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. 

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

Imagine a time when the Earth (or at least the Web) was young, when academic research on things digital was almost nonexistent, and when I had just published my first book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. A young Canadian researcher reached out to me about work he was doing on Star Trek fandom, we developed a friendship online, and ultimately I was flown in to serve as an advisor on his dissertation, probably the first dissertation I ever served on. Through his work, I discovered this whole parallel universe of folks who were applying techniques I associated with cultural studies to the understanding of consumer culture within the business school realm.

Robert Kozinets and I have maintained a friendship which now spans three decades. He has become an intellectual leader, modeling the methods and applications of what he calls “netnography,”" and we have ended up together at the University of Southern California where we co-taught a course in the spring focused on brand communities and fan communities. We were able to tap both of our networks to bring in a fascinating array of industry people who work with fans across diverse media sectors from sports to popular music, from action figures to religion.

I recently was interviewed by him for a podcast and so I asked him to return the favor. He had no idea what he was getting himself into Across this epic interview, Kozinets explains some of the methodological and ethical issues he negotiates as he applies netnographic approaches to understanding consumer culture.

Let’s start with a core definition. What do you mean by netnography? How do you situate it in the larger traditions of ethnography? What changes when we bring the Net into the equation?

The definition and the situation of netnography are both moving targets. They’ve been evolving since day one. Currently, there are four elements that distinguish netnography. First, it shares the cultural and contextualized focus of ethnography. Next, it uses social media data, which can mean data that come from, or are produced about, social media. Third, it requires an immersive engagement, an ethnographic reflective type of personal involvement in the social media phenomenon. Finally, I find it important to emphasize that netnography is a procedural approach to performing qualitative social media research. It encompasses a set of general instructions that relate specific ways to conduct qualitative social media research using a combination of different research practices, grouped into six overlapping movements. As you can tell from these four elements, the cultural and contextualized approach and the reflective type of immersion are both directly related to ethnographic traditions that stretch back to Malinowski and probably well before him. But the exact procedures change. Knowing the ethical practice of ethnography, for example, tells you very little about how to handle data ethics and GDPR regulations in netnography today. Knowing how to handle cultural entrée in an ethnography doesn’t help you much as you try to find good places where you can find relevant cultural data online. And, in the long run, it seems that some ethnographic notions for judging quality, such as duration and intensity, don’t apply or don’t apply the same way when you are sitting at home on your phone or computer to do cultural research, rather than being out in a physically embodied site meeting people eye-to-eye. So, when we bring the Net into the cultural research equation, a lot of things change: access to data becomes much simpler, amounts of data magnify like crazy, the type of data and the modes of transcript and analysis change, and many of the rules of embodied ethnography either need to be adapted or set aside for ones that make more sense. 

Early in the book, you spend some time discussing the ways that netnography engages with “online traces.” How does the concept of a “trace” differ from other words often used in this context, from “data” to “case studies” to “artifacts”? What does this suggest about the temporality of netnography? A traditional ethnographer might provide a thick description of a meaningful moment or talk about a culturally resonant narrative, but for the most part, they are discussing things they observed in real time as opposed to something they can recover after the fact.

I struggled with the meaning of data. I’d been using it somewhat unreflectively and I thought that it required a bit of philosophizing to really understand what it meant in the context of online research. The conclusion I came to was that it might be important to recognize that data happen when some sort of informational raw material come into contact with someone who is selecting and collecting them for a particular purpose, a particular project. So, when people do things like post messages or videos, like or reply to comments, those are traces, online traces. Those things don’t become data until someone collects them for a purpose, some objective or goal that someone has. Data implies purpose.

Online traces are a kind of digital artifact, in a socio-archaeological sense. But something like pressing a like button can leave a pretty low-commitment artifact, right? All of them are interesting. The footprints in an archaeological site probably tell you more about what happened to the everyday people there than what the scribes chose to carve in stone.

A case study I would think about as a very different and much more macro concept. It is related to the completeness of the entire site of investigation. But an online trace is something left behind that a researcher can scoop up, save, and study. Think about animal behaviorists out in the wild, taking casts of paw prints, samples of spoor, and photos of clawed trees and trying to reconstruct what animal was here, what they did, and where they went. The online traces are snapshots and, in that way, they are like artifacts left behind. They allow us to glimpse into the past, see the pathways of the masses who stopped to scoop or squat or whatever. That can be a very fresh past, as with comments and posts that were left today, or it can go back in time, sometimes years or decades. But tracing long-ago traces is certainly not the only tool the netnographer has. The researcher can also elicit data in live interaction with people, either online or off, synchronously or asynchronously, individually or in groups, as part of their study. In that way, the netnography can have those same meaningful moments, can relate those online conversations or exchanges that were observed in real time as well. And the immersion notes of the netnographer can capture those moments right after they occur, just as an ethnographer’s trusty fieldnotes would do. Downloading online traces is just one aspect of doing a netnography, although often it is viewed as the most emblematic one.  

You were there quite early on in terms of the applications of ethnographic methods for understanding online social interactions. What were some of the biggest challenges we faced early on? And to what degree does netnography provide a more fully developed set of protocols for addressing those challenges?

I like that you are asking me by saying “we faced”, since you were a trailblazer in whose footsteps I followed. I guess the biggest challenge early on was just the open space and blue sky. These worlds were opening up in front of us and there were very few maps or guides to what we should do in order to be rigorous. I found a few anthropologists who were considering that online work might be interesting, but there was very little methodological description or advice out there (Luciano Paccagnella’s Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicationarticle was a very helpful and notable exception).  I think we all fell into a bit of a trap in thinking that because an aspect of ethnography worked well and meant something in the in-person context, it would work well and mean the same thing in the online context. There are numerous aspects, but two big ones I’m thinking of are fieldsites and participation. What does it mean to participate in an ethnography when the cultural action is happening, partially or even wholly, online? What does it mean to engage with an ethnographic field when the field is behind your screen? As a field, this emerging sense of social media studies or Internet studies was grappling with what was going on in ways that, looking back, may not have been so productive. We were using the term community to refer to online discourse, and often that term wasn’t particularly reflexive or accurate. We were using terms like cyberspace, and other spatial and place-based metaphors that hung onto past conceptions and clouded the way we saw how these communications and systems were developing at the early points. Many of us were naïve about the commercialization and commodification potentials of these new communication forms as they developed. So, we were hobbled a bit by our own preconceptions, language use, and lack of guidance. And added to that, starting in the early 2000s as blogs started to develop and then social networking sites like Friendster began growing, there was this incredible explosion of user growth and diversity, and a lack of conceptual and methodological agreements about what to call things and how to study them. So, add this incredibly dynamism, which continues on steroids today, into the mix. 

Netnography is still reeling, still adapting, still evolving. It will never be “fully developed”. It will always be under development, like a piece of software that needs regular updating. And the short answer to your question about providing protocols to address these challenges is that people doing netnography publish and share their adaptations, and use each other’s work. The approach is open source and crowdsourced, as a scientific technique should always be. It has to be as dynamic and flexible as the rapidly changing phenomena it tries to understand, but it builds from a base of agree upon, proven, operations and steps. That base-setting task happens when researchers across many fields, including but absolutely not limited to me, write about the method and the way it has been used, looking back at what others have done, consolidating and trying to organize it, and provide specific foundations for others to breach and build upon again. That is the topic of my next book, Netnography Unlimited, which is a volume that Rossella Gambetti and I have edited. It features work by 32 different researchers and scholars, including several in industry, in 19 different chapters examining how they have adapted and altered netnography to the investigative task at hand.

 Robert V. Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations at USC Annenberg, a position he shares with the USC Marshall School of Business. Previously, he has been a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, and York University’s Schulich School of Business.

His mission at USC is to build academic and popular understanding about the social and economic impacts of our new digital communications systems. In particular, his most recent research investigates the cultural effects of new technologies of personal and corporate branding. Rob is a globally recognized expert on social media, marketing, branding and innovation. In 1995, during his dissertation work on media fan communities, he invented the method of netnography, which adapts the anthropological approach of ethnography to work with the many types of social experience and interaction that emerge through networked digital communications. In the two decades since he first created and shared this new method, netnography has been adopted by academic researchers working in computer science, sociology, geography, library sciences, nursing, health sciences, psychology, addiction research, anthropology, marketing and consumer research. His research examines topics such as social branding, word-of-mouth marketing, themed retail spectacle, media consumption, technology ideologies, brand archetypes, utopian consumer culture, capitalist emancipation, and consumer activism through investigating sites such as Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, ESPN Zone, the American Girl brand, Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, mobile device use, digital social networks, and the Burning Man project.

The Stuff Through Which We Represent Our Lives: An Interview with Anna Poletti (Part Two)

Tell us about your intriguing concept,   “confessional entrepreneurs.” What does it suggest about the mechanisms which not only solicit but profit from our sharing of self in the network era?

I had become very interested in crowdsourced projects that invite the general public to contribute autobiographical fragments because these projects seemed to have such a strong transmedial element—utilizing online publishing (websites), book publishing, live events, podcasts and documentary. On the one hand, these projects seemed to create their own communities of dedicated contributors and followers online, while also appealing to a wider audience: how did they do that? And why was autobiographical content particularly amenable to this form of transmedial cultural production? It was clear to me that projects such as The Moth, PostSecret, Six Word Memoir were of a type—that all did a similar thing (collect autobiographical fragments and compile them into texts available in different media formats). My research began with a pretty basic question: how do these projects work and what makes them successful?

I developed the concept of ‘confessional entrepreneurship’ as a way to categorize the elements that these projects share, at the level of intention (what confessional entrepreneurs are trying to achieve), and how they go about achieving their aims (what specific uses of media, materiality and curation they have in common). I wanted to make a checklist of sorts, that would help identify whether or not a project could be considered as an example of confessional entrepreneurship, with the view that this can be updated as the strategies of these projects change. I also wanted to use the concept to help us think about the unique ways the logic of crowdsourcing is used to source analogue autobiographical texts (handmade postcards, childhood diaries or letters, live events, in person conversation) and that are repackaged into digital products (websites, podcasts, apps) and commercially successful mass market books. Researching these projects made the necessity of studying digital culture from a comparative media studies approach very clear to me—the power of these projects, their ability to claim and market the life narratives they collect as being authentic, is anchored in the materiality of analogue forms of media.

I use the term “entrepreneurship” to conceptualize the projects because even though the vast majority of them fall into a not-for-profit model, they are clearly attempts by individuals, or small groups of individuals who are “concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities” (Shane and Venkataraman, 217). The people behind this projects develop careers in the cultural industries by becoming experts in their particular brand of autobiographical storytelling—that is indeed branded and sold on to corporate and educational clients in some cases (such as The Moth, and StoryCorps). Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as consisting of two related properties: the presence of potentially lucrative opportunities, and the presence of “enterprising individuals” prepared to take action in response to the opportunities (218). In the case of confessional entrepreneurs, the opportunity occurs in the context of the three interconnected elements of the mid-2000s: the increased influence of memoir and personal storytelling (sometimes referred to as the ‘memoir boom’ which Julie Rak has written about the rise of intimacy and affect in the construction of US citizenship outlined by Lauren Berlant in her theory of intimate publics and the rise of communicative capitalism, theorized by Jodi Dean in her book Blog Theory. At its core—the entrepreneurs have seen that there is an increased expectation that people will engage in personal storytelling, and they have managed to convince millions of people that they need a template or a coach in order to do it well.

Confessional entrepreneurs exploit this cultural context by creating a textual template (secrets on postcards (PostSecret), short spoken work presentations such as those fostered by The Moth, the interview technique of StoryCorps) that they promote and which generates freely generated products that flow into the project via the logic of crowdsourcing. Terms of Service agreements are very important element here but they are not always easily visible: but each of these projects has them somewhere, and they grant the project ownership over the contributions they have crowdsourced and license the entrepreneurs to repackage the content into commercial products. I was interested in both the mechanisms of digital culture and the cultural logics that has led to people having no problem with someone like Frank Warren, or The Moth, claiming ownership of their life narrative. Indeed, the projects create such a convincing framing narrative about the community building and psychological importance of “sharing real life stories” that they convince many of us that contributing to the project is a means of confirms one’s humanity. Sending a card to Frank Warren, or writing a Six Word Memoir, is a way to confirm your membership of the human race (always conceptualized as a narrative race).

