’s).

Admittedly, in my end-of-quarter panic, I read through this work fairly quickly and will have to give it another read through, but I am left with some questions.

Specifically, while I wholeheartedly agree that digital media and technology offer many possibilities for democratic work and subversion of institutions and power within the public sphere, I am still wondering whether democratic work is as absolutely possible as it is made to seem in his work. There are still issues, as always, of access and difference that I think need to be taken up, especially in the everyday, real world context in which digital media and technologies are used.

But, I think wikipedia and its amazing growth is an example of the truth in Feenberg’s work. Technology, as he writes and as wikipedia shows, has created an entirely new avenue for the development of new democratic practices as well as, I think, the potential for a return to and revaluing of doxa as a form of truth. Moreso than any other space, I think, that we publicly access day-to-day, the internet has become a forum in which doxa is created. While at the moment we teach wary consumption online, including teaching people to read critically for sites and information that may be ‘untrue’, I really think digital media presents a new opportunity for us to rethink and redefine, rhetorically, what truth and information mean on an everyday basis in our culture. That is, we have a tangible example of the ways in which knowledge is constructed at our disposal and I think we should use them as such.

Social Theory and Digital Media: Foucault, Bourdieu, and de Certeau.

For this post, I thought it would be better to tackle the three social theorists I have read together rather than addressing them apart. Issues of economy and efficiency aside, these three thinkers seem to absolutely be in conversation with one another and I felt that addressing them alongside each other would benefit me as I worked to synthesize their theories.

Accordingly, I’ll only be generally following the road map that I’ve been using in previous posts. I certainly will be using it as my organizational scheme, but it may get a bit messy.

I.Primary Question
Each of these texts engage with multiple questions (especially Foucault’s Power/Knowledge as it is a collection of essays), but I think most generally the issues that are taken up in these texts circulate within and around the themes of power, knowledge, and the individual. By knowledge, here, I refer more to ways of knowing (maybe episteme?) rather than any coherent set of facts or a knowledge base. I think all of these texts are concerned with how we know the world and make sense of it. All are also, I think, concerned with both the what and how of power as well as the what and how of the individual.

II. Project of the Book and Its Overall Aim

Each of these texts aim to theorize (or create a philosophy) of the relationship between power and the individual/society. I would also argue that all of these texts are concerned with everyday life, although de Certeau may be the only one to call it precisely that. However, all three are interested in the ways in which power is operated and deployed in the everyday activities of individuals—both singularly and collectively.

III. Major Rhetorical Moves/IV. Intersections between the Author’s Interests and my Own

For the major rhetorical moves, I will examine the key terms and ideas that each author has gone over that I found to be important.

For Foucault the key idea, for epistemological concept, that I want to take away from reading these essays is his use of thinking in “both/and” terms. It seems to deconstruct binaries, Foucault’s default move is to level the playing field between opposing ideas/things and to treat them equally. So maybe this is simply just the deconstructive move that I am, in fact, admiring in his work. Regardless, I find that as I think of the problematic relationship between power, knowledge, and the individual, the best approach for working through the truths of existence (e.g. the real conditions that we encounter everyday) and the concepts that Foucault develops is to consider them within a both/and framework. As I think I sensed in his discussion of the individual, this both/and prospect of existence seems to make room for action and change; this space for change is something I hadn’t yet encountered in my readings from Foucault, and it was very encouraging to see.

Also very important concepts to take away from this work are, I think, his definitions of power, truth, and the individual. Foucault defines power throughout the essays I read, but the most encompassing definition comes from the essay entitled ‘Power and Strategies’; Foucault writes:
I would suggest rather…: (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network; (ii) the relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations…for which they play at one a conditioning and conditioned role; (iii) that these relations don’t take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organised into a more or less coherent and unitary strategic form…; (v) that power relations to indeed ‘serve’, but not at all because they are in the service of an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are ‘in the service of’ an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised (142).
The incorporation of resistance into his definition of power (using the both/and sort of approach I was trying to articulate) while simultaneously stating that there are “no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network” illustrates the complexity of Foucault’s idea of power and how it operates. But what I most value in this definition is its affirmation that despite (or maybe because of?) powers all-encompassing existence, it isn’t entirely oppressive. There are gaps, it seems (maybe like Gramscii’s theory of hegemony), and even as power is reproduced it can be simultaneously contested.

Power, it seems, is the force that Foucault places as responsible for the construction of both the individual and truth. Nothing exists outside of it in his estimation. He defines the individual as “an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation” (98). Power produces the individual by regulating and disciplining the individual and the social body through discourse. Similarly, power constructs truth: “…Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” (131). What I like best about Foucault’s concept of truth is his insistence that it is “a thing of this world” (131); granted, I have never been a fan of Plato but I like to see Foucault plainly define truth as a social construct.

