Is the Media the Message?

After watching Scott McCloud’s talk at the TED conference in 2004, I can’t stop thinking about the ideas he talked about, and how they may apply to libraries. McCloud and other comic book artists are heavily invested in print media—and as he discusses in his talk, everything about a comic, from using panels to present time frame, to using left-right tracking to create storyline, exist because of adaptations creators made to allow comics to fit into the specific media of paper, newspaper, and eventually books.

Libraries, too, are heavily invested in print media. Librarians value print media, specifically books, but also newspapers and magazines, as privileged information sources with good reason. They are durable and portable, go through a vetting and editorial process to ensure their content quality, and have served as the cornerstone of thought and learning for generations. But as McCloud points out, with new media come new opportunities and challenges. For comic artists, this meant discovering that you couldn’t plop print-based comics directly into electronic screens, add sound & interactivity, and expect it to act in the intended ways. He discusses how the linear, time frame based panels start to lose cohesiveness if you take readers out of the in-text timeline by introducing outside media.

To me, this is a fabulous metaphor for what many people (and libraries) are struggling with in using and applying new media—oftentimes we want to plop existing content in its existing form into these new channels. But to really be meaningful, the content needs to be re-conceived in new ways that are specifically designed to exploit the benefits of that new media.

To clarify this a bit, I’d like to take a look at what McCloud says, then discuss some examples. And along the way, I will trace some questions that I had as I listened to his talk. McCloud talks about “a McLuhenesque mistake” that many people make when looking at new technology. This mistake is to appropriate the shape of a previous technology as the content of new technology. Not being super familiar with Marshall McLuhen , I decided to try to look up some of his thoughts to see if I could clarify this for myself a bit more. From Wikipedia, McLuhen, perhaps most famous for the ideas of “global village” and “the medium is the message,” was a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist (interestingly, he was also a tutor and friend to Walter Ong, who wrote about the imperiousness of literacy in our of our class readings). In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, he wrote about how communication technology (from alphabetic writing to printing press to electronic media) affects cognitive organization (a la Proust and the Squid maybe?) and hence social organization.

He wrote in the 1960s about how individualistic print culture would eventually be brought to an end by “electronic interdependence” where electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture, coming full circle from the much earlier movement form oral to print. I’m guessing that where McCloud differs from McLuhan is in McLuhan’s assertions in Understanding Media (1964), that media itself, and not the messages it carries, should be the focus of study (hence “the medium is the message”).

For McCloud, the medium seems to be only useful as a way by which to more clearly, fluidly, and naturally to pass the message in a way that it can be received by others. I tend to agree with McCloud on this, that it is the content that should be valued. However, I find that quite a few librarians and teachers disagree with me on this, as we heavily value the medium of books. Can the content gotten from a web site really be as valuable or confirmable as the information gotten from a book? What do we lose in a generation of kids that gets their primary information from the Web instead of from books?

These questions are of real concern to librarians and teachers, as I think they should be. Books are valuable, precisely because of the process by which they are created, vetted, edited, and scrutinized. These same processes have not necessarily built up around digital media and web sites. And in the places that they do exist, such as online journals, the information has become so guarded, locked down, difficult to access, and poorly manipulated , that it becomes extremely difficult to use. But I think this proves McCloud’s point. It really isn’t the specific media that necessarily defines the quality of the information, but rather it is the surrounding processes that ensure the quality. And since much of the web doesn’t have these processes built in, it is much more suspect and susceptible to inaccuracies. On the other hand, though, online databases suffer from the opposite problem, the one that McCloud points out. They have appropriated the shape of the previous media (bound print journals) that have to be subscribed to, are limited to libraries and academics, etc. and carried these ideas over as content. I’m not saying they haven’t had good reasons to do this, but it does lead to many problems, including: young people find these databases difficult, inscrutable, not helpful, and hence will go to media such as Google or Wikipedia instead, which have succeeded in making content accessible and usable.

McCloud talks about finding a “durable mutation” in comics to allow for staying power that will marry both form and content in usable, helpful ways. I wonder how this will play out in online representations of information.

These ideas crosses over to ways in which teens interact with media for pleasure as well. I am interested in researching video games, and for me they have really come to represent a new means by which rich storytelling goes on. Without comparing the quality or value of the stories in games versus books, I’d like to just look at some differences in the media. I think games are attractive to so many because they are immersive stories. A game player is not only receiving a story, but is acting within the story, making choices, manipulating the world, solving puzzles, and determining the course of the plotline. To me this is an example of a place where the content was valued, and the media was exploited to full extent in order to support and extend the content.