 In this sense, confessional entrepreneurship works with a participatory logic we see in zines and other subcultures where being a silent audience member is discouraged. However, unlike subcultures where participation is acknowledged as the making of the community, confessional entrepreneurs create projects that they claim meet an existing need for the sharing of personal stories. At the same time, these projects elevate the entrepreneurs (the people with the expertise in autobiographical storytelling) as individuals or small groups who must ‘help’ everyday people tell stories about their lives in engaging ways. 

The persona of the entrepreneur is vital to the organisation, coherence and commodification of the autobiographical fragments that are generated by the project—the entrepreneur articulates the logic of the project and names the affects the project seeks to foster (sense of community, relief at sharing a secret, a ‘mortified’  relationship with one’s teenage self). The confessional entrepreneur also articulates and polices quite narrow ideas about the form and content of the autobiographical material the project collects in order to establish, stablize and protect the coherence of the commodity the project produces.

You have very interesting things to say in the book about collage as an aesthetic form for articulating why and how queer lives matter in the context of a normative culture. Yet, collage has become such an everyday practice for many groups in our culture, especially if extended to include such forms of appropriation and quotation as scrapbooks or memes. I would argue that there are a range of different forms of collage practices out there, which express a range of different relations to the dominant culture. If so, what is particularly queer about collage in your eyes?

I agree that collage and appropriation is a wide spread technique that many different groups draw on for different reasons. At the core, what we do when collage is we take ownership of something, we take it apart, and we combine it with other things. We utilize and recombine existing meanings to make new meanings. 

Is this an inherently queer gesture? Maybe. If by queer we mean wanting to interrupt and mess around with existing structures of meaning and see what happens. To collage is to say: “well yes but maybe also… this.” It is additive, presumptive, potentially disruptive, and a bit disrespectful. 

We often collage with things we love, and when we do that we are loving the text in a specific way—our love for it overruns our respect for its integrity. We love it so much we want to cut it up. This form of loving may not be queer, but it is at least not an entirely respectable way to express one’s appreciation of something. It’s a little bit perverse to want to dismember the thing that brings you pleasure in order to increase your pleasure. 

When we collage out of ambivalence, or to demean something, we are also acknowledging the powerful reaction the thing has sparked in us. We may be unconsciously signalling our fetish. We are at least acknowledging the thing has moved us—it has meaning we want to grab on to and work with or on.

 I agree that there are a range of difference collaging practices out there, and that they all express different forms of relating to existing meanings in circulation in dominant culture. They may not all be queer, but maybe they enact queer relationships with culture, and produce queer readings of it. I don’t need to claim the aesthetic form itself for queerness, but I do think that it has been used by queer life writers in interesting and important ways, and these have overlooked in autobiography scholarship because of what collage does to authenticity (it destabilizes it).

In Stories of the Self, I am considering how queer life writers use collage to make a text that reflects on the work it takes to construct and believe in the possibility of a queer life. I am taking my lead from the work of Eve Sedgwick, and I approach the survival and flourishing of queer lives as an issue intrinsically linked to inventive, counterintuitive, and disobedient practices of reading and adaptation. In her influential essay “Queer and Now” under the heading “Promising, Smuggling, Reading, Overreading,” Sedgwick offers a theory of queer reading in the form of an autobiographical vignette:

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural text and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it. The demands on both the text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical.

In the work of many scholars of queer culture, we see how aesthetic experiences—which are mediated and material—are resources for living. Indeed, the impact of Sedgwick’s influential theory of reparative reading—which offers queer practices of reading and writing as counter-examples to a certain kind of paranoid scholarly reading—enshrines the relationship between life and texts, living and reading, into the heart of a reconsideration of critical practice. 

My reading of collage expands this strand of Sedgwick’s work by focusing explicitly on how some queer autobiographers voice their experiences of reparative reading through a very material form of ventriloquism. The queer collages I explore narrate the importance of media texts in the lives of queer young people.  

In talking about the texts that helped them imagine a queer life by talking through those texts themselves, these queer life writers strike at a core tenet of what makes autobiography a distinct genre of social action—they speak a truth about their lived experience in the voice of others. So, when Jonathan Caouette, in his documentary Tarnation shows us his teenage self lip-synching to the song Frank Mills from the musical Hair, he is not telling us about his reparative reading. He is not narrating the reparative reading as being important to him or to how he came to understand his relationship with his mother, her mental illness, and his own queer identity. He is showing usthe reparative reading itself, in the form of home movie footage of him emoting to Shelley Plimpton’s rendition of the song. 

Existing frameworks for understanding what makes autobiography a distinctive struggle to account for this as a meaningful (and indeed complex and moving) instance of life writing, because the youthful Jonathan in the frame is not speaking (he is miming) and the content of his utterance is a popular song performed by a female singer. He violates two basic elements of autobiography as a social and artistic genre here: he does not speak in his own voice, and he does not speak in his own words. Yet the young Jonathon’s commitment to the performance, his use of the song and the video camera to express and give form to his emotions, is undeniably saying something about his lived experience. But what is it saying, and how we can learn to recognize the young person’s statement as being a statement about themselves when it is made in this collaged way? 

Caouette the filmmaker does not remediate his youthful reparative reading from the perspective of his adult self reflecting back on his childhood. He puts the lip-synching child in front of his audience and lets him speak for himself. Media materialities play a vital role here, the filmmaker can do this because he is working with digitized footage that allows him to collage many materials together including this material from his personal archive of home movie footage. Caouette bends the material affordances of digital film as far as he can to show us that when the child is trying to understand how to survive he doesn’t speak in his own voice, but in Plimpton’s—how do we listen to that voice coming from, but also clearly not belonging to, that body and hear what he is trying to say?

When it was released into cinemas Tarnationwas infamous for being made entirely in iMovie for a total of around $200 dollars (the soundtrack, on the other hand, was very expensive because of the cost of the rights). In the trailer, a bi-line for the film is: Your greatest creation is the life you lead—and this is a statement of queer flourishing. While largely reviewed as a documentary about Caouette’s relationship with his mother (which it is) the film is, I think, equally a story about how Caouette came to believe in the possibility of his own life, growing up poor and gay in Texas. Tarnation tries to celebrate and see clearly Caouette’s mother’s life, but it also tells the story of the life Caouette made for himself by using dominant culture (movies, television, popular music, musicals) as a resource and engaging in what Sedgwick would call “overreading.”

For a book about the autobiographical impulse in culture, you tell us very little about yourself. If you were to mediate your own life story, given what you learned in researching this book, what form of mediation would you use?

This is a great question! One of the reasons I am scholar of autobiography is that I have immense respect for—bordering on fear of—the nature of the challenge we face when we try to find the right form and media to tell others about our lived experience, who we are, and what matters to us. When I was researching zines as an autobiographical form as part of my doctorate, I become quite frustrated with scholars (and practitioners) who claimed that making a zine was “easy.” While it is true that there are low financial and material barriers to making a zine—a zine can be made out of a single sheet of paper using a pen —having and refining the ideas, working out how to tell the story you want to tell, discovering what your audience does and does not need to know about the context in which you live and the people who are important to you in order to understand what you are trying to tell them is anything but easy. I only came to really appreciate that by choosing the medium of the zine to communicate with zinemakers during my doctoral research—that was an autobiographical project, albeit a meta one: a zine about undertaking a PhD on zines (Poletti).

I think we see the ingenuity it takes to make a seemingly simple piece of life media in the work people put in to learning how to take good selfies (of various genres), to craft Facebook posts that both say what they want to say and compel others to write a comment or click a reaction. Even the most seemingly simple (and some would say banal and ephemeral) forms of self-life-writing actually have quite high and complex aesthetic and formal components that are fundamental to their capacity to create satisfying and meaningful encounters for the authors and their readers. 

As I tell my students when I teach life writing and ask them to undertake life writing themselves: the trick with autobiography is that while it is a genre, there is no colour by numbers way to write or produce a piece of autobiographical media. Autobiography always requires ingenuity on behalf of its creator—the material you are seeking to communicate (your identity, your lived experience, your values, your desires and fears) are unique to you, and the text you make to communicate them will have to be unique too.

All that said, I have never really consistently engaged in autobiography until this year when, in early March, I contracted covid-19 (before widespread testing was available in the Netherlands). I was in isolation at home for six weeks with a lung infection and serious fatigue caused by the virus. I was very sick and living alone in a country that did not quite feel like home (I have only lived here for four years). On top of that I become ill right at the beginning of the pandemic, and the medical profession was taking a triage approach to the virus—unless they thought you were in danger of being unable to breathe, they were not able to provide any care. (During this time the proofs came in for Stories of the Selfand I had to do both the index and the proofreading, which was a challenge physically but also a great way to stay anchored to the world while I was alone for so long. That said, I do feel like the index should come with a disclaimer: constructed while the author was suffering from novel coronavirus.)

During this time I was regularly updating my friends and family in Australia about my experience on Facebook, but I was also ‘documenting’ the experience of the virus because I thought people might be interested to know the kinds of impact it could have on a healthy person, and how little the health profession knows about the virus or how to treat it. It was, and still is, a kind of covid-19 chronicle. For many people I am friends with on Facebook, I was the only person they knew who had the virus, and so there was a lot of engagement and support coming through the site because they were curious, horrified, worried. Their responses eased my social isolation, but many of my friends on Facebook also told me that my posts helped them understand the virus and the pandemic better. It was the first time in my life that talking about my lived experience and myself seemed to be useful to my community. Recording the experience on Facebook was mutually beneficial for them and for me. (Although I am sure it may have also increased some peoples’ anxiety about the pandemic, and they may have had to block my posts.)

I am a ‘long haul’ covid-19 case, and I am still recovering, and once I was well enough to work again I wrote a short essay about the physical elements of my experience for the Guardian .This was the first time I had ‘gone public’ with a life writing text. I am still not sure how I feel about it, to be honest, although a number of people from America, Europe, and Australia have written to say they found it comforting to read a personal account that so closely mirrored their own experience with the virus and its ongoing effects during this time when there is little reliable medical knowledge about it. This sense of being useful to people helped me overcome my fear that no-one would care that much about one person’s experience with a ‘mild’ version of the virus—a feeling that plagued me when I was writing the essay. 

 So, I guess in answer to your question, when I decide to write about my lived experience I choose the media that I think will help me reach the audience I want to speak to.  

Works cited:

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Bodó, Balázs. “Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators.” New Media & Society. 2020.

Dean, Jodi. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Hayles, N. K. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Jolly, Margaretta. In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism. Columbia University Press, 2008.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/8351.

Marwick, Alice. “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 27. 1. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech70 (1984): 151–167.

Poletti, Anna. “Putting Lives on the Record - The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing.” Biography, 40.3, 2017. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/359007

Poletti, Anna. Zines. In Ashley Barnwell & Kate Douglas (Eds.), Research methodologies for auto/biography studies. New York: Routledge, 2009: 26-33.

Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013.

Shane, Scott, and S. Venkataraman. “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review25, no. 1 (2000): 217–226.

Stanley, Liz and Margaretta Jolly. “Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?” a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies 32. 2, 2017: 229-33. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/61242/1/2017-5-23_Epistolari.pdf

 Tell us about your intriguing concept,   “confessional entrepreneurs.” What does it suggest about the mechanisms which not only solicit but profit from our sharing of self in the network era?

I had become very interested in crowdsourced projects that invite the general public to contribute autobiographical fragments because these projects seemed to have such a strong transmedial element—utilizing online publishing (websites), book publishing, live events, podcasts and documentary. On the one hand, these projects seemed to create their own communities of dedicated contributors and followers online, while also appealing to a wider audience: how did they do that? And why was autobiographical content particularly amenable to this form of transmedial cultural production? It was clear to me that projects such as The Moth, PostSecret, Six Word Memoir were of a type—that all did a similar thing (collect autobiographical fragments and compile them into texts available in different media formats). My research began with a pretty basic question: how do these projects work and what makes them successful?

I developed the concept of ‘confessional entrepreneurship’ as a way to categorize the elements that these projects share, at the level of intention (what confessional entrepreneurs are trying to achieve), and how they go about achieving their aims (what specific uses of media, materiality and curation they have in common). I wanted to make a checklist of sorts, that would help identify whether or not a project could be considered as an example of confessional entrepreneurship, with the view that this can be updated as the strategies of these projects change. I also wanted to use the concept to help us think about the unique ways the logic of crowdsourcing is used to source analogue autobiographical texts (handmade postcards, childhood diaries or letters, live events, in person conversation) and that are repackaged into digital products (websites, podcasts, apps) and commercially successful mass market books. Researching these projects made the necessity of studying digital culture from a comparative media studies approach very clear to me—the power of these projects, their ability to claim and market the life narratives they collect as being authentic, is anchored in the materiality of analogue forms of media.