Finally, Foucault also interestingly discusses the theory/practice split, specialization within the university, and the figure of the intellectual. Although I am not precisely sure it is altogether true, Foucault writes that “some years have passed since the intellectual was called upon to play [the] role [of the spokesman of the universal]” and
a new mode of the connection between ‘theory and practice’ has been established. Intellectuals have got used to working, not just in the modality of the ‘universal’…, but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them…. This has undoubtedly given them a much more immediate and concrete awareness of struggles (126).
With this shift in the theory/practice divide that Foucault cites, he sees the emergence of the specific intellectual (126). Specialization within the university, according to Foucault, lends itself to localized constructions of knowledge that seem to function in response to the monolithic constructions of truth that had preceded in the 18th and 19th centuries. I think Foucault, writing from a position situated in the wake of 1968, is far more primed to make such a statement then we may be. I still think this is a potentiality that we have not necessarily recognized in the academy. Certainly, I think we’ve at least recognized, if not maintained, the imperative for situated/localized knowledge, but I don’t think it has necessarily moved us towards action and change, as Foucault implies here. Maybe did it in Europe, and maybe it could here. But I think the social constructivist legacy has made me more wary of the problematics of change for/towards democracy. That is, I’m still trying to figure out how to find the balance between respecting difference and striving towards some sort of universal, humanist goal.

Foucault also makes important commentary, though, on the role of the intellectual in society, arguing against the isolated, white tower existence that has been the condition for so long: “…Even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic, if not as priniciple elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection” (127). Foucault calls for the intellectual to acknowledge his/her position as a reinforcer of power and as located in a position of privilege:
“And what is called the crisis of the universities should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication of and re-inforcement of their power-effects as centres in a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who virtually all pass through and relate themselves to the academic system” (127).

Thus, he argues that the specific intellectual, which “has emerged since the Second World War” is at a point at which “the function of the specific intellectual needs to be reconsidered. Reconsidered but not abandoned” (130), with the intellectual paying greater attention to the power they wield, their political responsibility in positions of power, and their ability to shape and disseminate discourse/truth/power.

From Bourdieu, I find that his key concepts, most generally, the idea of communication systems as economies of power to be most interesting and important.

Key, of course, are the ideas of types of capital and the habitus. The editor of my volume of Language and Symbolic Power summarizes the concepts well in his introduction. Of habitus he writes: “The key approach that Bourdieu employs in developing his approach is that of habitus. (…) The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes, which are regular without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’. (…) The habitus also provides individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily live” (Editor’s intro, 12-13).

And on the forms of capital, he writes the following: “One of the central ideas of Bourdieu’s work, for which he is well known among sociologists of education, is the idea that there are different forms of capital: not only economic capital in the strict sense…, but also cultural capital (i.e. knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications, ‘symbolic capital’ (i.e. accumulated prestige or honor), and so on. One of the most important properties of fields is the way in which they allow one form of capital to be converted into another…” (Editor’s intro, 14).

These two concepts seem like they will be the most useful ideas to take from Bourdieu’s work and apply to my own. Habitus seems like a very useful term for describing the ontological process/experience that forms the individual (through power) as Foucault conceives of it. That is, the habitus seems to bring the focus down to the individual, illustrating how he/she becomes an interpreter and re-enactor of power’s discourse. The forms of capital are also highly useful ideas, especially (as editor Colin Gordon notes) when thinking about education.

It was also striking, to me, how much the system of education was brought into play in Bourdieu’s work. Truly, he seems to locate it as the key site of indoctrination—or perhaps inculcation—in the formation of the individual. For us as educators, and scholars invested and interested in education and its outcomes, this insight is extremely important—both for how it illuminates how much power we wield as educators (as Foucault argued) as well as for how it rather unforgivingly raises the stakes for education as a mode of citizen-production. Indeed, as he puts it, the educational system is responsible for constructing the terms of the cultural/symbolic market, teaching students to conform to it (and setting up barriers for those who cannot perform to that standard: “The educational system…no doubt directly helped to devalue popular modes of expression…. But it was doubtless the dialectical relation between the school system and the labour market…which played the most decisive role in devaluing dialects and establishing the new hierarchy of linguistic practices” (49).

From de Certeau the definitions of, and distinctions between, tactics and strategies are two highly useful concepts that I think provide ways of thinking about the resistance to the power that Foucault’s definition of power seems to make room for. And, of course, the topic of study itself, everyday life, is absolutely of interest to me, and I think extremely relevant to my research interests.