Now, I’m not saying that the quality of video game storytelling is necessarily as accomplished as that within books. I don’t think it is (yet), as it is a new and developing form that is currently more focused on profitability than artistic accomplishment. However, I do think it has the potential to be extremely high quality and an extremely valuable experience for people who interact with games. However, historically we as librarians have placed extreme value on books, and excluded other media, from TV to movies to games. I understand the range of reasons for this, and I have heard the arguments, and I even myself believe that the media of print and writing is extremely important for success in today’s society. However, I also wonder if we as librarians and educators shouldn’t be thinking about what our youth will need for the world of the future as well. Have we so privileged the “shape” or the “media” that we have started to forget about or neglect content, especially if it doesn’t come in the preferred form?

Another Reluctant Gamer Comes Around

Much of what Sarah posted (Reluctant Gamer, March 14) resonated with me. Video games have long seemed pointless to me. Shooting and avoiding being shot, or moving to the next level, just don’t hold much interest for me. The whole language of using up one or more of your given “lives” has no appeal. But, like Sarah, I am slowly but surely coming to see that there is more to gaming than shooting and fighting and that there might be some fun, and yes, even some value, in playing video games—at least some of them.

Part of my resistance to video games comes from my essential non-competitiveness. I really don’t much enjoy beating people, and because my exposure to video games has consisted almost entirely of listening to people (most often my sons) playing shoot-em-up and fighting games, my impression of video games has been one of violence and fierce competition.

Another source of resistance is that I’m just not physically quick enough to play many of these games. I can’t react fast enough with the little buttons or joystick, I’m vaguely embarrassed at how bad I am at it, and I don’t have the time to play them over and over until I can get good at them.

I am aware, of course, that there are games that aren’t violent and don’t require shooting, such as Oregon Trail, Sim City, The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Portal, and now Spore. And I can see where they might be more fun for me, but by the time I was aware of such games, I no longer had the time or inclination to learn and play them.

I also was fascinated by Will Wright’s demonstration of his game, and I can imagine I might enjoy playing it (again, if I could only find the time) and I can see where kids might learn from playing it, which has gotten me thinking about why and how video games could be viewed as educational tools, or at least as not being brain-draining, creativity-sapping, time-wasting traps, which is pretty much how I have viewed most video games in the past.

Why might learning about evolution and long-term thinking be more likely to happen from playing Spore than from studying those topics in school? Why would kids prefer to learn about the difficulties of opening the frontier by playing Oregon Trail than by hearing a lecture or reading a book? Because playing Spore or Oregon Trail is fun, of course. And what makes it fun? It’s fun because it’s play. The essence of play according to the Wikipedia article that we read, is that it is both voluntary and intrinsically motivated. I’m willing to accept that this is an excellent definition of play. Something that a young person does willingly will naturally be more successful than something he or she is required to do. I think this principle also explains, at least in part, why attempts to introduce games, whether video games, role-playing games or board games, into classrooms are sometimes not very successful. When a teacher requires students to play a game, it immediately stops being play; it is no longer voluntary or intrinsically motivated.

This concept of intrinsic motivation also underlies Maria Montessori’s method of teaching. She understood that children love to play and that they can and will learn from playing, especially if they are offered high-quality materials in a carefully prepared environment. The Montessori “method”, in my view, is not so much a method, which implies rules and certain steps to be taken, as an approach or way of thinking. She believed that children inherently want to learn and make sense of their world and are remarkably capable of doing that on their own if provided with the tools to do it and the freedom to do it at their own pace.

This belief about how children learn was echoed by John Holt, a teacher and school reform advocate who eventually became a radical advocate of unschooling. He wrote passionately about the ability of children to learn on their own. He believed that: “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” In his view, education is more about allowing children to discover than about teaching them what we have decided they ought to know.

I believe that both Maria Montessori and John Holt would have liked Will Wright’s Spore. This game provides children with a chance to learn by engaging in an activity they choose simply because it is interesting to them.

I want to note, also, that I think it is significant that the definition of “play” that I am using here does not include the word “easy”. I can imagine someone reading what I have written so far and thinking that learning can’t always be easy, can’t be all fun and games, and that sometimes it takes good old-fashioned effort to learn something. I agree. My point has more to do with the voluntariness of learning and the motivation for learning. Although I don’t think I could advocate an immediate and complete abandonment of the public school system, I do think that the more that children are trusted to guide their own learning, and move at their own pace, and learn by the methods that they know work best for them, the more they will learn, and the more quickly they will learn. And for that reason, I would hope that parents and teachers alike might maintain an open mind about the possibility that children are not just wasting time when they play video games and about the possibility that they might be learning the skills they need to learn when they choose to play games.