I use the term “entrepreneurship” to conceptualize the projects because even though the vast majority of them fall into a not-for-profit model, they are clearly attempts by individuals, or small groups of individuals who are “concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities” (Shane and Venkataraman, 217). The people behind this projects develop careers in the cultural industries by becoming experts in their particular brand of autobiographical storytelling—that is indeed branded and sold on to corporate and educational clients in some cases (such as The Moth, and StoryCorps). Shane and Venkataraman define entrepreneurship as consisting of two related properties: the presence of potentially lucrative opportunities, and the presence of “enterprising individuals” prepared to take action in response to the opportunities (218). In the case of confessional entrepreneurs, the opportunity occurs in the context of the three interconnected elements of the mid-2000s: the increased influence of memoir and personal storytelling (sometimes referred to as the ‘memoir boom’ which Julie Rak has written about (https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/B/Boom2), rise of intimacy and affect in the construction of US citizenship outlined by Lauren Berlant in her theory of intimate publics (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-female-complaint), and the rise of communicative capitalism, theorized by Jodi Dean in her book Blog Theory(https://jdeanicite.typepad.com/files/dean--blog-theory.pdf). At its core—the entrepreneurs have seen that there is an increased expectation that people will engage in personal storytelling, and they have managed to convince millions of people that they need a template or a coach in order to do it well.

Confessional entrepreneurs exploit this cultural context by creating a textual template (secrets on postcards (PostSecret), short spoken work presentations such as those fostered by The Moth, the interview technique of StoryCorps) that they promote and which generates freely generated products that flow into the project via the logic of crowdsourcing. Terms of Service agreements are very important element here but they are not always easily visible: but each of these projects has them somewhere, and they grant the project ownership over the contributions they have crowdsourced and license the entrepreneurs to repackage the content into commercial products. I was interested in both the mechanisms of digital culture and the cultural logics that has led to people having no problem with someone like Frank Warren, or The Moth, claiming ownership of their life narrative. Indeed, the projects create such a convincing framing narrative about the community building and psychological importance of “sharing real life stories” that they convince many of us that contributing to the project is a means of confirms one’s humanity. Sending a card to Frank Warren, or writing a Six Word Memoir, is a way to confirm your membership of the human race (always conceptualized as a narrative race).

 In this sense, confessional entrepreneurship works with a participatory logic we see in zines and other subcultures where being a silent audience member is discouraged. However, unlike subcultures where participation is acknowledged as the making of the community, confessional entrepreneurs create projects that they claim meet an existing need for the sharing of personal stories. At the same time, these projects elevate the entrepreneurs (the people with the expertise in autobiographical storytelling) as individuals or small groups who must ‘help’ everyday people tell stories about their lives in engaging ways. 

The persona of the entrepreneur is vital to the organisation, coherence and commodification of the autobiographical fragments that are generated by the project—the entrepreneur articulates the logic of the project and names the affects the project seeks to foster (sense of community, relief at sharing a secret, a ‘mortified’ (https://getmortified.com/) relationship with one’s teenage self). The confessional entrepreneur also articulates and polices quite narrow ideas about the form and content of the autobiographical material the project collects in order to establish, stablize and protect the coherence of the commodity the project produces.

You have very interesting things to say in the book about collage as an aesthetic form for articulating why and how queer lives matter in the context of a normative culture. Yet, collage has become such an everyday practice for many groups in our culture, especially if extended to include such forms of appropriation and quotation as scrapbooks or memes. I would argue that there are a range of different forms of collage practices out there, which express a range of different relations to the dominant culture. If so, what is particularly queer about collage in your eyes?

I agree that collage and appropriation is a wide spread technique that many different groups draw on for different reasons. At the core, what we do when collage is we take ownership of something, we take it apart, and we combine it with other things. We utilize and recombine existing meanings to make new meanings. 

Is this an inherently queer gesture? Maybe. If by queer we mean wanting to interrupt and mess around with existing structures of meaning and see what happens. To collage is to say: “well yes but maybe also… this.” It is additive, presumptive, potentially disruptive, and a bit disrespectful. 

We often collage with things we love, and when we do that we are loving the text in a specific way—our love for it overruns our respect for its integrity. We love it so much we want to cut it up. This form of loving may not be queer, but it is at least not an entirely respectable way to express one’s appreciation of something. It’s a little bit perverse to want to dismember the thing that brings you pleasure in order to increase your pleasure. 

When we collage out of ambivalence, or to demean something, we are also acknowledging the powerful reaction the thing has sparked in us. We may be unconsciously signalling our fetish. We are at least acknowledging the thing has moved us—it has meaning we want to grab on to and work with or on.

 I agree that there are a range of difference collaging practices out there, and that they all express different forms of relating to existing meanings in circulation in dominant culture. They may not all be queer, but maybe they enact queer relationships with culture, and produce queer readings of it. I don’t need to claim the aesthetic form itself for queerness, but I do think that it has been used by queer life writers in interesting and important ways, and these have overlooked in autobiography scholarship because of what collage does to authenticity (it destabilizes it).

In Stories of the Self, I am considering how queer life writers use collage to make a text that reflects on the work it takes to construct and believe in the possibility of a queer life. I am taking my lead from the work of Eve Sedgwick, and I approach the survival and flourishing of queer lives as an issue intrinsically linked to inventive, counterintuitive, and disobedient practices of reading and adaptation. In her influential essay “Queer and Now” (https://lgbt200readings.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/week-01_sedgwick_-queer-and-now.pdf)under the heading “Promising, Smuggling, Reading, Overreading,” Sedgwick offers a theory of queer reading in the form of an autobiographical vignette:

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love. This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural text and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it. The demands on both the text and the reader from so intent an attachment can be multiple, even paradoxical.

In the work of many scholars of queer culture, we see how aesthetic experiences—which are mediated and material—are resources for living. Indeed, the impact of Sedgwick’s influential theory of reparative reading—which offers queer practices of reading and writing as counter-examples to a certain kind of paranoid scholarly reading—enshrines the relationship between life and texts, living and reading, into the heart of a reconsideration of critical practice. 

My reading of collage expands this strand of Sedgwick’s work by focusing explicitly on how some queer autobiographers voice their experiences of reparative reading through a very material form of ventriloquism. The queer collages I explore narrate the importance of media texts in the lives of queer young people. 

In talking about the texts that helped them imagine a queer life by talking through those texts themselves, these queer life writers strike at a core tenet of what makes autobiography a distinct genre of social action—they speak a truth about their lived experience in the voice of others. So, when Jonathan Caouette, in his documentary Tarnation(https://youtu.be/mLDQL23nutw) shows us his teenage self lip-synching to the song Frank Mills from the musical Hair, he is not telling us about his reparative reading. He is not narrating the reparative reading as being important to him or to how he came to understand his relationship with his mother, her mental illness, and his own queer identity. He is showing usthe reparative reading itself, in the form of home movie footage of him emoting to Shelley Plimpton’s rendition of the song. 

Existing frameworks for understanding what makes autobiography a distinctive struggle to account for this as a meaningful (and indeed complex and moving) instance of life writing, because the youthful Jonathan in the frame is not speaking (he is miming) and the content of his utterance is a popular song performed by a female singer. He violates two basic elements of autobiography as a social and artistic genre here: he does not speak in his own voice, and he does not speak in his own words. Yet the young Jonathon’s commitment to the performance, his use of the song and the video camera to express and give form to his emotions, is undeniably saying something about his lived experience. But what is it saying, and how we can learn to recognize the young person’s statement as being a statement about themselves when it is made in this collaged way? 

Caouette the filmmaker does not remediate his youthful reparative reading from the perspective of his adult self reflecting back on his childhood. He puts the lip-synching child in front of his audience and lets him speak for himself. Media materialities play a vital role here, the filmmaker can do this because he is working with digitized footage that allows him to collage many materials together including this material from his personal archive of home movie footage. Caouette bends the material affordances of digital film as far as he can to show us that when the child is trying to understand how to survive he doesn’t speak in his own voice, but in Plimpton’s—how do we listen to that voice coming from, but also clearly not belonging to, that body and hear what he is trying to say?

When it was released into cinemas Tarnationwas infamous for being made entirely in iMovie for a total of around $200 dollars (the soundtrack, on the other hand, was very expensive because of the cost of the rights). In the trailer, a bi-line for the film is: Your greatest creation is the life you lead—and this is a statement of queer flourishing. While largely reviewed as a documentary about Caouette’s relationship with his mother (which it is) the film is, I think, equally a story about how Caouette came to believe in the possibility of his own life, growing up poor and gay in Texas. Tarnationtries to celebrate and see clearly Caouette’s mother’s life, but it also tells the story of the life Caouette made for himself by using dominant culture (movies, television, popular music, musicals) as a resource and engaging in what Sedgwick would call “overreading.” 

For a book about the autobiographical impulse in culture, you tell us very little about yourself. If you were to mediate your own life story, given what you learned in researching this book, what form of mediation would you use?

This is a great question! One of the reasons I am scholar of autobiography is that I have immense respect for—bordering on fear of—the nature of the challenge we face when we try to find the right form and media to tell others about our lived experience, who we are, and what matters to us. When I was researching zines as an autobiographical form as part of my doctorate, I become quite frustrated with scholars (and practitioners) who claimed that making a zine was “easy.” While it is true that there are low financial and material barriers to making a zine—a zine can be made out of a single sheet of paper using a pen (https://youtu.be/3I7Uk24P-vI) —having and refining the ideas, working out how to tell the story you want to tell, discovering what your audience does and does not need to know about the context in which you live and the people who are important to you in order to understand what you are trying to tell them is anything but easy. I only came to really appreciate that by choosing the medium of the zine to communicate with zinemakers during my doctoral research—that was an autobiographical project, albeit a meta one: a zine about undertaking a PhD on zines (Poletti).

I think we see the ingenuity it takes to make a seemingly simple piece of life media in the work people put in to learning how to take good selfies (of various genres), to craft Facebook posts that both say what they want to say and compel others to write a comment or click a reaction. Even the most seemingly simple (and some would say banal and ephemeral) forms of self-life-writing actually have quite high and complex aesthetic and formal components that are fundamental to their capacity to create satisfying and meaningful encounters for the authors and their readers. 

As I tell my students when I teach life writing and ask them to undertake life writing themselves: the trick with autobiography is that while it is a genre, there is no colour by numbers way to write or produce a piece of autobiographical media. Autobiography always requires ingenuity on behalf of its creator—the material you are seeking to communicate (your identity, your lived experience, your values, your desires and fears) are unique to you, and the text you make to communicate them will have to be unique too.

All that said, I have never really consistently engaged in autobiography until this year when, in early March, I contracted covid-19 (before widespread testing was available in the Netherlands). I was in isolation at home for six weeks with a lung infection and serious fatigue caused by the virus. I was very sick and living alone in a country that did not quite feel like home (I have only lived here for four years). On top of that I become ill right at the beginning of the pandemic, and the medical profession was taking a triage approach to the virus—unless they thought you were in danger of being unable to breathe, they were not able to provide any care. (During this time the proofs came in for Stories of the Selfand I had to do both the index and the proofreading, which was a challenge physically but also a great way to stay anchored to the world while I was alone for so long. That said, I do feel like the index should come with a disclaimer: constructed while the author was suffering from novel coronavirus.)

During this time I was regularly updating my friends and family in Australia about my experience on Facebook, but I was also ‘documenting’ the experience of the virus because I thought people might be interested to know the kinds of impact it could have on a healthy person, and how little the health profession knows about the virus or how to treat it. It was, and still is, a kind of covid-19 chronicle. For many people I am friends with on Facebook, I was the only person they knew who had the virus, and so there was a lot of engagement and support coming through the site because they were curious, horrified, worried. Their responses eased my social isolation, but many of my friends on Facebook also told me that my posts helped them understand the virus and the pandemic better. It was the first time in my life that talking about my lived experience and myself seemed to be useful to my community. Recording the experience on Facebook was mutually beneficial for them and for me. (Although I am sure it may have also increased some peoples’ anxiety about the pandemic, and they may have had to block my posts.)

