Back to School: Science Fiction as Media Theory

This term, I am spending much of my time focused on speculative fiction. In part, this is because the work I have been doing on the Civic Imagination has left me working through core concepts from the realm of speculative fiction — especially the ways world-building has taken on a bigger role in social change movements but also because as we start to imagine life after the pandemic, a focus on alternative futures seems more urgent than ever. I have returned to a course I have only taught once before — Science Fiction as Media Theory — which encourages students to think creatively about the work theory does, who does theory, and how it operates in different contexts. While there are other versions of the class out there, I have updated it so much since 2011 when I taught it last that I thought it was worth sharing again. For those of you who are interested in the thinking behind the class, I recently published a piece demonstrating its underlying assumptions through an analysis of The Space Merchants, a classic SF novel dealing with the future of advertising Otherwise, without much more fanfare, here’s the syllabus.

              COMM 620: Science Fiction as Media Theory 

4 units

Fall 2020 – Tuesdays – 12:30-3:20 p.m.

Section:20900D

Location: https://blackboard.usc.edu/

Instructor: Henry Jenkins

Office:ASC-101C

Office Hours: Virtual office hours by appointment. Contact assistant. (Info below.)

Contact Info: hjenkins@usc.edu

Assistant: Amanda Ford

Contact Info: amandafo@usc.edu 

          Course Description

This class explores the ways that science fiction—sometimes known as speculative fiction—has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have, in turn, inspired the developers of new technologies, as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists—raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence—are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

          Student Learning Outcomes 

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

·      describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory. 

·      explain key movements in science fiction (such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk) and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.

·      trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism back through science fiction films and literature.

·      develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

       Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 

·       One of the following: 

o  Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, original novel, Audible audiobook, or Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation

o  Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown, et al. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

o  Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, et al., The People’ s Future of the United States

o  Cory Doctorow, Radicalized. Available for $3 as ebook at https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/

All else is on Blackboard.

  Description and Assessment of Assignments & Assignment Submission Policy 

All assignments (except for Blackboard posts) should be submitted via email to the instructor by 5 p.m. on the due date.

1.    Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class Blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, or a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs of close reading and critical engagement. (30%)

2.     Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20%)

3.     Theory Analysis Paper:A key theme in our discussions is the idea that science fiction functions much like theory, to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20%)

4.     Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30%)

5.     Participation: Students are expected to come to class prepared and ready to participate in discussions around these materials. On most days, we have one or more guest speaker, so it is especially important to bring questions to gain maximum benefit from their experiences and expertise.

Each activity here builds on the previous ones, so it is important to meet deadlines in the class.  

Unless specified otherwise, I expect to fill the designated class period with a mix of discussions, activities, and guest visitors, so students should plan, under normal circumstances, to stay for the class period.

      Breakdown of Grade

·      Blackboard Posts (30%)

·      Media Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Theory Analysis Paper (20%)

·      Final Paper (30%)

     Course Schedule: A Weekly Breakdown

Important note to students:Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change—and probably will change—based on the progress of the class, events, and/or guest speaker availability, where relevant.  Students should consult the Registration Calendar for dates regarding add/drop deadlines, fees, grading options, etc.

TUESDAY, JANUARY19TH

Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

·      Students will watch Minority Reportprior to the first class session.

·      Brian David Johnson, excerpt from Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011), pp.9-32.

·      Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

·      Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions 16(3), May-June 2009, pp. 20-24.

·      Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seeley Brown, excerpt from Design Unbound(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).

·      The Ezra Klein Show, “I Build a World with Fantasy Master N. K. Jemison.” 

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26TH

Week Two: Technological Utopianism

·      Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.

·      Edward Bellamy, excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.

·      Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man13-62.

·      W. E. B. Dubois, “The Comet”  (1920). 

·      José Vasconcelos, “The Cosmic Race” (1925). 

·      (Reccomended) Alexis Lothian, “Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and The Fascism of the Baby’s Face,” Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility(New York: New York University Press, 2018), pp. 57-87

·        

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND

Week Three: The Origins of Science Fiction

·      Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits(London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135

·      John W. Campbell, "Twilight" (pp. 40-63); Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy" (pp. 62-73); Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God" (pp. 115-142); and Clifford Simak, “Huddling Place” (pp. 261-280) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).

·      Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, and "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.), The New Media Reader(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9TH

Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

·      George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." 

·      George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One.

·      Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131.

·      Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16TH

Week Five: The Space Merchants and American Advertising

·      Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders(New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.

·      Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man(New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.

·      Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants(New York: St. Martins, 1958).

·      Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp. 1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp. 62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl(New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977).

·      Henry Kuttner, “All Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner(New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp. 167-189.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23TH

Week Six: Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

·      Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948), pp. 43-92.

·      Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp. 65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp. 401-417); "A Planet Named Shayol" (pp. 419-448, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith(Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993).

TUESDAY, MARCH 2ND

Week Seven: Altered States

·      Alvin Toffler, "Diversity," Future Shock(New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.

·      Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name" (pp. 57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity," The Feminine Mystique(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp.123-136.

·      James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.), The Norton Book of Science Fiction(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.

·      Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), The New Women of Wonder(New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.

·      Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.), Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

·      Imaginary Worlds: The Mysterious James Tiptree. 

TUESDAY, MARCH 9TH

Week Eight: Cyberpunk 

·      Bruce Sterling, "Preface" (pp. XX); James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104); Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades" (pp. 223-239); and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177), in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology(Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).

·      William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome(New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.

·      Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.

TUESDAY, MARCH 16TH

Week Nine: Cyborg Feminism

·      Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.),Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality(New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.

·      N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.

·      Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs" (pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian" (pp. 369-390), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.

·      C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.

·      Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers(Orion, 2000).

·      Aja Romano, “Janelle Monae’s Body of Work Is A Masterpiece of Modern Science Fiction,” Vox, May 16 2018. 

·      Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.), Technoculture(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

TUESDAY, MARCH 23RD 

Week Ten: Wellness Day

TUESDAY, MARCH 30TH 

Week Eleven: Steampunk and Ecofuturism

·      Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies1(1), Autumn 2008, pp. 138-163.

·       Naomi Klein, excerpt from No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Boston: Haymarket, 2017[MOU1] ).

·       “A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” The Intercept, April 17, 2019.

·      “The Solarpunk Manifesto.” 

·      Imaginary Worlds, “Solarpunk The Future.” 

·       Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009).

Guest Speaker:Ed Finn, Director, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

TUESDAY, APRIL 6TH

Week Twelve: Octavia Butler and Her Legacy 

·      Alex Zamalin, “Octavia Butler and the Politics of Utopian Transcendence,” Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 123-136. 

·      Engage with Parable of the Sowerthrough one of the following:

o   Octavia Butler’s original novel

o   Audible audiobook

o   Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic NovelAdaptation (Seattle: Abrams, 2019). 

·      Octavia Butler, “The Evening and The Morning and the Night.”

·      Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’,” African American Review50(2), 2017, pp. 139-151. (Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/afa.2017.0018)

TUESDAY, APRIL 13TH

Week Thirteen: Afrofuturism and Global Science Fiction 

·      Alondra Nelson, “’Making the Impossible Possible’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” Social Text20(2), 2002, pp. 97-113.

·      Elizabeth C. Hamilton, “Afrofuturism and the Technologies of Survival,” African Arts50(4), Winter 2017, pp. 18-23.

·      Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Indigenous Futurisms in the Hyperpresent Now,” World Art 9(2), 2019, pp. 107-121.

·     Alexis Pauline Gumba, “Evidence” (pp. 33-42)[MOU2] ; Walidah Imarisha, “Black Angel” (pp. 43-56); Morgann Philips, “The Long Memory” (pp. 57-78); Mia Mingel, “Hollow” (pp.109-122) Autumn Brown, Small and Bright” (pp. pp.79-880; Gabriel Teodros, “Lalibela” (pp. 123-134), and Adrienne Marie Brown, “Outro,” (pp. 279-282 in Adriene Marie Brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds.), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements(New York: AK Press, 2015).

TUESDAY, APRIL 20TH

Week Fourteen: Science Fiction and Social Change

·      A. Merc Rustad, “Our Aim Is Not To Die” (pp. 27-47); Malka Older, “Disruption and Continuity” (pp. 84-92) Ashok K.  Baker, “By His Boostraps” (pp. 133-144); N. K. Jemison, “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” (pp. 298-306); Charles Yu, “Good News, Bad News” (pp. 307-320), in Victor Lavalle and John Joseph Adams (eds.), A People’s Future of the United States (New York: One World, 2019).

·      Cory Doctorow, “Model Minority,” Radicalized: Four Tales for Our Present(New York: Tor, 2020), pp. 111-180. 

·      Mariabe Kambe, “Justice,” in Alexandria Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (eds.) The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Versions of a Wildly Better World(New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015), pp. X

·     Curtis Marez, “Farm Worker Futurism Today,” Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 155-182.

TUESDAY, APRIL 27TH

Week Fifteen: Student Presentations

How Do You Like It So Far?: Here's What You Missed This Season

When we started our podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?, the title was something of an inside joke. We were trying something neither of us had done before. We wanted your feedback so we could get better. We didn’t get much feedback, to be honest, because we didn’t have many listeners but we did get better — practice makes perfect. And our title became about something more — encouraging us to reflect each week on popular culture in a changing world. This has been a rough year and it has pushed us to reflect more deeply. And as a result, we finished what my cohost Colin Maclay and I think has been our strongest season yet. We had great conversations with great quests and I wanted to share them with you as a package having recently wrapped that season, Here’s what you missed:

Episode 67 Pandemic, Pedagogy and Politics — This was an end of summer reflection about the world around us that ranged from reflections on how the Covid-19 lockdown was impacting various media and how it shaped the Republican and Democratic national conventions to thoughts about the Black Lives Matter protests, the census, and home schooling.

Episode 68 The Business of Fandom — Susan Kresnicka is one of the leading fandom researchers consulting with the media industry as they seek to understand their fans; Suzanne Scott wrote Fake Geek Girls; Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry and has been a sharp critic of how the media industry interacts with its fans. They had never met before and we thought something interesting might emerge if we brought them together for the show. They took over the show and we could barely get a word in edge-wise during this stereotype-shattering conversation about fandom and the media industry.

Episode 69 The Power of Fan Activism — Here, we brought together Janae Phillips from the Harry Potter Alliance and Shawn Taylor from Nerds of Color, for a far-ranging discussion of fan activism as a model for social change. They had much to say about how merging fan and activist identities increased the sustainability of social movements by bringing more joy and pleasure to the effort.

Episode 70 How the Babysitters Club Changed Asian-American Culture — We are joined by Sue Ding, whose film, The Claudia Kishi Club, launched on Netflix alongside their recent Babysitters Club series and interviews a range of contemporary Asian-American artists and writers about their childhood fascinating with Claudia Kishi. We use this topic as a starting point for considering representational politics and amplifying the voices of Asian-American producers, ending with some cool reflections on the importance of the Fast and Furious franchise.

Episode 71 The Undocumented Document Themselves — Set Hernandez Longkilyo is an undocumented queer filmmaker who documents the lives and political struggles of other undocumented peoples. His films also considers the everyday practices by which these people document their own lives and find the voice to tell their own stories. Here, he sounds off about the struggles for self-representation the community faces and their efforts to organize to tell their own stories in their own terms.

Episode 72 Religion, Sports and Popular Culture Are the Same/Seeking Sanctuary During the Apocalypse: USC’s Dean of Religious Life, Varun Soni is a remarkable guy who has a unique perspective on popular culture. Here, we range from his work counseling students during the pandemic to discussions of sports and ritual and Bob Marley as a religious prophet.

Episode 73 Increasing Visibility Is Essential for Native Communities — We check in with Crystal Echohawk, founder and CEO of IllumiNative, a research-driven initiative created and led by Natives that is challenging negative narratives and supporting accurate and authentic portrayals of Native communities in pop culture. She shares what’s been happening for Natives during 2020, from land rights struggles to coping with Covid-19 to achieving some real breakthroughs in terms of representation in popular culture.

Episode 74 Horror, Social Change, and Experimentation — In this discussion of the horror genre as a site of protest and experimentation across media. we talk to Campfire’s Michael Monello about his Shutter podcast Video Palace and Qiana Whitted who wrote a Eisner-Award Winning book about EC Comics. Between us, we cover horror in film, literature, radio/podcast, comics, and television, not to mention in the context of our everyday lives. I am a longtime monster buff while Colin is horror-curious but mostly new to the genre. A good time was had by all.

Episode 75 Play as a Precursor to Participation — Benjamin Stokes wrote a book about games as tools for enhancing civic engagement and Reanne Estrada is an artist and advocate in Los Angeles. They think we should take to the streets, when it’s safe to do so, not only to protest but also to celebrate, create, perform, and play as a means of rebuilding our connections with each other.

Episode 76 Skateboarding Subcultures Surprises — Neftalie Williams is a lifelong skateboarder and skateboarding advocate, while Zoe Corwin is a newbie who is grounded in educational research. They have been working together to study the educational and social benefits of skateboarding culture especially for youth of color around the world. Much of what they have found will surprise you — it certainly surprised us — but like the last episode, it gives us hope in terms of what’s going to happen next for American cities.

Episode 77 From Hip Hop to TikTok — Dexter Thomas is a Vice reporter who shares reflections about subjectivity and American journalism, his doctoral research on the Hip Hop scene in Japan, and explores how he thinks TikTok is changing American culture and politics. This is like our interview with Varun Soni an expansive discussion, one that hits one high note after the next, and the perfect way to end our season.

There’s something here which should grab your attention — otherwise, I don’t understand why you are reading this block. Check us out. Look at our notes which allow you to drill deeper into everything being discussed. And then try some of the other episodes, because we are mapping contemporary popular culture and its connections with social change; there’s a method to our madness and we see the topics being discussed as connected, as part of a larger culture shift changing our world. How do you like it so far?

Youth Power in Precarious Times: Interview with Melissa Brough (Part Two)

Why did you choose Medellin, Colombia, as the focus for your project? What makes this city a particularly rich site for understanding "youth power in precious times"?

I first visited Medellín in 2009 to attend the Our Media/Nuestros Medios conference on community/participatory media. I was struck by the ways in which Medellín was rebranding itself as a participatory city, with taglines like, “Medellín gobernable y participativa” (“Medellín, governable and participatory”). The Mayor’s Office had pasted its insignia and phrases like this throughout the city. On the very same streets, I noticed graffiti messages about non-violence and participation, or witnessed hip hop concerts in which young people were talking about making their voices heard and engaging in community development. It seemed like everywhere I turned people were invoking the idea of participation as a way to stabilize and rebuild a city that had been devastated by narcotrafficking and urban warfare. 

Until the early 2000s, Medellín had been famous on the world stage as the murder capital of the world and the home of the notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. In 2004 the Compromiso Ciudadano party (which can be translated as “Civic Engagement” or “Citizens’ Commitment” ) came into power -- the first independent party to hold the Mayor’s office -- built on a unique coalition that included leaders of grassroots organizers as well as business leaders and others.  The administration oversaw the development of dramatic changes to the urban landscape, like park libraries, situated in some of the poorest parts of the city. These served as striking physical symbols of their various efforts to integrate poorer neighborhoods and make the city more stable and governable. 

During this period Medellín enjoyed an era of relative peace and became internationally recognized for its urban revitalization projects -- so much so that some even referred to it (hyperbolically, I would argue) as “the miracle of Medellín.” In 2013, for example, Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal, and the Urban Land Institute named Medellin, Colombia, the “Innovative City of the Year,” describing Medellín’s transformation thus: 

“Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has plunged, nearly 80% from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and schools in poor hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links from there to its commercial and industrial centers. . . . The local government, along with businesses, community organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize Medellín. . . . In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations, health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership of their neighborhoods.”

 During this period the city also fashioned itself as an emerging digital hub of Latin America, drawing tech companies like Hewlett Packard to open regional offices there, and launching a number of digital portals with the stated aim of cultivating more “digital citizens”. These initiatives had varying degrees of success, but nonetheless added to the ethos of citizen participation that the Compromiso Ciudadano party was advocating.  

So the first reason I felt Medellín was an important site of study was because of the strategic use of discourses of participation at multiple levels of society, from the grassroots to the business sector to government officials. The second reason was that young people had been both the primary protagonists and victims of the violence that had decimated the city’s social fabric. This was largely due to an economic downturn and political disenfranchisement suffered by the city’s low-income youth, who often felt they had no better choice than to join a gang. Young people were recruited by multiple armed actors, from street gangs to guerrilla groups to paramilitaries to carry out their violent biddings in what some described as a “death market.” At the same time, young people also became central actors in the non-violent social movements that were struggling to shift the dynamics of violence.   

One of my first interviews with youth in Medellín was with two hip hop artists/activists who lived in Comuna 13, one of the poorest and most notoriously violent parts of the city. At the end of our interview they offered to give me the cell phone numbers of some officials in the mayor’s office. In Colombia, large municipal governments have a relatively high degree of autonomy and power, and operate somewhat like city-states in which mayors enjoy fairly high-profile visibility and influence. What’s more, the city’s political elite had traditionally been just that -- elite, quite distanced from the lower-income communities in the city. So I was rather surprised that youth from one of the most marginalized communities in the city had a direct line to the city’s center of power. As I investigated this dynamic I realized that it was a sign of the ways in which the people of Medellín, under the two Compromiso Ciudadano administrations (Mayor Sergio Fajardo, 2004-2007, and Mayor Alonso Salazar, 2008-2011) were cultivating an ecology of participation unlike any I personally had ever seen before. As I describe in the book, it was a civic polyculture, in which the participation of youth from low-income neighborhoods was, at its best, valued as much as that of civil society organizations or political institutions. This polycultural ecosystem of participation was a key dynamic in helping to transform the city -- and harnessing youth power toward that end. For all of these reasons, it offered an important case study for understanding the powerful role young people can play in challenging and changing systems of inequality, violence, economic precarity, and injustice. 

As I describe in the final chapter of my book, the case of Medellín offers several insights that are relevant around the globe today pertaining to: the disconnection between youth and traditional civic and political institutions; democracy-building and peace-building; participatory budgeting, which is growing in popularity in several countries including the U.S. and Canada; and fostering meaningful digital participation, citizenship and activism, among others. I also describe the limitations of discourses and practices of participation while still offering a hopeful way forward. 

All of that said, the way forward is not to reify youth power, placing all hope in future generations as a way for those currently in power to turn a blind eye or remain complicit while public institutions around the world are floundering and human societies seem to be careening toward global ecological disaster. Youth Power in Precarious Times advocates listening to, empowering, and engaging youth voices -- but not as a way to abdicate older generations’ (including my own) immediate responsibility and accountability for the impact of our actions on the future. It is not their job to save us.

Works Cited

Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari, eds. Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books, 2001.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Garcés Montoya, Ángela. Nos-otros los Jóvenes: Polisemias de las Culturas y los Territorios Musicales en Medellín. Medellín, Colombia: Universidad de Medellín, 2005.

Gumucio Dagron, Alfonso, and Thomas Tufte, eds. Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. South Orange, NJ: cfsc Consortium, 2016.

Participatory Budgeting Project, https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/case-studies/

Reguillo, Rossana. Culturas Juveniles: Formas Políticas del Desencanto. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013.

Riaño, Pilar. Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

Rodríguez, Clemencia. Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

 Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication & Technology in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University Northridge. Her research focuses on the relationships between digital communication, civic/political engagement and social change. Much of her work considers the role of communication technology in the social, cultural, and political lives of youth from historically disenfranchised groups. Her research has been published in Social Media + Society, Mobile Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, among others. Her first book, Youth Participation in Precarious Times: The Power of Polycultural Civics (2020), is now available from Duke University Press.

For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount please visit Youth Power in Precarious Times: Reimagining Civic Participation and enter the coupon code E20BROGH at checkout.

Youth Power in Precarious Times: Interview with Melissa Brough (Part One)

When I first came to USC more than 11 years ago, one of the first students I met was Melissa Brough, who challenged me to rethink some core assumptions about participatory culture by calling my attention to critical writings from Latin America. Through the years since, she has continued to hold my feet to the fire. She wrote a brilliant dissertation growing out of the field work she had done with various youth initiatives in Medellín, Colombia. She managed to deftly thread the needle with a committee which included myself, Manuel Castells, Sarah Banet-Weiser and others. She wrote a really provocative overview of various forms of fan activism with Sangita Shresthova for Transformative Works and Cultures.

And now she has published her first book coming out of this research, Youth Power in Precarious Times: Rethinking Civic Participation. This work merges a deep theoretical engagement with multiple traditions of writing about participation with some substantive observations from the field considering why these theories matter in terms of their application to the problems confronting the Global South. Any of us writing about participatory culture, learning, and politics need to engage seriously with this book. This interview will give you a preview of what you will find there.

From the start, you have described your project in terms of an effort to bridge between debates concerning participation as it has been framed in the “global north” and the “global north.” What can you tell us about the historic debates around participation, particularly youth participation, in Latin America?

In 2000 I spent a summer working with the Chiapas Media Project (CMP), a video project in Southern Mexico that helped train indigenous communities to produce their own videos, often in association with the Zapatista movement. The CMP was just shifting from linear to non-linear digital editing at that time, and I had the great privilege of teaching their indigenous filmmakers how to edit in Final Cut Pro. In the process, they taught me about a totally different style of video production than what I’d been taught in school; one that prioritized the needs of the community through a collectivist, collaborative process of video making. I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis about this project, and in so doing was introduced to decades of literature and case studies in participatory communication. So my first exposure to the idea of participatory media was not Web 2.0; it was participatory media as it had been practiced for decades across Latin America.  

 (Photo thanks to Chiapas Media Project)

Latin American theorists, practitioners and researchers of community participation have really been at the forefront of this topic for decades, at least as far back as the Bolivian miners’ network of radio stations founded in 1949, which were initiated, owned, and operated by and for local community members to share information. Since then, many cases of participatory media, theater, etc. have been documented across Latin America and beyond; see, for example, Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change. The field of Development Studies has done a better job to date of incorporating this body of knowledge and practice than have Media or Communication Studies. This is in part because Development Studies is primarily focused (for better or worse) on the so-called global South, whereas these other fields of study are typically very Western and Northern-centric. One of my motivations for doing this study was to try to push back against the dominant flow of information and scholarship from the global North to the global South and draw attention to these rich histories of participatory media, culture, and communication that most of the scholars in the U.S. were not aware of or acknowledging at the time.

Colombia in particular has been a nexus of participatory communication and other participatory projects for decades. I discuss this in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in my book, but Clemencia Rodriguez’s book Citizens’ Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia is another fascinating study of the rich fabric of citizens’ media and their wide range participatory practices in Colombia. (Note that both Rodriguez and I use the term “citizen” broadly, not confined to the legal status conferred by nation-states.) Pilar Riaño’s edited volume Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change was also influential for me, along with the work of Paulo Freire, Robert Huesca, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, Orlando Fals Borda, and many others. (For interested readers, several relevant texts are gathered in the Communication for Social Change Anthology compiled by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron and Thomas Tufte.) Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher most well known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), is widely considered one of the most important theorists of participation of the 20th century. He described participation as being “an exercise in voice, in having voice, in involvement, in decision making at certain levels of power... a right of citizenship.” His work continues to influence participatory projects in Latin America and beyond. 

In terms of youth participation in particular, two of my favorite Latin American scholars are Rossana Reguillo (especially Culturas Juveniles) and Ángela Garcés Montoya (especially Nos-otros los Jóvenes). They both take the cultural and political work of young people seriously, and illuminate how power is struggled over and wielded through symbolic, cultural forms. But I learned the most by observing and collaborating with youth activists and artists in Medellín. It was their work, and their thinking, that led me to the insights offered in my book. 

As you note, “While some scholars suggest that participation has been rendered a nearly useless concept with its widespread proliferation and should perhaps be abandoned, this book contends that it is crucial to recuperate its analytical and practical utility in order to work towards more equitable, just societies.” Explain. Why do you see participation as an especially valuable concept in this context? What work needs to be done to reclaim and redefine it?