What's all the Twitter about?

Just before classes began this year, I decided to try out Twitter. I’d heard about it for some time, yet kept putting it off. I don’t use my phone for internet/email access, and still don’t (gasp! I know! So outdated!) So I Twitter from the web (using TweetDeck right now – free software, though you can just use Twitter.com). My attitude was quite dismissive about the whole thing. Twitter? Microblogging? Really? So much of what I heard was negative. Yet there seemed to be more and more positive uses of it. At the fall conference of the Ohio Association for Gifted Children, attendees were encouraged to try out Twitter as several organizations in the gifted and education communities were using it. I had the same dismissive attitude toward Facebook before I began using it, and now I love it. I think this is a common initial response in most humans when faced with a new technology: rejection. Do we really need something else? Why? But could I be wrong about Twitter? Was I missing something?

So I jumped in. And it took a while, as most things do, but the more I use Twitter, the more worthwhile it becomes. I have several communities on Twitter : the gifted education community, social media related sites, especially those dealing with education, the library and book lovers community, the Jane Austen fans . My “celebrities” are Mo Willem’s Pigeon (yes, the Pigeon tweets) and halfpintingalls (whose tweets are in the persona of Laura Ingalls Wilder.) There are also a few personal friends, but for the most part my friends are on Facebook, and my colleagues are on Twitter – so Twitter has ended up being the more professional site for me. Quite recently the local school district started tweeting, so I decided to follow them. I was a bit surprised when they decided to follow me! It is always a little surprising, sometimes flattering, sometimes not, when someone decides to follow you. It is a good reminder that your tweets are public. Just like anything else, you need to think before you tweet. You can protect your tweets so that you decide who can follow you, but this doesn’t seem very friendly to me. This did lead me to reflect more and to start a different Twitter account for the educational support group that I’m involved with, which has been good for helping me to organize my interests .
One of the best things about Twitter is that tweets are limited to only 140 characters. Why is this good? You can quite quickly peruse a long list of items and choose those that sound most interesting to explore further. Often there are links to more information/articles, etc. So what good stuff has been tweeted lately? Here is a sampling from the past week of some tweets that seem particularly relevant to libraries and media literacy.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries: http://ow.ly/1nWmf from Tame the Web: Libraries, Technology and People. This looks like a great blog, bookmarked using Diigo (if you haven’t tried it, I love this bookmarking tool – allows you to highlight and put post-it style notes on webpages: www.diigo.com). This site has many other posts of interests that I want to come back to explore (quickly scanning I see “use social media to connect with teens”, “digital natives”,” the library tweets “ and more.)

How about 9 Great Reasons Teachers Should Use Twitter?

From James Mitchie (. . . a 21st century educator)’s blog, a post on Reading and Twitter: A Crowd-sourced Twitter Discussion about Getting Kids to Read. He writes openly and passionately about his core beliefs in getting high school kids to value reading and proposes the use of the #edread hashtag on Twitter and asks for collaboration on this project. If you want to check in on how it’s going, look here: http://jamesmichie.blogspot.com/p/edread.html

In the New York Times, an article on Reading and the Web, “Texts without Contexts”
I have recently thought of the idea of “cyberbalkanization” but didn’t know what to call it. This article describes it happening when “Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.” I’ve observed it on Facebook – I choose to receive news from NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, and updates from UNICEF, the Children’s Defense Fund, ALA & ALSC. What does my news look like? How about some of my “friends” whose feeds are from Fox News and such? How do the sites we choose to follow, those we select to appear on our news feeds, shape our thinking? How does this shape our view of the world and who we are? Are our choices more limited? What happens to serendipity?

I mentioned Diigo before, and here is what an article I bookmarked this morning, after learning of it on Twitter, looks like:
Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google - Forbes.com
• In addition to learning how to phrase a search query, students need to learn how to protect themselves online, and how to share their work through wikis, videos, and other interactive media. Without a dedicated guide, they end up, in the words of professor Henry Jenkins, as "feral children of the Internet raised by the Web 2.0 wolves."

Feral children of the Internet – wow! Okay librarians, we’re still needed!

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