Everyday life, according to de Certeau, are “ways of operating” which “constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociolcultural production” (xiv). This definition is similar to Bourdieu’s habitus, but I think it differs in that de Certeau seems to depend on both the compliant and resistant aspects of the relationship between the individual and power structures whereas Bourdieu’s definition of habitus doesn’t seem to precisely capture both complicity and resistance as de Certeau’s does.

De Certeau defines strategies as “the calculus force-relationship which becomes possible when a subject of will and power…can be isolated from an ‘environment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it” (xix). Thus, strategies construct the structures/institutions that exist within a place that seems to exceed time, based on de Certeau’s model.

Tactics, by contrast, are “a calculus which cannot count on a proper (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing to the other. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. (…) The proper is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’” (xix). Later on in the text, de Certeau introduces the concept of kairos into his discussion. As I think both the use of kairos and his definition of tactic show, de Certeau’s understanding of tactics as subversive actions/possibilities for the other are quite rhetorical. Thus, using strategies and tactics as organizing concepts or even analytical lenses or methodologies, I think, has quite a bit of pedagogical potential. Not only do these terms emphasize a critical engagement with those structures who have strategized enough to obtain a proper but these these terms—together and tactics itself—also illustrate the importance of rhetorical situation, exigency, and kairos (although, kairos may encompass exigency and rhetorical situation) as they are important to everyday life.

V. Questions

While I know Foucault tended to basically align himself against—or at the very least disagree—with Chomsky and his concepts, Bourdieu seems to draw upon them, at least as a starting point. Is this a fair assessment? At the very least, Bourdieu’s work does seem to draw on the premise of linguistic capacity as universal; perhaps this accounts for the slightly

To conclude—to get an accurate picture of these three thinkers, I think it was imperative to read them all together, to see how they are working with similar concepts and responding to one another (or rather responding successively).

Also, I am still working on my last two posts—one on Feenberg and a reflective post. Unfortunately I have failed to meet my own deadlines, but I will post them this week, as well as with some quote posts.

Foucault Quotes!

{posted for easy access in the future}

Quotes: Foucault, Michel.Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

“…one might describe as a febrile indolence—a typical affliction of those enamoured of libraries, documents…’ (Foucault 79).

“It would all accord too well with the busy inertia those who profess an idle knowledge, a species of luxurious sagacity, the rich hoard of the parvenus whose only outward signs are displayed in footnotes as the bottom of the page” (Foucault 79).

“I mean to speak of the great warm and tender freemasonry of useless erudititon” (79).

“By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation” (81).

“…namely a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the heirarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (82) → pedagogy and democracy

“Our task, on the contrary, will be to expose and specify the issue at stake in this opposition…of knowledges against the institutions and against the effects if the knowledge and power that invests scientific discourse” (87).

“…in the first place, is power always in a subordinate position relative to the economy? Is it always in service of, and ultimately answerable to, the economy? Is its essential end and purpose to serve the economy? Is it destined to realise, consolidate, maintain and reproduce the relations appropriate to the economy and essential to its functioning? In the second place, is power modelled upon the economy?” (89).

“What means are available to us today if we seek to conduct a non-economic analysis of power? Very few, I believe. We have in the first place the assertion that power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action. Again, we have at our disposal another assertion to the effect that power is not primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but is above all a relation of force. The questions to be poses would then be these: if power is exercised, what sort of exercise does it involve? In what does it consist? What is its mechanism? There is an immdiate answer…: power represses” (89-90).

“Then again, there is a second reply we might make: if power is properly speaking the way in which relations of forces are deployed and given concrete expression, rather than analysing it in terms of cession…, should we not analyse it primarily in terms of struggle, conflict, and war?” (90).

“…the how of power” (92).

“Hence we have a triangle: power, right, truth” (93).

“In a society such as ours…there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association” (93).

“We are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or to discover the truth. Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalises, professionalises, and rewards its pursuit” (93).

“When we say that sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies, what we mean basically is that the essential function of the discourse and techniques of right has been to efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present the latter at the level of appearance under to different aspects: on the one hand, as the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other, as the legal obligation to obey it. The system of right is centered entirely upon the King, and it is therefore designed to eliminate the fact of domination and its consequences” (95).

“It is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices. What is needed is a study of power in its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship with that which we can provisionally call its object, its target, its field of application, there—that is to say—where it installs itself and produces its real effects” (97).

“Power is employed through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application” (98).

“The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation” (98).

“This new type of power, which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty, is, I believe one of the great inventions of bourgeois society. (…) This non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty, is disciplinary power” (105).

“I believe that all this can explain the global functioning of what I would call a society of normalisation” (107).

“And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (117).

“For a long period, the left intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice. (…) Some years have now passed since the intellectual was called upon to play this role. A new mode of the connection between theory and practice has been established” (126).