In many ways, participation in public life seems more critical but also more complicated than ever. Traditional civic and political institutions have been largely discredited, particularly among younger generations who do not see their identities and needs reflected in these institutions, and who enact their political will in non-traditional ways (much of which you and your team has been documenting for some time now). This disconnection between young people and traditional institutions has been well documented in many parts of the globe, including in Latin America. The dynamic of disconnection has been further exacerbated by a fragmented mediascape and the variously construed phenomenon of “fake news”.

With the rise of Web 2.0 discourses of participation in the global North went from being relatively fringe and often counter-hegemonic to being fully mainstreamed and commercialized. There are so many examples of this; one I find particularly relevant and darkly amusing is Flock Associates’ description of Mountain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” participatory marketing campaign. (Here’s a taste: “We proposed that the brand give the people their due [Dew?]—it was to be the ultimate Dewmocracy... with the ultimate goal of creating an elixir that will restore choice to the people. [Online game] players worked together to design the color, flavor, and feel of their elixir that will ultimately become the next Mountain Dew product... The people’s voices were heard... [bringing] forth on this continent a new Dew, conceived in liberty.”) It’s no wonder that the commercialization of the rhetoric of participation left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who had been advocating for more participatory democracy for decades; if the rhetoric of participation can be so easily and completely co-opted to sell soda, how useful is the concept anymore? And yet the de-popularization and delegitimization of traditional government and civic institutions -- and, crucially, the press -- is clearly benefiting only a very small number of traditional power holders. 

Participation never has been and never will be perfect. Participation is messy. Practitioners and researchers in international development have perhaps best documented both the promises and perils of participatory practices for community building, development, and empowerment. They’ve shown inefficiencies, inequalities, and corruption in processes of participation that were meant to promote democratic practices (see, for example, Cooke & Kothari’s collection, Participation: The New Tyranny?); I found instances of all of these in Medellín. You obviously cannot have a democracy without participation; but participation does not a democracy make. One of the arguments of my book is that it’s time to reclaim and redefine participation so that it can be demanded, enacted, grappled with, and improved. In this book I focus specifically on participation in civic and political life and define participatory public culture as one with “significant opportunities for horizontal decision making, based in practices of dialogic communication with low barriers to participation, through which issues of public consequence are negotiated. A participatory public culture is one in which the voices, interests, and participation of non-hegemonic groups are valued.” This definition articulates some of the key characteristics of a public culture that offers meaningful opportunities for participation. While I believe this definition is more specific and therefore more useful than the vague and sweeping ways in which participation is often talked about in the current moment, I also believe that participation is a concept that must continuously be interrogated, refined, and redefined to better account for how relations of power are enacted in and through it, and to take contextual and historical factors into account. 

One of the biggest lessons I learned from the case of Medellín is that if we think about and support participation ecologically, from grassroots youth activists to civil society organizations to local and state government and beyond -- and, crucially, the relationships between these -- we have a better chance of nurturing a functional, vibrant, and democratic public life. This is why I make the case for polycultural civics. Borrowing the concept from agriculture, polyculture (vs. monoculture) refers to the practice of cultivating different crops in the same space in a way that is mutually beneficial and enhances the overall ecosystem. I adapt it here to think about participation as a resource that can be cultivated in different ways at multiple levels, from the grassroots to institutions -- and to emphasize that the relationships between these are crucial. 

What happened in Medellín from 2004-2011 is that many actors in the “ecosystem” of Medellín’s public life began working together in mutually beneficial relationships, even if sometimes their agendas were in conflict or competition. For example, the municipal government created a participatory budgeting process that enabled citizens age 14 and above to participate in the allocation of 5% of the city’s annual budget. The process was not perfect, and went through several iterations. People and organizations competed for the resources. Yet, at the time of my research, the outcomes of the participatory budgeting process for communities throughout the city were largely positive -- particularly so for youth (as young as age 14), who were quite active in the process. 

That is not to say the participatory budgeting process wasn’t flawed and susceptible to manipulation by corrupt actors -- it certainly was. And it only accounted for a small percentage of the city’s overall budget. But the predominant impact of this ecosystem of participation was to increase the opportunities for citizens (especially youth, women, and other groups who were traditionally marginalized from city politics) to participate meaningfully in public life. In the process, citizens learned how to engage actively and effectively in the development and governance of their communities. It was an especially powerful civic and political education for youth, who were learning by doing. At the same time, the local government gained greater legitimacy locally and internationally. This was a polycultural relationship. And within it, the concept of participation was defined, contested, debated, and refined in the process. This is an example of how participation is contextually and historically contingent; it is shaped within particular contexts, practices, relationships, and histories.   

 So one of our key tasks is to be historically and contextually specific when we talk about participation -- with special attention to who gets to participate, how, who is defining the terms of participation, who benefits from the participation, who wields power within (and after) the process of participation, and what is the labor involved in participating. I’m writing this just weeks away from the U.S. presidential election, the day after the New York Times released information about Donald Trump’s tax returns. I am reminded to add the question, who doesn’t participate?, and what are the costs of that to an ostensibly democratic society? 

 Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication & Technology in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University Northridge. Her research focuses on the relationships between digital communication, civic/political engagement and social change. Much of her work considers the role of communication technology in the social, cultural, and political lives of youth from historically disenfranchised groups. Her research has been published in Social Media + Society, Mobile Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, among others. Her first book, Youth Participation in Precarious Times: The Power of Polycultural Civics (2020), is now available from Duke University Press.

For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount please visit Youth Power in Precarious Times: Reimagining Civic Participation and enter the coupon code E20BROGH at checkout.

What Science Fiction Media Gets Wrong About Facial Recognition

This is the final in a series of blog posts created by students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals. I hope you have enjoyed the range of new voices and perspectives this series brought to this space.

What Science Fiction Media Gets Wrong About Facial Recognition

by Mehitabel Glenhaber

If you’re a theater-goer in the 21st century, you know how the AI surveillance dystopia story goes. The government has robotic eyes everywhere, tracking your every move with security cameras, and drones. Nothing escapes the watchful gaze of an computer system, which monitors your identity with face recognition and retina scans. Shady government agents sit in control rooms full of shiny blue screens, vigilantly watching thousands of video feeds. Tom Cruise, probably, is a fugitive on the run, but all the odds are against him. 

Every day, it seems that our world gets a little closer to this dystopia that we see so often on the screen. Police departments all around the US have deals with clearview.ai, a startup that sells face recognition software trained on personal photos posted to social media. HireVue hucksters face-recognition algorithms to help companies decide who to hire, based on whose face a computer thinks looks trustworthy. Software companies and computer science labs try to convince us that computer systems can determine someone’s health, emotional status, or even sexual orientation, just from one picture of them. 

In fact, in the past couple years, we’ve seen an explosion of articles comparing the current state of tech to famous sci-fi dystopias: 1984, Minority Report, Blade Runner, Terminator, and Robocop. This makes sense, because sci-fi can be a useful tool for making sense of the role of technology in our society and understanding the risks and stakes of AI based surveillance systems. Sci-fi can predict, or even influence the development of real-world tech. For instance, when face recognition technology showed up in the James Bond film A View To Kill in 1985, Robert Wallace, the then Director of Technical Services Staff at the CIA, claims to have gotten a phone call from the higher-ups asking “do you have one of those?” and then “How long will it take you to make it?” An acquaintance of mine who works at a tech startup in San Francisco once told me a story about their office screening the dystopian film Hyper-Reality. The next day, they got a message from their boss which read “I wonder if we can turn this nightmarish vision into a fun reality! :)” When real-world tech developers are treating dystopias as inspiration boards, maybe it’s not crazy to try and use these films to understand where the world is headed. 

Keiichi Matsuda’s nightmarish vision in Hyper-Reality, which I hope doesn’t become any kind of reality

But dystopian sci-fi can also mislead us about the future, or put our fears in the wrong places. Sci-fi narratives produced by Hollywood often give us a narrow picture: they show us only one set of dystopian tropes, and explore how members of only particular groups might be affected. In my own research, I look at depictions of facial recognition in science fiction film. There’s a lot of things that these films got right about the reality we live in now: Facial recognition everywhere is a huge violation of privacy. AI systems are scary because they’re inhumanly rigid, and they don’t care about you personally. Facial recognition is becoming a frightening tool for oppressive governments. But there’s also a few big things that these films get wrong – ways the tropes in these films don’t capture the whole picture. So let’s go into a few of them!

Yes! Even the Pixar film Coco has face recognition in it!

#1 – Who owns facial recognition?

When facial recognition in sci-fi films is used by humans, and not autonomous robots, it’s almost always used by a totalitarian, oppressive government that and uses it to surveill its citizens. Whether it’s John Anderton in Minority Reporttrying to hide from the precognitive police without his retina print giving him away, or Robocop using his cyborg memory to identify mugshots of a suspect, it’s usually government law enforcement using the technology in these films. 

Government control of face recognition is very real concern in the world today! A lot of the people we see adopting facial recognition are official law enforcement officials: it’s now used by the TSA in airports, in local police departments, and by ICE to hunt down and deport undocumented immigrants. But a lot of what makes facial recognition so frightening in the real world, that these films often leave out, is that facial recognition software is produced by privately owned companies. These companies are getting rich off of government surveillance – in the article I linked above, for instance, ICE payed clearview.ai $224,000 dollars for their services. Being privately owned also means that, even when these companies sell their services to the government, their software is proprietary – it’s often a secret black box that even government agencies can’t take a peek inside. While sci-fi films prepared us well to imagine a world where facial recognition is used by a restrictive government to oppress the population, we also have to be prepared for the opposite possibility: that corporations are playing fast and loose with this technology, with a dangerous lack of regulation. 

To it’s credit, Robocop does actually get into some of what is so scary about private contractors selling tech to law enforcement – that it lets private corporations decide who laws get enforced on, and who they don’t. 

#2 – What is facial recognition being used for? 

In Hollywood films, facial recognition is almost always being used to identify individuals, for security purposes. Sometimes the technology is part of a high-tech, retina-scan activated lock, like we’ve seen in Star Trek: Wrath of Khanor The Avengers franchise. Or sometimes it’s part of a sinister omnipresent surveillance network. In all these cases though, the point of facial recognition is to use an image of one person’s face to confirm that person’s identity. You’ve gotta admit, a camera zooming in and sketching a red box around a character’s face or eyeball, and their name rolling in monospace ticker tape on the screen is a great visual. But this one particular use-case doesn’t cover all the ways that facial recognition is being used today. We don’t see uses of facial recognition that happen on the secret back-end of websites, or in research labs. 

Captain Kirk accessing top-secret information with a retina scan in The Wrath Of Khan (1982) was a genre establishing scene which wowed many fans in the 1980s and established the trope of facial recognition being used on high-tech safes. 

Most patents for facial recognition these days aren’t actually about identifying individuals or creating security systems, they’re about using facial recognition to classify people: letting AI use faces to decide who’s a good hire and who isn’t, who’s a criminal and who isn’t. A group of computer scientists in 2017 even created a facial recognition algorithm which can supposedly identify if someone is gay or not – just based on their face. Facial recognition systems are also used to classify and judge behavior. Recently, there’s been a lot of controversy around remote proctoring softwares like Proctorio and ProctorU, which schools have been requiring students to subject themselves to in order to take remote tests during the covid-19 pandemic. And the Tokyo metro even uses a facial recognition system to grade employees smiles.

Facial recognition is also integrated into a variety of other places: when Twitter crops the previews of photos your post, when snapchat filters put bunny ears on your face, when deepfakes algorithms replace a face in a video with another face. If we only focus on the narrow view of facial recognition used a system to identify individuals, we risk missing the full breadth of ways this technology is used, and the possible benefits or dangers associated with each of those uses. While films might give us the sense that facial recognition is easy to define and ban, the reality is that the boundaries of this technology are not clear, and it’s a more complicated question. 

#3  - How accurate is facial recognition?

On the silver screen, the scary thing about facial recognition technology, and AI in general, is that they are inescapably accurate. The Terminator, in Judgment Day (2009), is terrifying because he’s coming to get you, there’s no way to fool him – his robot eyes can identify you from half a mile away. In films about facial recognition, we never see the AI mess up – or, when it does, it’s only because characters went to extreme lengths to avoid it. In Minority Report, the only way that John Anderton can avoid being identified by a futuristic retina-scanning system is to literally remove his own eyeballs.

You can run, but you can’t hide.  

However, when I read what technology studies scholars are writing about facial recognition, the thing that really scares me about it is that it messes up all the time. As Joy Buolamwini’s work shows, face recognition systems are actually terrible at telling black people apart. Some facial recognition systems don’t even recognize black faces as faces. Os Keyeshas also written about how facial recognition systems have no idea how to deal with queer and trans people, and constantly misgender them. Facial recognition systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on – and if mostly cis white male programmers use their own faces to test these systems, we end up with systems which are awful at identifying everyone else. 

Like all AI systems, facial recognition systems can encode the biases of their creators. We already know that AI systems for filtering through candidate’s resumes discriminate against female candidates and people of color. And we already know that predictive policing algorithms perpetuate bias against black and latinx folks. So we shouldn’t expect facial recognition systems to be any better. The remote proctoring softwares I mentioned above have already created problems for neuroatypical students with autism or ADHD, or even women with long hair, since it interprets these student’s natural tics as cheating behaviors. Films about facial recognition are certainly right that AI systems are frighteningly inflexible – there’s no way to reason with them, and they can’t be sympathetic to your personal situation. But instead of worrying about our lives being governed by deadly accurate machines, maybe we should be more worried about the alternative dystopia where these systems are wrong all the time, but we continue to put faith in them. 

#4 – Who is the target of facial recognition? 

Seriously? This movie’s supposed to be set in Washington DC?? A city that is currently 45.5% black??

In Hollywood surveillance dystopia films, the lone rebel protagonist on the run from an oppressive government is almost always a straight white man. This is not particularly unusual or unexpected – most Hollywood studio executives are straight white men, and they tend to make movies about straight white men. But in addition to just being bad representation, films which only tell this kind of story perpetuate an unfortunate trend in surveillance studies of straight white men only caring about surveillance when they can see themselves as the victims of it. 

Surveillance studies has, historically, not talked about race – which is pretty inexcusable, given that race is such a big factor in who gets surveilled. Influential writers in surveillance studies have often been white men, and have often regarded surveillance dystopias such as “the panopticon” or 1984 as a hypothetical scary future which might affect them. But something that they’ve ignored is that the kind of constant scrutiny, judgment, and oppression which are 1984 or Minority Report to white men are just current lived realities for people of color. People of color are already watched in stores, and have credit score checks run on them all the time. They are hassled by the police constantly, and are murdered by cops at a much higher rate than white people. Queer folks, also, especially queer and trans people of color, constantly have their gender presentation scrutinized, and judged, and are also often the subjects of police violence. As Brian Merchant writes, dystopian literature can “allo[w] white viewers to cosplay as the oppressed, without actually interrogating in any meaningful way what oppression might actually entail or who gets oppressed and why.”

Given everything I’ve said in the last section about how algorithms in general discriminate against black people, women, and queer folks, how facial recognition systems already fail when it comes to these groups, we should be very worried about what wider adoption of facial recognition technologies is going to mean for these groups in particular. But we don’t see them being subject to facial recognition technology in movies. I can’t think of any films where an algorithm falsely identifies a black person as a criminal or denies a trans character access to healthcare. But in the real world, if we’re headed towards a surveillance dystopia, straight white men probably won’t be the main victims of it. 

A comment I get a lot from my (often relatively privileged) friends when I try to warn them about the dangers of face recognition and surveillance is “sure, it sounds bad, but I guess I just don’t care that much about my own data, it doesn’t personally creep me out to know the government’s spying on me.” This individualistic view of data privacy makes a lot of sense in a world where movies tell you that the main thing that’d be scary about surveillance is if you personally had to go on the run from a surveillance state. But if you’re reading this, especially if you’re a straight white man, I want to say to you: don’t be scared of facial recognition collecting data on you because of what it’s going to do to you. Be scared of it collecting data on you because of how that data’s going to be used against your queer, black, or latinx neighbors.

As I said before, sci-fi can be a useful tool for envisioning and understanding how new technologies might affect our society. These films are completely correct that face recognition systems can be worryingly cold and inflexible, and can be employed by governments as tools of oppression. But images from these films might also blind us to another possible dystopia we could be headed towards:  one where we put extreme faith in corporations which make huge amounts of money employing faulty and biased algorithms which discriminate against people of color, women, and trans people in all sectors of society. I don’t know exactly what a film which captured all these complexities of the problem would look like – though I’m still holding out for the 21st century north-by-northwest-esque thriller about a person who has to go on the run after they’re mis-classified as a Most Wanted criminal by a facial recognition algorithm. But until films like this exist, we need to think about how these existing films might create blind spots for us, even as they warn us about dystopia. 

Transgressive Queer Space-Making in London

This is another in a series of blog posts by the students in my PhD seminar on public intellectuals.

Transgressive queer space-making in London

by Jody Liu

Prior to my time abroad in London, UK, I had spent my formative years attending parties of some of the greatest techno legends: Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson. Through these shows, I forged connections with music producers and djs, radio show hosts and music label owners, and event organizers both in Detroit and internationally. As a result, I came into a familiar network in London as I was settling into an unfamiliar city.

As I immersed myself in the underground electronic music scene, I connected with several queer people of color who hosted cultural events in music, dance, and the arts. Almost every weekend, I made the trek from my small rear-garden flat to various parts of the city: Elephant & Castle, Hackney Wick, Peckham, Tottenham Hale. Somehow, I had the energy to stay out until 5 or 6 in the morning. I would get home just as the birds were starting to chirp and people were heading to early shifts. The nights out nourished me, in some ways; there was something about striking up conversations with strangers in the smoking area, smiling across the dancefloor at each other, everyone moving in rhythm. Slowly, I began to recognize people as we found each other in different spaces week after week. This ritual of coming together and dispersing, of connecting--however momentarily--before returning to our everyday lives, made these places all the more special. For many queer individuals, these places provided respite in an otherwise hostile world. 

This personal connection to London’s music subculture led to my interest in how and why these spaces of community were disappearing. As an urban planning student, I wanted to understand how the profession could engage more critically with queer issues. But more importantly, how could urban planning support these rapidly-disappearing spaces that were so vital to marginalized queer communities?

Through our conversations, I began to understand how queer organizers and friends were navigating the disappearance of queer spaces across London, and more generally, the decline of LGBTQ+ neighborhoods. For a while now, they had found peers outside of established gay neighborhoods. They felt excluded from the image-conscious, consumption-focused venues for various reasons. Instead, they have relied on ephemeral, decentralized, and virtual spaces to sustain themselves. Through their actions, these individuals and organizations were both resisting and staking claim on a heteronormative and patriarchal envrionment.

In this blog post, I illustrate how changes in planning priorities have intensified the closure of queer venues across the world, using London as a case study. Furthermore, I describe how my interviewees have been mobilizing in different ways to assert their right to the city. The post concludes with a discussion on the need to continue fighting for lgbtq+ justice alongside the struggle for racial, labor, and gender equity. 

Declining venues, declined gayborhoods 

Researchers at the University College London found that between 2006 to 2017, the number of LGBTQ+ venues in London had decreased from 125 to 53. This loss in venues is situated within an overall decline in the nightlife scene, with a 44% closure in UK nightclubs (2005-2015), 35% in grassroots London venues (2007-2016), and 25% in UK pubs (2001-2016). The loss of both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ specific venues can be attributed to shifts in urban redevelopment under the Margaret Thatcher administration. The neoliberalization of urban planning in that era, which shifted towards more market-led regeneration, continues to have reverberting effects in London’s property market and development.

This approach is evidenced in the growth-first logic that the Greater London Authority (GLA) has pushed for in regeneration schemes. (The Greater London Authority is the governance body that oversees administration across London’s 33 boroughs, including strategic planning.) Most recently, the banking crisis in 2008 and the ensuing period of economic instability further cemented the age of austerity. To bring in revenue for the city, the GLA loosened planning regulations to capture “flows of global investment” (Imrie et al., 2009) through increasing permitted developments. The focus on economic growth pushed requirements for social sustainability to the wayside, thus exacerbating the issue of community venue loss. 

As a result, queer spaces have evolved as a reaction to, and recovery from, such neoliberal regeneration practices. Mayor Sadiq Khan, who intends to improve cultural sustainability under his leadership, has been supporting these efforts. For example, the government has established the LGBTQ+ Venues Charter and a Culture at Risk office to safeguard the loss of these venues.  However, it remains to be seen whether these initiatives will reflect the diverse needs of the queer community. 

Alternative making of queer space

My interviewees reflected the aforementioned ambivalence towards government initiatives through our conversations. One respondent explained, “This is a good first step towards protecting these venues. But I am worried most of their efforts will focus on Soho… which, to be honest, I haven’t frequented much at all since first coming out”. Other interviewees shared similar sentiments, expanding on how different aspects of their identities affected their experiences within Soho. 

Soho is perhaps the most recognizable gay neighborhood, or “gayborhood”, in the UK. It’s a neighborhood of with rich LGBTQ+ history, having hosted clandestine queer social clubs in the 1920s (when homosexuality was still criminalized in the UK). In 2005, it was the heart of a campaign against the Westminster City Council. LGBTQ+ businesses challenged and won the right to continue displaying the Pride flag on their premises, which the council had ordered them to remove as a violation of planning regulations. 

Despite this history of LGBTQ+ struggles, many of the interviewees actually expressed a disconnect with Soho. While Soho venues were the backdrop to some of their first “coming out” memories, they no longer found it relevant to their everyday lives. As one interviewee shared, the commercialization of the neighborhood made the venues feel unapproachable. He explained how, as a queer person from an immigrant and working-class background, he felt uncomfortable in spaces that catered largely to wealthy, white gay males. He shared, “I have both been fetishized as an ‘object’ of desire, and looked down upon”. The cognitive dissonance contributed towards the interviewees’ ambivalence regarding the venue charter. They believed the charter will mostly support the spaces that already have more resources and political support. 

Their experiences trouble the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model, which was first termed by sociologist Manuel Castells’ seminal work on the Castro district in San Francisco. In describing the Castro, Castells argued the transformation of the marginalized gay ghetto into a deliberatedly constructed neighborhood was a trajectory through which gay and lesbians could attain legitimation in the city. Geographer Jack Gieseking, however, argues this “liberation” model buys into a neoliberal approach--one which depends on gentrification and displacement of other marginalized communities to secure a better life for gays and lesbians. The model seeks assimilation into the American Dream of homeownership, rather than drawing a critical connection between the struggles of queer people to other marginalized groups in the United States. In other words, the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model aspires to problematic heteronormative and capitalist ideals. As a result, the interviewees have found different ways of sustaining themselves and resisting their erasure from the city through alternative spatial practices.

Emerging queer space: the Queer Picnic and Femmes of Color Open Brunch

In contrast to the static nature of Soho, interviewees often had to stake claim on heteronormative or homonormative spaces to construct a place for themselves. As a result, these spaces are often ephemeral, fragmented, and virtual. Through seemingly mundane acts of socializing, mingling, and eating together, queer people of color actively challenge the public gaze and perceptions of what being queer means.

In June 2017, I attended the Queer Picnic in southeast London, which attracted over 300+ people from across the city. People of diverse gender identities, ethnicities, abilities, and generations gathered and proudly affirmed their existence in a large public park. On its Facebook, the event page asked: “Are you tired of the stress of navigating London as a queer person of color or even as a queer white person? Do you love being with other queers but feel that Pride [Parade] is just a bit too corporate/assimilationist/white/expensive/policed or triggering?”. This statement unearthed a broader discontent within the (minority) queer community with wider LGBTQ+ culture. Interviewees felt mainstream LGBTQ+ culture has become depoliticized and corporatized as particular queer identities (i.e. white, cis-gendered, gay men) have become more accepted. Similarly, the Femmes of Color Open Brunch also described itself as an alternative to Pride. By positioning themselves in this way, it reflects the problem that Hannah Dee argues, “London Pride – once a militant demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall riots – has become a corporate-sponsored event far removed from any challenge to the ongoing injustices that we face”. 

