Digital literacy and radical education

Wikiworld, an online book with the subtitle 'Political economy of digital literacy, and the promise of participatory media', provides the kind of theoretical grounding many of us have been missing in much of the fare of literature about digital studies. The long-standing tension between technology and society is presented with reference to Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marcuse (among others); the radical conceptualization of education as life-long, everyday and emancipatory is related to the ideas of Freire and Illich. And the requirement for digital literacy – extending far beyond skill-building and schooling – is sketched and placed within the parameters of Web-based participatory media as exemplified by wikis. The book merits much more considered attention than I am now able to provide; here I merely wish to signal its publication and open access availability, and recommend its study.

Below is a descriptive paragraph from the book website:

The book out now!

Posted in announcements, education, social media, web 2.0 by vatsia on the March 21, 2007

WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media

Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland

In the digital world of learning there is a progressive transformation from the institutionalized and individualized forms of learning to open learning and collaboration. The book provides a critical view on the use of new technologies and learning practices in furthering socially just futures, while at the same time paying critical attention to the constants, or "unmoved movers" of the information society development; the West and Capitalism. The essential issue in the Wikiworld is one of freedom – levels and kinds of freedom. Our message is clear: we write for the radical openness of education for all.

History of communication research bibliography

Following with interest an email-based discussion between Igor Vobic, Maja Turnsek and Saso Slacek on the distinctions between the concepts audience, public, and mass, I began looking for one of the references mentioned and stumbled on probably the most thorough of sources: the History of Communication Research Bibliography (HCRB). No links to online versions, but still valuable… and a RSS feed can be created to be informed of updates, although nothing new seems to have been posted for almost a year….

‘Audience’ as concept relevant to Web 2.0

This week we discussed several of the articles in the First Monday theme issue on Web 2.0 in the Ljubljana seminar, and during that discussion wondered about the relevance of the (mass) communication concept of 'audience' to Web 2.0 environments. During that conversation, Maja Turnsek reminded us of the following publication that may provide a starting point for exploring such relevance:

Renckstorf, K., & McQuail, D. (1996). Social action perspectives in mass communication research: an introduction. In K. Renckstorf, D. McQuail & N. Jankowski (eds.), Media use as social action; A European approach to audience studies, pp. 1-17. London: John Libbey.

The introductory chapter in that book does provide a valuable historical overview and does develop a typology to facilitate understanding the concept audience. The text does not, however, deal with either the Internet or the Web - understandably, since the book was published prior to that era. Similarly, it does not deal with the related notion 'user generated content' (UGC). Although this last notion is generally associated with Web 2.0 developments, the idea of users generating content has a much longer history and dates back to (at least) the late 1960s with the rise of alternative media associated with the counter culture and anti-war movements in the United States and, subsequently, with the rise of public access television in that country and, later, with the coming of community radio and television in Europe during the mid-1970s. This history has been traced is various publications, notably Community Television in Amsterdam (Jankowski, 1988), The People's Voice (Jankowski, Prehn & Stappers, 1992) and Community Media in the Information Age (Jankowski & Prehn, 2002).

No one seems to have placed UGC in an historical perspective such as the one noted above, and no one seems to have considered UGC within a Web 2.0 environment from the perspective of audience. I think the latter would be useful, but I think the conclusion from that exercise would be that the conventional notions of audience lose their meaning in a UGC environment. That environment may, in fact, signal the considerable deficiency to the various formulations of audience enumerated in the Renckstorf and McQuail chapter with regard to Web-based communication - even those in which traditional mass media are active (e.g., online newspapers, Internet-delivered radio and television).

Scholarly discourse supreme: RCCS

Those of you that monitor the Air-list have probably already seen the announcement post from David Silver about the recent book titles that have been reviewed on the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS). This particular list of titles is stunning with respect to the titles, the reviewers and the authors' responses…and all relate to facets of the Ljubljana seminar. Below is Silver's post from the Air-List:

Dear AoIR people,

happy soon-to-be april!

 

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)

publishes a set of book reviews and author responses (

http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ). books of the month for april 2008

include:

 

Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

Author: Lisa Gitelman

Publisher: MIT Press, 2006

Review 1: J. Patrick Biddix

Review 2: David Heineman

Review 3: Michelle Rodino-Colocino

Author Response: Lisa Gitelman

 

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Author: Henry Jenkins

Publisher: NYU Press, 2006

Review 1: Susan Keith

Review 2: Anne Kustritz

Review 3: Darby Orcutt

Review 4: J. Richard Stevens

Author Response: Henry Jenkins

 

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Author: David Weinberger

Publisher: Times Books, 2007

Review 1: Lucinda Austin

Review 2: Geoffrey B. Cain

Review 3: Erika Pearson

Author Response: David Weinberger

 

Online Matchmaking

Editors: Monica T. Whitty, Andrea J. Baker, James A. Inman

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Review 1: Trudy Barber

Author Response: Andrea J. Baker

 

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

 

david silver

http://silverinsf.blogspot.com

Social media & election campaigns, American style

Fred Stutzman posted reflections at techPresident on what he terms the 'social filter' feature of social media and how this seems to be generating a change in political candidate strategies and electorate engagement. Reading his piece, a commentary on a NY Times article, 'Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On', resulted in a longer-than-expected thread of related posts, some of which are summarized / addressed here.