I am a ‘long haul’ covid-19 case, and I am still recovering, and once I was well enough to work again I wrote a short essay about the physical elements of my experience for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/i-was-regarded-as-having-a-mild-case-of-covid-19-i-had-burning-lungs-and-exhaustion-for-weeks).This was the first time I had ‘gone public’ with a life writing text. I am still not sure how I feel about it, to be honest, although a number of people from America, Europe, and Australia have written to say they found it comforting to read a personal account that so closely mirrored their own experience with the virus and its ongoing effects during this time when there is little reliable medical knowledge about it. This sense of being useful to people helped me overcome my fear that no-one would care that much about one person’s experience with a ‘mild’ version of the virus—a feeling that plagued me when I was writing the essay. 

So, I guess in answer to your question, when I decide to write about my lived experience I choose the media that I think will help me reach the audience I want to speak to. 

Works cited:

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Bodó, Balázs. “Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators.” New Media & Society. 2020.

Dean, Jodi. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Hayles, N. K. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Jolly, Margaretta. In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism. Columbia University Press, 2008.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/8351.

Marwick, Alice. “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 27. 1. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798379

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech70 (1984): 151–167.

Poletti, Anna. “Putting Lives on the Record - The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing.” Biography, 40.3, 2017. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/359007

Poletti, Anna. Zines. In Ashley Barnwell & Kate Douglas (Eds.), Research methodologies for auto/biography studies. New York: Routledge, 2009: 26-33.

Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013.

Shane, Scott, and S. Venkataraman. “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” Academy of Management Review25, no. 1 (2000): 217–226.

Stanley, Liz and Margaretta Jolly. “Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?” a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies 32. 2, 2017: 229-33. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/61242/1/2017-5-23_Epistolari.pdf

 Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). They are a researcher of contemporary life writing, and a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. They are the author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (2008). With Julie Rak, they co-edited Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014).

The Stuff Through Which We Represent Our Lives: An Interview with Anna Poletti

Anna Poletti’s Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book is a remarkable new monograph that we were lucky enough to publish in the Post-Millenial Pop book series which Karen Tongson and I co-edit for New York University Press. One of the things we pay attention to as we consider books for the series is the corpus of works that are being discussed. We certainly have some books that drill deep into a particular medium but we have a bias for books that adopt a comparative approach – that encourage us to trace a theme or trend across multiple media platforms, that ask us to read one medium in relation to another. And that is one of the reasons I was drawn to this particular project. 

From the first, she was arguing that our understanding of the autobiographical or “stories of the self” or “life writing” had been shaped largely by the properties of print, even if we expand book culture to include newer forms such as the graphic novel. She wanted to expand beyond that canon to reflect upon how people (such as Andy Warhol) left an account of their life through many boxes of seemingly random stuff, how entrepreneurs crowd sourced shared cultural memories via digital platforms, how queer filmmakers constructed accounts of the ways they constructed their identity via collages of borrowed media materials, and how the role of the camera in certain documentary films allows us to reflect on what it means to become an observer of our own life experiences. The book is organized around a series of such case studies, each of which pose important questions at the intersection of life writing, media and cultural studies, and gender/sexuality studies. 

This interview will give a portrait – intellectual but also as you will see personal – of a remarkable and original author reflecting on a subject that literally touches each of us where we live. Thanks to Poletti for being willing to address my questions under what were difficult circumstances for her.

You write, “Autobiography matters—culturally, politically, historically, socially—because it puts individual lives ‘on the record,’ and in so doing creates a scene of apprehension: it is a cultural and social practice that makes lives available for engagement by others and responds to the fundamental need to make ourselves legible in the social field.” What might a comparative media studies approach, then, contribute to our understanding of the different ways that people make their lives visible and apprehensible to others? What are some of the examples of media practices you discuss in your book?

Autobiography is examined in a variety of disciplines such as social sciences, sociology, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, cultural and media studies, and history. But the understanding of what autobiography is, and what it can tell us about the world varies a lot across these fields. For sociologists and historians, autobiography is often data—collected through interviews, or sourced from pre-existing archives—that is used to inform a study into a particular phenomenon (historical or contemporary), and for psychologists and philosophers, autobiography is a cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic practice that forms part of the basic building blocks of personhood and social life (identity, sense of community, sense of personal and shared values etc). In cultural and media studies, autobiography is not really studied as autobiography but as identity work, or community building activity that takes place in specific communities or online spaces. Here, scholars rarely use the term ‘autobiography’ because it is associated with books. Therefore most of the insights into autobiographical practice that have been developed in life writing studies do not cross the disciplinary divide.

Stories of the Self is a book that tries to point out two things: to media studies scholars, it wants to demonstrate that the ways of reading, conceptualizing and talking about life writing developed in life writing studies can be useful for answering many of the key questions that media studies scholarship seeks to understand—from the question of how trust is being reshaped by technology (Bodó), to how social media has reshaped traditional media industries through its emphasis on personal identity (Marwick). However, a lot of the work undertaken in media studies that examines the rise of personal storytelling, or the shifting importance of autobiography to specific elements of the social and political world, focuses solely on digital technologies and their impact. I think a comparative media studies approach is vital if we are to really understand the nature of the changes digital technology is bringing about. Yes, most of us have an online life, and digital technology is integrated into our everyday forms of communication and living, but our lives are still lived in a material world—teeming with objects such as birthday presents with wrapping paper and cards, childhood toys, novelty coffee cups and family heirlooms. Many of the impacts of digital technology have local, material impacts on people’s living conditions. I don’t think we can fully grasp the impact of digital technology on the world if we analyse it in total isolation from the gritty material embodied world we inhabit. 

So my starting position is that we are both digital and analogue, if by analogue we mean being material, geographically and temporally located and bounded. (Lockdown in the pandemic has brutally reminded most of us just how local and material our lives are.) A comparative media studies approach as I use it involves a constant movement between digital and analogue forms, in order to see what insights into autobiography and its role in shaping the social field emerge when we take media affordances and materiality seriously as conditions for autobiographical statements and their reception. 

On the flip side of this, for my colleagues in life writing, I wanted to write a book that (ironically) pushes the field out beyond the world of the printed book—beyond memoir and comics and autobiography—and that tries to challenge the tendency in the field to make claims about the power of life writing (which you quoted) that are sometimes really claims about what the printed book is and does (Poletti). This is a continuation of work I began with my doctoral study, which looked at zines as a unique form of autobiography, and in my collaborations with Julie Rak on digital life writing (Poletti and Rak) and drag. 

In life writing studies, we do study digital forms of life writing, and there is a long tradition of studying other forms of life writing that are not published, such as diaries (Lejeune) and letters (Jolly; Stanley and Jolly)—so it is not as though we are as book-bound as our colleagues who study the novel. Stories of the Selfasks a pretty basic question: Is a life really “on the record”  if it appears as one of over hundreds of thousands of postcards contributed to PostSecret ? Or as a selfie on an Instagram feed? And does our commitment to understanding autobiography as a dynamic, flexible, rich, and grounding cultural practice that informs the social field mean that we exclude from our purview all the examples that don’t seem to fit the scholarly consensus of how and why autobiography matters because they are too large or too small or too weird to be easily assimilated into ‘the record’?

Figure: Postcard posted to PostSecret blog under the title “Classic Secrets”

I wondered what might happen to autobiography studies if it no longer relied so heavily on the book as its default object, but took a promiscuous approach to what counts as autobiography—what could we say about autobiography then? A comparative media studies approach provides a coherent way of tracking autobiography as a practice that occurs across media, without losing sight of the fact that it is a coherent genre of social action (Miller)—a reliable yet also flexible way for people to communicate and achieve all kinds of things together. We can all recognise autobiography, for example, when it appears as the opening of Greta Thunberg’s influential Ted Talk , or in documentary film’s such as Catfish. But each use of the genre is also a use of media, and I wanted to keep that at the centre of my thinking.

So, in the book I examine a mix of analogue and digital media forms including documentary films largely made with consumer grade technologies, crowdsourced autobiographical projects such as PostSecret and The Moth, and selfies. But I also wanted to include limit cases—that might not initially seem to fit the category of autobiography—in order to better account for materiality and its role in autobiography on the ‘analogue’ side. For this I turned to documentary television, and visual art—where issues of concern to media and autobiography studies could be thought differently. One chapter considers digital technology in relation to surveillance and the kind of shadow autobiography that is written when our data is collected by corporations and governments and subject to algorithmic reading. To think this issue I turn to two projects that remediate surveillance files from the mid-twentieth century: Steve McQueen’s End Credits and Australian Indigenous activist and scholar Gary Foley’s reading of the surveillance file kept on him by Australian security services. Together, they allowed me to explore the question of scale and autobiographical meaning from a comparative media studies angle—an issue central to many of the current debates about the intersection of digital technology, personal communication, and surveillance capitalism.

The only thing that is not in the book is a life writing text published as a book—although there is a short discussion of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. My comparative analysis moves across digital and analogue media forms outside of print culture and its products (books, magazines and so on)—to return to the quote in your question, I wanted to know what ‘on the record’ really means (and if it still has meaning) if we no longer assume that it refers to the ‘the printed record.’ The commonality across the media forms, though, is that they are all media of inscription—an idea I take from the work of Lisa Gitelman and N. Katherine Hayles—which refers to any media device that can “instantiate material changes that can be read as marks” (Hayles, 24). Returning to Thunberg’s TedTalk – the live performance is a separate form (tailored to engage the people in the room) that is ephemeral, while the video camera used to record it is a media of inscription.

Your book can be read as contributing to the broad cross-disciplinary project of new materialism or as I call it in my own recent writing, stuff studies. Daniel Miller talks about stories told through "the medium of stuff," which would seem to be literally true in your discussion of Andy Warhol's archive of boxed papers and other "stuff." so, talk a bit about how and why materiality enters your analysis.

Stuff studies seems to me to be a vital tool for understanding the intersection of the analogue and digital planes of our existence. Our digital lives are embedded in consumer capitalism through surveillance capitalism (we are surveilled so we can be sold stuff and the internet is a powerful portal for the buying and selling of stuff). The work of people like Miller and other anthropologists of material culture is vitally important, I think, for those of us in cultural and media studies who want to move beyond an observation that the internet is a commercial and commericializing space, to understanding the pre-existing currents in relation to stuff that online shopping spaces such as Amazon and Etsy have connected to. For me, this means continuing my interest in the power of handmade objects to function as powerful vehicles for autobiography (an approach I developed in response to trying to understand how zine makers used handmade zines), and continuing to try to find ways to account for the stuffness of autobiographical texts—to not just read them as narratives and treat the media and materiality they occur in them as secondary, as a physical package that does not signify, but to try to learn how to read autobiographical texts as both narrative and material and to give equal weight to materiality when accounting for autobiography as a process that creates a scene of apprehension between people.

So materiality enters my analysis through my insistence that any autobiography is also a choice of media form and a material object and we must learn how to read and account for both of these things if we are to feel confident that we are grasping what the text is doing. When I was planning the book I wanted to explore autobiography as a material practice, and so I turned my attention to the cardboard box—a ubiquitous and invisible material object that is, I argue, actually a media for autobiography. I am not an anthropologist, so I did not seek out people to interview about their relationship with cardboard boxes, instead I turned to culture—where was the cardboard box used? This is what led me to Warhol’s Time Capsules and then the challenge became, how do I bring my skills as an interpreter of texts to  612 cardboard boxes of stuff? Is it even possible to ‘read’ the Time Capsules as an autobiographical artwork?

I had two options when looking for examples of the cardboard box to analyse—Warhol, or Stanley Kubrick’s boxes. Kubrick actually designed his own cardboard box for manufacture (he was particular about how well the lids fit), and his archive is a great example of how cardboard boxes are not just containers for stuff, but a technology that facilitates certain relationships with and through stuff. This to me is what is stuff studies allows us to consider: the way stuff means and allows us to make meaning: when we have a strong and ongoing interaction with specific materials they become an important element of our lived experience (they become part of our lives) and they become a means for us to live in particular ways.

 Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). They are a researcher of contemporary life writing, and a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. They are the author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (2008). With Julie Rak, they co-edited Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014).

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Home Front (Part 3)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: 

Before I write anything else, I want to second your endorsement of Joe Dillon’s work. I worked at the national office of the National Writing Project from 2015 to 2018, and I learned so much from him in that span, including a wonderfully inventive webinar protocol based on Peter Elbow’s Doubting/Believing game that I’ve been trying to find a chance to recreate for years. 