“The intellectual par excellence used to be the writer: as a universal consciousness, a free subject, he was counterposed to those intellectuals who were merely competent…” (127).

“And yet I believe intellectuals have actually been drawn closer to the proletariat and the masses, for two reasons. Firstly, because it has been a question of real, material, everyday struggles, and secondly because they have often been confronted, albeit in a different form, by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the property speculators, etc. This is what I would call the ‘specific’ intellectual as opposed to the ‘universal’ intellectual” (126).

“…writing, as the sacralising mark of the intellectual, has disappeared” (127).

“…Even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic, if not as priniciple elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection” (127).

“And what is called the crisis of the universities should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication of and re-inforcement of their power-effects as centres in a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who virtually all pass through and relate themselves to the academic system” (127).

“It seems to me that this figure of the specific intellectual has emerged since the Second World War” (127).

“It seems to me that we are now at a point where the function of the specific intellectual needs to be reconsidered. Reconsidered but not abandoned” (130).

“…Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” (131).

“It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in the intellectual is not the ‘bearer of universal values’. Rather, it’s the person occupying a specific position—but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth” (132).

“I would suggest rather…: (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network; (ii) the relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations…for which they play at one a conditioning and conditioned role; (iii) that these relations don’t take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organised into a more or less coherent and unitary strategic form…; (v) that power relations to indeed ‘serve’, but not at all because they are in the service of an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are ‘in the service of’ an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised” (142)

update!

The books have been read…for many days now…and the blog posts will be here on Friday!

Edited to add: By Friday, I’m seeing that I really meant Sunday.

where things stand, the second

Only just realizing that it is, in fact, week eight of the quarter and that I have accomplished, well, next to nothing, for this independent study, I feel compelled to take stock and do a little housekeeping.

In true, panicky end of quarter form, my plan now stands as follows:

1) Read from Foucault’s Power Knowledge, Feenberg, DeCerteau, and Bordieu by the end of the quarter. 2) Blog on each work by the end of the quarter. 3) Write a reflective entry that tries to bring some cohesion to all of the reading I have done, as well as some hints of mea culpa, and articulating for myself what I have learned and what steps I will be taking next.

In all, I feel like a massive failure, really, when it comes to this independent studying. But, that failure has itself been a learning experience, especially as I begin my life in academia.

Anyway, this is where things are at the moment. The next two weeks promise a flurry of activity, but then they always do.

Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”

I. Primary Question
In this essay, the main question driving this work broadly seems to be what is technology? More specifically, Heidegger wants to answer the question of what the essence of technology is as well as how man’s relationship to technology can be defined.

II. Project of the Book and Its Overall Aim
In this essay, The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger’s main aim seems to be to explore or question what technology is. Heidegger opens the essay by explaining that “Questioning builds a way. (…) The way is a way of thinking” (3). Thus, Heidegger sets out to explore technology and the question of what it is while maintaining “a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology” (3).

He adds: “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it” (4). Here, Heidegger qualifies his purpose as it was originally stated, in that he wants to emphasize the nature of the relationship between man and technology as it has been conceived and how it should be conceived of in the future. Like McLuhan, Heidegger argues that technology is not merely a neutral, tool without influence but rather that the medium can be the message and that we must pay attention to the potential effects and influences of technology.

He rephrases (and reaffirms) his purpose later on in the essay, writing “We are questioning concerning technology in order to bring to light our relationship to its essence” (23). This sentence restates his overall aim and primary driving question. He follows it with the answer to this question, and thus his main argument: “The essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call Enframing,” which he defines as “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (23).

III. Rhetorical Moves and Major Arguments
After going through the important quotes in this article, typing them up and piecing them together, I am beginning to feel like I can piece together the major pieces of his argument.

I will start with his methodology, which is a rhetorical point in and of itself. Heidegger uses “questioning” to “build a way” towards an understanding of technology and the human relationship to it. This method of exploratory theorizing leads to some rather winding and complicated statements and moves. However when coupled with two of his main points—the essence of technology is not a simple definite what-ness as we might have assumed and that it belies causal logic as we have known it—this method makes particular sense (however difficult that sense is to parse out).

After going back through the essay and typing up what I felt were some the major points made, I think I can begin to categorize his essay as being predominantly concerned with the following: defining logic; defining technology; and defining truth. These three concepts interplay with each other and work mutually to construct the relationship between man and technology that Heidegger is questioning.

Heidegger discusses the shift that has occurred in logic with the advent of technology. Heidegger writes: “For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes… [including] the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance the silversmith. (…) But suppose that causality, for its part, is veiled in darkness with respect to what it is?” (6). Here, Heidegger illustrates that while we have generally taken cause as the primary reason for being or essential aspect of something, this is actually an artificial –or maybe constructed—designation. Moreover, man is not the essence of anything or its cause: “The silversmith is not a causa efficiens” (8). Rather, Heidegger explains that in the creation of technology, man (or in his example) “The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacrificial vessel’s bringing forth and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure” (8).

