Mizuko Ito

Mobiles and the appropriation of time

• Because of the frequent use of mobile phones, Japanese youth always have another person socially co-present
• A perception of older generations is that mobile phones are taking away from traditional one-on-one interaction
• Some fail to realize that mobile phones have become devices for augmenting the experience and properties of physically co-located encounters rather than simply distracting from them
• Mobile phones enhance social regulations (ex. Courtesy text for someone waiting)
• Young people use phones in physical encounters as well, many times to aid to or call another into the interaction
• Mobile phones become devices for customizing and personalizing even the most generic of urban places

Intimate Visual Co-Presence

• Modalities of sharing camera phone pictures are likely to evolve considerably in the coming years
• An emergent visual sharing modality –intimate visual presence-is keyed to the personal, pervasive, and intimate nature of social connections via handheld devices
• Sending videos seems to be restricted to an intimate circle of family, friends, and lovers
• Photos are convenient as one being send a picture/video can view it at their leisure
• The efficiency of online photo sites (photo bucket, etc) are being utilized a large amount
• Camera pictures can give people more feelings of togetherness

Ito’s analysis of cell phone use in Japan was very similar to the ways in which people use these devices in America. It was actually rather tedious for me to read her commentary on her findings, not because they were uninteresting, but the information was all things I already knew. I too use my cell phone to send quick messages, hold conversations when I’m bored on the train, and send picture messages to feel a since of “togetherness” with someone from which I am away. I understand the interaction young people have with mobile devices as I am included in these interactions. What I did find interesting about her analysis was the disproof of the demise of face-to-face interaction between young people. Although I frequently use my cell phone, I was among those that believed face-to-face interactions was dissolving in my generation as well. Yet after reading Ito’s anaysis, I now believe that while cell phones can limit the interaction young people have with one another, they are used for social practices that can actually enhance face-to-face interaction as well. When a group of friends are together, the phone can be used to call another and include them in the conversation, reference something from a text message, and more conveniently coordinate appointments so that face-to-face interaction can occur. Just like the multiplicity of features that reside within a mobile device, a cell phone has multiple roles when interjected into face-to-face interaction among youth, whether they are in Japan or America.

CRASH!

Crash is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s genius. The way the seemingly unrelated characters end up saving the lives one another is awe-inspiring and brilliant. This movie is actually one of the things that have ignited my passion for producing positive media for a profession. As exemplified in the film, media is so incredibly influential on the minds of its consumers that it can dictate how people interact, relate and converse with one another. When the owner of the gun shop was rude (to say the least) to the Persian man and his daughter and when the white woman was afraid the Latino locksmith would come back to her home and rob her, these were instances of existing stereotypes (predominately perpetuated through media) influencing the judgment one has of another. Crash was full of such examples. However, it was media that provided the platform for this movie, confronted consumers with these stereotypes, and forced people to think critically about how and why we judge others. Media can be used for good and evil, and I want to use it for good. If I can use media to help stop the perpetuation of stereotypes and instead produce positive and complete depictions of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and the like, I will be proud.

Chapter 2: New Media Childhoods

Author: David Buckingham

Focus: To what extent do media simply impose ‘negative’ messages on passive minds, as many media educators have tended to suppose? To what extent do audiences have the power to create their own meanings and pleasures? And in what ways can children be seen as a ‘special’ audience, with distinctive characteristics and needs?