I’ve also filed away all your graphic novel recommendations! Another of Wesley’s birthday presents was a set of Dogman books, and the reception was chilly at best. I’m hoping they’ll grow on him. While we’re on the topic of graphic novels, I can’t recommend the March trilogy enough, which, like a lot of parents, we bought after John Lewis died back in July. You might have seen the widely circulated pictures of Lewis recreating his iconic march across the Edmund Pettus bridge at Comic-Con 2015. He was there promoting March, co-authored with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, which chronicles the history of the Civil Rights Movement in beautiful and frank detail. We’ve been reading it with the kids nightly, and it’s been a great way for us and them to make connections to what’s happening now with Black Lives Matter. The only downside has been the need to slightly increase our already outsized grocery budget, as Helen, our three-year-old, has decided she needs to eat an apple during every reading (and who am I to argue!?).

I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestion that perhaps what makes parents like us so nervous about games is simply a fear of the unknown and our general absence of familiarity with that world. It’s a super sharp observation and one that I think also applies to the lack of control parents (myself included) are feeling about not being able to fully monitor/engage with/participate in screen time of all sorts with their kids right now. Media scholars like Mimi Ito  have been saying for some time that the key to healthy screen time is not really about setting time limits on it but about building parents’ capacity to be good digital mentors. That is, screen time is better when it’s something parents can enjoy with their kids, talk to their kids about, or connect to other learning opportunities. 

But as parents try to do their own jobs and manage remote learning, sometimes tending to multiple children of varying ages, it’s very hard to be present and engaged with all screen time. The truth is, sometimes I need Daniel Tiger to babysit my kid while I take an important call, and I may or may not have a meaningful conversation about it at the dinner table later on. Of course, digital mentorship is still an important goal, but I also think it’s essential to be realistic about the fact that some of the scenarios in which we’re utilizing screen time are exclusively about triage. 

Your suggestion, Jessica, about peer mentorship, is a good one here. Working parents have minimal bandwidth, and I also see that it’s a struggle for Wesley’s teacher to captivate a group of between twenty and twenty-five first graders on Google Meet when the small group options are limited and there is pressure to get through as much instruction as possible during the synchronous teaching periods. Having kids serve as experts during in-class instruction seems like a great way to bridge learners’ own interests and affinities with the need to foster community during remote learning. There’s a lot of untapped potential there, and it wouldn’t necessarily have to come exclusively from the kids; I’m thinking particularly of a permanent aid, Mr. Andrew, who helps with learning and classwork for one of my son’s classmates. He was there before COVID-19, and he’s a fixture now on Zoom, and I know from talking to him that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon! 

The idea of leveraging peer expertise also underscores something that’s easy to forget: we and our kids are not defined by this pandemic. I look forward to the day when we can all fully pursue our passions again and when my kids can play online and in-person with their friends. I feel this way especially when I think about Helen, our three-year-old, who loves making mud pies in the backyard and watercoloring and dancing. She happens to be plugged into the iPad on the floor right now, watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the millionth time; but unlike my son, screen time is much less of a remedy for her in these tough times. While we’re doing our best by signing her up for Outschool circle times (shout out to Ms. Libby!) and downloading asynchronous preschool art curriculum, it’s no substitute for her friends and the playground and the Pinterest-worthy teacher activities to which she’s accustomed. For her, no amount of screen time can set things straight. 

What I hope the most is that, after all this is over, and we do go back to a world where close human interaction is part of our everyday lives again, we won’t lose what we’ve learned during this time. As a parent, I don’t want to forget how I’ve given myself permission to relax on my screen time rules and about all the cool things my kids have learned because of it. While it’s been a process, I also see the innovation by so many teachers out there, who have had to learn to adapt at lightning speed. I hope we remember what’s possible when it comes to learning online and that we hold our school and district leaders accountable when it comes to making sure these technological and pedagogical gains aren’t lost to the annals of history.  We can’t just go back to the way things were when everyone returns to the classroom, nor should we. Let’s always remember both the creativity and struggle of parenting, teaching, and learning during this time. If we do, I believe we’ll change education for the better. 

It’s been such a pleasure thinking and writing with you, Jessica! I hope we can do it again some time. Solidarity! 

Jessie Early: Liana, I love what you say above about the way we, as working parents, are, at times, using screen time for our kids as a form of triage. This is the truth.  I don’t know a single parent, working or otherwise, who isn’t performing some form of triage right now. As overly occupied parents, we put so much pressure on ourselves to do better than we are. I know I’m always battling an idealized vision of a no-screen childhood for my kids. However, part of being in the world today is learning to use, learn from, and regulate screens.  Wouldn't it be easier if we stopped fighting unrealistic visions of simplicity and gave ourselves  permission to do our best right now, whatever that may be (#goals)? Perhaps this time will bring about change in the way we all think about screen time and the many unfolding ways it can be used  as a rich and transformative endeavor when embedded carefully and observantly into teaching, learning, and living.

When I step back to reflect on this shared conversation between two working moms during this pandemic, what stands out most is the way our experiences highlight forms of privilege that so many are not experiencing. As we describe our kids playing on their Xboxes and Ipads, I know there are so many kids living without reliable or any internet access. Many teachers are spending most of their days teaching online struggling with basic internet connectivity issues for their students. A fourth-grade teacher-friend shared with me last week a typical day in her teaching life: She begins by giving her students a mini lesson and instructions, then half the students will start working and the other will drop off the screen after losing internet connectivity. The students who lost connectivity will slowly log on again, and then my friend will repeat the directions she started with and new students will drop off the screen again. This is her reality teaching right now. All day. Every day. 

As Liana and I exchange graphic novel suggestions for our children in this blog, I know many kids do not have access to books with public and school libraries closed. I also know many are choosing to leave their children at home alone to do online school so they may go to work to earn a living. Parents and caregivers are making choices no one should have to make right now.  We are all compromising or being compromised and we are all enacting forms of triage, but some are having to do so in ways that will be more lasting and scarring than others. If kids are cared for and loved and safe and spend too much time on their screens right now, they are more than lucky. 

My hope is this time highlights the ways our society has set children up again and again to succeed and others to fail, not because of ability, intelligence, willingness, or commitment, but because of zip code, skin color, and economic status. I hope this time will bring real change to the way our society values, support, and attends to children, teachers, schools, and families from all walks of life.  As you, Liana, so brilliantly write above, “We can’t just go back to the way things were when everyone returns to the classroom, nor should we.”

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell — March

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Home Front (Part Two)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: I loved reading your description of Lucca’s summer and how her love of gaming helped her navigate quarantine emotions and connect with friends. Your reflections were especially timely because over the weekend, we jumped off the precipice of a new gaming/literacy journey for my son; Wesley just celebrated his seventh birthday, and we got him a Nintendo Switch, a grand, quarantine-y gesture of unusual scale. He’s been exploring the forests of Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! all weekend, snapping up new Pokémon and battling trainers to his heart’s delight. On the parent front, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little wary. It feels like we’ve entered a new dimension (of owning a gaming console) that we’ll never be able to come back from. I always said I’d wait until he was older. 

Yet, in keeping with the spirit of open mindedness I promised at the very end of my intro and building on your touching observations on how gaming can lead to confidence and collaboration, I’m suppressing the urge to panic. I’m already seeing some hopeful glimmers for how the Switch might be a good supplement to his other regular activities like reading physical books, daily swimming, and watching seemingly endless episodes of Wild Kratts on the iPad. 

First, best I can tell it seems like text-based adventure games (like the Pokémon game Wesley is playing) a la Legend of Zelda have won out in popularity over the arcade style games of my youth. While I have had to answer, “What does this say?” a bit more than my liking, I see Wesley making a concerted effort to sound out words and sentences on his own within the game. He’s at a point in his literacy development that he will spend hours flipping through encyclopedic reference books on animals and dinosaurs but isn’t quite confident enough to explore chapter books on his own, despite our having read every single Magic Treehouse book ever written together. I see that connecting his reading to the game play might just be the confidence boost he needs and might plant the seed for a love of narrative fiction that is largely overshadowed by his perfectly acceptable but singular love of nature anthologies. 

Secondly, like Lucca, he’s already delved into the collaborative side of gaming. The morning after he received the Switch, he had a playdate with his classmate, Sean, who is by comparison a seasoned gamer. On a FaceTime call, Sean patiently explained the ins and outs of the Pokémon game and played alongside him after helping him through the seemingly epic setup. It felt nice to see them engaging in a form of cooperation that is almost entirely absent from his remote learning experience. Because his teacher is prevented from facilitating breakout rooms for privacy reasons, he rarely gets 1:1 or small group interaction with his peers while learning from home. As such, the social aspect of gaming was a draw for us as we weighed the decision to purchase the Switch at what felt like a potentially premature age. 

You said something really powerful in your intro, Jessica, when you described Lucca’s gaming kicking into warp speed during quarantine. You said that, despite your decades of professional and scholarly training and your knowledge of “video gaming as [a] valuable, productive, and rich literacy space,” you still felt the weight of parental guilt. That feeling is so real. And it is so strong. 

The parental guilt comes from many directions. Part of eschewing screen time is about anticipating judgment from other parents; no one wants to seem like the negligent one among their parental peers. What’s more (and perhaps I’m just easily swayed), my social media echo chamber reinforces a particular path to parental piety via depictions of perfectly curated play spaces with nothing but neutral, wooden, educational toys. The toys are always wooden! Of course, that vision of what an idealistic childhood looks like is shaped largely by privilege and whiteness, and I think it’s important to keep coming back to that point across this conversation (especially one in which I’m describing the Sturm und Drang of buying my kid a 300 dollar Nintendo). 

The guilt is further codified by recommendations from medical experts. Until now, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended no screen time for children under two (except for video chats) and just one hour a day of “quality” programming for preschoolers. To say the least, those recommendations are purely aspirational if not downright impossible these days. Still, making a conscious break from conventional wisdom and medical advice about what’s good for kids can be agonizing, even if, like with Lucca and Wesley, we can see the good in it. I read a nice blog post by Laura Wheatman Hill over on JSTOR recently in which she reminds us that, in the 18th century, reading too many novels was considered dangerous, raising the potential for one to dissociate from reality. So, who knows. Maybe we’ll look back on this time period one day and wonder just why we were so worried about the dangers of Pokémon. 

Jessie Early: Reading your words about Wesley and his newly opened Pokeman and your internal, sometimes external, dialogue questioning this parenting choice, made me smile. I feel less alone in trying to navigate this time as a working parent. Your experience helps me realize how, on top of all the juggling and stress of what we are managing right now, so many parents are feeling extra pressure to somehow get this time “right”, even though none of us know what we are doing or have ever lived through a global pandemic. 

I, too, feel inundated with social media messages from parents who are backpacking with kids on weekends and making painted rocks to gift to trees and nooks and crannies throughout the neighborhood. I’ve read about “doom scrolling” , the act of endlessly scrolling social media looking for bad news. Instead, I scroll for articles and experts to reassure me that what I’m doing as a parent is ok. I jumped for joy after reading the  New York Times piece Just Give Them the Screens (for Now). As my husband often tells me, “You can search for anything to tell you what you want to hear.” We all need some reassurance right now.

I also think about Wesley with his Pokeman and Lucca with her Royal High and wonder if part of our uncertainty in allowing our kids to dive into these digital worlds is a lack of familiarity? These are not the same worlds we entered as children. Give me Donkey Kong and Pac Man and I would be good to go! However, as you point out, Pac Man is lacking the complexity and collaboration and storytelling of current games. Wesley and Lucca, in their digital endeavors, grant us a chance to try to silence our internal dialogue to step back and observe. I teach a class on research methods for pre service and inservice English language arts teachers, where I ask them to step back from their teaching practice and notice and document what is happening more closely to inform their practice. This act of observation more often than not, leads teachers to slow down, reflect, and revise their teaching for the better. As teachers and as parents, the act of decentering our expertise, or admitting we are lacking any, is vulnerable and scary.  

I have been sitting next to my twin 9-year-old sons as they navigate online school from home and one of the things that strikes me is how their classmates are using the chat space and time before and after the office Google Meet with their teachers to set up digital video gaming playdates. I heard one kid shout out from his little box on the screen this morning, “Who wants to meet up in Roblox after PE today?” I wonder how teachers and parents can take up these digital spaces our students and kids are diving into right now and blend them into the formal curriculum or or honor them in family conversation?  