Thus (I think, but am open to correction on this point) essence can be understood as something’s “bringing forth” and “resting-in-self” (i.e. being) (8). But, as mentioned, bringing forth is not just creation; rather, it is revealing: “The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say ‘truth’ and usually understand it as the correctness of an idea” (12).

With this, Heidegger moves beyond the anthropological and instrumental definitions of technology that he gives in the beginning of the essay: “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e. of truth” (12).

To illustrate how this is possible, that technology is both revealing and the revealed, Heidegger turns to the Ancient understandings of techne. He explains, “From earliest times until Plato, the word techne is linked with word episteme. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides and opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing” (13). Thus techne refers to both skills of doing as well as an art in and of itself; techne points to both revealing and being simultaneously.

Technology is perhaps better understood with this etymology. It both reveals truth for man and is, in and of itself, a whole, artistic being/thing. It is not simply a means to an end and a human activity. It is rather always already the end and the activity of itself. It doesn’t depend on man, nor are we fully in control of technology, as Heidegger’s warning at the start of the essay seems to imply. Rather, we seem to extend ourselves alongside technology, as McLuhan might argue. It seems that we have a more cooperative relationship with technology, I think.

Of Enframing, Heidegger writes: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which itself is nothing technological” (20). Thus, enframing can be called the essence of technology because it is the force (I guess) that always calls technology into being; it generates technology as a method of revealing truth, or the standing-reserve.

“Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes” (35).

IV: Intersections between Author’s Interests and My Own
Well… I’m not sure. I feel that part of Heidegger’s trickiness in comprehension has made it difficult for me to immediately grasp why he’s going to be important to my work.

His use of Ancient Greek concepts and weaving them into his discussion on modern technologies greatly interests me, though. This is a method—interweaving historical theories, ideas, movements, etc. into contemporary discussions of digital media—that I am particularly interested in adapting and using in my work. History has always seemed to be the perfect place to look to understand what we’re doing in our current moments. But I always come up short when trying to figure out where to go next. That is, historical ideas and concepts usually provide a good foundation for understanding newer phenomena, but once we use history as a lens for understanding, what comes next? The answers are usually the same, but maybe that’s the point.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because I am not sure I fully understand it just yet, I don’t know that Heidegger’s definition of technology is going to be especially useful to me. He does make a point well taken, though, about the essence of technology being more than just a means to an end or a human activity. This emphasis does give technology and the use of technology the value and weight it deserves and needs. I imagine in his historical moment, these points were very important to make. As McLuhan wrote at one point in Understanding Media, it’s silly to think that technology is value neutral and message-less; rather, as Heidegger says, it reveals the truth. At the very least, we imbue it with the power to, that is we believe it can, reveal the truth. As such, it does need to be taken seriously in and of itself, as a whole entity, as it were.

V. Questions/Comments/Concerns
I am primarily concerned about what I am not getting here or what I am reading incorrectly. I have to go back and reread Penny’s blog entry on Heidegger to get her take on this text. More importantly, Heidegger, like Derrida, seems to be one of those theorists who warrant multiple reads and who you have to learn how to read to get to the heart of what is being said. So, my first read through, I think I’ve parsed enough out to mull over, but it’s certainly a text I will have to revisit. And perhaps for 880 this Fall, it will be useful to do so.

Penny—feel free to leave comments; perhaps we can start a mini-dialogue here!

McLuhan Part II

I. Primary Question the Author is Trying to Address
Part Two of Understanding Media furthers the question that part one poses: in short, how can media be understood as extensions of man? Furthermore, McLuhan also examines how different types of media have effects on society and humankind.

II. Project of the Book and its Overall Aim
Following the theoretical working-definition set up of part one, part two seems to put McLuhan’s ideas into action and examines different media with his theoretical framework in mind. Thus, each chapter in this section contributes to the understanding of media as an extension of man by examining each different medium within the theoretical framework he has established. These chapters engage with the ideas of the medium as the message, how media is decentralized, etc.

III. Rhetorical Moves and Major Arguments
I did not read every chapter in part two of Understanding Media, but I will examine closely the chapters I did read here.

