Ambience

Early in the semester, Lee Rainie talked about the “always on” or “ambient” quality of technology today, especially in the lives of young people. Lately I’ve been thinking about this idea and how it applies to other library and educational issues. For example, in a library, reading should be ambient. Right now, learning seems to be ambient for me. By this I mean different aspects of my life keep crossing over, informing other aspects of my life. The boundaries of personal and professional are blurring. I used to think it was unprofessional to talk about family, children, and also about a career, but for me, these two broad arenas keep overlapping – even when I try to keep them separate.

Here is an example. In reading Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Ito, Mizuko, et.al. published by the MacArthur Foundation,2010) for my resource review, one of the studies included focused on Neopets. This was of no particular interest (interesting, but not compelling) until I discovered that my eleven-year old was spending a great deal of time on Neopets. These two things – my reading and his interest, took place in the span of the same two week period. Coincidence? The study talked about three very different reasons that most children use Neopets: 1) social (interacting with their friends) 2) creative (inventing pets, dressing them, decorating their houses, taking care of them) or 3) economic – by playing different games and making investments, children “earn” more points. Those who are focused on the earning usually don’t spend all of their points. Capitalist, yes. Certainly not violent. I pictured my son – why would he play? My guess was #3. So I asked him if he liked playing the market and he responded very enthusiastically. But is this a good way for him to be spending his time? So, I also checked on Common Sense Media (a site we have looked at in this class and I have used before) to see what they have to say . . . and yes, it’s not too bad. They also note the commercial nature of the site and recommend avoiding the chat rooms and discussion boards, which my son was very dismissive about when I asked him – that part is just not interesting to him. Still, he gets so involved that it does seem addictive at times . . . so I can understand the concerns that parents have about too much media use and gaming. Where these lines are, how much is too much, what is appropriate? . . . I’m not sure, but I’m still learning.

In another part of my life I’m involved with a parent educational group. At the April meeting a school administrator talking about an exciting new program she is implementing to help teachers learn how to differentiate in the classroom. What planning method did she refer to? Backwards design. A concept that makes great sense, but I was not very familiar with before just a few weeks ago. This week’s article by Wiggins and McTighe, “Put Understanding First”, about using backwards design in designing school curriculum was excellent for me as a parent and well as a librarian. Learning is ambient.

Another example: Comics. We’ve recently analyzed the conventions needed to interpret comics, issues surrounding comics and reading, visual literacy. And the same week we discussed it in class, a comic book exhibit at The Works, a local science museum, opened: Stories in Four Colors: Cartoon Art in Ohio. This coming Saturday, May 1, our local library is hosting a comic book day with a workshop for youth in the afternoon. Ahh . . . because it's National Comic Book Day. Thanks to Carol for tweeting this NPR resource as I'm blogging! Cool! Other recent comics news include a graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time. One of my favorite books, so I’m both excited and a bit worried – so is the artist, who is at least aware that L’Engle didn’t want illustrations for her book. But if it will introduce the story to new readers, then that’s a good thing . . . And what about the movies? I haven’t heard much positive about the Kick-Ass movie, but this article asks whether graphic novel heroines are different when written by women, instead of men (think Wonder Woman)? I think she’s on to something here . . . will graphic novels written by women appeal more to girls than traditional comics do?

Does this kind of coincidence happen for the rest of you? Where one aspect of your life informs another . . . in sometimes unpredictable ways? It’s exciting . . . and there is always more to learn.

"An Open Letter to Educators"

On adapting institutional education (at all levels) to the "information revolution." Found via tametheweb.

A notable quote:
"Society no longer cares how many facts we can memorize, because in the information age, facts are free."

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?