What if students could spend time designing avatars for their online school spaces and creating instructional videos to share their expertise (either digital or non) with one another? What if they got to draw and write and create new chapters or characters or worlds for the games they are playing in their free time during their class time? For kids who do not play these games, they could design and create ones that fit their interests and play, either digital or real time. There are teachers out there, many in the National Writing Project, doing this work like Joe Dillon from NWP sharing his work teaching high school students to write code for video games with Scalable Game Design and NWP Blog Radio’s blog radio show Addressing Skepticism Around Using Video Games for Learning



I also recognize the reading transition you describe Wesley facing in moving from picture books to chapter books. My twin boys experienced this as well and  I didn’t know what to do until we discovered graphic novels! I brought home books like Dave Pilkey’s DogMan series and Aaron Blabey’s The Bad Guys series and Abby Hanlon’s Dory Fantasmagory and Nate Evan’s Tyrannosaurus Ralph and they started reading again. The mix of the visual and the textual on each page helped bridge the gap between the genres they had been experiencing (picture books) and the ones they were moving toward (chapter). I also see, from what you share about Wesley’s gaming, how video games do this too. These digital spaces allow kids to enact, build, and follow stories with characters and drama and story all with a sense of ownership and control.

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

"Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19: Reports from the Front Lines (Part One)

Liana Gamber-Thompson: I’ve tried to write this no fewer than ten times. With a three-year-old who has been largely free-ranging since her preschool closed for the year and a six-year-old remote learning his way through first grade, a good chunk of my brain space is generally occupied by trying to get someone back on a Google Meet, cutting crusts off PBJs, and discovering new household surfaces that have been graffitied. The remainder of my attention goes to trying to perform my full-time job to fidelity, which consists of fielding client calls and hosting live webinars for hundreds of viewers from my bedroom, all while trying to appear professional from the shoulders up. Along the way, I catch snippets of my partner, a 9th grade English teacher, translating James Baldwin’s GoTell It on the Mountain into Spanish on the fly and eking out virtual class discussions from our kids’ treehouse, which might be the quietest spot in the vicinity. 

To put it mildly, it’s a lot, and grabbing any significant chunk of time to write is a Sisyphean task. Still, my family and I are among the lucky ones. Henry asked Jessica and me to reflect, not only on our experiences as parents, but also on the impact of COVID-19 on school and learning, especially as it relates to what I think most people recognize as an across-the-board re-orientation toward screen time. Like many parents, we are absolutely fumbling our way through remote learning. But when I really reflect on my personal experiences of trying to keep learning going, I also realize there is a lot I take for granted. With our relative flexibility to work from home, an at-home stash of newer iPads and laptops, access to stable wifi, and enough books in the house to fill twenty Little Free Libraries, our kids will be fine. But the harsh reality is that many families aren’t fine when it comes to both access and a safe and productive space to learn. 

In my days as a media scholar, I focused on young people’s political and performative use of media, often looking to the explosion of mobile access in the late aughts as proof enough of the democratizing effects of technology. The Digital Divide was real, but it was decreasing; and safe in that knowledge, I focused almost solely on the creative output of young people. But working and learning in the COVID-19 world has underscored the essential nature of a reliable internet connection and access to devices, and despite large scale efforts by private telecom companies and state governments to provide hot spots to all students, many gaps remain. Just last week, photos of two Salinas, CA students sitting outside a Taco Bell with their laptops were circulated widely online. They were reportedly using the restaurant’s wifi in order to participate in remote learning, and the inequities exposed by the snapshot received widespread condemnation from educators and tech leaders alike. 

Photo Credit: Luis Alejo/Twitter via CNN

Successful learning outcomes during COVID-19 are about more than putting laptops or hot spots in the hands of students and their parents, though. The issue of access is multidimensional and sometimes surprising. For example, my colleague Tony Wan, Managing Editor at EdSurge, recently reported that a major factor hindering students’ learning is actually their inability to find a quiet place to work (relatable!). Other pain points of remote learning include lack of tech support for students and generally poor communication between schools and parents about learning schedules and plans. 

We’ve certainly been privy to these struggles in our own home. Our first day of distance learning was nothing short of disastrous when we tried to use the school-issued Chromebook to access my first grade son’s Google Meet. In an effort to ensure all students had access to technology, his school, a racially and economically diverse Title 1 school in suburban Los Angeles, issued devices of varying make and quality to all students before the first day of instruction. Unfortunately, while the devices might have been suitable for casual web browsing, they were not equipped to support a video call of 25 students. The result was a lot of angry and frustrated parents and six-year-olds who couldn’t access their class. Because it’s 2020 and adding insult to injury is now the norm, a neighborhood wildfire coincided with the first day of school. Amidst the tech stress of the first day, a fellow mom texted me jokingly supposing the overworked fans of the first grade laptops, which we later learned were 7 years old, were somehow responsible for the fire. 

But in all seriousness, our response to this problem was to provide our son with a newish Mac I had inherited from a former job. The wildfire mom drove straight to Best Buy that day to purchase her daughter a new Chromebook. But what about the parents who can’t afford to buy a new laptop? Or parents whose first language is not English who might be trying to troubleshoot with school IT staff? Or for those who are working on the front lines, unable to spend an hour of their day setting up a district email for their student, which, I kid you not, required parents to input a child’s first name, middle initial, student permanent ID, and lunch number, just to access live instruction. These are the sticky situations parents and educators, who are also working with limited resources, keep finding themselves in, and all these little inconveniences add up to one giant headache. 

Before this introduction devolves into one long diatribe about the personal hellscape that is keeping two kids alive and schooled during a global pandemic, I want to zoom out a bit to make two key points that I hope to expand on in my conversation with Jessica. First, I want to make it clear that the huge headache I describe is 100% a structural failure. My academic training is in Sociology, and if there is one thing it taught me, it’s that we are so often blind to the effects decades or centuries-old institutions and policies have on our everyday lives. In the case of COVID-19, remote learning has further exposed the impact of long term underfunding of schools and the often devastating marriage between property taxes and K-12 funding.

In America especially, our tendency is to personalize structural inadequacies into individual, moral failures, and I see that playing out in the series of difficult decisions being made by parents and educators during COVID-19. Families and school districts with access and resources might be experiencing daily chaos, but they again come out on top as they develop creative solutions to ensure their students succeed (I hesitate to bring up the exhausted topic of “pandemic pods,” but they are a good example of how those with generational wealth and white privilege continue to use the system for their advantage). 

Secondly, if there was ever a time when grace was called for, it’s now. Part of the storyline of parents leveraging their privilege to help their own kids come out on top is the normalization of micromanaging teachers’ instructional choices. We’re in the third week of school, and already I’ve been on the receiving end of concerns from fellow parents that our kids’ teachers aren’t employing differentiation, “flipped classroom” strategies, or inventive multimedia nearly enough. While some teachers are taking to virtual teaching with ease, learning multiple new platforms while trying to meet the needs of diverse learners is a real challenge. As parents, we need to be sensitive to the epic task in front of teachers right now. Not only are they being forced to reimagine teaching as they know it, but being married to a teacher has shown me how they are simultaneously facing myriad behind-the-scenes pressures around testing and assessment, attendance, mandated synchronous instruction, and so forth. We cannot place our 2019 expectations on 2020 learning. 

When it comes to using media for learning, politics, and expression, I’ve always been an optimist. In almost everything I’ve ever written or published, I look to the creative and liberatory uses of media, and I still do. Strangely, in my life as a parent, I’ve taken a much more cautionary approach to screen time, limiting it only to weekends in pre-quarantine times. Now, of course, those limitations have gone out the window, and I’ve been trying to reflect more on why I was so hesitant to allow screen time in the first place. Part of that re-assessment has been seeing firsthand that effective classroom instruction can take place with the wide range of tools at our fingertips, even if figuring it out is messy. Because of it, my geeky school-age learner is largely thriving. My greatest hope, though, is that as many learners as possible have those same experiences and opportunities, even if the path to equity is a tumultuous one; if anything, I hope this situation proves that something beautiful can still grow from rocky, rocky soil. 

Jessica Early: 

I have been quarantining with my husband, 11-year-old daughter, 9-year-old twin boys, and our two guinea pigs since March 6th. We live in Arizona, where the Covid numbers were late to expand, but by mid June had exploded, to land us with the horrid distinction of a world hotspot. As a family, we have taken a cautious and privileged approach to this time. My husband is a self-employed, professional artist and I am a professor at Arizona State University, but have been granted accommodation to work from home to help care for my kids. We remain at home almost exclusively, except for a once-a-week grocery run and frequent bike rides. 

In between dish washing and meal making, I spent the summer in my role as director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, working to support teachers in an unprecedented and traumatic time and to prepare myself and others to transition to teaching writing and reading in virtual or hybrid teaching spaces. Needless to say, with three kids, two full-time jobs, record breaking summer heat in the desert (52 days over 110 degrees so far - and no rain), and a global pandemic, we have a lot on our plate. Like working parents everywhere, my husband and I have spent our days trying to support the well-being of our kids and ourselves while also trying to get our work done and maintain a 24/7 occupied household.

When I was invited to contribute to Henry’s blog to reflect with Liana on our experiences as parents during Covid-19 and on school and learning and how it relates to screen time, the one thing that came to mind was my eleven year old daughter. Nothing has informed my teaching, thinking, learning, and parenting more than Lucca, and her nonstop video gaming throughout our quarantine. I first have to confess that a huge part of me feels uncomfortable and vulnerable admitting that my daughter has been glued to her iPad all summer. Even though I have spent the last 20 years researching and teaching literacy practices in school, after school, and community settings and know video gaming as valuable, productive, and rich literacy space, I was certain that Lucca’s intense devotion to gaming represented some failure on my part as a parent. Regardless of my insecurity around screen time and parenting, this pandemic summer has afforded me the chance to step back, notice, and learn first-hand from my daughter’s literacy endeavors. I have seen how her screen has become a space to form a supportive and valuable peer community, to learn and practice sophisticated and transferable literacy skills, to make sense of broader social issues like the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, and to process uncertainty and fear.

When the pandemic hit here in March and schools in Arizona went online, Lucca went from being an outgoing 5th grade soccer player, “A” student, and avid reader to  completely shutting down in almost every way. She struggled with anxiety, couldn’t sleep alone, rarely talked, and seemed generally depressed. She put on her headphones, turned on her iPad, and started playing a Roblox game called Princess High. This game, from what I can tell, is about the creation of Avatar identities through themed fashion outfits and trading and earning diamonds to purchase fancier and more desirable attire, including magical halos and wands and oversized digital stuffed animals. I found the game choice surprising because Lucca had never been interested in fashion or looks in her daily life. My husband and I worried about her screen time and withdrawal from our family, but we also knew that anything normal was upended and we weren’t sure what to do. So, we observed closely, checked in often, and let her be.

Over the summer months, Lucca played hours and hours of Roblox. Jake and I frequently asked her about the game and she shared the ins and outs of her play. She created her own Avatar, a wide-eyed pink lipped brown haired beauty who constantly changed and traded outfits and wings and halos. As weeks passed, she started playing with a friend of a friend, Penny, from her soccer team and the two became gaming buddies. They Facetime and game simultaneously so they can talk and play together for hours and they have become close friends even living apart and never spending time together in person.

As the weeks passed, Lucca and Penny began gaming with new friends from Sweden and Australia and Canada who they grew to know through shared Avatar conversations. Through their gaming, they discussed their experiences with the pandemic from their different countries and with the Black Lives Matters movement and protests. Many of her gaming friends dressed their Avatars in Black Lives Matter T-shirts. Lucca talked about how in Sweden the Covid cases were growing and her friend was worried and in Canada her other gaming friend was having playdates and life seemed normal. She also learned about new shampoo she wanted to try and how to dye her hair with lemon juice.

Lucca and Penny started a YouTube channel about the game using their Avatars as the hosts. Within weeks, they taught themselves how to make and edit sophisticated videos with voice overs with credits and music. They started collecting followers, including grandparents, parents, and other gamers around the country and the world. Lucca wanted to celebrate when she reached 200 followers. I made brownies and got her hot cheetos. She started asking Jake to help her design digital “merchandise” for Avatars that she could sell for digital coins within the game and a logo to use for her YouTube channel. At one point during the summer, I asked Lucca if I could play the game with her. I spent  an hour beside her trying to figure it out while she rolled with laughter watching me try to navigate this unfamiliar space, which was her expert territory. 

As the summer went on, Lucca started coming out of her shell. She went on bike rides and started baking cookies and swimming. She asked more and more questions about Covid and wanted help understanding the possibility of a vaccine and how science around vaccines works. Many of her questions were sparked by conversations she was having in her game. She also started expressing her fear about transitioning to middle school and how she wished she could go back to 5th grade. 