• Is media killing childhoods, or liberating children?
• In The Disappearance of Childhood, Postman argues that our modern conception of childhood was a creation of the print media, and new media, particularly television, are destroying it
• If capitalism can be said to have created ‘the teenager’ in the 1950s, children are now increasingly addressed directly as a consumer market in their own right, rather than simply as a means of reaching parents
• Children have gained power, not merely as citizens but also as consumers, and indeed the two may have become impossible to separate
• Boundaries between children and adults appear to be blurring, while on the other, they appear to be being reinforced. Children are being ‘empowered’ and yet simultaneously denied the opportunity to exercise control
• In Growing Up Digital, Don Tapscott blames media (specifically digital) technology is to blame for blurring the lines between childhood and adulthood, and sees it as a form of liberation or ‘empowerment’ for young people
• Old vs. new technology

*TV is passive, net s active

*tv dumbs down readers, net raises intelligence

*television broadcasts a singular view of the world, net is democratic and interactive

*tv generation is the antithesis of the net generation

*members of net generation are hungry for expression, discovery and seld-development; tv generation is savvy, self-reliant, analytical, accepting of diverisity-all because of their intuitive relationship with technology

· Proliferation of media technologies: number of channels have increased, convergence between information and communication technologies

· Childhood is not homogenous, it depends on other social factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, social class, geographical location, etc.

· Parents devoting increasing economic resources to child rearing

· Media technology forces parents to catch up with their kids

· Parental/adult responsibility

· New cultural forms (such as video games) are primarily identified with the young

· Children’s growing access to media is generating increasing concern about their exposure to material hitherto largely confined to adults-most obviously to ‘sex and violence’ (both of which are very loosely defined)

· Large majority of children have seen material they should not have legally been able to obtain

· Anyone can put anything on the internet, with access to anyone; no authority

· Via internet, children can communicate with anyone without identifying themselves as children

· Situations have called for stricter regulation and censorship

· Integration and globalization of the media industries

· Integration does not mean homogenization: competition has caused the fragmentation of audiences, rise of ‘niche’ marketing

· Children seen as more valuable as they can persuade their parents to buy things

· Media texts-tv programs, movies, games and other artifacts children are engaging with

· Intertextuality: texts are constantly referring to and drawing upon other texts, often in ironic ways

· Interactivity: a liberation from the constraints of more traditional ‘linear’ media such as film and television

· More technological access means less parental restriction

· TV programs have become films, record, lunch boxes, drinks, etc-children’s media culture increasingly crosses boundaries between texts and between traditional media forms

· Children as ‘getting older younger’

· Oldr children can no longer be easily protected

· Widening gap between children’s outside world and education system

· School is often cite for negotiation between competing conceptions of knowledge and cultural value

· Vital that children understand understand the social, economic and institutional power of media

I disagree with the notion that new media technology is destroying childhoods all across the nation. The traditional, more analog influenced childhood are becoming a thing of the past, but the digitization of the world is not robbing any child of an authentic growing-up experience. Change and difference does not always equate to a bad thing, and eventually we all must recognize the times in which we live in and respond accordingly.

I do agree, however, that new media has helped cause children 'grow up faster younger.' Because of the easy accessibility to things online that would have been prohibited in an earlier time and the ability for anyone to say anything and be anyone without regulation, children can be exposed to more adult things at an earlier time. But the key word is can. There are parental controls that can reinstate regulation and prevent access to such adult topics. There is parental authority that can shut down and regulate what information is provided to a child. People are not handcuffed and unarmed in the face of new media. If digital media does anything for us, it makes us more active consumers and makes communication a two lane highway. We play an active role in what we want to see and what we don't, and parents, schools, and networks have the ability to make those decisions for children.

Lister Chapter 4: New Media in Everyday Life

• Cyberspace, then, is disembodied and exhilarating-promising the new: new worlds, new frontiers, new identities
• Virtual reality has been seen as a new world in direct opposition to the old world of everyday life, of individuals socially and geographically located, a world in which social problems and urban decay are finally overwhelming
• Discussions of virtuality frequently juxtapose the everyday and ordinary with the revolutionary and unsettling
• Everyday life: the family relationships, routines, cultural practices and spaces through which people make sense of the world; on one hand it’s the site in which the popular meanings and uses of new media are negotiated and played out, on the other, nearly all of the discussions of new media, to a greater or lesser degree, make claims that they transform, or will soon transform (or transcend), day-to-day life, its spatio-temporal limits, its restrictions and power structures
• Everyday life is important as:

-the market for which companies develop consumer hardware and software

-the site of practices and relationships in which sense is made of new media

-focal point of an interlocking set of convergences of consumer, media, educational and entertainment technologies and markets

-social conditions which are, to a greater or lesser degree, transformed by the use and consumption of media

• Cyberspace: the network “in” which we communicate with distant others or from which we receive images, information and services, as opposed to the material space of homes, libraries, streets from which we ‘enter’ these spaces
• For the individuals, families and groups studied, Internet media such as email and websites are experienced not as virtual but as ‘concrete and mundane enactments of belonging.’
• Nicholas Negroponte, MIT futurologist & Wired columnist

-Ubiquitous computing: “computers as we know them will…disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, self-cleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs…computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: we live in them, wear them, even eat them (1998)

• Consumer electronics producers refer to ‘black boxes’, a particular configuration of entertainment and/or information technologies packaged as a single, commercially successful product
• Digital media and virtual culture are generally to transcend, or render obsolete, mundane questions of commercial interests or already existing practices of media use
• Shaun Moores are argues, “There is always a degree of closure of possible meanings and uses of media technologies at the point of their manufacture and promotion
• Edutainment: alludes to abroad belief that boundaries are dissolving between education and the consumption of commercial media. This phenomenon is not limited to new media, but it is the digital multimedia forms of CD-ROM encyclopedias and learning games (and new technologies such as interactive whiteboards) that seem to be of central significance
• ‘every primary school will be its own Hollywood’ –Brown, 1999
• Bricolage: adopted by cultural studies to describe the appropriation and manipulation-even subversion-of the meanings of commodities by youth subcultures
• Questions of new media & identity

-Does the everyday engagement with Internet media escape established patterns of embodied, situated, media use?

-What is the relationship, if any, between virtual identity play and the negotiations and constructions of identity in ‘old’ media consumption?

-On what notions of historical, technological or cultural change are these incorporeal virtual identities based?

• Identity versus corporeality (and all the body’s historical and cultural ‘baggage’), the virtual versus the real, play versus consumption, utopia versus the mundane politics and contractions of the real world, cyberspace or VR versus commercial and material communications and information media

Identity in new media is based on how you use it. The websites you visit, the projects you make with it, the people you communicate with as a result of it, are all aspects of one’s virtual identity. In my experience, everyday life influences the way new media is used. New media can make everyday life more convenient and efficient, but the things you do everyday dictate the way you interact with media.

The term edutainment is an accurate depiction of the blur between education and entertainment that has been created as a result of new media. Many programs and advertisements have made to allow people to have fun, but educate them about an issue, product, or a skill at the same time. But is this phenomenon exclusive to new media? Was the intent of the board game “Life” to educate kids on life lessons while entertaining them? Are some books not written to educate and entertain? I think edutainment has been incorporated into the fabric of American culture for decades, and while it may be enhanced, it is not made new my new media.

Jenkins Lecture

Convergence

• Multiplicity of black boxes used for media
• Convergence-can mean everything in one box, or dispersed in many boxes
• Media consolidation-corporation (convergence) vs. anti-corporation (assimilation)
• The flow of stories, ideas, info across all media platforms and channels
• Top –down process made by corporations, bottom-up by consumers
• This intersection is the focal point
• Multitasking is becoming the norm
• Hypertextuality
• Collective intelligence community
• Difference between processing info from television, and processing the info from online communities
• Fan friction-an expansion of text outward in a variety of interpretations
• There were predictions that mass media will die, notably by Negroponte & a writer from Wired, but mass media is stronger than ever
• Interactivity-a product of technology
• Participation-a product of culture
• Expansion of copyright regimes
• Example: army game; more teens find out how army works by playing game, according to surveys, then by watching the news-a result of the online communities created by corporation

Much of Jenkins’s lecture brought up similar and more detailed descriptions of arguments he made in chapter six of his book. Many of his arguments alluded to the ever-continuous debate of technological determinism vs. social determinism. Are the online communities and increase of fan base simply a product of technology, or a virtual extension of what we do in society? I believe it is both. People definitely formed various communites before the introduction of new media, yet the technology took those communities to another level.