The central point in this series of posts is that electoral politics is changing rapidly and radically; and, if we believe Stutzman's analysis and prediction, politics a decade down the road will be a different animal and hardly reflective of the 'politics as usual' cliché.

To begin with the NY Times article and one of the sources cited therein, a Pew report from last January suggests that media use during the 2008 US election campaign varies consistently and strikingly along age: half of the 50 and older respondents attend to TV for campaign news, 39% of the middle-age voters do so, and only a quarter of the under-30 crowd watch TV for their election news consumption. Some two-thirds of the last group, call them 'youth' for ease, rely mainly on social networking sites for campaign information.

In the context of this thread, social networking sites, although multiple and varied, encompass the very large social contact sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as file sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr and, and that vast terrain known as the blogosphere including 'micro blogging' as reflected in initiatives like Twitter.

The NY Times quote from Pew Project director Lee Rainie sums up the different way youth seem to acquire and process campaign information: "Young people are particularly galvanized in this campaign, and they have a new set of tools that make it look different from the enthusiasm that greeted other politicians 30 years ago …. They read a news story and then blog about it, or they see a YouTube video and then link to it, or they go to a campaign Web site, download some phone numbers, and make calls on behalf of a candidate."

The 'social filter' component of social media is reflected in the personal and informal character, 'between us, in conversation' as Stutzman puts it. He argues that these media are 'identity driven', that is, generated by individuals known in some manner to the other persons within a particular social network. The 'rub', of course, is that the nature of this knowing, the meaning of being a 'Friend' on SNS Friendster for example, is both thin and nebulous (see boyd's elaboration of this feature).

In an earlier post this month, called The Social Media Voter, Stutzman elaborates on how social media are being used in the 2008 US campaign and suggests a typology that he qualifies as a 'brainstorm' rather than research-based construction. Still, this typology has a ring of clarity and, for those of us weaned on various typologies of adoption patterns, familiarity. He suggests four types of social media voters: (1) Window-Shoppers, (2) Toe-Dippers, (3) Communicators, and (4) the Mavans (experts). Persons interested in the description of these categories should consult Stutzman's posting; what is relevant here is that a clustering of social media users in relation to their attention to election-oriented news is possible **and** that there is a increasing shift from consuming to producing such news in the typology. In Stutzman's words, "…the turn isn't consumption of information, but production and communication of information."

Another post from Stutzman, from almost a year ago, entitled 'Authenticity in Social Media', reflects on a conference panel discussing social media and the then upcoming US election cycle. Panelists talked about using these media to humanize candidates and, as paraphrased by Stutzman, to generate "the perception that candidate are actively engaging with digital supporters." He rightly points to the issue of authenticity with regard to social media and wonders whether such political strategy may back-fire – that voter trust may be undermined through such sham-style presentations.

There is, in other words, much to learn about the effective ways in which social media may be integrated into electoral campaigns; some of the comments to this last posting by Stutzman provide nuances of importance, such as one suggesting distinguishing between social media environments which by their nature accentuate socializing and activist networks that have a more action-oriented mandate.

Stutzman's concluding prediction-oriented paragraph merits repeat, in part because of its absolute expression of how tomorrow will be (as an aside, predicting the future is perhaps the most risky of enterprises, resembling more the soothsayer than the scholar) and because embedded in that statement is a hypothesis worth scientific exploration:

"… it is clear beyond a doubt that social media will play significant roles in 2008, 2012, 2016 and so on. The candidates that use social media most effectively will set the precedent that will resound for years to come. I've got a feeling that the candidate that most authentically represents her or himself online will be this precedent-setter, and they'll benefit substantially as a result."

Digital literacy: KNAW conference overview

Yesterday I attended a conference organized by the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam entitled 'Literacy in the Age of New Media' [Footnote: the book 'Literacy in the New Media Age' which was published just a couple of years ago and widely reviewed (see e.g., review1, review2), failed to receive a nod of acknowledgement.]

In a series of postings I plan to sketch and comment on the presentations. Here, in this introductory post, I wish to dwell on the objectives of the half-day event, the program, and the venue.