We spent the last weeks of summer rearranging rooms, building desks, and creating spaces for each of us to work and learn comfortably. My husband ordered each of us wireless headphones and blue light blocking glasses. We picked up each of the kid’s laptops from their schools, I brought my office desk chair from work home, and we ordered pencils and highlighters and glue sticks and Post-It notes. Even with preparation and support, the transition and practice of daily online schooling has been a rocky and tiresome adventure. With glitches in internet connectivity (on our end and the school’s), new learning platforms to navigate, classmates constantly “spam chatting” in the Google Classroom chat spaces, and meeting and working with new teachers and schedules and classmates, the first weeks of school have been unlike any other. 

Lucca is making the transition from elementary to middle school with grace and courage and confidence. She sets her alarm each morning to wake up on time, takes a shower, brushes her hair and logs on to class. She follows her schedule and takes notes and does her work. She comes out of her room to ask for help and food. During lunch she logs on to Roblox and plays or texts Penny to check in about her day or goes for a swim in the pool. She still has meltdowns and longs to play on her soccer team again and have sleepovers with friends, but she’s ok. She’s really ok. 

I don’t want to portray screen time as a cure-all for Covid blues. I know some families who are struggling to care for children suffering from serious mental health challenges at this time and, in no way do I want to communicate that gaming is the route to curing mental health challenges, which  need professional attention and care. There are a lot of ways Lucca received support over the summer from us beyond allowing her to stay glued to her game. She began learning Italian with my husband through a language app. We made her exercise daily. I read to her at night because she didn’t want to read on her own, and we joked around with her and constantly engaged her in conversations about her interests. I recognize the privilege that goes with all of this, with her iPad and internet access and comfort and safety of our home and food to eat and the attention of two parents at home all day every day. However, even with all of that, the world, for Lucca and kids all over this country and globe, has felt scary and out of control during the pandemic. While the world outside was spinning, the online spaces Lucca navigated over the summer were her own. 

In the following conversation with Liana, I wonder about the ways we can think about the value of letting go or, as she writes, “throwing out the window” our preconceived notions of what is ok when it comes to screen time, but still provide the support, gentle oversight, and observation to understand what our kids are doing and gaining or needing in these digital spaces? I also wonder, as a teacher educator and writing scholar, how the various kinds of digital play our kids take part in may be tapped into during formal school literacy learning as a way to draw from and honor their expertise and lived experiences while living in a pandemic?

Jessica Early, Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a scholar of English education and secondary literacy. She is the director of English Education and the Central Arizona Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, at ASU. She began her career in the field of education as a high school English language arts teacher.  

Liana Gamber-Thompson  is Digital Project and Operations Manager at EdSurge, an award-winning education news organization that reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. EdSurge is now part of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Previously, Liana was a researcher on youth and politics at USC, Community Manager at Connected Camps, and Program Associate at the National Writing Project. She is co-author of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices for Parents During Covid-19 (Part Three)

C, M. Hoffman, cc

S. Craig Watkins: Meryl, thanks for these great examples of how we look toward a more inclusive post-COVID future.  I agree that we need to develop ways to empower parents and other caregivers who are on the frontlines of social change.  Community-based organizations will always be critical in the struggle for social and economic justice.  As I think about social justice the implications for parents are significant. Parents are a vital resource in their children’s lives and to the extent that systemic forms of inequality, namely racial and gender, undermine adults they also undermine the families and children that they care for.  I vividly remember meeting the parents in our research for the Digital Edge and thinking how resourceful they were in the struggle to keep their families afloat. Our field work began just as the Great Recession was coming from its peak.  As economic data would later reveal the recovery for those in poverty was slow in coming, at best.  Whether it was immigrant parents or a working poor African American parent, they spent every day fighting for their children and their families.  The occupations they held, usually low-status and low-income, seldom offered them dignity or opportunity.  And yet, they worked in those jobs, relocated to neighborhoods, and did other things to try and improve the life chances of their children. These parents understood the value of education more than anyone, even though many of them never reached high levels of educational attainment.  When I think about the challenges parents face today, especially those heading resource-constrained households, I often think about the parents we met and how little support they received.  

If we learn anything through this current and unprecedented crisis it is the need to make sure that families, especially the most vulnerable, are stable. Without familial stability, children are at greater risk for poverty, immobility, and health problems in their adult lives.  One area of change that is desperately needed is the creation of a policy apparatus that is truly family-centered.  So much of the financial mitigation policy efforts that we see happening in the U.S. in response to COVID (and the Great Recession) is about saving corporations that are so-called, “too big to fail.”  But there is no greater institution in the modern world than our families.  The lack of family friendly policies-- paid sick leave, childcare, health care, guaranteed income--continues to undermine the lives of working poor adults and the young people they care for.     

A future challenge is cultivating a policy discourse that is sensitive to the needs of vulnerable families.  Many of our elected officials and policy makers simply don’t get what it's like to try and keep a family together when you are paid poverty wages, do not have access to healthcare, and send your children to schools that are ill-equipped to prepare your children for the world of tomorrow. Thus, policy mechanisms that are designed to support parents and their desire to ensure that their children have access to social, educational, and economic opportunity is a critical feature of any social justice future.  

Sonia Livingstone: I find it fascinating that we all research families’ lives in a digital world but, although the media themselves love to point to their own importance in shaping children’s experiences and life chances, we find over and again that the fundamentals of structural inequality matter hugely, and so for the most part, socio-economic divides shape digital divides. As Craig says, it is crucial that educators, social workers, policy makers and community workers keep this in mind when working with families instead, as so often happens, of somehow becoming overly focused on popular expectations of “silver bullet” technological solutions, or distracted by families’ particular, and supposedly problematic, uses of technologies.

Nonetheless, digital technologies make a difference, entering into families’ possibilities, and becoming the focus of parents’ hopes and fears for their children in ways that often compound but sometimes alleviate experiences linked to poverty, marginalization, mental ill-health, racism, or disability. Just reviewing our discussion across these three posts, we have noted that digital technologies enter as actors into families’ lives by introducing a series of specific safety, informational, and privacy risks. More positively, we have also suggested that, if parents and others (policy makers, educators…) could throw off misleading discourses relating to screen time, digital natives and the rest, they could embrace and support parents’ investments, energies and expertise regarding digital technologies in ways that are, thus far, undervalued and underexploited, and thereby further children’s interests for the better. As Meryl eloquently argued, this should be done not (or not only) parent by parent, as individuals, but by recognizing parents as a collectivity, and parenting as a phenomenon that society as a whole should invest in – and everyone could benefit.

Without exaggerating the role of digital technologies, we end our book on Parenting for a Digital Future with six recommendations for how society can better support parents – 1. Make room for parents’ voices in policymaking, including in relation to provision of digital resources; 2. Ensure that public and media discourses offer parents a realistic (rather than a contradictory, or simplistic) vision of their role; 3. Recognize the already-significant contribution of parents to their children’s learning, digital and otherwise, rather than endlessly rehearsing deficit accounts of parents; 4. Takes steps so that professionals who support parents are well-informed regarding the latest research and guidance on digital technologies; 5. Build in attention to parents and parenting when designing and governing the digital environment; 6. Resource research on diverse families and take the findings into account when formulating policy for families and education.

Meryl Alper: Thank you Craig and Sonia for summarizing and synthesizing our discussion as we find ourselves looking for ways to “build back better” (to echo a popular phrase among various political leaders at the moment) with respect to the recovery and reconstruction of social institutions and digital infrastructures that support children and families in the wake of the pandemic. 

Rebuilding for youth and their communities will require nothing short of a radical reexamination of supposedly-democratic schooling. To this end, I wish more people knew the story of Reggio Emilia, an Italian city destroyed by fascist forces that after World War II completely reoriented itself to center early childhood education as its highest public priority. Out of literal wreckage and destroyed buildings, the citizens of the town (led by the Italian Women’s Union) rebuilt the working-class village around the site of a school they physically constructed together. The new school and others built in the area were driven by parent cooperatives who insisted that their children be raised with high expectations of citizen responsibility and participation. Children not only needed to be listened to by adults and their peers, but they had a right to. Further cultivated by educator Loris Malaguzzi, Reggio Emilia has become a global educational philosophythat emphasizes the responsibilities that adults have to actively respond to children as they co-construct their ideas and knowledge.

In contrast, instead of centering children, families, and public schools in the U.S. pandemic response, our leadership prioritized business interests (and unequally for that matter), as Craig notes. Going forward, we will need digital tools and environments that are explicitly designed not to surveil and monetize children’s participation, but to put children in charge of their own learning in an open-ended manner. And lastly, we deserve leadership at the very top of our government system that does not stand to financially benefit from the privatization of education, and even better, has actual classroom experience (even if for right now, that means teaching over Zoom).

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices For Parents During Covid-19 (Part Two)

G. White, CC By SA 2.0

Sonia Livingstone: Craig’s question - how do we design ways for parents and guardians who manage resource-constrained households to access vital social and informational networks – is a crucial one. In some ways, access to digital resources create new workarounds that can empower families. But as we have all three argued, in many ways they intensify the inequalities that many families face and, therefore, the urgency of finding new educational and policy solutions.

Our lives during the pandemic have already gone through several significant stages. At first, confusion and disbelief, relieved only by the misconception that the pandemic would be quickly over. Then an overwhelming concern for our personal circumstances, accompanied by anger and frustration with politicians and those with the power to address the problem, as recognition of the likely duration of the pandemic began to sink in. Then, a (perhaps belated) analysis of the societal costs and their unfolding geopolitical consequences. I remember in the early months of 2020 noting how little attention was paid to children and young people. Indeed, in some quarters, they were blamed for their (supposed) bad behavior in spreading the virus to others while (supposedly) avoiding it themselves. Only those of us specifically attuned to research and advocacy for young people observed the growing evidence of the adverse mental health consequences of isolation and anxiety, the increased risk of being victims of family breakdown or abuse, and the catastrophic and deeply unequal costs of school closures – for children’s education most obviously, but also for their friendships, community belonging and participation in the wider world, and their future life chances.

Even when the losses suffered by children during the pandemic are noticed, they are too often treated as a homogenous group (“children”). And the assumption is easily made that everything could be put right if only society could return to life as it was before. But as Craig has argued, inequality and injustice differentiates children’s experiences, with some much harder hit than others. Like Craig’s Digital Edge project, we too found that, in the case of the ethnic minority families, most of whom lived on a very low income, digital technologies seemed to offer a workaround to the structural disadvantages they face, and to map some practical steps they could take to benefit their children (often involving an investment in technology that is disproportionate to their income).

I also appreciate Meryl’s point that life before COVID-19 was already highly problematic for many families, and so it hardly provides an occasion for nostalgia or a vision of the life we hope to return to “when this is all over.” In part inspired byMeryl’s research, Alicia Blum-Ross and I, in our “Parenting for a Digital Future” project, also interviewed some families with children on the autism spectrum. And informed by Craig’s work on the Digital Edge project (as we both participated in Mizuko Ito’sConnected Learning Research Network), we also interviewed a good many families from, as we say in the UK, diverse ethnicities and cultural origins.

Although I strongly agree with Meryl’s critique that it is unsustainable – indeed, unconscionable - to leave these families during COVID-19 with no alternative than an ICT-mediated reality, in interviewing both groups of families in our London-based research, we were struck by the strength of parents hopes for a digital future for their children. In relation to the families of children with special educational needs and disabilities, we analyzed this in terms of parents’ talk of aspecial affinitybetween their child’s capabilities, as they see them, and the distinct affordances of digital technologies. For example, parents told us how they valued the visual natureof digital media learning, or how their children preferred the asynchronous communicationof some messaging services, by comparison with the intensity of face-to-face communication. This special affinity is reflected directly, for instance, in promised routes to a digital future, such as theMicrosoft Autism Hiringprogram, and indirectly through cultural representations of ‘on the spectrum’ geeky software engineers (think of Big Bang Theory or Silicon Valley), leading parents to hope that, for their child too, “geeks will inherit the earth.” 

But, of course, the future is inherently unknowable, and so these parental strategies, whilst borne of need and, often, of the lack of any viable alternative, are nonetheless risky and uncertain. We’ll need to revisit this discussion in a few years or even decades to see whether– bear fruit. Or, will they turn out to illustrate what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism,” meaning that parents would have done better to place their hopes and investments in something other than digital technology, for this may not only disappoint but may even impede children’s life changes. More urgently, we need to build strong alternative pathways for these children and their parents, to reduce the allure of such a risky “digital future.”