An attendee described feeling a sense of ease at the picnic; the organizers had been very intentional in creating an inclusive space. Unlike the Soho bars and clubs, which necessitated purchasing drinks or paying an entry fee, these do-it-yourself events were free or had a sliding payscale. The organizers also paid attention to people’s abilities, making sure the space was in an accessible section of the park. Another attendee mentioned how, due to social anxiety, crowded clubs or intimate bars were out of the question for him. He preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the park, which allowed for conversations to take place. In contrast, clubs often blasted loud music that made conversation difficult -- unless you wanted to shout at each other repeatedly. Additionally, the organizers had put together a taxi fund beforehand. While this may seem like a small detail, it made a world of difference. This fund ensured that people who felt uncomfortable using public transit could still attend the picnic without worrying about cost. These actions of care and community prefigures a future of more inclusive spatial practices, where queer people of all identities could feel safe and accepted. 

A new LGBTQ+ community center

This desire for more inclusive space outside of nightlife has galvanized a crowd-funding campaign for a new LGBTQ+ community center in London.

Back in 1985, the Labour-run Greater London Council had established the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. As Christobel Hastings at VICE explores, the Centre provided a respite during a time when queer people faced workplace discrimination, harassment, and arrests; it also provided office space for various queer organizations. The center was short-lived, however. Just after 5 years, the centre closed due to political infighting, financial losses, and the withdrawal of grant funding by the incoming Conservative government. 

While the center was set up as a workers’ cooperative, and purportedly ran on a decentralized structure, the Centre nevertheless ran into issues. In a Vice article, former visitors and volunteers recounted issues with representation (with most of the workforce being white and college educated) and conflicts between queer identities (and certain groups being “policed”). Despite these shortcomings, however, the Lesbian and Gay Centre nevertheless presented a model for what an anti-capitalist, community-driven space could be. 

Since then, London has been without a dedicated LGBTQ+ community center. Plans were made in 2007 for a community center in Soho, but a narrow vision for the center (i.e. white and gay male-focused) created a rift within the City of Westminster Council; ultimately, the plans were not realized.  In late 2017, as I was wrapping up my research project, a new initiative was underway in East London. A group of volunteers held open meetings, consultations, conversations, and workshops to envision a new LGBTQ+ centre. Collectively, the center will be a nonprofit multi-purpose, multi-generational space offering clinic and therapy spaces for service providers; a garden; an informational hub; and a workspace for individuals and campaigning groups. As of June 2018, they have raised about £102,000 and are working to secure a physical space. 

The future of queer spaces

The interviews revealed the paradoxical ways in which a queer space can be a site of inclusion for some, and one of exclusion and anxiety for others. In particular, more established neighborhood of Soho felt particularly alienating for the queer people of color I interviewed. Instead, they preferred and produced more decentralized spaces across the city. Such a diffused network of spaces disappear as quickly as they come into being. Queer spaces are made both by queer bodies and through queer practices; that is, spaces become queer through the presence of queer bodies, as well as through deliberate queer actions. The local library becomes a queer space as a gay, Black man learns about what it means to hold his Blackness and gayness from James Baldwin. The local beauty store becomes a queer space as an Iraqi of nonbinary identity buys make-up they’ll later use in a photoshoot centering trans and queer of color identities. Burgess Park became a queer space when the organizers planned the picnic, then people of all non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations gathered there. Thus, queer space can come into being through everyday actions and through deliberative planning. 

However, this does not mean queer minorities are against establishing more permanent and welcoming spaces. Some of the organizers expressed how having to constantly look for new venues to host events can be tiresome. What it does mean, however, is that queer spaces should not be understood as fixed and static; nor should the existense of a gayborhood be understood to mean queer rights have been fully realized. Rather, the fleeting and precarious nature of queer minority-led spaces signifies the political, economic, racial, and gender injustices they continue to face. It serves as a reminder that queer liberation is a continuous fight, one that necessitates us to act outside the confines of capitalism. ⧫

Jody Liu is a doctoral student in urban planning and policy at the Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. Her work explores how queer communities center healing and mutual care to contest racial capitalism and carceral feminism across digital and physical geographies.

Jamming the Olympic Rings: Anti-Olympics Art Across Space and Time

This is another in a series of blog posts written by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals Seminar.

Jamming the Olympic Rings: Anti-Olympics Art Across Space and Time

by Cerianne Robertson

I can still recite so many of their names. The names of the gymnasts from Romania, Russia, China, and the United States who tumbled their way into my heart in 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics. I was nine years old. The perfect age to be enchanted by a sport. The way I saw it, those young women defied gravity and embodied power, all under the majestic icon of the interlocked Olympic rings. I was hooked. At my own gymnastics practice that week I imagined dismounting my bar routine onto a mat emblazoned with the five rings, saluting the adoring crowd. Those rings meant dreams. Those rings meant excellence. 

This is just what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wants, of course. In 2019 the organization published an article claiming that people around the world associate the five rings with concepts like "global," "diversity," "heritage and tradition," "inspirational," "optimistic," "inclusive," "excellence," and "friendship.” The IOC touted its logo as “one of the world’s most widely recognized symbols.” 

Nine-year-old me was a sucker for that branding.

Twenty years later, the rings mean something very different for me. I first encountered anti-Olympics graphics while reporting in Rio de Janeiro for RioOnWatch, a platform that monitored urban transformations as the Brazilian city prepared to host the 2016 Olympics. As the city evicted an estimated 77,000 people and as police violence against the low-income, predominantly Black residents of favelas spiked, I encountered comics like the one drawn by Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff below. The red Olympic ring turns into blood gushing from a man’s body as a police helicopter flies overhead, a reminder that police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro doubled in the three months before the 2016 Olympics compared to the same period in the previous year. 

“The gold, silver, and bronze are over but the lead continues!” Image by Carlos Latuff (Rio 2016).

From mass demonstrations across Brazil to grassroots campaigns in Boston, an increasingly critical global public discourse has linked sports mega-events to public debt, evictions, real estate speculation and gentrification, spikes in police brutality and surveillance, environmental destruction, and corruption. Over the course of the past decade an unprecedented number of cities have dropped their bids to host the Olympics Games.  

As part of my PhD research on contested narratives about Olympics host cities, I’ve been collecting, archiving, and analyzing art and graphics produced by anti-Olympics activists or Olympics watchdog groups. I’ve compiled many of these images in an informal archive on Flickr. (And I’ve stored many more on my computer as I find excuse after excuse to procrastinate on uploading them.) It turns out Carlos Latuff is only one of many artists — spanning across continents and over the course of decades — who have transformed the Olympics rings in order to critique the Games. Images from Vancouver, for instance, paired the Olympic rings with Indigenous iconography, accompanied by text reminding viewers that the 2010 Games were taking place on unceded Indigenous land. Another poster embedded the five rings into the tires of a tractor clearing a tree, a reference to deforestation to make way for ski runs in Vancouver. 

Left: Image from antiolympicartscouncil.tumblr.com/ (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image by Zig Zag (Vancouver 2010).

The employment of the rings in these images suggests that the IOC is right that the Olympic rings are globally recognizable, but that the question of what values are associated with that symbol is highly contested.

As I started to see more and more hijackings of the Olympics rings by anti-Olympics activists, I started to wonder what patterns we might find in the way the rings are appropriated. I also wondered what role these visual subversions could play in challenging the powerful global network of elites that make up or support the IOC. 

Policing and the rings

Policing, surveillance, and incarceration collectively constitute the most common theme captured in the visual subversions of the Olympic rings that I’ve collected thus far. In several of the images I’ve encountered, the rings are reimagined as handcuffs, like in these examples from Vancouver 2010 and Beijing 2008.

Left: Image from no2010.com (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Beijing 2008).

The rings have also often been redrawn as barbed wire fencing, as in these examples from LA 1984 and Rio 2016.

 Left: Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (LA 1984). Right: Image from the Rio de Janeiro Popular Committee of the World Cup and Olympics (Rio 2016).

This art also reflects a concern with surveillance, with the rings turned into lenses through which state (or corporate) power might watch and monitor. 

Left: Image by Zig Zag (Vancouver 2010). Right: Image from Random Blowe blog’s Anti Olympic Poster Competition (London 2012).

These themes may seem surprising to some Olympics fans, but probably won’t surprise anyone who has actually lived near Olympics infrastructure, where security is usually designed to be spectacularly visible. These themes will be even less surprising to folks from racialized and/or marginalized communities who are often targeted in police ‘crackdowns’ ahead of the Games to make the area more ‘secure’ for visitors (and more desirable for global corporate sponsors). Ahead of the Olympics, host cities typically expand their police forces (both in terms of personnel and weapons) and call on armed forces, multinational private security firms, and global intelligence networks to support operations during the Games. Meanwhile protests and activism that might be tolerated under normal circumstances are restricted and criminalized throughout the ‘state of exception’ of the Olympic Games. 

 It is no wonder then that counter-Olympics artists opt to subvert the positive values the IOC wants to associate with the rings and associate them instead with more nefarious imagery, including symbols of oppression and state violence.

Challenging sacred and supreme authority

If you check out how the IOC talks about the rings, it’s easy to see why they make such a juicy target for activists and critics. It’s not just their malleable shape that lends itself to transformation. It’s also about the symbolic weight the IOC itself has bestowed on these five linked circles.  

One page of the IOC’s website is dedicated entirely to the rings, describing them as “the visual ambassador of Olympism for billions of people.” That’s quite a weighty role. Another IOC webpage explains: 

The Olympic Movement is the concerted, organised, universal and permanent action, carried out under the supreme authority of the IOC, of all individuals and entities who are inspired by the values of Olympism…. Its symbol is five interlaced rings. The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport …

 Here, the IOC declares itself the “supreme authority” over its “movement.” Someone unfamiliar with the IOC might imagine that this is a bizarre but ultimately harmless exaggeration. But the IOC’s claim to “supreme authority” reflects the iron-fisted control with which it has protected its trademarks (including the rings), enforced its corporate sponsors’ exclusive marketing rights, and even insisted that host countries adjust their laws in order to restrict protests related to the sports event. 

The combination of the IOC’s insistence on authority and its simple narrative of building a peaceful world call for a consideration of Nick Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality. Visuality is “that narrative that concentrates on the formation of a coherent and intelligible picture of modernity that allowed for centralized and/or autocratic leadership,” Mirzoeff writes in The Right to Look(p. 23). He adds that visuality is “that authority to tell us to move on” (p. 2), the way a police officer might tell us “there’s nothing to see here” (p. 1). The Olympic media event is a struggle over where to look: the producers and corporate sponsors of the event insist that everyone should watch the official content they generate. 

Anti-Olympic art refuses those instructions. It subverts the rings and associates them with evictions, policing, marginalization, and corporate greed, among other manifestations of power and inequality, insisting on what Mirzoeff calls the “right to look.” Rather than focusing on the subjects included in the TV version of the Olympics — often wealthier, whiter people who can afford tickets — anti-Olympic art puts on a spotlight on those who are excluded from the sports event and caught up in larger processes of exclusion related to the Olympics, including Black, brown, and unhoused targets of police sweeps in LA, Indigenous communities in Vancouver, and favela residents in Rio, among others. 

By linking the rings and the Olympics to other institutions like real estate developers, police, corporations, and autocratic governments that are more visibly political than the IOC, anti-Olympic art disputes the IOC’s claims that it just “place[s] sport at the service of humanity” from a position of political neutrality. It not only critiques the “supreme authority” (the IOC), but by appropriating the IOC’s primary symbol it enacts a challenge to that authority, producing a reality in which the IOC does not reign “supreme” over its claimed property. 

Anti-Olympic art makes visible the struggle and contradiction that exists around the Olympics. Each visual subversion of the rings chips away at their supposed sanctity. 

The power of ‘no’

All of these examples can be considered culture jamming, which Mark Dery defines as to “appropriate, rework, and disseminate cultural symbols in order to contest meaning and challenge dominant forms of power.” Culture jamming often targets corporations and consumer culture. Some recent writings on culture jamming have criticized this form (see below) of hijacking corporate or institutional imagery, arguing that it offers a negative critique but doesn’t offer solutions, alternatives, or ways for people to engage.

Artist: Klaus Staek. Image from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

What’s interesting from the images I’ve been able to collect is that, yes, they’re incredibly negative. They are part of campaigns that say “no” to the Olympics. Literally. The rings are appropriated into the letter “o” of “no” or “fuck off” (“foda-se,” in Portuguese), or transformed into prohibition signs.

Embracing negation extends beyond the rings imagery, too. The recent campaign against the 2024 Olympics bid in Hamburg, Germany is a particularly great example. The official logo for the Olympic bid was this “Fire and Flame” symbol below:

Image from Hamburg 2024 committee (Hamburg 2024 bid).

And since the official image of the pro-Olympics campaign was fire, guess what the anti-Olympics group adopted as their logo?

Image from NOlympia Hamburg (Hamburg 2024 bid).

A fire extinguisher. (And occasionally a watering can.) They fully embraced the idea of being the “anti” campaign. And this campaign was successful! Hamburg withdrew its Olympic bid after 52% percent of residents voted against hosting in a referendum in 2015, proving that a campaign based on saying no to something can be a winning strategy with concrete results in a struggle against a coalition of powerful global elites. Part of why saying ‘no’ to the Olympics can be generative — even if it doesn’t appear proactive or offer clear proposals — is that it is often asserted in the context of a ‘right to the city’ framework. Anti-Olympic campaigns have insisted that cities’ residents should have power over the decisions that affect their lives and urban environment. They’ve argued that preparing to host an Olympics opens the way for multinational actors to exploit the city for profit and for local elites to build a more exclusive space — the opposite of ‘right to the city’ demands. 

In cases where cities have actually held referenda to vote on hosting the Olympics, this argument has been pretty successful. Since 2013, at least five cities have held referenda in which a majority voted against the bid (versus one referendum in which residents of Oslo initially voted in favor of hosting, before the city ultimately dropped its bid anyway after public opinion soured on the idea). Another six cities have dropped their bids due to a lack of support. 

In voting against an Olympic bid, a city’s residents are saying “no” to a club of powerful actors including multinational corporations, local business and government leaders, media conglomerates, international security consultants, sports federations, and that highly profitable non-profit headquartered in a château in Switzerland: the IOC. This rejection thus imagines and enacts new possibilities in which a city’s residents are more empowered and global networks of capital have to respect local residents’ wishes. 

Final thoughts

From this study of anti-Olympic art, I believe these subversive graphics play two main roles in contesting the power of the Olympic Movement. They disrupt the IOC’s simple narratives and threaten its (fragile) claims to authority, insisting instead on the “right to look” elsewhere. By rejecting top-down visuality, the graphics also imagine and enact new alternative possibilities in which a city’s residents have more local power relative to global networks of capital.

Now when I see the five rings looming over sports events, I see them as a frame ready for millions of global viewers to attach their interpretations. I’m sure there are still many nine-year-olds for whom those rings provoke excitement and awe. I’m sure there are folks of all ages who feel that way. But there’s a growing and increasingly vocal group of people around the world who associate the rings with oppression and an abuse of power, including nine-year-olds who have been displaced from their homes in the name of the Olympics. There’s a growing group of people who are eager to disrupt the five rings’ claims to peace and humanity. For all it can legally declare its ownership rights over those five circles, the IOC does not — and cannot — own those rings. 

Academic references 

Dery, M. (2017). Culture jamming: Hacking, slashing, and sniping in the empire of signs. In M. Delaure, & M. Fink (eds.), Culture jamming: Activism and the art of cultural resistance. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cerianne Robertson is a PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She researches the news media narratives, discourses, and practices that sustain power relations, as well as the opportunities available to disrupt and change them. Her research often focuses on the stories we tell about cities and sports mega-events. Cerianne previously worked as the Editor and Media Monitoring Coordinator for RioOnWatch.org, a Rio de Janeiro-based media platform that aimed to amplify favela resident perspectives and monitor urban transformations in the build-up to the 2016 Olympics. She is currently a participant in NOlympics LA.

Thinking Through Voice: Sound, Identity and Race

This is another in a series of blog posts written by PhD students in my Public Intellectuals class.

“Thinking through voice: Sound, identity, and race”

Edward B. Kang 

If you’re like me, the pandemic-induced migration of social life to Zoom (the face-to-face parts at least) has really shed light on how jarring it is to hear random disruptions (silences) in speech. To be fair, my Internet connection sucks, but the effects of it were tolerable until now. It’s truly frustrating when I have to text my colleagues to ask what was just said, or to avoid being annoying, just listen through a patchy conversation in which my Internet sporadically glitches at just the right moments to make the discussion just the right level of incomprehensible. But beyond the frustrating disconnects that interrupt my ability to listen to others, I’m also made hyper cognizant about how my voicemight sound when I’m speaking on Zoom. I mean it probably goes both ways, right? Perhaps somewhat resonant with, but of course not nearly as enduring as, the way one is socially conditioned to feel self-conscious if s/he has a heavy accent or a distinct vocal timbre, my unstable Internet connection oddly manifests as a kind of temporary but still relevant and embodied ailment that mediates my voice in Zoom space.   

I want to take some time here to thinkabout voice and all of the different things it stands for. As a budding scholar broadly interested in technological mediations of the voice and their manifestations in various sociocultural contexts from Voice ID, voice biometrics/analytics, interactive virtual assistants etc., I often force myself (and also pressured by the structure of academia itself) to locate specific sites in which my “intersection” of “voice/sound, identity, and technology” materialize, so I can analyze them for the purposes of producing a CV-worthy paper or a chapter for my doctoral dissertation. As rigorous and enlightening as this institutionalized method of critical and structured thinking can be, it can also take away from the practice of just thinking for thinking’s sake. Without having to “delineate my disciplinary boundaries,” “carefully lay out the limitations of my thinking,” “detail the methodological advantages of my objects of analyses,” “make interventions in current scholarly debates,” or write with the unavoidable factor of pleasing journal reviewers in mind, I want to take some time here to just thinkabout voice. Not “examine the ways, in which” or “drawing from the frameworks of.” Just think. 

Voice is messy. And it can mean a lot of different things to different people in different contexts. We talk about “fighting for a voice,” by which we mean something along the lines of staking a claim to our political identities. A right to express our personhood. We “read other voices” as cues to interiority or as registers of well-being: “she said this, but I think she actually meant this.” “I can hear it in her voice.” We all have “inner” voices to think. Some of us have “outer” voices to speak. Someone might be the “voice of a community,” as an individual representing a collective. We also treat voice, in its most physical sense, as a kind of “sound object”, if you will. Something to be liked, circulated, compared, and bought, even. For vocalists, voice is something that can be trained, refined and, to some, maybe even perfected. It’s also the means by which they make a living. Think about the ways some talents are evaluated on the hit television show, The Voice. As William Cheng, Associate Professor of Musicology at Dartmouth University, observes in his book, Loving Music Till It Hurts, the contestants’ impressive singing voices become technologies of super-humanization or as romanticized correctives for those with disabilities. Voices deemed impressive can be deifying. But those deemed not can be crippling. 



“The Blind Auditions: Dylan Marguccio sings ‘I Want You Back’ | The Voice Australia 2020”

As an ethnic and racial minority in America, I’m often told I don’t sound Asian. Without immediately denigrating these comments as ignorant, I’m inclined to say that the prevalence of these kinds of encounters for ethnic minorities acrossNorth America (actually probably across the world) really does speak to a larger cultural imagination (one that we are all responsible for) that affixes voice to identity. We talk about voices that are appropriatefor radio or opera. We often understand dialects as ways of categorization and identification. But also, in terms of ownership and authenticity. What do we make of Awkwafina’s “blaccent?” 



“Crazy Rich Asians: Rachel Chu and Peik Lin Goh scenes” 

Voice, as we know it, is raced, gendered, spatialized, and classed. It’s possible to have a voice in one sense but be completely devoid of it in another. It’s possible to have a voice that doesn’t “fit” you. It’s possible to useyour voice. It’s possible to have it taken away. Voice is not singular, but multiple. 

Thinking about voice is complicated precisely because of this multiplicity. When a bank asks me to set up a Voice ID as part of a more secure two-factor authentication method, which part of my voice is it using as the ID? I don’t think it’s measuring my ability to express my personhood. I’m pretty sure those “without” much of a voice in this sense, can still technically set up a Voice ID at Charles Schwab. In fact, it’s been reported that prisons across the United States are coercing inmates to enroll into their voice biometric identification systems in order to maintain phone access. Let’s add “voice as object of control or surveillance” to the list as well. 

It’s also probably not trying to identify hidden meanings that might be gleaned through the wayI say something. If anything, a reliable Voice ID should be able to match me with my voice regardless of whether I’m feeling down or excited, sick or well, right? That gets a little trickier because the actual tonality and the timbral qualities of our voices do change based on our emotions and health. And vocal timbre isactually one of the aspects of voice that gets factored into constructing a Voice ID. But the question is, how does it account for that inevitable variability inherent to vocal expression? Without getting into too much detail of how voiceprint technologies operate, I’ll just say that as a doctoral student researcher who’s been looking at patents of these kinds of technologies, they technically can’t, which is (1) why they are almost always used as supplementsand not alternatives to passphrases and (2) why there are numerous cases of expert impersonators deceiving these Voice ID systems. 

“Dialect Coach Guesses Who Is Faking An American Accent” 

Expert impersonators, voice actors, accent coaches, and even singers share a relationship to voice that really foregrounds that link we make between voice and identity. For one, they simultaneously riff on the singularity of voice as well as its collectivity. The fascination that follows a good vocal impersonation is based on the idea that we understand individual voices as just that – individual. And yet the perceptual similarity of the impersonation also questions that individuality. We’re confronted with a performance that questions the intimate relationship we have with our voices. If my voice is unique, why does that person sound exactly like me? Where do we locate the uniqueness of voice? 

Accent coaches operate in a similar way. Without going into too much detail about the different ways that accents and dialects are positioned as sociocultural markers (Basil Bernstein or William Labov can tell you more about that elsewhere), we generally understand that they are often used to gauge other kinds of information about speakers. They are often linked to identity in ways that position the speakers as part of larger collectives (a Brooklyn accent, an Indian accent, an Oxford accent etc.) through which we try to gather additional sociocultural information. 

And yet, the idea that we are able to gather such information by listening to accent or dialect is confounded by individuals who have learned to code switch effortlessly. I, for one, did not have the slightest clue that Alfred Enoch, who played Wes Gibbins on the American television series, How to Get Away with Murder, was a British actor until I watched this interview (and then I remembered he was Dean Thomas in theHarry Potterfilms). 



“Alfred Enoch Shows Off His British and American Accents” 

I find Enoch’s effortless switch from a British accent to an American one impressive, and based on the clip, I’d say the audience and the hosts seem to agree. But we need to remember that discussions around accent, dialect, and code switching inevitably also necessitate conversations around authenticity, ownership, and power. Where does one draw the line between code switching and cultural appropriation? At their most fundamental levels, both practices involve the adoption of different dialects or ways of speaking/voicing that presumably deviate from the way individuals might “originally” talk. Why do discussions around Eminem or Awkwafina’s cultural appropriation of the “blaccent” seem appropriate? And yet why does it seem odd to accuse Key & Peele of culturally appropriating White Americanness in this clip below? 

“Key & Peele – White-Sounding Black Guys” 

As Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele “dial down their blackness” and speak in a way that “sounds whiter than Mitt Romney in a snowstorm,” they say they’re doing so with the hopes of not intimidating anybody, thus hinging their joke on a politics of respectability that tells Black Americans to police their own “intimidating” voices. More generally, this concept of respectability politics refers to a moralistic discourse that polices individuals from marginalized or minority groups to adhere to constructed standards of hegemonic “respectability.” In the context of language, this means that specific vernaculars are suppressed and replaced with what is generally understood to be a more “standard” – i.e. white – dialect. W.E.B Dubois in The Souls of Black Folkreferred to this “double consciousness” among Black Americans as the position in which one is forced to look and evaluate at one’s self through the eyes of others. This performance in the clip below by Keegan Michael-Key and Barack Obama also riffs on this same idea. Here Michael-Key is not only Obama’s anger translator, but also his vernacular code switcher. 



“President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner” 

If we understand that Black Americans code switch in this way, as part of a larger system of oppression that necessitates a politics of respectability as a method of survival, how does this play into its separation from the flip side of that discourse in cultural appropriation? Perhaps we can try to unpack that difference by attending to the ways that Black Americans negotiate social pressures to conform to a standardized English at the moment in which they code-switch back. Ida Harris, writer and assistant editor for Blavity, talks about the shame she feels when she finds herself abandoning her “native tongue – African American Vernacular English,” in order to assimilate into the role of an instructor in a classroom. As a means of dealing with that shame, she references Derrick Harriel, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, suggesting that “the ability to code switch back into our Black selves is another way we subsist, feel whole and in some regard redeemed.” 