Beginning with the last, the venue, the Royal Academy is the home of the arts and sciences in the Netherlands. The building, situated in the 17^th century heart of Amsterdam, reflects the history, culture and wealth of the country – all projected in a modest and circumspect Calvinist manner. The conference was organized by a national scholarly commission appointed by the KNAW to consider literacy in a multimedia era. The commission was initiated and is still dominated by humanities scholars and institutions, although this 'bias' is seemingly changing. The new chairman of this commission, for example, comes from the Amsterdam Communications Department, which is – still – dominated by a behaviorist, quantitative conception of communications scholarship. This means, among other things, that the commission is expanding from a humanities perspective on literacy to one more pluralistic and embracing of the social sciences.

The objective of the event, according to the announcement text found on the KNAW website, is to facilitate exchange between media, language and literature scholars; and representatives from educational institutions and from publishing industry active in the world of new media. The final sentence of the conference announcement, in translated form, suggests much: 'a search for refinement of collective analysis and for refinement of the terms through which societal and educational discussion [on the topic of the conference, literacy in the age of new media] can be conducted'. The obvious question, emerging from this objective, is to what degree this conference contributed to such a broad and ambitious intent. Obvious though it is, the question is impossible to answer at this point in anything other than subjective, impressionistic terms. Here, then, are a few personal impressions….

As far as academic conferences go, this event faired well: the speakers were well chosen and knew their trade, the conventional conference formula – presentations and panel, short moments for interventions from the floor, long coffee breaks and a concluding reception – was successfully applied. I genuinely enjoyed the Friday afternoon, in being able to partake of the presentations given and insights shared. That appreciation stated, I nevertheless felt a strong discomfort about the conventionality and predictability of the formula. The formula lacked what is, in fact, the frequently stated component in the new media environment: participation and user-generated content. The conference reflected the way academics have organized such events for decades and the way most of us probably organize our seminars and classes. The personal and 'real' moments of engagement and exchange took place, predictably, during the coffee breaks and during the reception afterwards. The formula lacked creative innovation related to that core component of new media, user generation, because of which the concern about literacy in a new media age has gained prominence. In this respect, the organizers of this conference missed an opportunity to 'go beyond' the conventional formula of presentation and exchange in an effort to contribute to the overriding objective: generation of discourse among members of the academic community.

I know how difficult it is to 'go beyond' such conventionality; most events for which I have shared organizational responsibility have reflected the same features and formula. All too often we seem captives to the 'one to many' notion of communication and, when there are relatively large numbers involved, as in the case of this KNAW event involving some 150 persons, we close our minds to alternatives. I am involved in organizing an ICA pre-conference entitled the Long History of New Media, and we are facing the same organizational difficulty: how to construct a setting within which engagement, participation, can be optimalized? We've considered several alternatives, like a 'speed dating' variant of small group meetings where individuals rotate among groups at pre-determined time intervals and address topics of the event in groups of 10-15 persons. Until now we've come up with nothing better than a wide range of panels with time built into each for audience interventions. I feel this is a far cry from serious participation, but haven't yet come up with any organizational structures that would accomplish more than something as mundane as increasing the duration of the coffee breaks.

Here's the latest description of how the day is organized, sent this week to authors of papers for the event:

We also wish to mention again the particulars about the roundtables at the pre-conference.  In an effort to facilitate exchange, the roundtables will be organized as follows:

a)      First, each participant in the roundtable presents a 5-minute statement concerning their work.

b)      After each participant has presented, there will be a round of interactions between participants.

c)       After this, there will be time reserved for interventions from the floor.

 We are planning to video and audio record the sessions and hope to archive them and make them available to participants via the Web.

 

As I re-examine the procedures, I see little substantive difference with the KNAW approach and expect a blogger afterwards will express the same disappointment I now share in this post with the paucity of participation built into the KNAW new media literacy event… Before it is too late, within the next few weeks, I would welcome suggestions for facilitating engagement among a group of a hundred, using conventional large room university facilities.

 

 

 

Discussion lists and blogs for librarians

Once again, as we would expect, librarians score as ultra-organized professionals active in the domain of information storage and retrieval.

The Library and Information Science Wiki (LisWiki) is a treasure chest filled with the kinds of information professional librarians crave – and the rest of us would like to have access to in our respective fields. One of the treasures on this wiki is a long list of discussion groups devoted to library-type issues. Another is a list of blogs specialized on the profession; another is material, some now classic, on digitalization, which is one of my present interests (exploring ways to digitalize 30-year-old video tapes from one of the very first community television stations in Europe, the Lokale Omroep Bijlmermeer).

If anyone finds similar wikis for the various department labels of communication studies (e.g., media studies, cultural studies, communication science) and Internet studies (also: multimedia, digital studies, ICT, telematics), please let me know….