Chapter 8, The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil? As a start to the second part of McLuhan’s book, the subject of this chapter is particularly striking. As the first medium he examines within his theoretical framework, the spoken word might seem to be an unlikely choice. But, with what has preceded this chapter, it seems to make some sense. In part one, McLuhan explains that the medium is the message and as a result each medium contains another medium; this containment seems to occur ad infinitum except to the point at which one reaches pure media such as light and thoughts. Within this framework speech can be viewed as a medium/extension of man. The most important move McLuhan makes in this chapter is, in effect, to denaturalize the natural by calling attention to the arbitrary constructed-ness of spoken language. It seems effective as well to frame this section with a discussion of the extension of man that is perhaps the closest to us (i.e. if we were to map out extensions and auto-amputations, I think we would/could say that in the series of amputations speech might be the first, in which our thoughts become mediated by spoken words).

“The patterns of the senses that are extended in the various languages of men are as varied as styles of dress and art. Each mother tongue teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of acting in the world, that is quite unique” (114).

Chapter 9, The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear In this chapter, McLuhan proclaims that “Western man has done little to study or to understand the effects of the phonetic alphabet in creating many of his basic patterns of culture” (118). He follows this statement by saying it may already be too late, in the electric age, to address this question, but he’s going to do it anyway. And in examining the issue–how the phonetic alphabet has created basic patterns of Western culture–McLuhan is able to illustrate and argue that “the phonetic alphabet, alone, is the technology that has been the means of creating ‘civilized man’–the separate individuals equal before a written code of law” (120). Thus, McLuhan charges phonetic literacy with the creation of the individual (a fair enough claim, perhaps) and in turn with the creation of Western civilization as we have known it. However, as he will illustrate later in part two, while this shift has created civilization as we know it, it is also seemingly ill-suited to account for society as it is becoming in the electric age.

Chapter 12, Clothing: Our Extended Skin I read this chapter not because I think it’s particularly relevant to my scholarly interests but because I like clothes. I also like performance theory, and since clothing goes well with that, I figured this would be a good chapter to look at.

In this chapter, McLuhan seems to mark the shift from the industrial, visual, patterned and alphabetic-literacy oriented culture to a decentralized, diffusely sensorial, electric culture/age. He writes: “In a word, the American woman for the first time presents herself as a person to be touched and handled, not just to be looked at. … [I]t is relatively easy for us now to recognize clothing as an extension of skin. … Gone are the thrills of strip-tease. Nudity could be naughty excitement only for a visual culture that had divorced itself from the audile-tactile values of less abstract societies” (164-165). McLuhan concludes the chapter by explaining that “the electric age usher us into a world in which we live and breathe and listen with the entire epidermis” (166).

Chapter 13, Housing: New Look and New Outlook McLuhan furthers that important final point of chapter twelve in the following chapter on housing, discussing housing as the equivalent of clothing on a larger social scale. I’m still pondering this chapter and may return to say more about it later.

Chapter 16, The Print: How to Dig It In this chapter, McLuhan makes a few statements that seem important to the work as a whole. First, McLuhan writes about print technology the following: “Repeatability is the core of mechanical principle that has dominated our world, especially since the Gutenberg technology. The message of the print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability” (218). This aspect of print, its repeatability, seems to be important according to McLuhan: “The print in its clumsly woodcut-phase reveals a major aspect of language; namely that words cannot bear sharp definition in daily use” (219). With this statement, McLuhan illustrates how print lends itself to standardization in a literate, visual culture.

Second, McLuhan discusses the movement from visual, industrial culture to tactile, electric culture. He illustrates this shift with an interesting shift in his terminology when discussing the work of Lewis Carroll, first talking about “space-and-time” and then “the electronic age of space-time” (220). Although a minor point, the distinction between these two terms (and seeing these two phrases as distinct terms) could potentially be highly useful for conceiving what has shifted precisely in our conception of space in the electronic age.

Finally, McLuhan concludes this chapter writing: “Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or ‘rational’ space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD.

The dissolution of space-and-time to become space-time seems to be an apt way of describing the shift between the literate culture we have emerged from and the electric age we have entered. The implications of this shift are, as McLuhan points out, that it has created space for Picasso and the Marx brothers, but I am curious about how this has affected our everyday experiences currently. This is something I will try to tease out further later on in the post.

Chapter 17, Comics: MAD Vestibule to TV After reading this chapter, I wonder if it informed McCloud’s understanding comics much. It seems to tackle similar lines of thinking.

According to McLuhan, “the print and the comics provide a useful approach to understanding the TV image,” and “the print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to understanding the TV image” (225). Thus, McLuhan mostly examines in this chapter how the comic was affected by the TV image and how changes in the comic caused by the TV image indicates a social shift and illustrates how the TV image has changed culture.