Individuals who need to code-switch intowhat is standard American English (as opposed to those who just speak it) can, in this way, be seen to have an intimate relationship with the dialect that they switch backto. There is a sense of inwardness or affinity that only those who are burdened with the social pressure to code-switch share at the moment they return to their native dialect. At least, I know that that’s the case for me. It feels awkward (even strangely elitist or at least pretentious) to speak to other Korean people in English. It’s a space only available to us. Let’s cherish it. So, in addition to the exploitation, fetishization of culture as “exotica,” and the overall alienation that characterizes cultural appropriation, maybe on a more personal level, there’s also a sense of infringement on that intimate space of momentary redemption. When Jordan Peele says, “you never want to be the whitest sounding Black guy in a room,” it makes sense to me too.

But I also want to ask, without negating the above-mentioned dispossessions that follow cultural appropriation, what does policing the boundaries of those spaces of intimacy under the righteous duty to undo cultural appropriation, necessarily achieve? In simpler words, what does the negativity associated with cultural appropriation miss about the fundamental multiplicity of culture, and thus also the voices associated with them? Marxist intellectual and past Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Vijay Prashad, in Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Puritymakes the provocative suggestion that although as a defense tactic, laying claim to certain cultures and lineages may protect minority groups from the cruelties of racism, as a strategy for freedom, it only reifies culture as a separate and distinct artifact, thus taking away from the grander project of collective liberty which requires that we see all cultures as fundamentally interlinked. As Robin Kelley, Professor of American History at UCLA, asserted in 1999 for ColorLines Magazine, “All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our blood lines to all of these continents.” 

I’ve tried to trace this multiplicity of voice/identity/culture by sifting through the different ways it is sounded, taken, claimed, and replicated. And yet, I must admit it still weirdly makes sense to think of voice as something intimate and unique. And despite the inherent variability that arises even within an individual’s voice through emotion, age, culture, physical environment, and health, the idea of a voiceprint or Voice ID, which positions our voice as an invariant biometric identifier, is strangely seductive. Voice, like culture, oddly feels like something I can own as part of my identity.

Thinking about the voice is, in this way, an incessantly undulating and polymorphic process. It requires acknowledging the enormously variegated channels, abstract and concrete, through which it takes form and occupies our political, social, and cultural lives. It requires us to negotiate those irresistibly tempting understandings of voice as unique markers of identity with the equally accurate and critical perspectives that tells us voice, identity, and culture are never fixed but always rearranging according to the specific relations from which they emerge. This unruliness is precisely what makes voice such a difficult object/phenomenon/concept – thing– to study. But understood differently, this conceptual intractability is also what allows me to use it as the malleable mouthpiece through which I explore and comment on the multiplicity of culture, society, and politics writ large. It’s what allows me to link Schwab’s Voice ID to Key & Peele. Barack Obama to The Voice. And respectability politics to glitchy Zoom calls. 

As Nina Sun Eidsheim, Professor of Musicology at UCLA, reminds us, we must resist the temptation to knowsound, and instead find ways to engage with it as a complex system of knowledge in and of itself. 

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research concerns the social and cultural dimensions of digital technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between surveillance, race, and identity. Currently, he is interested in exploring the broader cultural imaginations around voice embedded into the operational logics of voiceprint technologies (voice biometrics, voice analytics). Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg's annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg's Critical Media Project with California Humanities.

Love-Letters and Thing-Bads: Video Essays and 'Intellectual' Self-Presentation

This is another in a series of blog posts written by PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar.

Love Letters and Thing-Bad’s: Video Essays and “Intellectual” Self-Presentation 

Steven Proudfoot

"Maybe there's even a lesson to be learned in this awful, awful way. What else am I going to do? This is my brand, I think? So, let's give talking dog movies the true rigor of academic analysis they've long been sorely in need of."

 – Jack Saint, The Political Implications of Talking Dog Movies

Let’s talk about tone. I am an academic (grad student), writing on a blog platform created by a Big Name Scholar, writing about YouTubers doing various kinds of analysis. Naturally,I will talk a lot differently here than if I was trying to write an article for a publication. The medium and intended audience could make the same argument look completely different, argued in different ways. For example, I can say “fuck” outside of a relevant quote here, just for fun. Take that, Ivory Tower.

Using this space and freedom of tone, I want to talk about academia and video essays. More pointedly, I want to talk about some YouTubers’ sometimes mixed relationship to academia and how many benefit from defining themselves in contrast to it. The few I highlight here don’t take an anti-intellectual stance, but present as post-academic dropouts or debt-burdened graduates who are qualified to talk the talk but will tell it to you straight without lecturing you like an academic. By reflecting on how we present ourselves as academics and subsequently considering some things they do to maintain an “authentic” self-presentation that we can’t. Particularly, I’ll highlight how they take advantage of this post-academic positioning with patterns like using alcohol as a visual tone-setter and simply using humor in place of academic distance to make passionate visual love letters to their favorite things or arguments of why something is bad where it could have been good (often called the “thing bad” format).

While it is important to foreground these techniques in an academic context, I’ll be focusing on the work happening on YouTube. Even though YouTube is sometimes a long way from the ivory tower, there’s a lot we can learn from it about subtle and intentional techniques of self-presentation.

As a quick disclaimer: for this post, I’ll mostly be discussing the work of four video essayists on YouTube: Lindsay Ellis, Jack Saint, KaptainKristian, and ContraPoints. Notably, not all of these fit within the same niche. Some of these channels do deep dives into seemingly innocuous topics while others are very up front with the fact that their work is activism. Some of them switch between those attitudes. The first three channels are mostly about media analysis while ContraPoints works more on general societal issues. Each of these creators have videos that have excellent arguments and analysis, and they also all have videos or arguments that aren’t so great and fall into some holes. Sometimes they have bad takes. Sometimes they present things in ways that are worrying, but ultimately aren’t in bad faith. I don’t think that the accuracy or consistency of their claims are important for the conversation I’m trying to have here. I’m not going to go into any of these YouTuber’s arguments or talk about why they’re wrong or right, but more look at how they talk about things and the surrounding context that drives it.

Negotiating with the Ivory Tower

            Now that I’ve specified that I’m going to talk about YouTubers specifically, I’m going to talk about academia instead. Oops. Before talking about the weirder informal stuff that YouTube video essayists tend to do, it’s important to emphasize that these don’t only exist on YouTube.

            While more formal, video essays do exist in academia. Relatively speaking, they’re rare, but there’s a movement within media studies to make a space for this format within a serious academic sphere. There are now journals like [in]Transitionentirely for videographic essays. These journals are home to some well-crafted and compelling work ranging from editing film into montagesthat make a statement to essays that use visual evidence to short documentaries.



            As is natural for publishing in an academic space like this, the tone of these videos then to be more serious than those on YouTube. The simple fact that there is academic space to publish work like this is worth taking a moment to call out. This work of making a serious space for this sort of work in academia where “alternate” formats have been not commonly accepted is being done by a number of academics like Drew Morton and Jason Mittell and this movement is growing. While there has been acceptance of academic video essays as far back as the early 2000’s, it’s important to emphasize that this wasn’t always widely accepted. 

            In general, academia is slow to change from what it has always been doing. While we are on a path towards academia at large acknowledging serious video essays occupying the same space as written work, it will be a slow process of getting there. Any academic who has tried to use a different medium than articles or has tried interdisciplinary work is likely familiar with the phrase “when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The line quickly makes a point that lies at the heart of many people’s pushes to do any number of new or not-yet-normal things within academia: sometimes it’s best to do things outside of the box because it fits the problem better. Because sometimes it’s a screw and just whapping that thing with a hammer will probably end up clumsy and worse off than it could have been.

            Except, sometimes it’s really hard to see that a screw isn’t a nail. Sometimes, it’s even harder to pick up the screwdriver when you do see it. Even if you do use a hammer and a screwdriver both to make some really cool shit, sometimes it doesn’t matter because the publications build their reputation and livelihood on talking really, really well about hitting nails with hammers. The Journal of Hammer Studies might think that’s great work, really cool, really cutting edge. But it’s not what they do, they don’t want to publish it themselves. Doing different-than-normal things in academia is always a question of finding and negotiating space. So, when something like [in]Transition comes along and makes a space for this for a different tool, that is radical and important work.

            Talking in metaphor like this makes it seem light and like if you just stop and think, it’s actually quite logical and, after all, why don’t we all just do it. While I believe in these ideas, it’s worth mentioning that it’s not simple to just do things like that. People often have good reasons for working the way they do and making space for new modalities, methods, and interdisciplinary work is hard. Even if you do find space to do this kind of work, it can also be a question of if a hiring committee is even able to properly consider, assess and “count” less traditional types of work if they don’t have an expert among them already. Even though my own identity as a scholar is built around trying to mix psychology and humanistic work on games and fandom, I’ve only ever written from one or the other field without actually using both. It’s a problem I spend most of my time thinking about, yet I’ve done very little to actually do anything about it.

            Simply engaging with all of this broad umbrella of work is an active process of negotiating your own existence within an ivory tower stuck in its ways. While these spaces exist now, they’re not always well known yet and a budding video essayist might miss the chance to give their work a real platform inside the academy. 

            So what happens when those negotiations fail and someone falls through yet-to-be-filled gaps? What of those who, instead of taking up the fight for a space inside the academy, said “fuck this” and went to talk to a different audience? 

Post-Academic Intellectuals

            Youtubers. Sometimes, YouTubers happen. YouTubers with academic training doing analysis on a similar level to what you could see in any number of fields in a different way with a different set of rules. They’re using different tools in different ways to approach similar topics as many academics, and they’re doing it well. And that idea that they learned how to talk the talk and then left because they’re not going to deal with the system and debt is a big part of how some YouTubers present themselves. 

Admittedly, I am, in part, focusing on these four creators because of how they position themselves in relation to academia. Lindsay Ellis has an MFA in Film from USC, Jack Saint has an MA in English Lit, kaptainkristian dropped out of undergraduate film school, and Natalie Wynn (creator of ContraPoints) dropped out of a PhD in Philosophy at Northwestern University. This sample of four channels isn’t necessarily representative of all of FilmTube or the wider “BreadTube.” There are great series in these spaces like FilmJoy’s Movies with Mikeyor hbomberguy’s “Measured Response” by people who don’t have a fancy piece of paper declaring some kind of expert training.

While none of them are openly hostile to academia and don’t yell for people to stop going to school, they pretty universally present their academic credentials as something that they wouldn’t recommend or are helping others avoid. Lindsay Ellis’ merchandise page on DFTBAintroduces herself as a video essayist with degrees from NYU and USC, noting that “She conveys the knowledge she gained at these great institutions so her viewers won’t be burdened with student debt like she is.” Kaptainkristian dropped out of film school when he “realized everything they were teaching was available online” (Liptak, 2016).

Are they right? 

Well, yes and no. You can’t get everything online, but , a course is more than the articles you’re assigned to read, but sometimes it isn’t worth it to go into academia to get it. If I were to list everything wrong with academia, this would be a book not a blog post, so I’ll be brief here. In short, sometimes it’s not a great idea to be in academia. The academic job market is depressingly sparse, and it’s gotten worse since the global pandemic. Sometimes it isn’t worth going into debt to do this. It can work for those who find their passion here, but it’s not universally good. Often, dropping out isn’t the bad choice or failure of someone who wasn’t good enough to finish. Often, it can just be a good decision for your career and mental health.

So, academia…. Bad?

Sometimes, yeah. But more importantly, these YouTubers present themselves as aware of this state of academia-bad and it frames nearly all of what they do. By establishing credentials and then subsequently distancing themselves from it, they show expertise without being a lame professor who would lecture you about something. They can take a shot straight from a bottle of vodka and tell you some shitabout everything wrong with Jon Snow’s characterization in Game of Thrones.

Watch from starting timestamp (20:29) to 21:10 for a brief example of this tone.

And that works. I often find myself procrastinating reading theory by listening to these people talk about different theories in entertaining ways. Put simply, reading most theory is a lot less fun than watching a ContraPoints video about why Autogynephilia (a transphobic theory on why trans people are trans) is blatantly wrong as she provides her own experience, perspective, and analysis of the relevant texts.

Watch from starting timestamp (10:58) to 13:21 for snippet of this. 

Instead of existing within the highly regulated, toxic environment of academia and writing articles, they now exist within the moderately regulated, toxic environment of YouTube and make video essays with similar content. Here, you can say “fuck” and call people cucks. Take that, Ivory tower.

To be serious though, while these video essays have certain freedoms of expression that you don’t have in an academic context, like swearing and drinking on camera, there’s still informal rules and citational practices. As an example, if you want to make a case about what the ideology of the apocalypse is in Mad Max, you’re expected to bring your citations instead of just talking about what you thought. See this clip of Jack Saint’s video for an example of providing an argument, citation, joke, then video clips of the text to back it up (timestamp 28:22 to 29:46). 



While you can of course talk in these spaces without citing Hegel, there is clear expectation of having done your homework instead of simply showing up excited to talk about the idea. Even when no academic sources are used, like in the above Game of Thrones video, creator commentary, pieces of a show or movie, or other similar sources are presented to back up what they’re saying. 

Whether its about a thing they like or why thing-bad, these argumentative video essays are compelling, in part, because you tell that they genuinely care about the content. Because someone frustrated with how good Jon Snow couldhave been developed better and yet wasn’t is a lot more compelling than an article explaining how character development works or a professor lecturing about the concept. Someone who finds the use of color pallet in the Watchmencomics compelling and their use in the 2009 movie is more interesting when they lean in to show you the panels and the shots in question instead of describing them in text. 



In this example (from 1:53 to 2:12), his argument is essentially: Lookat how cool this is and how flat the film’s reproduction was. And, yeah, he’s right, those comics looked really damn cool. This video captures a feeling that runs throughout kaptainkristian’s work. Looking at his YouTube channel description, you’ll find only three words: visual love letters. He’s clearly a nerd who is excited to show you some really cool shit. Whether he’s talking about the color in Watchmen, the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or rhyming for two straight minutes to talk about Dr. Seuss, these videos are clear projects of passion. And that passion is infectious.



That impression is no mistake, nor probably unrelated to his success. In a way similar to how academics are compelled to present as emotionally distanced, cooly rational, and calmly argumentative, YouTubers of various genres have been rewarded for presenting a sense of authenticity. Lindsay Ellis, has an insightful essay on “Manufactured Authenticity” in which she uses How to Cake It with Yolanda Gamppand some others as case studies in how presenting as informal and authentic tends to go hand in hand with audience growth as well as talking to her friend and fellow YouTuber Hank Green about how they perceive these ideas impacting their own channels. Critically, I don’t think that this drive to seem authentic is presented as condemnation, but as an impact of the medium they are on. No one is really immune to it. 

There’s quite a lot that these creators do that very intentionally presents themselves as genuine, authentic, or passionate and shapes the way they present their points. While kap might show this by rhyming for two minutes, there’s more subtle ways this shows up. One way that a number of YouTubers do this, including both Lindsay Ellis herself and Natalie Wynn (creator of contrapoints), is using alcohol as a visual tool. 

In a lot of videos, Lindsay will either take a shot straight from a bottle of liquor before getting into something she presents as particularly eye-roll-worthy or will drink a glass of wine after saying something bad that a movie or director did. For example, in same the video as linked above, she drinks various kinds of beers and liquors throughout “The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes.”The copious amounts of empty beer bottles and cans in the background that progressively grows almost every time it cuts back to her in is likely not an accident. Natalie, when talking about getting “cancelled” on twitter, is persistently drinking in a bathtub. 

(First minute)

They both seem to use this as a way to signal that they’re tired of or exasperated with the topic and that they will need to drink to really get through talking about it. Drinking here is signposting that they’re going to tell you like it is without having to say that outright. In reality, they aren’t saying this in a moment of probably-a-bit-buzzed rambling: they’ve taken months to prepare scripts and carefully controlled every element of the presentation, including that impression.

Humor itself can do essentially the same thing. Saying something funny instead of “in this essay I will…” is a great way to set the tone for a video that does a longform argument anyways. The ContraPoints video on The West is a great example of this.

(From starting timestamp 1:29 to 2:00) 

She ends her intro here with saying what one should do to talk about this topic, then instead dismisses it with the 16-corndogs/dicks joke right before doing what she just dismissed anyways. Which is a lot more engaging than ending your thesis paragraph in an educational essay with “in this essay I will operationalize The West.” Similarly, Jack Saint opens his talking dogs movies video by pointing out how absurd it would be to do a video about it and plays on the humor of applying serious “rigorous analysis” to a topic that sounds extremely not-serious immediately before he does it anyways. All of these four channels do things like this because sarcasm and humor works. It helps make their arguments actually seem genuine and entertaining instead of feeling like a lecture. 

Pointing out how these creators intentionally use these strategies to present themselves as more authentic isn’t to say that it’s all artifice. While there is a lot going on to help build that impression, it’s clear that these people genuinely care about the things they’re talking about. Instead, I want to use this to draw attention to this format and how it’s not only been shaped by the influences of YouTube, but by presenting as an intellectual without seeming like they’re lecturing. By doing things like this that academic pointedly can’t, they can lean on academic authority without falling into its patterns. The details of how they present themselves are carefully crafted to maintain this image. 

So what? Why should I care?

Thinking about how we, as academics and “public intellectuals,” do something similar in articles but in the opposite emotional direction can be instructive in thinking about what spaces we create with our work and the personas we develop simply by inhabiting that space. By shaping to the norms of our medium, we’re letting it shape who we present ourselves as. In most journals, that means presenting as emotionally distant and expositing knowledge.

Naturally, there is also passion in academia. There is writing that comes off as personal and authentic, but sometimes it’s quite hard for that to survive the peer review process. Similarly, academics like bell hooks have talked about how passion is an essential element of teaching (hooks, 1993). Personally, a lot of my favorite classes have been ones where the professor is passionate about the topic. Yet, the norms of this system typically push towards not presenting that passion.

They’re approaching a similar nail as we are, then they’re hitting it with a different tool in a different way and doing so with passion. They’re being intentional about presenting themselves as emotionally present and in conversation. They’re writing love letters (and thing-bads) to be shared instead of lectures and articles to be published. 

We too could just try to be more authentic and be intentional about how we present that authenticity. Underneath the layers of authority and “academic rigor,” many academics are simply passionate about what they study and will endlessly ramble lovingly about the topic they’re fascinated with if prompted. All my friends certainly know that I wouldn’t shut up about video essays for weeks before I wrote this.

I don’t think you have to drop out and start a YouTube channel, but I do implore you to consider maybe folding something you’re working on into a love letter instead of hammering it into an article. 

 Referenced videos and links to these aforementioned creators’ platforms:

[in]Transition

    http://mediacommons.org/intransition/

Watching the Pain of Others by Chloé Galibert-Laîné
     http://mediacommons.org/intransition/watching-pain-others

Who Ever Heard…? By Matthew Thomas Payne

      http://mediacommons.org/intransition/who-ever-heard%E2%80%A6

ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/c/ContraPoints/videos

    https://twitter.com/ContraPoints

Autogynephilia | ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6czRFLs5JQo

The West | ContraPoints 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyaftqCORT4

Canceling | ContraPoints

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

Cringe | ContraPoints

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q

Lindsay Ellis 

    https://www.youtube.com/c/LindsayEllisVids/videos 

    https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis

    Her book, Axiom’s End: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/axioms-end/

    Aforementioned merch page: https://store.dftba.com/collections/lindsay-ellis

YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!) - Lindsay Ellis

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw

RENT - Look Pretty and Do As Little as Possible: A Video Essay

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qfFbtIj5w&t=2369s

The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGr0NRx3TKU
Is Titanic Good, Actually?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW4U_lfgPac

kaptainkristian

    https://www.youtube.com/c/kaptainkristian/videos

    https://twitter.com/kaptainkristian

    An article about him that I pulled a quote from: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/1/12318900/kaptain-kristian-video-blogger-interview

Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oltd-Jsi2I

Jack Saint

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdQKvqmHKe_8fv4Rwe7ag9Q

    https://twitter.com/LackingSaint

The Political Implications Of Talking Dog Movies | Jack Saint

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq8AYICXVUs

FilmJoy, home of Movies with Mikey 

https://www.youtube.com/c/filmjoy/videos

hbomberguy
    https://www.youtube.com/c/hbomberguy/videos

Steven Proudfoot is a Ph.D student at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.

The Ghost on the Phone

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts created by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar.

The Ghost in the Phone

By Simogne Hudson

October 2, 2020

I got my first cell phone when I was twelve: a Nokia 3310 (pictured here). After begging for a cell phone for years, my parents finally got me one a few years after their divorce (I remember, in my tween mind, feeling conflicted over my excitement at the phone and the knowledge of why I had it -- so my parents wouldn’t need to communicate directly with each other). As was usual at that time, the affordances of the phone were pretty limited. I don’t even think I had texting; it was for emergencies only. Nevertheless, the glee of a first cell phone in one’s hands will surely be relatable to anyone reading this.

            Years later, I upgraded to my first flip phone, which was (if my memory serves me correctly) a Samsung Gusto (also pictured). Many phones followed, including QWERTY slider phones, Blackberries, and iPhones. One thing that’s remained consistent, however, is my phone number. I have had the same phone number for almost fifteen years now, which gives me an odd sense of satisfaction given the never-ending flux that defines the technology industry. At the risk of coming off cyborg-like, I feel like the phone number is a part of me. However, phone numbers are not actually so individual:they get recycled,maybe even more so than the physical cell phones they’re attached to, which most often end up at the dump.

My phone number was inherited from somebody else, a man by the name of Bradley Holsclaw.

            For most people, the question of their new number’s previous owner would never come up. But in the first few weeks of calling this phone number my own, I started receiving calls of a particular sort that persist to this day. For years, I simply looked at the calls as a minor annoyance, ignoring them and writing off any voicemails as spam. A few years ago, when I started thinking more critically about technology (an interest that then blossomed into my PhD research), I got increasingly more curious about where these calls were coming from and who they were for. So I started listening. 

            My first step was to figure out who these calls were intended for, which was more difficult than one might imagine. Those who were technologically active prior to the iPhone era will likely be able to distinguish the difference in audio quality between then and now. However, after some sustained and attentive listening, I was able to catch the intended recipient’s name: Bradley Holsclaw.

The calls came from debt collectors, an industry I was unfamiliar with until I began this detective work. The short of it: debt becomes “delinquent,” debt collection agencies can hire debt collectors, or sell the debt to debt buyers,both of which result in these types of calls. 

Over the last few years I’ve begun archiving the voicemails -- you can listen to them here.

            At this point in my investigation, two things were clear to me: someone named Bradley used to have my phone number, and Bradley owes somebody a lot of money. So, I looked Bradley up on Google. What I found in that search has stayed with me ever since:

SE Portland man dies a day after devastating house fire

Posted Jan. 28, 2008

A man died today, a day after inhaling smoke and suffering burns in a fire that gutted a home in Southeast Portland.

Firefighters arrived at the home in the 4400 block of Southeast 65th Avenue just after 7:45 a.m. Sunday as smoke poured out of the eaves.

Two men in the home at the time were not harmed, said Kim Kosmas, a Portland Fire Bureau spokeswoman. But the third roommate, identified as 28-year-old Bradley Holsclaw, died of his injuries the next morning.

The home, valued at $330,000, was a total loss, Kosmas said. And the fire's cause may remain unknown because of the extent of the damage.

(The Oregonian)

Bradley, the former owner of my phone number, died in a house fire only a few weeks before I received my cell phone.

Put differently, I have a haunted phone number.

(East PDX News)

In technology discourse, we often talk about death as it relates to the objects themselves. Concepts like planned obsolescence, hyper-consumerism, and innovation dominate, and user vitality takes a backseat to its technological counterpart. A phone without a charged battery is “dead,” they are released in “generations,” and earlier models are referred to, with a sense of owners’ misfortune, as “old.”