What is most interesting is Jenkin’s discussion on multitasking. As I watched him discuss this topic on my computer, I was able to take notes, listen to music, and check email. New media makes more things accessible at a much rapid pace and makes our day more efficient. That is, until the computer freezes from too much activity!

Jenkins Chapter 6

Interactive Audiences? The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans

• “We should change our theory every five thousand miles just like we change oil in our cars. New injections improve performance and keep us from clogging up the system.” –Jenkins
• If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies.
• How the new “participatory culture” is taking shape at the intersection between 3 trends:

1.) New tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content

2.) A range of subcultures promote Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies

3.) Economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship

• “Knowledge space”, or “the cosmopedia”, will emerge as citizens more fully realize the potentials of the new media environment;
• “Within a knowledge community, no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” –Baym
• In self organized groups (such as the virtual communities of the web), there are substantial breakdowns of things such as geographic constraints on communication, of the declining loyalty of individuals to organized groups, and of the diminished power of nation-states to command the exclusive loyalty of their citizens.
• Members may shift from one community to another as their interests and needs change, and they may belong to more than one community at the same time (reminds me of discourse)
• Expansive self organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture
• As fandom diversifies, it moves from the cult status toward the cultural mainstream, with more Internet users engaged in some form of activity
• American fans have learned Japanese, often teaching each other outside of a formal educational context, in order to participate in grassroots projects to subtitle anime films or to translate magna (comics) (makes me think of Princess Minonoke)
• Attempts to link consumers directly into the production and marketing of media content are variously described as “permission-based marketing,” “relationship marketing,” or “viral marketing” and are increasingly promoted as the model for how to sell goods, cultural and otherwise, in an interactive environment
• Researchers are finding that fandom and other knowledge communities foster a sense of passionate affiliation or brand loyalty that insures the longevity of particular product lines

New media does increase the “fandom” and popularity of products. Geographic boundaries are erased and communication is done in a far more rapid pace thanks to online communites and virtual communication tools such as blogs. But I can’t help but wonder if we are truly revolutionizing education and the acquision of knowledge to the degree that Jenkins suggests. I completely agree that knowledge of different products, people, situations has increased dramatically due to new media, but does this knowledge translate into accurate social, cultural, and intellectual understanding? If I am exposed to anime or Japanese animation more as a result of new media, am I more knowledgeable about Japanese culture? If I choose to find my information from certain websites that tend to deliver messages I already believe to be true, am I really exposing myself to knew thought?

Freire & Macedo

Literacy: Reading the word and the world

• Reading isn’t just decoding written word into language, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world
• Language universe of elders-their beliefs, tastes, fears, values; language as an inheritance
• “The earth was my blackboard, the sticks my chalk.
• Amazed at how much he remembers about learning to read
• The student is the subject of the process of learning to read and write as an act of knowing and of creating
• Pedagogical situation
• Learning to read and write means creating and assembling a written expression for what can be said orally. The teacher cannot put it together for the student, that is the student’s creative task
• Decodifying or reading the situations pictured leads students to a critical perception of the meaning of culture by leading them to understand how human practice or work transforms the world
• Reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read

The imagery of the author’s hometown in Brazil was a beautiful illustration of the influence that culture, environment, and class had on literacy and language. Often times in American schools, all of these contexts that influence literacy are ignored. The words we read and the way we are taught to write have been very heavily based on very European ideas. The perpetuation of this type of literacy education ignores the increasing diverse population of students in schools and dismisses their cultural and social experiences. This cannot happen, not with traditional literacy or new media literacy. A more all inclusive literacy needs to be created in order to effectively teach all students.