McLuhan writes: “With the arrival of TV and its iconic mosaic image, the every life situations began to seem very square, indeed. … He [comic artist Al Capp] felt Americans had lost their power to laugh at themselves. He was wrong. TV simply involved everybody in everybody more deeply than before. … Depth involvement encourages everyone to take himself much more seriously than before” (226-227). I find this description of the shift especially intriguing and important to consider, especially forty-five years after this was written, to understand what the potential effects of such a shift as McLuhan theorizes it has been, In short, I don’t think he’s wrong about this at all, and I think this has had some very lasting cultural effects/trends/changes that we have yet to examine from this perspective (as far as I know, at least).

Chapter 23, Ads: Keeping up with the Joneses As ads are likely the most pervasive form of visual rhetoric (or at least, the most pervasive form with the most blatant arguments), I was especially interested to see what theoretical points McLuhan would be making in this chapter. He writes, “To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society”‘ (306). To accomplish this extension of the principles of automation, ads are designed in rather specific ways, which I think reflect their primary aim as McLuhan sees it: “Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell…” (307). McLuhan also points out that “Some writers have argues that the Graphic Revolution has shifted our culture away from private ideals to corporate images. That is really to say that the photo and TV seduce us from the literate and private ‘point of view’ to the complex and inclusive world of the group icon” (309).

The key concepts that he develops here, I think, are the notions of sublimination and iconization.

Chapter 24, Games: The Extensions of Man I found this chapter to be incredibly exciting to read, which maybe is a silly statement but it’s true nonetheless. My excitement stemmed from the fact that this chapter may be the part of this work most relevant to my own scholarly interests–examining how play is a medium and technology (and a rhetorical medium at that…).

McLuhan defines games as follows:
Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image (316).

With this definition, I think McLuhan has given me a rather solid way of answering the question of what we’re doing when we go online. As he writes, “games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions” (317).

Chapter 26, The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim McLuhan illustrates the democratizing power of the typewriter technology in this chapter. He writes: “…The typewriter…carried the Gutenberg technology into every nook and cranny of our culture and economy,” and “as expediter, the typewriter brought writing and speech and publication into close association” (351).

Chapter 29, Movies: The Reel World In this chapter, McLuhan works again to defamiliarize the very familiar experience of film watching: “The business of the writer or film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness” (384). This assessment, I think, still proves to be mostly true of the filmic experience. The subconscious experience of film, like ads, would seem to indicate the importance of critical engagement with the texts.

Chapter 30, Radio: The Tribal Drum In this chapter, McLuhan addresses the influence of radio, comparing it as a medium to television. McLuhan writes the following about radio: “Radio provides a speedup of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice. But while radio contracts the world to village dimensions, it hasn’t the effect of homogenizing the village quarters” (408). This last point seems to be especially poignant to me as I think about online interactions and how communication technologies continue to collapse space-and-time into space-time, but without necessarily causing absolute universalization or homogenization.

Chapter 31, Television: The Timid Giant After reading this chapter (which I think may have been the longest in the entire book), I was most curious as to how one might rewrite this chapter today with the perspective of the forty-five years that have lapsed between McLuhan’s work and now. McLuhan makes many interesting points in this chapter, but to focus on a few, I am highly interested in his use of the term “synesthesia, or unifed sense and imaginative live” (420) to describe the effects of living in a television-mediated world. It would an interesting project, I think, to see how this experience of perception has become a more diffuse practice.

Chapter 33, Automation: Learning a Living In the introduction to this chapter, the editor explains that automation “is characterized as electric logic” (458). With this working definition in mind, I turned to McLuhan’s text. To begin this chapter, McLuhan writes: “Automation is information and is not ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end the world of learning. The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure” (459). What is most striking about the beginning to this chapter is the accurate description it seems to hold in representing our current position in the electric age.

McLuhan goes on to talk about the emphasis automation and electric logic places on process and discusses the outdated model of subject-oriented education. And McLuhan concludes by explaining that electric energy creates decentralization and a new logic that, he seems to argue, mustn’t be panicked over with a guiding vision of a “projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism” because the time of these logics is “now past” (473).

IV. Intersections between Author’s Interests and my own
McLuhan’s insights in part two into the different types of media as extensions of man have really pushed me to start thinking about how some of these concepts could be extended and rethought within out current technological/electric moment.

Most prominently, I have puzzled over the notions of a shift from “space-and-time” to “space-time”, his definition of games, and automation as learning a living.

The idea of “space-time” seems to encapsulate perfectly for me the idea of spatial and temporal realities in online environments. These are elements of online interactivity that I have struggled to discuss adequately but they are still important facets of the online experience that need to be taken into consideration, I think. As spaces in which rhetorical activity happen, online spaces of interactivity are in fact affected by the boundaries and issues of space-time; although many of the limitations of these designations (poor word choice, but how would we term this? dimensions?) have been overcome online, it is interesting to see how they are reconfigured and reconstructed in many ways. Moreover, in some ways space and time, as separate entities and boundaries, cannot be completely overcome nor are they completely collapsed into one another. A tension still exists, I think, but I am interested in exploring how we negotiate these issues online, what they’re effects are, and first and foremost, how we should approach and discuss them.