I don’t claim to exist outside of this construct; as I stated earlier on in this post I have personally participated in the rapid consumption of cell phones. Seeing these photos, though, and reading these articles, brought my thinking back into the human-embodied elements of life and death that technology exists alongside. Instead of huffing about the annoyance that is automated debt collection calls, I am now shaken each time I get a call and remember the traces -- the ghost -- that lives inside of my phone.

            The intersection of technology and ghosts is one that, while I think undertheorized on an academic level, comes up consistently in popular media. Take for example the South Korean film Phone (2002):

Soon after Ji-won gets a new cell phone, her friend’s young daughter, Yeong-ju, puts it to her ear and immediately begins screaming in terror. When other strange things start happening in connection with the phone, Ji-Won does some investigating and discovers that of the people before her who had the same number, almost all of them died suddenly under unusual circumstances. As Yeong-ju’s behavior becomes increasingly alarming, Ji-won digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the number’s first owner, a high school girl named Jin-hie. (Horror News Net)

Media like this depart from utopian ideas about technology and what it can do for us. Instead, they point out the fears that surround technology, specifically in how, in its operational opacity, can take on a life of its own. How can we read the “life cycle” of a technological object (whether via material form of a cell phone or immaterial form of a number) to look for themes of the uncanny or the haunted?

In thinking about how the traces of Bradley manifest in my phone number, I also have to ask about the significance of the signs. Given that his ghost is coming through not in direct communication, but refracted through the communication of debt collectors, I would argue that what is exposed is another particular (and troubling) aspect of technology and haunting: he only exists in my life because of his debts. In other words, Bradley’s existence in the technological plane of reality is informed, and catalyzed, by harmful capitalist practices of the debt chase: when somebody dies, their debt does not go away. Instead of being exposed by Ghost Hunters (a la the A&E program Ghost Hunters), or, in a more expected fashion, eulogized and memorialized by his family, he is instead kept alive through debt.

I suppose in some odd way I’m honored to have inherited Bradley’s phone number. In all of my detective work I’ve never been able to track down family members or anything more detailed than the two news articles referenced in this post. In his 1919 writing on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud articulates that terror comes from the idea of the “double.” Might the double here be the phone-body connection? In that case, it would certainly seem like the possession I feel is at least in part because I’ve replaced the latter half of that connection, and I’m now faced with a reflection that is not my own.

Many phones and one number after Bradley’s death, I feel a certain amount of responsibility to continue his legacy, even if only by keeping this phone number for as long as I possibly can. What if the next owner didn’t realize the significance of (what I’ve now termed) the Bradley calls? The East PDX News article includes a photo of a “rain-soaked makeshift shrine” for Bradley.

            My only hope is that my shrine, which is really just my phone’s voicemail folder, might do something to carry on his memory (no matter how insignificant). 

The Problem with the "Main Character" Meme

This is the third in a series of blog posts written by students in my Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice seminar.

Alexandria Arrieta

The Problem with the “Main Character” Meme

On May 26, a TikTok user named Ashley Ward posted a video of herself lying on a towel at the beach with this voiceover:

You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed. So take a second, and look around, and realize that it is a blessing to be here right now.

Main character video by Ashley Ward posted on May 26

It is a pretty simple, even trite idea, but being the “main character” in life is something that feels particularly resonant right now for teenagers and young adults who are missing out on some of the basic milestones of growing up, such as prom, graduation, and fooling around with friends. They may feel as though their agency and their youth have been taken away as they are forced to awkwardly navigate many of those experiences through Zoom or worse, alongside their parents. As a result, users like Ward started to create content about what it means to be the “main character” in May. Many latched onto Ward’s audio and used it to soundtrack TikTok videos of themselves and their friends going on camping trips, running on beaches during sunset, driving late at night and (of course) editing them with retro film filters. Beyond that, a whole “main character” discourse emerged over the summer on TikTok through various types of memes and comments, and it actually reveals a lot about the ways in which teens are modeled what it means to “come of age” through media, and specifically, through whiteness. 

Over the past decade, both major studio films like The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Love, Simon (2018) and critically acclaimed indie pieces like Lady Bird (2018), Boyhood (2014), Booksmart (2019), and Call Me By Your Name (2017) have presented coming of age narratives focused on white protagonists navigating identity, sexuality and purpose in the transition from adolescence into adulthood.

Amanda Mary Anna in her YouTube video "dressing like the main character in a coming of age movie" posted on July 16

These films, especially those made by indie production companies like A24, provided key references as the main character meme spread on TikTok, YouTube and Spotify over the summer.

Emma Topp in her YouTube video "HOW TO ROMANTICIZE YOUR LIFE || main character energy" posted on August 18

In her YouTube video entitled “becoming the main character of your life,” Claire Bergen explains, “You basically just need to essentially live your life as if you are a character in a movie or a tv show or a book because everyone’s always jealous of the lives of these characters but you can literally have that life if you wish to and I believe that to my core. It’s important to do things for yourself, do things that feed your soul, do what you want to when you want to.” She then proceeds to reference the show Outer Banksas a model of adventurous risk-taking. Many of these main character videos on YouTube begin with a general explanation of the concept and proceed to model “main character energy” through a makeup and outfit tutorial, drawing from the costume design of specific coming of age films as references. It is in these moments where the meme seems to intersect the most with activities of tv and film fandom through casual cosplay. But other than that, much of the discourse involves a general pop cultural engagement with narrative studies and understanding of character.

TikTok video posted by @arijelkins on July 6

Perhaps the most important reference that teens have drawn from these coming of age films is the particular sonic landscapes they present through soundtracks full of artists from indie and alt rock genres. Early in the development of this main character meme on TikTok, users started to make videos about the songs that make them feel like main characters, and many of them used bands that often appear in these films, such as M83 and Grouplove. There is even a growing number of playlists on Spotify and YouTube called “main character” that are dominated by white artists and bands, such as Lorde, Wallows, COIN, and Dayglow—acts that have situated many of their music videos in suburban streets and neighborhoods. These playlists often have thousands of followers, and one of them “main. character.” by David Welch (which I found out about on TikTok) has almost 100,000 followers. There are a few artists of color that I’ve noticed on these playlists, such as Labrinth (who made the soundtrack for Euphoria) and Frank Ocean, but it’s important to note that genres like hip-hop are largely absent from these playlists and are not part of this particular sonic landscape for coming of age.

Spotify curators created a popular main character playlist that has over 100,000 followers featuring primarily indie and alt rock music bands and artists

As a researcher who studies the relationship between Internet memes and popular music, I was initially interested in this particular meme because instead of merely propelling individual songs into virality (as TikTok often does), the main character meme has resulted in imaginative worldbuilding through playlist curation. As I was sifting through playlists, I also remembered that about a year ago my friend Brandon, a nineteen year old that I know through volunteering, suggested that I follow his Spotify playlist “Life’s an Indie Film, Vol. I,” which featured a lot of the same songs that were highlighted this year through the main character meme. When I asked him why he made his playlist, he said, “It’s just songs I loved that matched me and who I was in those moments when I was going through something or doing something like sneaking out late at night with friends [...] almost like a time capsule.” He also explained that he became annoyed when this type of playlisting became part of the main character meme because it felt like it had lost its meaning.

Wallows is an alt rock band that often appears on main character playlists

But it seems that a key difference between the way in which Brandon and others engaged in playlisting indie film music in 2018 and 2019 and how it played out this year is that while Brandon was working to capture memories from his teen years, many TikTokers were attempting to create memories that they never got to experience due to COVID-19. The main character idea was not simply focused on nostalgic reflection mediated through film references, but instead, became a call to reassert agency over a year of lost experiences. As platforms like TikTok increasingly center content creation around a matching process between video and audio, young users are becoming particularly fluent in soundtracking. At times, it feels as if the Internet has raised the next generation of skilled music supervisors, and at other moments, it seems as if they are simply reiterating past creative choices and tropes from popular films—even as these films reify racial stereotypes and lack of representation.

As TikTokers started to create videos about the qualifications for being the main character, such as childhood trauma and having parents that are divorced, user @nabazillion created a video that highlighted that whiteness seems to be a central characteristic.

TikTok video posted by @nabazillion on May 25

Though some users in the comments celebrated the fact that they were not eliminated from qualifying as main characters, others recognized that @nabazillion’s video was actually a commentary about lack of representation in the coming of age genre. It’s a severe issue—only 34.3 percent of speaking roles in the top 100 films of 2019 were given to people of color (Smith et al, 2020, p. 2)—and it’s also something that prior generations of people of color have had to navigate in different ways. In their editorial piece that calls readers to rethink the politics of representation by “looking away” from whiteness, J. Reid Miller, Richard T. Rodríguez, Celine Parreñas Shimizu (2018) write, “Thinking about the 1980s movies of our American teenhood, we recognize how we were forced to be white in our spectatorships and fantasies—you have to be white to be in this!” (p. 240). 

In her YouTube video, Amanda Mary Anna, a NYU film student, says, “When I think about the main character what comes to mind is the quirky, skinny, white ingénue in a low budget coming of age film set in suburbia, not McMansions and strip malls suburbia but like cute, quaint houses and like sunflower fields suburbia, you know what I’m talking about.” After declaring that she is “here to be the black Lady Bird,” she provides a tutorial on how to dress and model the adventurous and free-spirited behavior of the character. Both Amanda Mary Anna and users in the comments expressed the desire for more coming of age films featuring black protagonists that are not set in inner-city contexts or focused on racial trauma:

The first comment is interesting not simply because it’s an expression of a desire for black coming of age stories set in suburban spaces, but also because a suburban setting feels like a particular prerequisite for entry into this genre. It is also important to note that films like The Hate U Give (2018), which features a black adolescent protagonist dealing with racial violence and police brutality, were not commonly referenced in this meme because they did not function as compelling sites of escapism. It’s not that coming of age films about people of color don’t exist—they are beginning to become more common, especially with newer Netflix originals like Never Have I Ever (2020) or To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)— but the meme tended to circulate a particular, narrow vision of adolescence modeled by films in which white protagonists don’t need to worry about the daily reality of systemic racism but are able to explore other aspects of identity formation.

This year, as police brutality against black lives has reached a critical boiling point and COVID-19 has revealed entrenched socioeconomic inequality along racial lines as Latinx and black communities have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, it is important to consider how this genre of film has too often reinforced “coming of age” as a privilege of whiteness. And by this I’m not simply referring to growing up, but rather, the privilege of having the space to engage in exploration, rebellion and play in the process with little ramifications. Related to this is the way in which suburban spaces have been imagined and invoked within political discourse this year. On one hand, President Donald Trump has made incessant appeals to his white voter base by stoking fear that the suburbs are at risk due to the encroachment of low-income housing and Obama-era policies bent on breaking down suburban racial segregation. On the other, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked in July what cities would look like if the police were to be defunded, her response was that they would look like a suburb. The way that we conceptualize cities and invoke the imagery of the suburb, beyond existing as a bastion of white flight and racial segregation, has a significant impact on civic imagination and spatial figurations of community. 

The “main character” meme has grown and developed in some interesting ways within the last month or so. Many TikTok users have taken to the comment sections of comedic videos to identify “main character energy” when someone in a video behaves with freedom and an extreme lack of self-consciousness about what others think and have applied the term much more liberally to individuals from different generations. Others made fun of the trite nature of Olivia Ward’s audio by using it in videos of animals defecating.

TikTok video posted by @eshelton3 on August 14

The song “Heather” by Conan Gray became a sleeper hit as it captured the particular despair of being a side character. In the song, Gray writes about how the person he is in love with is in love with Heather, a seemingly perfect girl that everyone is jealous of. The song has inspired the creation of over a million videos, and in many of them, teens identify the “heathers” of their families and their schools or post vintage photos of their moms who they believe were the “heathers” of their time.

Much of the research I have done in the past has focused on how music memes can work to dismantle racialized genre borders in the music industry, but this is an example of the opposite. Memes, as digital items that can be rapidly spread or imitated, have the potential to quickly reinforce these borders as well, especially when they are not created in a comedic mode or for the purposes of trolling. As teens grappled with and mourned the experiences that they missed out on this year, they largely perpetuated narrow representations in pop culture of what those moments should entail through the main character meme. In the process, they often worked to reify “coming of age” as a process that is intertwined with systems of race and privilege.

References:

Reid Miller, J., Rodríguez, R. T., & Shimizu, C. P. (2018). The Unwatchability of Whiteness: A New Imperative of Representation. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 4(3), 235–243. https://doi.org/10.1163/23523085-00403001

Smith, D. S. L., & Pieper, D. K. (2020). Inequality in 1,300 Popular Films: xamining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2019. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, 42.

Alexandria Arrieta is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Southern California. She researches the relationship between popular music and Internet memes and also focuses on issues related to gender and race in the music industry. Arrieta is an independent music artist and producer who has toured across the west coast.

Stop Stressing Graduate Students About Tenure

This is the second in a series of blog posts developed by students in my PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice.

Stop Stressing Graduate Students about Tenure 

By: Jordan Harper 

Faculty are responsible for and take pride in many things: teaching, research, service, and stressing graduate students out about tenure. The realities of the academy actually make the latter unnecessary. 

The academy is changing and has been for a while. Data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) show that three-quarters of all faculty positions exist off the tenure-track. That is, non-tenure-track faculty (i.e., part-time, full-time contingent and adjunct faculty). Pressuring graduate students to think about tenure in just about everything they do is a carceral logic that impacts their intellectual curiosity and overall experience in graduate education. It is unhelpful to burden graduate students with the thought of tenure when the reality of the academy is that very few, if any at this point in time, will even land a tenure-track job, or, even have a desire to go into the academy at all. Conversations about tenure are distracting and burdensome. 

Before we go any further, let us first observe how tenure is talked about before graduate students even become fully aware of what it actually means to ‘get’ tenure. I present to you, tenure, as discussed on Big Bang Theory. 

In the clip, tenure is discussed as a flashy, highly sought after reward that will not impact “output,” gives you job security and freedom, and may even make your mother proud, that is if she can even comprehend what tenure truly is. One of the guys, Sheldon, even goes as far as to allude that, even after achieving tenure, he will still have to live with a roommate. This slight comment illustrates that the Ph.D. and tenure is not a ticket to financial freedom and ease, but instead serves as more of a personal achievement and a recognition that your work in theacademyis promising and worthwhile. Another guy in the clip, Leonard, informs Penny that he, in fact, does not have to schmooze up to anyone to be awarded tenure. This is not true. In fact, your career leading up to tenure is all about schmoozing.

Graduate students, especially, exist in marginal and vulnerable positions. They feel all the pressure to conform and fold into what the academy desires of them (i.e., publications, conference presentations, research) and even adjust their research interests to what will get them published and land them a job. As gatekeepers of the academy, faculty often call attention to tenure every chance they get and some feel that it is their responsibility to do so. The tenure conversation deeply impacts vulnerable graduate students by lowering them into a rabbit hole of reevaluation: reevaluating their relationships with the academy, with their personal research interests, with social media, with television, with themselves. Graduate students then internalize the position of a tenure-track professor by falling into the idea that they must publish or perish, reach for only the top journals that exist behind a paywall, and put their mental health on the line and work, work, work. 

Tenure talk also stirs graduate students away from engaging with public audiences. It is no secret that research published in top-tier journals is the golden ticket to tenure, especially at a Research I institution. So, graduate students will often feel the pressure to shift all of their energy to the top journals in their respective fields, even if it takes over a year for the article to get published. Graduate students only talk to other academics when publishing in these journals and miss vital opportunities to share that research and information with broader audiences. Partly because of the ongoing tenure conversations, graduate students do not even think about ways to translate their research to public audiences by way of op-eds, blog posts, or resource guides. Here, key opportunities are missed to broaden a graduate students’ network and reach. And, if a tenure-track position is out of their reach or becomes a distant desire, all they have on their CV’s is an article citation that shows their allegiance to academia and to no one else. 

Another tale as old as time is that graduate students are in no position to conduct ‘cutting edge,’ ‘radical,’ or ‘critical’ research. Graduate students are frequently reminded of tenure when they do so and are often encouraged to wait until they receive the job security that comes with tenure to produce such research. What happened to the purpose of graduate education? To advance and construct new knowledge? Unfortunately, the purpose of graduate education gets lost in the conversation of tenure. When students are indoctrinated with the thought and concept of tenure, they tend to police their actions and the product(s) they consume, locking themselves into a carceral state that stifles their creativity and agency.  

I, for one, am not solely looking at academic jobs or tenure-track jobs. In fact, I am aware of the current job outlook for tenure-track faculty and am fully aware of the fact that tenure is diminishing before our eyes. Therefore, in all the work I do, I am reminded of two things: why I’m doing a Ph.D. and the fact that I do not necessarily need to enter academia after completing my program. I’m doing a Ph.D. because I’m genuinely curious about a multitude of things regarding higher education—leadership, non-tenure-track faculty, graduate admissions/education, hiring. And I know that my curiosity about all things higher education will lead me wherever I am meant to be. I am also aware of my commitment to public work and public scholarship and how that may later come in tension with a tenure-track faculty position. My commitment to public work is something I hold close and allows me to drown out conflicting messages about publishing or perishing and the need to publish in top-tier journals. In fact, I am more interested in publishing in open-access journals and more public forums so my work can land in the hands of those who need it most. I want my work to start conversations. If my work is only published in top-tier journals and journals behind paywalls, then that means only other academics with institutional access to these journals can start conversations. And even then, it’s probably only to cite me in the introduction of a paper or at most, a literature review. These commitments I hold cause me to think beyond tenure. In fact, I very seldom think about tenure. I think about the vital need for the work I produce, where it can go for others to read widely, and how to have subsequent conversations with the people who read and engage with my work. Tenure is truly the last thing on my mind. And I acknowledge that this is a privilege and a luxury, but I think it is a mindset for other graduate students to adopt and actively think about to push against the carceral state graduate students’ are put in when they are bogged down with the reminder of tenure and what you have to lose or give up in order to achieve it. 

So many graduate students lose their soul well before landing a tenure-track job. And that is, in part, due to the conversations they have with other faculty regarding what they should or should not be doing during their time as graduate students. Instead of pressuring graduate students to think about tenure and how their work will affect their ability to be awarded tenure, the message should be more about authenticity; to thine own self be true. Graduate students should be able to pursue any line of inquiry they want without the pressure of tenure looming over their heads. They should be able to honor their personal commitments in an academic space. Also, graduate students do not need a reminder of tenure in every academic space; it’s stressful, unnecessary, and lowkey traumatic. The message for faculty is clear: stop stressing graduate students about tenure. And the message for graduate students is even more straightforward: express yourself and do work that you’re passionate about during your time as a graduate student. We’ll cross that [tenure] bridge if and when we get there. 

Jordan Harper is a research assistant at the Pullias Center for Higher Education and a PhD student in the Urban Education Policy program at USC Rossier School of Education. His research interests are focused on higher education leadership, non-tenure-track faculty, graduate admissions, and graduate education.

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Trust and American Democracy

This is the first of a series of blog posts written by the PhD students in my seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice. Over the next few weeks, I, like a proud father, will display my student’s work.

Trust and American Democracy

by Jackson De Vight

Over the last three decades partisan polarization has steadily increased across every societal arena, including perception of news organizations, trust in political opponents’ good faith, and opinions of institutions like churches or media outletsassociated with the other side. As a society we used to have a certain level of trust in major institutions even if we knew they were somewhat flawed, and that common ground and experience provided a space for us understand and discuss issues. Today, such an ideal seems almost unreachable. Americans are increasingly suspicious of traditional news sources, such as network and cable news, national newspapers, or public radio, fearing that they are biased or ‘fake news.’ At the same time, on both the left and right, partisan sources – from Fox News to MSNBC – have further polarizedhow many Americans get their news. In a way, these partisan news sources are making those fears come true by the very act of giving consumers an ‘unbiased’ [read: they agree with me] news source.

We don’t have a set of common sources we can agree on for the facts, and that’s a problem because before we can have a worthwhile discussion about what should be done, it’s important that we have agreement on what’s happening in the first place. This trend has been on the uptick for some time, but at some point I think that gradual increases build up to a complete change, which is exactly what I think has happened with the current outrage over the impartiality of institutions like the post office and ballot counting. This ought to be of utmost importance across the political spectrum, and cannot be another space in which those vaguely sympathetic to Donald Trump’s policy positions or judicial appointments wave off criticism of his combativeness as an unfortunate but understandable element of his character. This attack is not limited to cultural institutions like the New York Times or NPR, but an assault on one of the core presumptions of the American system. This category difference matters. I’ll make my case here as if I were narrating how I think through these sorts of questions that contain both nerdy theoretical ideas and some more grounded and specific analysis.

To start I’ll try to justify why I think this issue matters, followed by some work to define some terms – how do I define undermining and how I define whether or not it’s occurring, and finish with some responses to the sorts of pushback I expect a reasonable, good faith opponent might levy against me. I need to be clear – I disagree profoundly with the sitting president and those who still support him, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. My study of the fractured news climate in our country and how it shapes people’s perception of reality has pushed me to genuine care and humility in how I approach these issues. The contemporary media landscape deals heavily in whole narratives rather than providing strictly factual accounts, and it is my hope in this blog piece to temporarily peel back the some assumptions surrounding this situation just long enough to plant seeds of thought on this critical issue.

Before I step into the nitty-gritty of how I think through electoral misconduct, I want to lay out my reasoning for why this question has even arisen during this most unusual of elections. There are two major reasons why the validity of this coming election have been cast into doubt. First, as noted previously, the sitting president and some of his supporters appear to be trying to castinto question the conditions under which they would ensure a peaceful transition of power. They have cited concerns about election fraud, and at times implied that a loss would mean that fraud had taken place! 

The persuasiveness of this approach is somewhat compounded by the second contributing factor: mail-in ballots. An unprecedented percentage of voters are expected to vote by mail this year due to changes caused by COVID-. This presents a number of potential strategic concerns for the GOP. Democratsare more likely to vote by mail than Republicans both nationwide and state-by-state. Older voters, a demographic which had until March firmly favored Trump in most relevant states, decidedly flipped due to his handling of the pandemic. 

Furthermore, the speed at which vote by mail has been expanded across the country has substantial consequences. Most polling and vote counting is done by dutiful but busy and often older volunteers, meaning that rapid changes in how voting is carried out can cause significant misunderstandings, delays, or errors. In states which have gone from either no or very limited general mail in ballots there may simply not be sufficient resources to process the vote counts as quickly as they did with the previous system. Most states prohibit pre-Election Day ballot counting to prevent leaks or influencing in-person voters, and the logistical challenge of both manning polls and counting mail-in ballots is likely to either make the former severely understaffed, or to make ballot counting from the latter stretch over the coming week. In the past, the overall result of races have rarely been changed by mail-in ballots. The percentage of votes cast in person and the skew one way or the other in mail-in ballots was insufficient to make a difference. In this case, however, it’s entirely possible that a number of important state and national elections, including the presidential race, could break that mold entirely due to these rapid reforms.

Like any good academic I have a strong, some might say annoying, tendency to fixate on definitions and categories. How and where we sort various ideas, issues, and people in our mental bookshelves is often an unconscious but nevertheless vital aspect of critical thought and belief. For instance, whether or not you consider gravity a law (so nearly always true it’s best just to live like it’s an iron-clad rule) or a theory (an interesting but unproven explanation or pattern) will have major implications for your life! In my mind there are two general ways of approaching the question of electoral legitimacy. First, one could say that in order to believe the results of the election they themselves, or one of their hand-picked representatives or trusted sources must personally observe enough of the election results to guarantee their legitimacy. Forgive what might sound like a sarcastic tone, I don’t mean it that way at all– this is an extreme but rational extension of a natural tendency to draw tight boundaries around ‘your people,’ particularly when wider, less personally connected sources are cast into doubt! There’s an important distinction to be drawn here, however. 

