Understanding Media Studies: A Blog

Abstract

This work will serve to reflect on the changing discourse on the subject of identity in virtual context, paying particular attention to race as a social construct carried over into the digital. I aim to push forward study that has contended with the budding sociality found on the internet in its early stages and appraising what has come to pass in the present. I ultimately intend to demonstrate that identity matters online, and its trappings – race, gender, socioeconomic strata — matter more insofar as its commodification in an economic system generated by the new social media by engaging in participant-observation within the social realms of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Second Life with a trained eye upon the social construction, language, interface semiotics, and practices of race among participants. 

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          Ever the familiar topic of contention, the subject of race has become an important discourse within academia in the modern era. Questions of hegemony, imperialism, and representation have all become major cornerstones in the study of race, as it has moved from being defined as an absolute biological trait to a sociopolitical construct. However, its being a product of what Adorno might call the “culture industry” does not remove its force; bell hooks (1992) notes Lorraine Hansberry’s play Les Blancs,quoting revolutionary Tshembe’s reply to white American journalist Charles:

“I believe in the recognition of devices as devices — but I also believe in the reality of those devices. In one century men chose to hide their conquests under religion, in another under race. So you and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device in both cases, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run through him because he will not become a Moslem or a Christian — or who is lynched in Mississippi or Zatembe because he is black — is suffering the utter reality of that device of conquest. And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn’t exist — merely because it is a lie…” (1994)

          However, this was all before the Internet.

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David Shields, professor of English at the University of Washington and author of the new novel Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is one of many on the forefront of what could be called “the appropriation controversy.” Interviewed by Randy Kennedy for the New York Times, Shields speaks and writes in defense of a growing trend within the arts that makes use of the remix to transform old ideas into new ones. Appropriation, in essence, is taking something that was and turning it into something it wasn’t. He writes:

“My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media… who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work. (Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one work that is meaningless without quotation marks.)” (1)

Shields writes on behalf of artists like fellow novelist Helene Hegemann and the mash-up artist Gregg Gillis, also known as Girl Talk, who make use of materials in the public domain – songs and writings that form particular aspects of a subjective reality – and blend them together into new expressions that reflect their own creativity. The ongoing controversy centers on whether or not this practice of appropriation, especially in the realm of copyright, is legally justifiable. The questions now become: How can one defend the use of someone else’s intellectual property in another’s work? What limits should be imposed on the artist, especially now in the age of the Internet? As Marybeth Peters says in Brett Gaylor’s open source documentary “RiP!: A Remix Manifesto,” the answer will always depend on whose the work is and how upset they are. However, set within a balanced framework that benefits both those creating and those consuming, appropriation can become a vital part of culture as we recognize appropriation as a tool used actively by the mainstream and those outside it.

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“Setting Out,” from Tristes Tropiques

Author: Claude Levi-Strauss

The chapter opens with the author candidly stating that he hates travelling and explorers, making plain that he believes explorers and their accounts are largely useless.  The pictures and exaggerated stories, according to Levi-Strauss, told by the amateurs in his view don’t amount to anything learned by the audience consuming them, but rather turn locales and their so-called discoveries into entertainment. He is frustrated by their popularity in his contemporary France, as he by then has travelled, studied, and made genuine discoveries of his own within the field. However, he admits in this chapter that he is setting out to write his own account of the journey into the tropics as a form of instruction and to better understand the phenomenon that is making explorers’ accounts so popular. Here, with commentary and anecdotes, he begins his narrative by relating the account of how his teacher George Dumas gathers him and his colleagues at a banquet given by the Comité France-Amérique. There, Dumas gives a lecture and invites the scholars to travel to Brazil for study and an easy life as “habitués” of casinos and racecourses. The account in this initial chapter frames the narrative and sets the tone for later chapters in the work.

My name is Kwame Opam, and I’ve come to the New School because I want to be an ethnographer, journalist, and above all a storyteller. When I consider the process I undertook that led to my decision to pursue a masters in media studies, the first conclusion I come upon is how natural it seemed at the time. So much so that afterward I would question my original motivations, asking myself, “How sure are you about this?” This wasn’t very long ago; I’d just finished my “Endless Summer” of interning at Newsday and finishing up my BA in anthropology at Stony Brook University, and I was relieved to be taking what I hoped would be a semester’s break from academia while I worked and nursed myself back into some semblance of stability. It was time to take a step back and re-examine myself while figuring out what it was that I wanted to do. I found myself asking that age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” while also finding out that I was not yet so grown. It’s no easy question to answer, and, truthfully, I’m still answering it. However, my proposal to find a solution that fit for me was that I simply do what I love. And what I love, after many years of study and experience, turned out to be what I believe connects all the things I’m passionate about: Media. So naturally I should like to be in and contribute to a something that I love. It’s just the doing it that’s now the challenge.

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Coming from a background in cultural anthropology and being a bit of a fan of the late Levi-Strauss, I want to examine how different people interact with contemporary media through the lens of anthropology and ethnography. I want to know if there’s an ethnography of new media to be done, because I do believe that media today has changed us utterly. I want to know if there are new mythologies that are being informed by post-literate society or heuristics that allow us as a whole to cope with the constant inundation of media we’re exposed to everyday. I guess the kind of “probe” I would set out with would be, already taking into account the idea of secondary orality, “Are we hunter-gatherers in the new virtual world?”

Along the same lines, I want to create my own contributory medium for the kind of mythology that explains what’s happening now and tell stories about how this is all happening.

I have no idea how I’m going to finish this thing.

New students in the MA in Media Studies program at the New School have been tasked, as their first major assignment, with writing their “Intellectual Autobiographies.” In up to 1500 words, we have to tell a story about why we want a Masters in the field, giving detailed glimpses into our lives both personally and professionally, how that informs our choices in our educational journey, and what we want to do with all this knowledge we will most certainly attain.

I suppose that amounts to more than saying, “Because media’s cool. Duh?”

That’s the honest truth, though. I think media’s cool. Cool in an inspiring way, as it’s all-encompassing and yet so easy to take for granted. Speaking for myself, I never paid much attention to it until very recently, and the thing that stuck with me is that of all the things that I have more than a fleeting interest in, I came into media with very little knowledge. Not in the same way that one can not understand how a car works — I still only have a basic concept about all that — but it was like an epiphany. “How did I miss this?”

With a background in cultural anthropology, I thought it apropos that I try to get to the heart of what’s part and parcel of culture. Because media is everything to do with culture.