As I said before, McLuhan’s definitions of games seems absolutely perfect for discussing the sort of rhetorical online activities I am interested in looking at. I will wait to say more on this though until I read Gaming Lives….

Finally, I am interested in the ways in which education as we practice and participate in it may no longer serve our interests in an environment so dictated by electric logic. Reforming education systems would take a long time, of course, and I think there have been plenty of reasons for it to remain subject-oriented as it has. But I am mulling over this notion of education in the face of electric logic, and how students respond to their education. Would they enjoy it more/respond better if we restructured it? Would it be more effective? I guess thinking about WAC initiatives starts to address these concerns in a way. But, maybe that’s still too subject-oriented. What would education look like in a world with electric logic and focused on process primarily?

V. Questions, Disagreements, Concerns
There were many points in Understanding Media at which I had to remind myself that McLuhan was writing in 1964. I also felt at some points he made some statements with very broad sweeps, but this too, I think, can sometimes be effective in theoretical works in starting a conversation.

But I do have to note that one claim he made which was particularly striking was in chapter thirty in which he wrote that “Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have undergone a resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio…” (409). Such a claim seems a bit outrageous to me, and upon review would likely make me read some of his other assertions a bit more carefully.

Given all of this, however, it has been most intriguing to see the points at which his predictions and assessments have proven to be rather shockingly accurate. Moreover, reading this book has been incredibly helpful in providing me with a set of working definitions and concepts that I will be able to tease out and begin to apply to my work and to use to read other critical works to see how McLuhan’s ideas may have framed and/or informed them.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2003.

DMAC reflection

This is getting more difficult than I ever anticipated!

Anyway, my DMAC psa can be accessed here: https://mediamanager.osu.edu/R9cFNTIZX.

My original plan for this reflection was to make a psa as discussed, but I did want it to have a film accompaniment. I felt like the visual aspect would help–mostly because I don’t trust myself as a conveyor of information in an audio format. Alas, the more and more I tried to get the video component to work, the clearer it became that it just wasn’t going to work. I didn’t have nearly enough footage to get it done.

To bring closure to what has been a very drawn out project (for which I am very sorry), I did want to add a bit more reflection on DMAC as a whole and on the psa as a reflective experience (perhaps that’s a bit to meta–reflecting on the reflection?).

As I say in my reflection, DMAC marked the moment at which I felt like I really knew and felt what it meant to be a part of an intellectual community. I suddenly felt like I had entered a field of my peers, and as I shared at DMAC, I remembered and revived my scholarly passion. Participating in this institute and working with scholars from across the country truly solidified for me what it means to be a digital media scholar, and I very clearly saw where I was going and realized where I wanted to be going.

I also feel that having the grad session on professionalization and academic politics with Cheryl Ball and Kris Blair really gave some invaluable insight into what it means to be a graduate student. I’ve had trouble making the transition from undergrad to graduate student, not knowing how to form relationships with my professors and colleagues and unsure what exactly I was supposed to be doing. I feel that after attending DMAC I have a much better grasp on what my professional position is as a graduate student. And although I have only been in grad school for a year now, I can firmly say that no other experience I’ve had has so soundly shown me what I need to be doing. More importantly, no experience has yet to given me as much confidence as DMAC has that I can and want to do this grad school thing. It was incredibly revitalizing after a very long first year.

After attending this year, I hope that next year I will be able to contribute to DMAC. I gained so much from this two week experience, and I hope to be able to give something in return. Whether it is to encourage other OSU grad students to attend DMAC, as my reflection psa aims to do, or to help out somehow with the planning of DMAC, I would love to contribute somehow. For instance, I think the DMAC website could be streamlined slightly–particularly the calendar page–and would be happy to do that.

In all, I am very glad I attended DMAC this year. It provided me with invaluable experiences and enabled me to reevaluate and rethink my scholarly plans and goals. I feel more on track now than I ever did.

where things are at the moment

So! Here’s what’s happening, for interested parties:

1. I am still working on my DMAC reflection, and I am resisting the urge to scrap it and start over again. But, in the interest of time–and considering that DMAC has been over for about a month–I am just going to create a finished draft of what I am working on now and post it. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be something.

2. I’ve finished reading McLuhan’s ‘Understanding Media,’ and I’m organizing my thoughts on it. I hope to have a post completed on it today or tomorrow.

3. I’ll be reading and posting on Heidegger next. I also hope to get that one done and posted within the next couple of days.

That’s where things are at the moment; hopefully my productivity levels are just going to shoot up within the next few days and I’ll hit my stride.