Sometimes we can be drawn into what social scientists call a ‘parasocial relationship’ with news organizations or pundits. These parasocial connections are essentially where aspects of a real, two-way relationship such as you might have with a friend or family member is transferred to a media figure. This tendency is very common! Teens develop emotional attachments not just to the music from their favorite artists but the artists themselves, any number of sports fans treat longtime coaches of home teams like heroes or traitors, and real, genuine senses of personal loss may accompany the death of a longtime favorite actor or activist. I don’t make this point to dismiss the validity of any of these feelings, but rather to note that the ‘one of us’ set of emotions which can so easily transfer to news figures who we agree with and enjoy the style of can cause real trouble. Unlike actors, athletes, or musicians who may depart their area of expertise and discuss politics and society, news outlets are conduits for facts themselves and granting an organization the benefit of the doubt out of loyalty to a shared ideological position may, over time, seriously skew your perception of reality. After all, a domestic news organization covering an American presidential election has much more bias in reporting than the same organization might have covering an election in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, or Asia, where outside observation may indeed be the most trustworthy metric for electoral legitimacy in part because there’s less motivated reasoning at play. 

In short, I encourage you to think critically about who you sort into the absolutely trusted, generally trusted, trusted if corroborated, doubted, and patently untrustworthy buckets. If you’re anyone like me, almost every major news source should be right in the middle of that spectrum. Try to develop a robust background of each source’s history, the coverage from other sources, and a good nose for nonsense to test each story, especially the ones you want to believe.

The second approach to validating the legitimacy to the election is to trust the institutional mechanisms formally set out as the legal authorities for ensuring electoral legitimacy. There is crossover with the previous approach, of course. Instead of putting trust in news figures, individual politicians, or internet media groups trust is put in a formal system. I don’t want to seem dismissive that both notions involve trust, they most certainly do, nor imply that I think the electoral system is some unchanging bedrock in civic society. Quite the contrary! The system of elections has changed frequently across the United States, including reforms to how ballots are written and counted, how folks in various places and demographics are allowed to vote, and the weight of votes relative to votes in other precincts and states. Another important point is to remember that the federal government does not operate even federal elections! That work is entirely conducted from the state on downward, with federal regulation and engagement limited to issues of campaign finance and, in rare cases, judicial involvement in contested races. Mail-in ballots, precinct staffing, and all the other attending details are much more localized. This has, aside from atypical situations like the Hanging Chads in Florida during the 2000 election, rarely prompted much national-level outcry, much less serious accusations of electoral misconduct. 

With these two broad approaches of assessing electoral legitimacy in mind, I want to lay out how I think through the all-important question of whether or not an election is illegitimate. To my mind there are three components to whether an election’s resultis illegitimate. First, there must be sufficient evidence of misconduct to question the validity of some set of votes. This could include illegal acts like stealing or counterfeiting ballots, which take place prior to a ballot being entered, or as part of the counting of ballots through negligent or intentional exclusion of some particular set of ballots, but it must be provable to a wider public, not mere conspiracy. 

Second, the counts cast into doubt must be of sufficient magnitude to be consequential to the election’s results. While popular vote totals may be helpful perceptually, our system does not operate as a count of totality. For example, even if the long-publicized issue of ballots being sent in by deceased voters in Chicago (a totalof 229 votes from 119 ‘voters’ according to bipartisan commission) were a thousand times more severe it would not have changed which presidential candidate Illinois voted for in over thirty years. 

Finally, the counts in question must be cast in a state where the suspected misconduct would change the allocation of electors in sufficient quantities to change the election’s outcome. Now, before I am carted off to be burned for what may seem to be outrageously generous standards, let me be clear: these are not thresholds for whether election tampering has taken place, but rather thresholds for whether that tampering has made an entire race’s results untrustworthy. Concerns surrounding the detection and prosecution of ballot misconduct is entirely valid and should be pursued to the utmost extent of the law, which I must note is remarkably strict. 

The question here, the critical issue which threatens to undermine the core principals and practices of this nation, is whether the end result of the presidential election in 2020 can be trusted, and under what conditions those results are to be determined. So far I have tried my best to describe why I think this issue is pressing for our contemporary moment, provide general categories for how folks tend to put their trust in the results of elections, and to make as clear as possible my bright-lines for what would and would not cast the results into doubt. From here, all that remains is to discuss the probability of electoral illegitimacy and to briefly game out the most likely scenarios for the week of November 3rd.

I must begin my discussion of election-changing mishaps or misconduct with a warning. I do not trade in conspiracy theories, and as flawed or imbalanced as the various institutions, scholars, news organizations, partisan and bipartisan political commissions, authors, law enforcement agencies, and other such mainstream bodies may be, the notion that they, with all the checks and balances they are subject to, all cooperatively or coincidentally stand together against truth is preposterous. One ought to corroborate information from any of those sources, but anonymous leaks, internet diatribes, and discredited figureheads do not bear on this analysis. Fortunately, unless you are given to the notion that both political parties and every layer of the news, legal, and credible watchdog worlds are in on a plot to radically downplay massive voter fraud and ballot counting errors, we can trust that the study and investigations into these issues offer at least ballpark figures for what we can expect. 

The first set of ballot question marks likely to arise in November centers on criminal or negligent tampering with ballot distribution, alteration, or collection. FBI Director Christopher Wray noted in a congressional hearing on September 24ththat the FBI has been monitoring but has seen no evidence of coordinated voter fraud, either historically or in this election cycle, though both White House press secretary McEnany and Attorney General Barr argued that this analysis is irrelevant in such an unprecedented mail-in election. Further, the sum total of voter fraud cases documented by any credible news organization, including conservative sources, during the 2016 election was four, including Terri Lynn Rote, an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump, Phillip Cook, a Texas man who voted twice for Trump and then claimed he was working for the Trump campaign when he was caught, Audrey Cook, a Republican election judge in Illinois who voted on behalf of her dead husband, and Gladys Coego, an election volunteer in Florida who filled in a mayoral bubble on a ballot she was counting. Rote, Mr. Cook, and Coego were arrested and charged, while Ms. Cook’s ballot was discarded. 

The sum total of suspected but documented cases for the 2016 election totals, at most number under a hundred out of over a hundred and thirty million ballots cast. Even if that number were a hundred times a hundred it wouldn’t have changed the results even in America’s least populated district, Rhode Island’s 1stwhich has around 500,000 residents and 200,000 active voters. This data certainly isn’t conclusive given the nature of a blog post, but I hope it’s illustrative for how unlikely election-changing fraud is in our system. 

The second, and far more likely, ballot issue for 2020 has to do with notcounting genuine votes rather than counting fraudulent ones, and not along any lines of political bias whatsoever. Each state has some combination of four or five methods for ensuring the legitimacy of ballots, and each year genuine ballots are thrown out due to issues like incorrectly mailed forms, subjective judgements about matching signatures, and machine errors. This is significantly more of an issue with mail-in ballots,  especially in states new to the practice, which due to the demographics who tend to vote remotely will hurt Biden more than Trump.

There are a number of feasible scenarios for how November 3rdand the ensuing week plays out. 

-      If we take present polling at face value and maintain the assumption regarding who will benefit more from mail-in voting, Biden will win the race on Election Day and his lead will continue to grow as more mail-in ballots are counted. 

-      The second most likely scenario is essentially a tie or narrow lead by Trump on Election day, perhaps again losing the popular vote, but Biden doesn’t concede given the unprecedented number of ballots which won’t have been counted yet. If those mail-in ballots flip some important states and Biden ends up winning the electoral vote, especially if it’s close or he loses the popular vote, the groundwork laid by the president and his campaign for claiming a stolen election will kick into gear. Based on the data we have, which is admittedly premised on extrapolations from prior to the COVID-19 complications, it is extremely unlikely that the president will fair better than his challenger in mail-in ballots. 

-      The least likely, but certainly possible way this election plays out, is that Trump wins sufficiently on election night for Biden to concede and no transition of power takes place, shifting attention to the various congressional and state-level elections. 

What exactly a crisis such as that mentioned in the second scenario would entail is beyond the scope of this piece or any precedent in American history, but do note two key facts. First, partisanship has become more rabid and violent over the last few decades – over a third of voters from both parties polled by YouGov and the Voter Study Group expressed openness to violence for advancing political goals, up from 8% in November of 2017. Second, the record of presidents peacefully and graciously leaving office and the public by and large avoiding violent protest could, potentially, be threatened if this election’s results are too contentious., The assumption of reasonable observers has been that that if Trump were in fact as insane and power hungry as his more extreme critics claim and refused to leave his office he’d be kicked out of the White House as a tresspasser, no longer president no matter what he claimedWhile the contingency of the election being in such doubt as to carry into 2021 is unlikely in the extreme, the very idea of a contested election could foment unrest leading to tragedy.

If you find yourself to be open to the idea that an election might be fraudulently decided this November, I encourage you to think through precisely what conditions would lead you to make that determination. Then, as much as you can, stick to them. I understand that if you’ve spent the last three years miserable with Trump as president, it could be remarkably attractive to undermine the legitimacy of the election if he were to win. The same is perhaps even more true if you are a Trump supporter and feel as though he’s the first chance you’ve had to fight back against institutions which are contrary to your beliefs and best interests. This country needs to be bigger than one election, and it is up to each and every one of us to put aside our biases to recognize that faith in our system must far transcend faith in one man, party, policy, or cultural belief.

Jackson De Vight is a doctoral student in Communication Studies in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California where he researches political rhetoric, voter behavior, and security narratives in the media. His past work includes discussions of TSA checkpoints, the cultural location of the national anthem as seen through the Colin Kaepernick protests, and a rich history in speech and debate. As of 2020 he remains committed to a robust interdisciplinary approach, spending most of his free reading on topics ranging from cookery to economics and his free time fishing, working in the woodshop, and carrying on intellectually stimulating and utterly unimportant arguments with his friends.

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Three)

As you note, there were a proliferation of images of television in the cinema prior to the reality of television in the lives of the average consumer -- for example, in Metropolis, Modern Times, International House, Murder by Television and many more. What were the prevailing images that film constructed around television as a medium? Were these early representations caught up in the rivalry between media in the ways that 1950s vintage representation of television, such as in All that Heaven Allows? 

The cinema screen was another important source of information from which the public learned about television before regular broadcasting started. The films you mention, made between the late 1920s and the late 1930s, capitalized on the great interest in the always-just-around-the-corner new medium. Yet films have depicted television technologies starting very early on, in the period when cinema itself was a novelty. While I was doing the research for the book, film historian Richard Koszarski and I compiled a filmography of television in the cinema prior to 1939, which is published, alongside an article by Koszarski, inThe Journal of E Media Studies. 

We discovered over 100 films from all over the world – features, shorts, animation, serials (we excluded newsreels and documentaries in order to keep the volume manageable) – that in one way or another dealt with televisual media. And yet, we were not close to being done: since then we have found quite a few new entries and are now maintaining a webpage that regularly updates the filmography, now consisting of 127 titles (if you know of more films we should add, please get in touch!).The earliest item on the filmography is Georges Méliès trick film Photographie électrique à distance from 1908   which is unsurprising given that in the early cinema era, televisual devices were a fantasy and an attraction in and of themselves, and thereby a most appropriate subject matter for the kinds of films Méliès made at the time. 

When I attempted to synthesize and make sense of this large volume of cinematic depictions of television in my book, I frankly found that they were too anarchic and diverse to do justice to in a conclusive summary or an overarching theory. And here, I’d say, lies the difference between the intermedial relations at play in All that Heaven Allows and other films from its period and the films that dealt with television before 1939. 

In All that Heaven Allows, television signifies values such as domesticity, femininity, consumerism, while a film like A Face in the Crowd, to give an example of another notable 1950s film, critiques broadcast television for its potential for mass political influence and susceptibility to manipulation by economic powers. Both examples, in turn, invite comparison between the cultural and social institution of cinema and its televisual “other.” But as we discussed above, during the silent era and the 1930s, the very nature of television was still up for grabs. Film made in this period, therefore, don’t offer a critique of the new medium as such but rather explore its possibilities. The results are often magnificent: some movies showed television devices in realistic contexts of video-phone conversations or large screen live transmissions, whereas other opted for imaginary depictions, showing televisual devices that transmit images from Mars or from the future. In some movies, television sets are found in houses and movie theaters, while in others they are installed in spaceships, caves, or inside a wrist watch. Television are operated on screen by cowboys, spies, superheroes, tyrannical leaders, and mad professors. Not to mention cartoon puppies

What I found particularly interesting in this large body of varied imaginary depictions was that in many cases the engagement with future forms of moving image media compelled filmmakers to reflect about the nature of their own medium. Thus, several of the films that tell stories about television also raise questions about the ontology of the moving image, its evidential value, and its susceptibility to misinterpretation – all of which, remarkably, echo a very similar reflexive attitude to that we see in films from cinema’s first decades.

What did Dziga Vertov mean by the “Radio-Eye”? What window does his work offer us into utopian and avant garde conceptions of television that emerged in the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik revolution? 

Vertov started using the term Radio Eye in the mid-1920s, when he was commenting on the prospects of television in his manifestoes and essays. Vertov observed the progress in television technology in the United States and Britain, and already at that early moment saw in the experimental medium a promise for new possibilities for revolutionary filmmaking. Radio Eye is a neologism that he coined, an intermedial combination of the Kino Eye (his term for newsreels edited with a montage technique that aims at “deciphering the visible world”)and Radio Ear (the montage of documentary sound recording). Much like he used the term Kino Eye to distance his work from “the movies” in the mainstream Hollywood sense, so does Radio Eye signify a unique political and aesthetic concept of television that departs from the broadcast medium that emerged in the West. 

Vertov’s speculative writings on the Radio-Eye provide us with a very rich case study for how television was imagined in an ideological and industrial context very different from those we typically associate with the emergence of the medium. When Vertov conceived of political deployment of television he did not just think of broadcasting revolutionary propaganda films; in true avant-garde spirit, he rather envisioned a radically different deployment of moving image transmission media altogether. Vertov saw in the coming of television an opportunity to realize something that the cinema in his view had failed to achieve, namely a way to connect the working people to one another.

Hence, the idea of the Radio Eye rejected the centralized one-to-many communication model of broadcasting, both technologically and in terms of the administration of the culture industry. Instead, Vertov envisioned the Radio Eye as a network configuration that anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s idea of “radio as anapparatus of communication” or even contemporary online grassroots media practices. He described a truly collectivist audiovisual apparatus that would enable proletariats to share audiovisual materials, so that they can document their lives and see the political realities of fellow workers. In this media configuration, every spectator is also an agitator, a producer, and a comrade. 

Vertov’s vision of the new medium was absolutely utopian, but he was hardly naïve about the prospects of television. He acknowledged the fact that cinema’s revolutionary potential had by then already been colonized by the capitalist West. His writings on television thus have an urgent tone to them. Vertov knew that within a decade the emergent medium would become a reality and so the Soviet Union had to beat the West in developing transmission technologies and shaping an aesthetic that would be appropriate for television.

And this leads me to believe that Vertov’s late-1920s filmmaking strategies – which we associate with high-modernist interest in medium specificity – were at least partly influenced by his anticipation of television. Like many other ideas about television, this one remained a “road not taken” in media history, but one that remained significant nonetheless. 

Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.

Covid-19, Participatory Culture, and the Challenges of Misinformation and Disinformation

This morning, I will be delivering some keynote remarks reflecting back on our white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, which was written more than 15 years ago. I was honored to be asked to deliver keynote remarks at the opening session of the Global Media and Information Literacy week co-hosted by UNESCO and the Government of South Korea. My remarks centered around the issue of mis/disinformation in a networked culture. In preparation for this talk, I was interviewed by a Korean journalist, Bon-kwon Koo, who has given me permission to reproduce the exchange here, having been able to use only excerpts in his reporting. I thought the work product from this exchange would be of interest to my readers — especially those involved in Media Literacy Education. When his article appears, I will provide a link here. I am also told a video of the opening event will be posted soon and I will embed it here when it is. I am going to be sharing some more reflections on that white paper and its legacy in the weeks ahead.

I will be posting the final segment of my interview with Doron Gailli on my blog on Wednesday. Sorry for the delay but I wanted to insure circulation of this time sensitive information.

UNESCO has been providing literacy education and emphasizing media literacy for a long time. This year, the theme of the MIL feature conference is ‘Resisting Disinfodemic’. UNESCO seems to be placing particular importance on combating the flood of disinformation during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

-Why do you think UNESCO decided to make the theme of the conference ‘Resisting Disinfodemic’?

Misinformation/disinformation is one of the biggest problems facing the world today, having a corrosive effect on many democratic countries, both because of active efforts by the Russians and other state players to divide their enemies and rivals, but also because of locally produced conspiracy theories and polarizing claims. As someone who studies participatory culture, I am particularly concerned by the ways that everyday citizens become involved in circulating (and in some cases producing) such disinformation in a world where young people get much of their information about the world through social media. We want to see every citizen more conscious and more accountable about the information they put into circulation and we want them to develop stronger discernment skills for verifying the reliability of sources upon which they depend. In both ways, media literacy can play a key role.

 What will you be emphasizing in your keynote speech for 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy Week Feature Conference? 

As always, I stress the agency of everyday citizens to make a difference in the world. I will be reflecting back on my white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, which was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago, showing how the key media literacy skills identified there remain essential in our own times by looking at how youth activists around the world are deploying those skills to make a difference on issues that matter to them. In many ways, the new youth activists – ranging from Greta Thunberg to Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez to Emma Gonzales of the March for Our Lives movement , to cite a few examples—are shaped by their acquisition and deployment of core skills in accessing, interpreting, critiquing, and deploying media (including popular culture) as resources for social change. I also argue that the three problems my report identified – the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethical challenges associated with new media – have not been addressed and create the context for our current problems with dis/misinformation.

The WHO has also been warning about a disinfodemic regarding COVID-19, and in fact, it does seem that a huge amount of disinformation about COVID-19 has been circulated, which has caused significant damage. 

-More people are being educated now than at any time in human history, and they also have greater access to tools that let them easily verify the source of the information. But still, the negative influence that disinformation is having is greater than ever. Why do you think this is happening?

I would bring this straight back to the lack of core media literacy skills. The tools are there. The access is there. We have social mechanisms for collectively verifying information. BUT the average citizen around the world has a limited grasp of how to use those tools effectively. I had a family member describe the conspiracy theory site, QAnon, as their prefered “fact checker,” showing a deep lack of understanding of the concept of media bias.  Young people get most of their information through social media: they act as each other’s filter, forwarding things to each other that they think are significant. Most of that news comes from traditional news agencies; some of it comes from websites which are deeply biased in their perspective; some come from people actively producing and circulating “fake news” (a term which has lost its impact through misuse by our political leaders). And the problem is they are all coming at us through the same social media platforms and consumed without much awareness of the original sources. We are seeing national political leaders forward misinformation without even asking their staff to verify the information – just because they thought it was interesting or shared with them by a supporter. So how do we expect young people to sort out the nature of this rapidly flowing content? Short answer – through acquiring and deploying core media literacy skills to filter content and by developing a sense of responsibility to their peers to insure the quality of information they put into circulation.

-Currently, many countries and companies are devising legal and technical solutions to cope with fake news and disinformation. Do you think they will work?

All of the experts agree – these solutions will help but they will not solve the problem. There is no substitute for an informed, engaged, and responsible public to hold each other and especially to hold themslves accountable for the quality of information they share with each other.

- What do you think is the most important media literacy skill in this age of post-truth so full of disinformation?

Judgement, which my white paper defined as “the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources..”  In a networked and participatory era, judgement is closely linked to several other skills: Collective intelligence, “the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal,”; Networking, “The ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information’ and Negotiation, “the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives.” In other words, judgement is not a skill that can be practiced by individuals in isolation from others. In a networked culture, we are mutually dependent on each other to insure the quality of our information environment and that includes engaging with people who bring different perspectives to bear on that information. The notion of  Negotiation, say, seems more and more urgent as we discover the very different realities that people of different races or living in different countries experience on a daily basis. If we are to weigh the caliber of information, we need to do so with eyes that question our own priviledge and our cultural isolation, listening to others whose perspectives and experiences differ radically from our own.

 Some have said that we have become excessively dependent on digital media, particularly with the decrease in in-person contact during the pandemic. There are also widening gaps between individuals' digital media usage capabilities.

- What do you think is the wisest attitude to take towards using the media during the current pandemic, which doesn’t look as if it is ending any time soon?

The lockdown has revealed the flaws in arguments based on the concept of “screen time.” Our concern should not be ultimately about the screen and what it is doing to us. Our focus should be about what activities we are performing through those screens. Right now, most of our day is screen time, but we are using screens for a broad range of purposes, from work and education to socializing and recreation. And this has always been the case. Similarly, the old argument was that the screen was isolating and to blame for our lack of interaction with others in our community. Today, we are socially distanced and many of us turn to the digital as the only means of maintaining social contact with the most important people in our lives. Covid-19 has turned many myths about digital media on their head. So, the wisest attitude comes back to the idea that what we do with and through media is far more important in shaping our lives than suspicions about what media is doing to us (the tired old media effects arguments). We need to think through our choices and use media responsibily. But right now, for the short term at least, we have no choice but to rely on screen media for many of the core functions of our society. Beyond that, as you note, we should be concerned with questions of equality of access and participation, which are impacting who has access to education, who can apply for jobs, who is isolated from their communities, etc. The impact of what I call the Participation Gap has never been clearer than it is at this moment and the question there is what we as a society are going to do about it.

-Classes in a lot of schools are being replaced with online education. This, in some ways, increases educational gaps between students. As online education spreads across the world, what do you think is the new media literacy capability? 

Many of us anticipated this situation two decades ago. We urged the development of rich educational resources and activities that took advantage of the affordances of the new media environment. We called for professional development to prepare teachers to teach under these conditions. We supported research to better understanding how learning might most effectively occur online. For the most part, none of these things were supported by key decision-makers effecting education. They were blindsided by a problem some of us saw coming twenty years before. A key element in our vision for online education was the importance of media literacy. This is what we called the transparency problem. Just because you are using media does not mean you automatically understand how it works or the role it plays in your life or how to use It effectively to serve your ends. Most young people lack mentorship in how to deal with the complex social and ethical issues they encounter with online communities. We have already discussed the impact of limited skills and personal responsibility over processing news and other information which flows through our social media platforms. So, to create online education without developing robust media literacy training is criminal (or at least should be).

 As someone who created the term Convergence Culture, you have been speaking up about the use of today’s convergent media for a long time. 

-You have emphasized the importance of users’ capability to participate independently and actively rather than the technology for convergent media itself. What do you think is required in order to have this kind of capability?

I would question the use of the term, “independently,” in the above. My work stresses collective rather than individual agency. I describe the new media literacies as social skills and cultural competencies because they refer to things which are best achieved through networks. The modern world is too complex for us to go it alone. None of us know everything, most of us know somethings, and what we need to learn is to share knowledge, debate the quality of information, and teach each other the skills we need to survive. We see something like that occuring in the most robust participatory culture communities – whether it is the norms and practices that have grown up around Wikipedia, the multiple forms of literacy involved in participating in a fan fiction site like Archive of Our Own, or the sharing of technical skills and resources in an affinity space like those surrounding Minecraft. These are places where people learn from each other and at the same time hold each other accountable. 

-How can gaps between users in an interactive media environment be reduced?

First, we need to recognize that the problem goes beyond technical skills and access, as important as these are in the contemporary world. Governments often feel they have solved the problem by insuring access through schools and libraries, but this creates a different kind of gap since those who have access at home have different relationships to these platforms and practices than those who only have limited access through schools. And the problem is not simply technical. The participation gap is concerned with social and cultural obstacles. Do you have the skills you need to participate? Do you know how to find the most meaningful communities to help you learn and grow? Do people listen to you when you post things or are you facing systemic forms of descrimination? Do you feel entitled to create and share media with others? Do you have the mentorship you need to help guide you to make the right choices when you go online? And so forth. These are, again, not questions of technical skill development but of media literacy. 

 The concept of the media audience is changing from consumers to “prosumers”, and the idea of participatory media that you have been emphasizing for a long time is now widely recognized.

- You have emphasized the role of the user's participatory culture and collective intelligence in media use. Is the ability to participate sensibly something that can be acquired naturally through the use of new media, or is it something to be nurtured through new literacy education?

The idea that young people acquire the skills they need on their own through axccess to digital media is a myth. The result is that there is a generation of feral children of the internet who have been raised by the wolves of Web 2.0 and toxic game culture. This myth lets the adults off the hook: how could we help if our children are digital natives and we are simply digital immigrants? Children still need guidance, adults helping them acquire needed skills, competencies, and literacies and providing help in confronting complex problems as they arise. We do not give them the support we need through either a laissez-faire (emphasis on lazy) response or through one which involves spying on children. Our young people do not need us snooping over their shoulders; they need us watching their back. And yes, this requires media literacy education whether formalized through schools or informal through parental advice or the kinds of participatory culture communities I discussed above.

- Participatory culture has been spreading widely, with users who used to be audience members are now acting as content producers. Previously, education has been conducted mainly on the premise of embracing the media as trusted sources, but now there are arguments that media education that is appropriate in terms of “prosumers” is required. What do you think should be new in media education regarding this matter?

We would not consider someone as literate if they can read but not write. We should not consider them as media literate if they can not produce as well as consume media. But in a network culture, this consumption/production frame doesn’t go far enough. They need the skills required to meaningfully participate in this media environment, which include skills around negotiating differenes as they move across communities, processing information collectively, taking ownership over the quality of information they circulate, and using networks to effectively mobilize others to help confront social problems.  These are some of the core literacy needs for people who are going to live and work in a networked culture.

You have emphasized users' agency rather than media technology in Convergence Culture, but in today's social media and the media environment, which is so highly focused on customized algorithms, I think algorithms created by tech companies have greater influence than individuals. 

- In a situation where we are surrounded by 'invisible algorithms', which have a huge impact on users' content consumption, what are the greatest needs in terms of media literacy at both the individual and societal levels?

For sure, alogrithmic manipulation represents a serious challenge to the capacity of individuals and communities to exercise agency in a digital environment. One challenge here is that so few of us understand how these algorithms work, what roles they play in shaping the choices available to us and channeling us in certain directions. It is not that we can not take collective action to restrict or resist the use of algorithims but it is that they are so little understood by most people around the world. We can not take collective action against an enemy we can not see, whose actions remain hidden as trade secrets, and whose core assumptions often start from racist and sexist foundations. So, as with so many problems, the first step has to be a more robust media literacy program – not just for youth but for the society at large. Media literacy here is not enough, though. We can’t simply read our way past these algorithims. We are going to need to take collective action to shift governmental and corporate policies that are adversely effecting our lives. We are probably not going to get rid of algorithimns but we do need to build in safeguards that protect our privacy, allow for meaningful overrides, and insure greater transparency, among other things. But these goals can only be pursued by an educated citizenry.

I found your discussion with Sonia Livingstone very interesting.

-What do you think is the most significant thing about 'digital natives' that many adults misunderstand?

Let’s start with the offensive assumptions about “natives” and “immigrants” that shape how these terms are understood. Digital Natives is in effect a theory of the noble savage straight out of 19th century settler mythology. Digital Immigrant starts from the premise that immigrants know nothing and bring nothing of value to the new world – in short, a kind of digital nativism, Hopefully, few of us would accept those premises about actual indigeneous peoples or immigrants, so why should we accept them in response to the digital world. Beyond that, the myth assumes that all youth have equal access to digital networks, that they acquire skills directly from their use of those technologies with any reflection or guidance, and that the skills they acquire are adequate to dealing with the complex problems they are confronting. None of these things are true. And these myths let adults off the hook from any responsibility to provide assistance and guidance, to learn enough themselves so they can help their children. And given how long we have lived in the digital era at this point, do people automatically lose everything they acquired as “digital natives” when they become adults or have we crossed the point where many adults can not longer be meaningfully discussed in those terms. The best participatory culture communities are those where youth and adults learn from each other without strong enforcement of assumptions based on age. 

-What do you think the adult generation, who are digital immigrants, have to teach the digital native generation, and what should they learn from them?

Well, for starters, the generation of parents today grew up playing Super Mario Brothers, hanging out in chatrooms, and engaging with fan discussion lists. They have plenty of practical experience with many of the social issues their children encounter online even if they do not know specific platforms, like Twitch or TicToc. If there ever was a generation of digital immigrants who were as clueless as they are often described, that generation is now the grandparents, not the parents. Beyond that, there is great wisdom in the elders about human relations, about traditional literacies and research skills, which can help guide youth’s online choices. The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1950s that grandparents will have experienced an enormous amount of dramatic change in their lifetime and we should rely on them more to think through how we adjust to change. We also find something powerful takes places when adults and youth interact with each other online around shared interests and passions, such as within fandom or gaming, without a fixed relationship (like parent-child or Teacher-Student) but rather a fluidity where expertise and skill is transferred back and forth across generations. Our fears about stranger often gets in the way of such interactions. But if it takes a village to raise a child off-line, the same is true online, and many youth are finding their mentors or wide elders through such relations.

Although active participation among users has increased greatly in the current interactive media environment, social polarization is becoming more severe and communication between groups with different views is becoming more difficult. It seems that the active participation culture alone is not enough. What media capabilities are newly required in this interactive media environment?

This brings us to what I call the ethical challenge. The technology enables our participation, but it does so without regard to whether we adopt forms of participation that are socially constructive or destructive. The rapid growth of the internet population meant that there was not any system for enculcating shared ethical values. We have put massive communication capacity into the hands of people who have never used it before, who have not been encouraged to reflect on their obligations to each other or to be accountable to the information they put into circulation. And not surprisingly, some of them are using that capacity in very irresponsible ways. The dark side of the web is very real and having bad effects on our culture. The solution is to focus more attention on how we build up ethical norms within these communities and how the community holds its members accountable for those violations. The idea of self-regulation through norms and social contracts is much more acceptable among digital paticipants than legal regulation and thus apt to be more effective in the long run. Here, again, all roads lead back to media literacy education as a space where people can have such discussions and internalize a different set of values for their online lives.

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Two)

You write, “Significantly, they [“the electricians, physicists, telegraph technicians, and engineers” invested in developing television] worked in almost complete isolation from the lanternists, photographers, opticians, mechanics, chemists and showmen who were to become the pioneers of cinema.” Why? What were the consequences of this isolation? 

One of the main things that I was curious about as I started this project was the simultaneous emergence of cinema and television. As technological histories show us, the origins of both animated photography and moving image transmission can be traced back to the 1870s and 1880s, and I was fascinated by the fact that although we typically think of television as a twentieth-century post-cinematic cultural phenomenon, it shares the same historical origins as cinema. Hence, early on in my research, I was looking for historical materials that could give an idea about how the projects of developing cinematic and transmission technologies had intersected in their very first years. To my surprise, what I found in popular and scientific magazines suggested rather that the professional circles that mobilized the respective two projects hardly overlapped at all and had very limited exchanges. 

On the most basic level, the distinction is simply on a professional basis. On the one hand, the challenge of realizing image transmission devices was primarily an electrical engineering enterprise; on the other, the pioneers of projected animated pictures, fromEadweard Muybridge and Émile Reynaud to the Lumière brothers, came from the fields of photography, optics, projection, and experimentations with vision.

In terms of media practices, too, the conception of television as a visual variant of the telephone placed it in a different realm from the popular spectacle context of early cinema. Yet this separated manner in which the two moving image media were originally conceived seems to me to hold a deeper significance to media historiography. It requires us to revise the old story about the origins of the moving image and acknowledge that parallel to the lineage of the so-called pre-cinematic toys and lantern shows ran a completely different historical trajectory of developing moving image media within the context of electrical telecommunications.

You suggest the two media give us an opportunity to revise older distinctions between storage and transmission media. How so?

The distinction between the fundamental technological affordances of recording and transmission is quintessential in media theory. Versions of it may be found in canonical texts such as Harold Innin's work on forms of writing, James Carey’s famous article on the telegraph, or McLuhan’s media metaphors of the nervous system. William Uricchio has demonstrated how this distinction is key in defining the ontological difference between film and television, which he influentially described as technologies of storage and simultaneity, respectively. However, the more I read into the early history of television and its relation to cinema, I felt that this distinction risks distracting us from crucial overlaps and cross-influences in the history of the moving image.

To be clear, I am not trying to suggest the distinction is wrong – but I find that in several important historical moments in their development the two media were not necessarily thought of as distinct. It is easy for us today to think of technological amalgamations in the form of VCR or TiVo, two technological forms that certainly trouble the binary opposition or recording/transmission. Likewise, it has become clear that today’s digital media operations such as buffering make it hard to draw a line between recording and transmission. But looking at the early history of moving image media, we see that recording and transmission were not taken to be mutually exclusive long before existing media technologies were combined into single multimedia systems. 

Overlaps and amalgamations were actually fundamental in thinking about the prospects of both film and television from their very beginning. Let us recall that hybrids of recording and transmission media existed before the first experiments with moving image transmission. Most important among those is probably Morse’s contribution to communication media, which was fundamentally a combination of telegraphic transmission with a writing mechanism. In similar fashion, some technicians speculated as early as the 1890s about combining televisual technologies with photographic devices, suggesting that they could produce records of transmitted moving images. During the same period, many commentators wrote about innovations in the field of moving image transmission not necessarily as marking the emergence of a new medium but simply as an inevitable future formation of film.

Furthermore, when the first prototypes of television were in place in the 1920s, film proved to be a crucial component in transmission systems. The earliest broadcasts carried by American experimental television stations consisted of filmed footage, that better suited the slow speed of the scanning devices

Thus, even if the differences between storage and transmission were self-evident from the start, the boundaries appeared quite flexible. This is important to note not only because it allows us to sketch a richer historical narrative of media configurations and transformations but also because it throws in question some of our most basic definitions of medium-specific traits.

Television became associated with liveness, largely contra the filmic mummification of time, not because of essential attributes of the medium, but because of discursive, intermedial, and institutional conditions that actually came into being at a fairly late state in the history of moving image transmission. 

Science fiction was taking shape alongside these fantasies (utopian and dystopian) of communication across distance. No wonder that Hugo Gernsback, considered the father of American science fiction, was also associated with the amateur radio movement and popular technoculture more generally. What might you tell us about the relationship between emerging technology and emerging genres in this instance? 

Indeed, the first ideas about the electrical transmission of moving images coincided with the rise of the science fiction genre in the late nineteenth century. Numerous sci-fi stories from the period my book covers speculated on future worlds and new formations of technologized environments and social realities in whic htelevisual devices are ubiquitous. Over the years, the genre came to play an important role in popularizing the idea of television, and I suspect that by the beginning of the twentieth century the reading public considered moving image transmission not as a fantasy but as an inevitable and imminent development in modern media technology.

I am interested in the early fictional depictions, therefore, not as prophecies that got the future of media correctly or incorrectly, but rather as commentaries on their own time. Imaginary scenarios about telectroscopes and telephonoscopes – whether they allow for long distance communication, the viewing of operas from afar, or tyrannical panopticon-like surveillance – reveal something about the period’s attitudes towards modernization and technology’s increasing impact on all aspects of everyday life. It is fascinating in particular to see how the early science fiction writers anticipatedby several decades of theoretical discourses on the power of technologically-mediated gaze, the globalization of cultural production, and surveillance and political control. 

            There are, to be sure, fundamental similarities between how fiction writers and inventors approach media technologies. Much like how science fiction authors speculate on the traits of future technologies, the engineers and technicians who develop new media forms also work with an imaginary configuration in mind (sociologists of technology call it “technological imaginary”). In some cases, we can trace direct lines of influence between fictional depictions and technical developments, as imaginary depictions may very well become one of the sources for ideas that inspire technicians’ experimentations. For example, when John Perry and W. E. Ayrton published their design for a system of “seeing by telegraphy” in 1880 they noted that the inspiration came from the now classic 1878 cartoon of the “telephonoscope” from Punch magazine. 

            Hugo Gernsback is a wonderful example for how imaginary forms of television coexisted in the realms of technology and of fictional writings. His radio station WRNY started operating experimental television broadcasts as early as 1928.

But Gernsback had been interested in television – both as a technology and a fictional trope –for two decades by that point. The various magazines that he published offered information about electrical technologies as well as science fiction stories – sometimes in the very same volume. As early as in December 1909, he published a survey of the state of the art in television development in Modern Electric In 1911, his science fiction serial (that was eventually published as a novel) Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, depicted several different moving image transmission devices including ones for point to point communication and for theatrical display.

Gernsback continued to write on the topic and to revise his views on the future of the medium way into the 1930s, amassing an oeuvre that uniquely chronicles the dynamic changes in concepts of television. (The Perversity of Things, a volume of Gernsback’s works edited by Grant Wythoff, includes a lot of his fascinating works on television).

Reading this book at the current moment, how might we understand the increased popularity of Zoom to these older fantasies about point-to-point audiovisual connection across geographic distances?

This is a very good question, because the book came out in February 2020, the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the backdrop of current conversations about transmitted images abruptly shifted. When I thought about current changes in television as I was finishing the book, what mostly came to mind was the increasingly important place that streaming services have been occupying in our mediascape. Soon afterwards, though, for many of us the predominant form of moving image experience has become video-conferencing platforms like Zoom. This certainly brings to mind the earliest ideas about televisual communication when, long before the idea of broadcasting came up, the medium was conceived as a visual variant of point-to-point telephony. It might be tempting, therefore, to see our present as a return to the “original” or “true” essence of the medium

But we ought to be careful about making such broad historiographic claims, and so I find myself rather thinking of today’s shifts in media uses in the context of the dialectical relationship between physical distance and media. Simply put, even if the function of telecommunications media remains more or less the same – that is, enabling virtually instantaneous communication at a distance – the cultural meanings of distance and the social functions of audiovisual transmission keep changing. 

As I show in the book, the initial conceptions of seeing at a distance in the late nineteenth century were intimately linked to colonialism, the formation of global capitalist markets, massive migration, and new forms of transportation. Think, for example, of the common statement about “the annihilation of space and time.” This trope was not coined in order to describe telecommunications (it referred earlier on to God as well as to capital), but the coming of telegraphy and its offshoots certainly appeared to fulfill the desires for total speed and unlimited territorial expansion.

Frequently, nineteenth-century fictional depictions of television illustrated how the technology could link the European imperial centers with distant colonies and allow the middle classes to take full advantage of market and entertainment opportunities worldwide. This notion has been somewhat revised in the twentieth century. I found a brilliant magazine article from 1912, where the author complains about the crowded streets and jammed roads of modern metropolitans, suggesting that electrical technology can resolve such annoyances by allowing most work to be done from home without requiring excessive commute and face to face interactions. Isn’t this kind of thinking neatly applicable to today’s experience?

Today, given the pandemic, closeness rather than distance has become a problem, and as our societies seek technological solutions, the media forms that were famed for annihilating space are now used to literally give us some space. So whereas there are striking similarities between how we today conduct faculty meetings via zoom and how, for example, journalists in the 1892 novel The Twentieth Century report the news to their editors via portable telectroscopes, I am tempted to say that these similarities actually highlight the changes in the very conceptual framework in which we use media. Media can both cancel the distance between people and allow to expand it, and distance itself can be either a problem or a solution. 

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part One)

What is television? Where does it come from? When does television begin? These are questions which are addressed by Doron Galili’s compelling new book, Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939. The answers may surprise many readers whose casual assumptions about the nature of this medium are disrupted by this deep historical dive into how television took shape as a concept in the late 19th century and the complex ways that television intercepts other communication systems, not just radio or cinema but also the telegraph and the telephone.

Right now, what we mean by television is in radical flux as more cord-cutters and streaming services alter how we access television content and what technologies we use to engage with it. This book suggests television (as a concept and a reality) has always been more unstable than we might have imagined and that there have always been multiple and conflicting ideas about what television is.

In this interview, Doron Galili gives us a glimpse into the rich content of this significant new contribution to media history. We even consider Zoom as a platform which comes close to the original conception of television.

Many American histories of television start with the public demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair but your subtitle, “The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939,” suggests your book ends where those books start. How would you sum up this earlier period? What does television mean in this context?

The 1939 World’s Fair has become an effective starting point for American television histories because as part of the event, NBC inaugurated their regular television broadcast services, introducing it for the first time to the general public.  To be sure, what people saw in 1939 was still not quite television broadcasting as we know it today – for example, the broadcasts were not yet commercial (that is, ad supported) and in the early years only viewers in the New York area could receive the transmissions. But that moment arguably marks the beginning of television as a mass medium in America.

What I explore in the book is rather the history of television prior to its deployment as a mass medium. I looked into the earliest stages of the history of television, starting in the late nineteenth century with the first ideas regarding electrical technologies of “seeing by electricity,” through the period of technological experimentation with television, and ending with the beginning of the first television broadcast services in the 1930s. In so doing, the book concerns a large variety of televisual media that existed – in speculative or experimental fashion – before the coming of what we typically identify as television.

Therefore, to answer your question, I would say that the initial meaning of television was in the broadest sense the electrical transmission of moving images at a distance. During the six decades the book covers, this idea of moving image transmission – an idea that predated electronic screens, network broadcasting, and even wireless transmission – acquired a myriad of meanings, which continuously altered between different historical moments and cultural contexts, until eventually the 1930s saw the formation of the medium-specific attributes that we came to recognize as television. 

Yet I do not consider the book to be a pre-history of television. I think it is vital to understand the speculative and experimental periods as integral parts of the history of television. Our present moment actually makes a strong case for this: in the recent decade, media scholars have been addressing yet another set of transformations in the medium-specific identity of television as we find ourselves in a post-broadcast / post-network era. These current media changes compel us to come to terms with what television means now – textually, culturally, technologically, ideologically – and it is crucial to recall that the stable meaning of broadcast-era television was not a natural state of things but itself a product of a of long period of transformations and negotiations.  

Marshall McLuhan has said “media are often put out before they are thought out.” Might we say the opposite is true in the case of television?

There was most certainly a lot of thought given to television before any TV program aired. 

In my research I found that not only did inventors, electrical engineers and broadcasters think through challenges of realizing the technology and planning programs, but also critics, filmmakers, novelists, and eventually academics and regulators engaged in speculations about possible uses of the medium and its social effects. For example, Edward Bellamy describes in his 1897 novel Equality (the sequel to his famed Looking Backwards) a medium for seeing at a distance dubbed the “electroscope.” In Bellamy’s utopia, the electroscope is not used for entertainment or for surveillance but rather for taking virtual trips around the world and for attending at a distance a lecture about life in socialist economy (yes, there was a time when distant learning was part of utopian thought…).

In a very different context, RCA’s David Sarnoff dedicated many popular articles during the 1930s to laying out his vision about the part broadcasting would play in America’s future. As Sarnoff saw it, television would promote the democratization of culture and allow societies to evolve, since it would make it possible for people of all classes to enjoy the finest operas.

During the same decade, in the United States and elsewhere, government regulation got into the picture. Regulators defined how broadcasting services should function and set formal protocols for transmission stations. Thus, by the time television services began, all the details about the operation of the medium were already in place, including the number of channels approved to air programs, their frequencies, picture resolution, technical specs for receiver sets, and of course rules regarding commercializing television services. 

            Hence the case of early television history fascinatingly problematizes the very idea of “putting out” a medium. It is easy for us (as I suspect it was for McLuhan back in the day, too) to think of new media inventions that took us by storm. Take for example the World Wide Web, which became part of so many aspects of our lives within just a few years, or the cinema, which one century beforehand became a global success within less than a decade from its invention.

The emergence of television is a much slower-moving narrative: almost half a century passed between the publication of the initial ideas about the electric transmission of images and the first demonstrations of working prototypes of television systems; even after that, it took more than a decade before the appropriate infrastructure, mass marketing of sets, and regulatory approval enabled the launch of broadcasting services. 

In what ways is the public anticipation of television linked to the telephone and the telegraph, with which it shares the same prefix?

The very idea of transmitting moving images by electricity can be traced back to responses to Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. Once Bell demonstrated that it is possible to send sound virtually instantaneously by wires, numerous commentators, authors, illustrators, and technicians began speculating on the prospects of doing the same with images. This is, by the way, not a historiographical interpretation or speculation (even if I’d have loved to own it as such) – we actually have quite a few documents from the nineteenth century where writers explicitly make this connection.

The telephone, thus, provided a model for both the first imaginary uses of televisual media and its technological design. Early depictions of moving image transmission devices were themselves multimedia constructs, as they often took the form of a visual supplement to point-to-point telephone communication (this way, they anticipated something more similar to facetime than to broadcast television). 

As early as the late 1870s, technicians attempted to create schemes for visual communication devices that emulated the manner in which the telephone captures sound and converts it to electrical signals that could be relayed and reconstituted on the other end of the line. This, of course, introduced a host of new problems, including finding a light-sensitive substance and dissecting images to pixels that could be sent linearly, but the technologies that eventually materialized do follow this model. Many of the early names given to the still-inexistent medium were based on the “tele-״prefix, and so before 1900 one could encounter accounts of the telectroscope, telephonoscope, telephote etc.

            But the telephone analogy is important for the history of television for another reason. While television was conceived as a visual extension of telephony, the telephone itself was invented as an extension of yet another “tele” medium, the telegraph network, to which Bell added the ability to carry audible communications. What we see, then, is a trajectory that starts way back in the 1830s with the invention of the electric telegraph, continues in the 1870s with the telephone, and soon after points towards the introduction of televisual transmission of images. That is not to say that we should be simplistic in tracing the emergence of television and imagine a linear trajectory of improvement that moves towards multimedia perfection; but this notion is definitely valuable for shedding light on the terms in which the emergent medium was understood in real time. That is, the telegraph network was viewed in the nineteenth century as allowing the “annihilation of space and time” and creating what McLuhan later termed “the global village” and these notions to a great extent also informed the popular anticipation of television. 

 Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Four)

We’ve had some very generative conversations through the years about the similarities and differences between fandom studies and consumer research (specifically in its cultural/qualitative forms). How would you characterize the relations between the two? 

I think people in marketing are fascinated by the work you do, they know it, and they know fandom studies mainly through you and your works. We’ve both been chipping away over the years in slightly different ways at the differences between consumer research and cultural studies. For instance, you put more pragmatic work and examples into material like Convergence Culture as you engaged more with people like Grant McCracken and me, and I started a career in marketing with cultural studies types investigations, in part thanks to your mentorship and works. I think you helped open up a part of media studies that was not reactively hostile to business and business school scholars. In my experience, surprising numbers of the business school academics (especially postmodern accountants) are as critical and even Marxist as any academic. 

Marketing has a drift towards economics and psychology. A part of cultural studies maybe hasn’t quite escaped critical theory and the Frankfurt School’s gravity field, I don’t know, I could be wrong about that. So, I’d say the two fields are sort of strange attractors in terms of topic matter like popular culture, but they also have philosophies at their cores that push them away from each other. Nonetheless, they get closer at times, such as when people publish work that crosses over, using brands or cultural studies ideas, like you sometimes see in consumer culture theory work, and more frequently see in journals like the Journal of Consumer Culture, or Consumption, Markets, and Culture. We don’t yet have much of a formal crossover. Words like brand fans get thrown around a bit, without rigor. A notable exception was the article by Matthew Guschwan (2013) that we used in our co-taught class, and there are a number of others. I like to think that, as the word “brand” and its study no longer carry quite the same stigma in the field of communication and media studies as they once may have, and that as marketing and consumer researchers continue to embrace critical, positional, and transformative perspectives, that we can see these fields meeting more, and maybe even a coherent subfield start to form. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing?

You end the book with a quote from William Gibson about the relationship between terrorism and the media. It’s a provocative end point. How do you see the relationship between netnography and terrorism? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? To what degree is the goal to be a “troublemaker,” to point towards another key word that crops up near the end of the book? 

This is the most important question, isn’t it? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? The netnographer, or the team of netnographers, should serve a moral interest, I think, and they should speak the truth to power, publicly, as best and as much as they can. I developed netnography first in order to understand fans, to be able to get closer to the worlds that they experience and to empathize with them. At the time I was doing my dissertation on Star Trek fans, there was a researcher who was getting a lot of press with a study showing that Star Trek fans were pathological, that they had some kind of social deficiencies. That research, which was terrible for so many reasons, including methodologically, infuriated me. With my netnography collecting data using email conversations, I was able to openly explore topics relating to stigma in the Star Trek and fan community in a way that would have been much more awkward to handle in person. In person, I was seeing things, like debates over the Star Trek uniform, that were very revealing. Online, I was able to get very detailed confessional type tales that unpacked what I had seen in person, many of which I found heart-breaking and inspirational at the same time. So, from the beginning, for me, netnography was, like ethnography, about serving the interests of social and individual betterment, in particular, about finding empathy with groups that might be treated by mainstream thinkers or groups from a distance as pathological or wrong. A recent netnography I did with Ulrike Gretzel and Anja Dinhopl looked at how art museum consumers used selfies of themselves with art in order to elevate and play with their identities. That work, which was published in a psychology journal, contradicted a raft of work on selfies that looked at as a narcissistic pursuit, a pathology. Again, the goal of much academic netnography is to humanize, to promote understanding and empathy, to enlarge our viewpoints. I think that’s why netnography has been used to study some difficult to reach groups like illegal drug users and  people on the dark web, teen drinkers, and challenging topics like sexting or online violence and extremism. 

            Of course, netnography is an effective tool. It works for building a deeper human understanding than you get with many other methods. So, it is employed and has been developing in relation to the needs of industry to understand its consumers and potential customers. A lot of my work in marketing has been to hone it and demonstrate its effective use as a deeper and more effective tool for uncovering business insights. My early work showed how valuable that could be in understanding what consumers wanted and how you could innovative new product and services by applying it.

            And yes, I think that the use of netnography can be and often should be to disrupt. This world we live in is in desperate need of the right kinds of trouble, as John Lewis liked to say. I think a lot of modes of understanding that we use in science and business, the quantification and modeling used for prediction, the manipulation and control are having terrible effects on our society and our ways of relating with each other and the wider world around us. We need empathy. We need more questioning of fundamental assumptions. We need more connection with each other and with our own raw, difficult to handle feelings of fear and anger. We need more critical thinking and reflectivity that cuts to the root of many of our social problems and helps to envision collective solutions we can live with. I like to think that netnography can help to bring some of this mentality into the act of research, that we can keep the rigor of computer science, communication, and marketing modes, but add the empathy, troublemaking, and humanizing of ethnography. That’s not always the goal, but it is definitely one important goal.

We’ve just co-taught a class together on fan communities and brand communities, where we spoke to key fan representatives from different media industries. What were some of your take-aways from this process? What do you see as some of the common mistakes brands and media industries make in dealing with their fans/enthusiasts?

Oh, that is a fun thing to revisit after these several months have passed. It was interesting to see presenters do their normal things in front of the class until Spring break, and then after March, we were seeing people Zoom into class from their homes. We got a different, more intimate conversation with them because they were in their homes, with their pets and kids and stuff around them. I thought Britt Shotts, who manages the He-Man brand for Mattel, and recently managed the Jurassic Park brand, was a terrific guest (we had many). Her pet actually attacked the camera during the presentation, which was one of those perfect moments I will remember from our COVID semester.

What I got from Britt’s presentation and discussion was a sense of how canny she is, and Mattel is, in the way they have been listening to consumers. I don’t think this is typical. I think that many brands still use more traditional ways of keeping customers and their voices at a controllable level. They use social monitoring devices to look at mass conversations in word clouds and pie chart, they use focus groups and surveys to direct, tabulate, and process information before they see it. But I think they usually come to customers and fans with the attitude that they, as the producers, are the authorities and the experts. But it actually turns out that fan-consumers understand the brand and they care about it and its products. A lot. That’s where Britt was really refreshing, because her presentation captured this idea that the fans are the experts, and that her learning is sort of learning at their knees. She might pitch them, and then they might school her on the brand, what it means, what has been done in the past. She was a big Jurassic Park fan, so her fandom translated very naturally into her fan relations activities managing that brand for Mattel. But she had to gear up a lot when she was assigned to the He-Man brand, a very masculine and Anglo brand, and that’s where she had to really assume an attitude of listen and learn. And what she found, when she really listened, was that the He-Man was meaningful because he conveyed a sense of moral certitude to people. The brand relationship turned out to be a complex exchange.  Not simply a one-way relationship, where consumers give their money and companies toss them new stuff. She emphasized working with positive voices in the fan communities online, empowering them. She was very conscious of influencing the public conversation on social media, building these champions and influencers and empowering them, but also listening to criticism very carefully, which she recognized as a fine line. Real relationships are hard. Enduring brand relationships? Those are also hard.

In most businesses, the brand managers come and go every year or two, so it’s a revolving door for any particular brand. But the fans and devotees—they stay. When someone has been using a brand like Pepsi or Nike for a lifetime, it is like it is a part of their family. It isn’t just a drink or detergent, an economic resource or a trademark—it means something special and the people who are devoted to it use it because of that meaning. I think that there’s a very different way of seeing a brand when you sit at this managerial distance, where idiosyncratic brand meaning is something a manager is extrinsically motivated to cope with. They have to listen and try very hard to get out of that instrumentalist mind frame, not just with the products and brand, but with customers, too. It’s about empathy, again. What Britt said was that she tried to take fans on the manager’s journey, to let them into the production process, and that this was something they wanted to experience. She saw social media as a huge gift that managers have only very lightly begun to touch upon—and remember, this is for Mattel, a pretty big outfit. One of the great things she noted was that now, as people who are stuck at home with their toy collections are creating huge amounts of content online today, during COVID, managers are mostly stuck at home and can’t do photoshoots. And that “user-generated content” becomes incredibly valuable to the company under those circumstances. But all of it, she emphasized, was about partaking, with respect and empathy, in a cultural conversation. Not dictating it.

You and others in the Strategic Communication program have recently turned your attention to young activists, a topic we discuss often here. What were some of your core findings? How do you see brands connecting with activists in meaningful ways at the moment? Or is such an alliance possible?

I think that there’s currently a fascination throughout the social sciences and in industry with young activists because this seems to be where the cultural momentum is. I turn to your research on this, Henry, and point to what you have been telling us for a while in your books like By Any Media Necessary, and your work on the Harry Potter Alliance goes back a number of years before that. 

In my research, I see technology as an integrated part of this process. The current activist moment and the role of hashtags and online organization only emphasizes the power of the platforms and their algorithms again. I think the challenge for society is going to be how we manage to balance the desires of people for social change with the desires of managers and executives, including the large technology platform companies and their advertising and data driven business models and executives, to keep the economic and social systems stable. They want them stable so that they can continue to profit from them. If we take as a founding principle that things like racial justice and social justice are tied to environmental justice, then companies which are extensively using plastics, rare metals, and fossil fuels, companies that are extensively involved in wasting energy, companies that are founded on cheap, desperate, fungible, precarious labor domestically and abroad, might be in trouble. And there are a lot of those companies--it is just about all of them. It’s all of us, too. We are consumers hooked on and into an unjust system that is killing everything around us. Almost 70% percent of the living things that were around in 1970 are gone today. That is unthinkable, and should be unbearable, but human beings have increased their numbers and their footprints massively. Today, wildfires are destroying the wilderness of the entire West Coast. Tomorrow, it will be some new devastation. Eventually, our species pays the piper.

We aren’t really having a conversation about actually addressing the system changes that are required, that have been required for fifty years now. Environmental justice is currently being sold in America as a way to promote jobs and more economic growth and that is not going to solve the underlying problem. This isn’t a job creation crisis. Consumers and companies are institutionally very far along a path with a dark and fiery end. And, for their part, corporations, brands, and their governments and regulatory bodies base their responses to protest on lessons developed in propaganda wars. They have crisis communications set up to handle things like the George Floyd protests or the challenges of COVID lockdowns. They greenwash and release statements, lobby and hire influencers, or engage in cynical and sinister corporate social responsibility initiatives. They scan, detect, message, virtue signal, tamp down, and then carry on with business as usual. 

If people are seeking real change, fundamental change that encompasses social and environmental justice, they are not going to find it with the business or government institutions of today. A lot of young people today, globally, whatever their political inclinations or interests, realize this, and that’s why we are seeing this uptick in activism. And in response, institutions are doing what institutions are built to do, which is that they do everything they can to keep things from changing in a substantial way. Companies and brands cast change in terms of new energy projects, new plastic product innovations, new clear cuts of old growth forest, or new mining projects. I think we are going to see a toughening and a hardening of business and government institutions against activism, probably worldwide, as they continue to try to keep things in human society from changing radically away from rampant consumerism. As they have in the past, over the next few decades they will keep steering people towards solutions that involve the exact same systems that got us into this mess and that are now accelerating it. Whether accompanied by political sideshows and clowning, or war, or new health crises, the solution we will be sold will be to buy more stuff, double down on the stock market, deregulate business further so that the magical mystery market can perform its miracles, but all of it will keep stoking the capitalist industrial machines, burning and tearing up the natural world, and making the ultra-rich a whole lot richer. It isn’t going to be a smooth ride and, so far, I unfortunately don’t see the big brands of today doing anything other than rapaciously protecting the interests of their wealthy owners. The people who make decisions in business and government are, for the most part, terrified of a change that might reverse the “progress” that is devastating the environment and leading to new massive wealth increases among the already abominably wealthy. And as for the activism we see, I think it only feeds into ideological narratives of political suppression and ever-increasing consumerism. The way companies and government are managing the current unrest is working well for them, and it’s likely that the same tools of distraction, diversion, fear, and outrage will help them manage future unrest and keep on profiting from it. That seems like a rather sour note to end on, but maybe it is the most appropriate one of all.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Three)

A key concern in ethnographic research over the past few decades has been with positionality. In what ways does it matter if an ethnographer (or here, netnographer) is a part of, a participant in, the culture they study. How would you address this in your work, especially as you try to bridge between qualitative and quantitative approaches to consumer research?

Well, I had my postmodern stage, my panicky crisis of representation phase, and got it out of my system pretty early. But I kept the hermeneutics of it close to heart. I think most everything I do now from a methodological perspective, and everything you now see in the most recent edition of the netnography book depicted as interpretive data operations, all of that comes from a place of hermeneutic and introspective practice that is fundamentality based on a phenomenological appreciation for researcher positionality. I think netnography is shot through now, especially since my second book, with genuine attempts at rhetorical reflectivity. The whole emphasis on “auto-netnography”, which people like Liz Howard, the education nursing scholar who been developing the method in her dissertation and subsequent work, is based in this, and it is growing. This is about netnographers not just being reflexive in some methodological sense, but taking that to the level of being reflective, being seriously and deeply contemplative an axiological, a moral, and an intellectual sense. 

            As I write in the third edition (Kozinets 2020, 44-5), I was influenced by your early online ethnographies, in which you describe online discussions “that occur without direct control or intervention by the researcher” (Jenkins 1995, 53). So, it was not necessary to get in the fray, as it were, with every discussion, in order to hear these conversations and appreciate them, perhaps even to fully understand them. Even in person, we weren’t necessarily participating in every conversation we heard, or leading every discussion we recorded in our fieldnotes. At a Star Trek convention, for instance, I was often more comfortable sitting back, observing, and recording what I heard others say rather than socializing or asking questions (although I did plenty of both). 

When you boil it down, the idea of participation as it lives in ethnographic representation is based upon having a vantage point and making it rhetorically apparent. In netnography, that means having a point of view on these communicative events that involve you in the social, in the wider social experience, rather than necessarily being physically or even discursively active in some particular social field as you are in a typical in-person ethnography. So, when you read a recent netnography of mine, like the Networks of Desire netnography about food porn and food image sharing generally that I wrote with Rachel Ashman and Tony Patterson, you see that we try to blend together a lot of different perspectives through the research, but our own food and food image sharing habits aren’t included in the study. Being deeply engaged in a netnography means you keep some sort of record, some kind of creation, some notes about what you did, why you did it, what you found, what it made you think about, and so on. Engagement with the social can happen in many ways—intellectual, emotional, in your dreams, through conversations with people in your family and social group, as you scribble your notes and play with ideas. Record it, call it an immersion journal, and you have the raw material to engage with your positionality. Your online data gathering becomes able to handle the structuring of an intersectional case study interpretation that we commonly link to high quality netnography. 

In describing the terminological shifts between ethnography and netnography, you suggest a shift from “participation” to “engagement.” What’s at stake for you in this terminological shift? I would have argued that part of what the online world allows are deeper forms of participation within the culture rather than the relatively superficial forms of engagement historically discussed in audience research. But you seem to put different valiances of these two terms. 

What is at stake for me is exhaustion. I am flat out tired of trying to extend in person metaphors for in-person social gatherings to the massive array of digital possibilities we have to socialize and be a part of the social. Technologically mediated forms of sociality are blooming, like a massive gender reveal party explosion that has burned up a lot of prior intellectual investment, including the word “participation”. In an in-person ethnography, we know what it means to participate. At Burning Man, they have a rule: no spectators. So, you have to wear or not wear or do or share, do something outlandish, something active at least, don’t just lean back and watch at a consumers’ social distance from others and at a pathological distance from your own creative empathy. I had to be careful in my interviews and observations to be a part of the festival, because of the no spectators rule. If I wasn’t doing something overtly participative, people would have confronted me as a “lookie loo”, a tourist who is just there to gape, to take: a typical consumer, rather than an active creator of my own and others’ experiences.

But there is no analog like this that is practical in the online world of social media. Not everyone can be posting on every site, conversing with a particular crowd in public, because most people who go to those platforms or sites do not converse at all. What do you do when conversation is not allowed, or when it’s a blog dominated by the voice of the blogger? We aren’t in the socially flatter world of the bulletin board or forum any more. So, what is participation in this context? I prefer simple words native to the online realm, like engagement. What is at stake with that move is that people might confuse this new notion of engagement with the social media influencers’ engagement and reach. That’s not it. Engagement is about contextually appropriate types of participation, of course. I don’t mean to disrespect the word, or certainly leave out the ideas of participatory culture. But I do want to defamiliarize the term a bit in terms as we move the process of netnography further and further away from the old travelogue view of ethnography. It’s moving away from anthropology, towards computer science, towards communication, toward social psychology, it has been for years. 

            Certainly, hanging out online with a particular group, whether they are coffee aficionados, Lower Decks fans, or Pilipino European immigrants, learning their language, posting messages, participating with them regularly, is a very useful type of netnography. But, I don’t think that is the only way to do a netnography. There are plenty of great netnographies, like your own online work, where the authors describe it as “observational”. It’s a big tent, netnography. There’s room for lots of stuff, as long as it builds on prior methodological work, learns from it, extends it in specific and useful ways, and maintains the focus on empathy. I think the absolute key is to emphasize positionality, researcher reflectivity, this interpretation of your own involvement and how it shapes your work. You can even engage spread out among the social nodes online. You can engage emotionally only, in your own body, and reflect on that, like Annette Markham does in Life Online when she describes her wrist and neck adjusting to the supposed disembodiment of the online world, and the physicality of cybersex. It’s about the quality of the qualitative inquiry, not just one particular technique or set of them that you use to get there.

You write in the book, “I must make a request. If you want to follow guidelines that revisit netnography’s ethical rules and empathetic stance on the study of sensitive research topics, then please do not call your work a netnography. Because netnography is defined by its adherence to general and agreed-upon procedures., a netnography revisited in this matter is definitely not a netnography. It is something else entirely. Ethical procedures are at the very heart of what a netnography is and what it does.” (185) So, how would you characterize the ethical stance that guides netnography. Are current IRB standards adequate for promoting those ethical commitments?

That statement was a reaction to some damaging research that tried to dial back ethical procedures on netnography by claiming it was just the same as any other content analysis. As for your question, I mean, it completely depends upon the IRB. A particular IRB is only as good as its members and its guiding institution and sometimes the researcher, who might just be a PhD student asking for approval of their first piece of research or their dissertation, needs to engage with them and educate them. There’s a lot of diversity out there, but in general, if you are asking whether a typical IRB can handle a typical netnography It think the answer is absolutely, they are doing it around the world at a very regular rate now. We do it here at USC all the time and they have made it a pretty seamless process almost from the very beginning. And my books are there to help all of the stakeholders navigate the complexities of the process. The first edition of the netnography text by SAGE included a lengthy guide to informed consent, a sample form, and advice for IRB approval. The second developed a very detailed ethical research section with even more detail about representational choices. The current edition goes much further and puts it all into an easy-to-follow flowchart that helps the researcher navigate the procedures needed to be compliant. It covers ethical challenges and how to respond to them in detailed tables of terms, linked to definitions, intermixed with the research procedures, from site selection through to research publication, and the ethics flow is now a part of the procedures from start to finish. Any of this is available for researchers to use, and for IRB and Human Subjects Ethics Review Committees to consult and interpret. It’s intended to make the rule of qualitative social media research ethics comprehensible and straightforward to follow. It shouldn’t be a philosophical minefield to conduct humane human subjects research. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to clarify what the standards are and how even beginners to this kind of research can follow them. So, yes, if someone chooses to go their own way on ethics, say by revealing sensitive person data or deceiving people, then please do not call it a netnography. Following the book’s ethics guidelines, along with the other things I have spoken about in this interview, is a big part of what I think makes a particular piece of research a netnography and not something else.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Two)

You take us step by step through different media platforms, from Reddit to Tumblr, and discuss the different traditions for writing about them. How important is platform specificity to doing Netnographic work? What are the implications of platform specificity for the ability to compare “online traces” across multiple online locations?

It’s incredibly important. In the same way you can’t really understand a particular human culture without understanding the constraints and influence of things like geography, climate, and technical skills, you need to understand the techno-social situation that surrounds online socialities. I think we are at a very early stage of conceptualizing this kind of comprehension. We’ve had quite a few Facebook and Twitter netnographies already, and it would be enormously interesting to me if someone were to look back at them as a group and track how the development of the particular affordances of the sites helped to create the types of cultural experiences and behaviors that were noted over time. I touch on it a little in the book, leaning on José van Dijck’s (2013) very useful Culture of Connectivitybook. But there’s much more that could be done. Peter Lugosi and Sarah Quinton coined the nice term “more-than-human netnography” to capture the idea that algorithms, platform affordances, AI, and other non-human actors and agencies should be included into netnographies. This work is also at a very early, but promising and exciting, stage. 

The second part of your question asks about whether and how we can compare traces about related topic and peoples across different platforms. It’s potentially very valuable to think about how context creates content online, or how medium influences message. Most netnographic research still rather unproblematically scoops up online traces from multiple platforms and then analyzes their content and meaning without much attention to the various contexts that created those traces—platform-specific, but also cultural, subcultural, socio-economic, historical. Those comparisons of circulations between what Mirca Madianou and Danny Miller call polymedia, the confederated bricolaged conglomerations of various platforms that people use in their panoply of communications and socialities with one another, are another very rich area for future investigation. Like many things, we are still beginning to ask the right questions and build our own understanding of the substantive and methodological implications of things like platform specificity and its impacts. 

So much industry work on the consumers of products or media properties assumes individual and autonomous decision-makers. Yet, you stress your borrowings from Cultural Studies which has historically concerned itself with collective behavoir. So, how do you explain to the industry why the social and cultural relations amongst consumers matter?

Look at the research I was involved with at both ESPN Zone and at The American Girl Place, both on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, a few blocks from where I was teaching in the Kellogg School of Management’s Marketing program at the time. When John Sherry, Nina Diamond, Mary Ann McGrath, Adam Duhachek, Diana Storm, Benét DeBerry-Spence, Stefania Borghini, Al Muniz, and Krittinee Nuttavuthisit and I conducted that ethnographic retail research over several years, we were emphasizing the role of people’s imaginations, their fantasy lives, and the role that Disney branded cable channel celebrity, and sport cultures, and female perspective historical fiction and Mattel doll culture, played. Men might be ostensibly sitting in gigantic armchairs eating burgers and trying to watch 21 screens of sports at once, but they also were consuming sports narratives of history and heroism in which they were very active imaginative players. The same thing was true of young girls, their moms and grandmothers dining in the American Girl Store’s restaurants with their dolls. They were consuming notions of civility, of morality, of being grounded in history and traditions that meant something and in which they, themselves, were actively imagining and building that history.

My chosen field is consumer research, which is dominated by psychologists and economists and their paradigms and methodologies, but somewhat open to new approaches if they can deliver insights that business people find valuable. So we had a pioneers in our fields of consumer cultural research like Sidney Levy who were way ahead of the crowd in explaining brands, perhaps even inventing the word in its modern usage, according to Philip Kotler. They argued and still argue against the idea that consumers were somehow rational or autonomous in their decisions, rather than the super-social cultural critters we mostly know ourselves to be. 

After the internet become mainstream, it became a lot easier for me to explain to MBA students and business people what the meso level of analysis is and why it matters to them. The notion of brand communities identified a real feeling in the world of brand managers, that there was a chance to fully insert brands into people’s socialities. This expanded imaginative real estate really opened a lot of managers eyes and got them salivating. The business research world knew about it as soon as there were social monitoring services and software to automate the data as it became more voluminous and towards big data handling capacities.

What all that data said to managers was—here is an opportunity to study your consumers, to model their behavior in order to predict and nudge, test, experiment, predict and nudge again. The goal was the same thing it always has been for companies, to manage the customer experience. Industries and governance institutions, regulatory bodies, they were all about regulating human experience by placing it into the context of consumers, their needs, and consumption. What happened is that these was an assumption that the behaviors of unruly consumer tribes could be managed by invoking the C-word: community. So at the same time things were seeming a bit out of control with the internet, there were countervailing discourses in business academe which were saying that people were being brought together by brands, that they loved brands, that their mutual adoration and devotion to brands was bringing society itself together. If you are a brand manager who has been taught in your business school that building the sociocultural and motivational architecture of consumers’ demand-based mentalities is part of what marketers do, then this is music to your ears. 

So much of today’s social media assumes and facilitates transnational communication, yet markets have historically been understood within national boundaries. What can you tell us about the tension between global media circulation and national specificities in doing netnographic research?

Almost from the start, people started doing netnography wherever they were. The technologies were well in place around 2005 when a few academics in a few fields mostly from the North America, Western Europe, and Oceania began to get their netnographies published in good journals. Pretty quickly, there were people doing netnography as consumer culture research type projects in tourism, then game studies, then sociology, then nursing, in a variety of countries and regions. It grew throughout marketing and consumer research scholarship worldwide, in a bunch of different languages and in many different online contexts. The netnographic record is like global digital archaeology. And its global nature reflects a whole bunch of complex flows of energy, messages, ideologies, identities and sanctioned actions. 

University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notion of scapes captures the kind of complex and underdetermined interrelationship of these complex cultural flows that many of us observe in online world today. I think Appadurai kind of nails it for the ages, for me at least, with mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, idioscapes, finanscapes, and the rest of them. So, if you wanted to talk about media circulation, I’d point to those two things. That Appadurai draws our attention to the varieties of flows among and within those nations. There are probably more similarities to people living in big cities today around the world than there are with people in big cities and small towns or remote regions within the countries they live in today, and that is because they get similar flows of media, finance, technologies, and because of the directionality of some of these flows. That we can both maintain the complexity in rich description, but also abstract to important guiding elements and tendencies—this is what Appadurai’s work suggests, at least for me. 

And the last thing I would point out is the global nature of netnography and its research, almost from the beginning. The very early work of people like Eileen Fischer, Hope Schau, Cele Othnes, Michelle Neilson, Pauline Maclaran, Andrea Hemetsberger, Kristine de Valck, Ingeborg Kleppe, Marylouise Caldwell, Rachel Ashman, Mina Askit, Daiane Scaraboto, Richard Kedzior, Jonnas Rokka and the massive involvement of other Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Brazilians, Australians, Turkish people, British, and Europeans of many stripes and feathers. Netnography has only recently spread to The New World of medical research and the Far East. Many of those applications are partnerships, teamwork between people doing netnographic kinds of interpretation in their own countries, on local data, and building it into projects, presentations, and articles. 

From my vantage point, the medium of research, the medium of netnography, is bringing people together. I still believe that some forms of technology unite us, and when we collectively cohabitate the many forms of storyworld we do, then we form alliances. When I do netnographic research, when I detect “real people” are talking on social media, there is lots of sincere public communication out there than seems authentic. And I often see them doing good things for each other, and mostly acting as good humans. We all have our faults, and there are huge massive problems with the infrastructure itself, the systems of manipulation around them, all of the stuff that communication and cultural studies tells us is locked into the system. But most people, that I see in my netnography research still have some of that sociality we saw in different kinds of fan communities. There are gifts of different kinds being exchanged almost constantly. And for me, this says a lot about the current state of the world—on the whole, people are good, but the systems built up to manage them are unfair, unwieldy, and often retrogressive in their intent.