S. Craig Watkins: Meryl and Sonia raise some interesting questions about parenting in the context of COVID and the degree to which systemic forms of racism and inequality underscore the extraordinary challenges that many families face.  Meryl, you are right: the brutal nature of capitalism leaves families on the margins with only bad choices.  For example, work in “essential jobs” that heighten your risk of virus exposure or struggle to provide shelter and food for your children.  Meryl and Sonia, I think we would agree that the challenges that we and others have alluded to such as unequal learning opportunities or increasing household stress in the context of COVID could have been predicted by our research.  Did it really take a global pandemic and the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Eric Garner and others to recognize the unprecedented forms of inequality that shape our lives today?

Sonia has made a few references to mental health, something that I have been thinking about a lot in my current research.  Over the last year my team and I have been speaking with young people and mental health professionals about the state of mental health.  We were experiencing a mental health crisis before COVID and we know what the pandemic has done for mental health.  We have done parents a great disservice by blaming the mental health challenges their children face on smartphones and social media. If only the problem was that simple. Let me be clear: these technologies have certainly been designed to absorb our attention and keep us scrolling. But the mental health crisis among young people--pre and post-COVID--is a result of factors far more complicated than smartphones.  The conditions that underlie the mental health conditions of children and teens--a lack of support, strained personal relationships, poverty, discrimination, and a sense of hopelessness--are rooted in the sharp realities of structural inequality.  To the extent that we blame the youth mental health crisis on technology alone, we undermine the development of solutions that help families and societies respond in more effective ways. 

We can only hope that out of the ashes of COVID and a public reckoning with systemic racism that we can build and sustain the momentum for substantive change. This is an opportunity to realize a new vision for society, one that takes the challenge of building a more equitable future head on.  Sonia and Meryl:  As we look toward a post-COVID society, what kind of solutions for families would you like to see gain more traction? 

Meryl Alper: We cannot wait for this indefinite pandemic to end to make, as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren champions,“big, structural change.”Online and offline, we need to enable resource-constrained households to more fully tap into networks of connections, resources, and information that make it possible for them to advocate collectively on behalf of their children. I strongly agree with Craig that any such initiatives have to be culturally specific and lead from within. I am thinking of an autism services resource fair for parents that I attended last year in a predominantly Latinx immigrant community in Boston, one that is currently one of the main epicenters of COVID-19 in the state of Massachusetts. While these sorts of fairs happen with great regularity in mostly white, suburban neighborhoods, until the neighborhood group organizing it received a grant from a national foundation, there had never been one locally that was fully bilingual in Spanish and English, that fed families food donated from neighborhood Colombian and Dominican restaurants, and that featured autism advocates with shared experiences of racial discrimination in education and healthcare. In this vein, I really admire the work ofRicarose Roque, whose Family Creative Learningworkshopsleverage the strengths that minoritized parents with little background in technology can bring to support their child’s digital learning.

Individual solutions alone though will never solve systemic problems. Hands-on, in-person workshops that provide opportunities for technological tinkering are a non-starter during the pandemic, which has removed the possibilities of parentsbuilding supportive networks through everyday interactions at sites like child care centers. Taking up Craig’s question, about how to build a more equitable future moving forward, any investment in reconstructing a better post-COVID-19 society must center the needs of those most severely affected. Personally, I would like to see greater public investment in high-quality broadband internet access—whichVikki Katzhas beenchampioningfor years now—so that all children have the potential to do their homework at home without having to work from theparking lot of a Taco Bellto access wi-fi. I would love for there to be guaranteed paid family leave in the U.S. that allows more than just the most privileged mothers and fathers to build the kind of relationships with their children that pay dividends later on. In the U.S., there are also decades of housing segregation to reckon with and correct so that all children get to socially, emotionally, and cognitively benefit from racially integrated neighborhoods and schools. There should also be greater regulatory pressure across all branches of government placed on big tech companies like Facebook and Alphabet, who have enabled informational ecosystems that regularly expose minors to misinformation, disinformation, andadult content masquerading as child-friendly.

Speaking to Sonia’s most recent book, spanning both families of children with disabilities and ethnic minority families, I have to see those categories in my work as overlapping and through anintersectional lens. The dream of someday joining a program like Microsoft’s Autism Hiring Program (which has truly changed the lives of some autistic people and their loved ones) or becoming a “geeky” software engineer is one that is inherently raced, classed, and gendered. Yes, technology can provide immense sensory pleasure for these young people and open up new possibilities for socializing remotely with friends through online gaming and video chat. But it was only the parents of Black and Latinx autistic boys and girls that I talked to in my research who were afraid of police officers seeing their child as a mortal threat and treating them as such, like 15-year-oldStephon Watts. I am energized by BIPOC disabled people and parents of disabled children like artist, scholar, and activist Jen White Johnsonutilizing and developing resources through social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram; for example, coalescing around hashtags like#BlackDisabledLivesMatterto engage in advocacy. And touching upon the themes that both Sonia and Craig raise about mental health, teenagers, and technology, this is another conversation within which disability communities should be centered and consulted.

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Unequal Struggles and Impossible Digital Choices for Parents During COVID19 (Part 1)

Sonia Livingstone: This is an extraordinary time for parents trying to ensure their children learn and gain a good education, while also working, and worrying about the family’s income, health and a host of everyday practicalities during COVID-19. Among the problems they need to tackle are how tomaximize the opportunities and minimize the risksof the digital technologies they are able to access. Of course, achieving such a balance has long been a concern of parents, but this is hugely exacerbated at a time when, it seems, so much of our daily lives has gone online. This includes, for many, their children’s education, contact with friends and relatives, access to information, and much of their entertainment, all of which are fast becomingdigital by default. Also to be contended with is that many commercial and institutional services, including most forms of welfare and support, are now functioning only online, and that isolation is difficult for many, resulting in adverse consequences for mental health.

I’m especially interested in the ways that life online brings its own problems.Digital inequalitiesare heightened, and lack ofmeaningful accessor digital skills matters more than ever. Reports suggest that online risks of harm of all kinds have increased – from scams and cybercrime to bullying and sexual abuse. Less obvious perhaps but also of growing concern is the fact that life online means ever more of our daily activities and interactions aredigitally tracked, with our personal data being collected and aggregated by others and possibly hacked or exploited. COVID-19 is far from the only “digital” problem of the recent period: the challenge ofmisinformation or false informationremains largely unmet, with many parents and children struggling to locate or evaluate reliable information regarding news, learning, health, finances, or other significant matters. All this contributes to a climate of confusion, mistrust, and tension.

On a more positive note, I suggest that this unprecedented turn to the digital has laid to rest some myths that have undermined parents in recent years. Three myths have been of particular concern to me in my own research on “Parenting for a Digital Future.”

The first myth is that “screen time” matters. In fact, thedemise of screen timehad already been announced by a series of high-level expert pronouncements, including from the American Academy of Pediatrics who originally invented and promoted the notion of screen time 30 years ago. Reviews of the available evidence have been increasingly critical of the quality of that evidence as well as the conclusions popularly drawn from it, that namely that what matters is the amount of time children spend with one screen or another rather than the quality of the content that they engage with, the context in which they watch, or the social connections that mediated engagement makes possible. Still, as we found our in-depth qualitative research with parents, even though the academics and other experts were voicing doubts, for parents, screen time has been a rod for their backs, asource of conflictin its own right, and a source of guilt and shame regarding their parenting practices and their seeming laxity in “controlling” or, worse, “policing” their children’s activities. But since COVID-19, the mass media and public opinion has radically shifted, and it is at last acknowledged that technology, perhaps like books or bicycles, can be good or bad for children, depending on how they are used and by whom.

The second myth that my research contradicts, and that I believe we now should lay to rest, is that parents know nothing about the digital world and the children know everything. The idea ofdigital natives and digital immigrants. This idea has been extraordinarily successful, and it has had the advantage of recognizing that, perhaps for the first time in history, children genuinely have knowledge of value in the wider society, well beyond the small private sphere in which they are often sequestered. But it also had two adverse consequences. First, it hasallowed policymakersto rhetorically celebrate children’s digital expertise with the effect of undermining the case, or perceived need, for educational support or, indeed, regulation of the digital realm. Second, and receiving less attention still, it has led many to undervalue the contribution that parents could make to the children’s development and digital literacy. As I saw clearly in our “parenting for a digital future” research,parental interests and expertiseregarding digital technologies, while of course heavily stratified by class and other forms of inequality, is nonethelessroutinely underestimatedby schools and other societal institutions, as well as by themselves. With appropriate encouragement and guidance, parents could harness their digital knowledge gained through our personal interest to benefit their children. Indeed, many are trying to do exactly this, with some success.

Third, it has been often said in recent years that young people prefer the online world to the offline world, that they would rather talk to their friends online than engage with a person in front of them, and there is no natural limit on their desire to go digital. Life during COVID-19 has clearly proved the falsity of such a myth. For young people as for the rest of us, the task of balancing online and offline remains critical and difficult, and the value of seeing friends face-to-face, of going out into the world, into the community, and engaging there freely with others, is as vital to them as for everyone. The “COVID generation,” so-called, is becoming angry, let down by the generations in power on this as in other matters. We may expect them to take increasingly to the streets, and to digital public spaces, as the actuality and perception ofgenerational injusticegrows.

Meryl Alper: These are indeed isolating times for so many families; a stretch of months (though it feels so much longer) during which technology has been a lifeline for connecting with friends, extended family, community, and the broader public. This dependency on social media and digital platforms, as Sonia notes, has also created new possibilities for those who seek to further surveil, sow conflict among, and physically and emotionally harm young people, particularly those from poor and minoritized communities. I additionally appreciate Sonia’s work to illustrate that various myths about children, youth, and media were false long before COVID-19 and should not be perpetuated going forward: beliefs in the utility of “screen time” as a concept, the idea that children can fend for themselves online and well intentioned adults have nothing to contribute, and the notion that adolescents and teens choose media over people when most are just finding ways to bond and thrive through whatever form of sociality is available and useful to them.

Particularly within the U.S. context, I have been thinking a lot about how the “choices” parents are being offered right now for managing their household’s health and well-being (and sometimes that of their own older parents), their family’s media use, and their children’s education (i.e., “Zoom school” and “learning pods”) are not really choices at all under the conditions of capitalism, neoliberalism, and “rugged individualism.” As they stand, the institutions and infrastructures are not built for marginalized parents to make mistakes just like any other parents because the systems are not designed for interdependency and collective care across families and within communities. Moreover, the illusory nature of choice is only now being discovered by some (primarily white)families when other parents (especially Black and brown caregivers) have not been under any such illusion.

Distance learning in the pandemic has enabled some students with disabilities to thrive while it has set others back significantly.In my work, I am especially interested in how children with disabilities and their families—across race, ethnicity, and social class—have been making the most of sometimes fairly awful (and illegal) learning conditions for their child, and to what extent digital media and technology have helped or hurt them in their efforts to thrive. Over the past seven years, I have been conducting ethnographic research in the homes of over 60 children ages 3 to 13 on the autism spectrum in Boston and Los Angeles (remotely starting in April 2020) by interviewing parents, observing kids engaged in their media habits and rituals, and asking them to explain the appeal and challenges of technology to me. What I have found so far is that for many families of disabled children in the COVID era, being cut off from various forms of institutional support and caregivers turning to technology to provide some form of relief is not an unfamiliar experience.

Take Sofia Acosta (pseudonym), a five-year-old non-speaking Latina girl on the autism spectrum with a deep love of the classic storybook character Clifford the Big Red Dog. When I visited her Boston apartment in July 2019, her mom April explained that Sofia was stuck at home and not attending summer camp, that her days at home lacked structure, and that she was usually up all night for those reasons, combined with the fact that she had a naturally dysregulated sleeping pattern. Watching media, and especially Clifford videos on YouTube, was the only thing that helped keep Sofia calm and maintain control of her body. While staying home, having no summer camp options, and passing time on structureless days was new for many families in July 2020, my visit with Sofia was a year earlier. She was not attending camp because local programs for autistic kids were too expensive. She was not leaving the apartment much because her home was in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood with very little green space and Sofia’s senses got easily overwhelmed on mass transit. And she was spending so much time using media as a coping mechanism because she was on a never-ending wait list for speech and behavioral therapy services that might have given her important communicative and expressive tools.

Many people have made excruciatingly hard choices and major sacrifices to incorporate social distancing and self-isolation into their vocabularies and lifestyles post-COVID-19. Interlocking forms of structural inequality have meant, though, that Sofia and the Acosta family were already intimately familiar with being socially distanced and heavily technologically mediated. Disabled adults, youth, and their loved oneshave been telling us for a long timehow unsustainable it is to leave families with no other options but to turn to media and technology to offset undue caregiving responsibilities that are actually failed societal and moral obligations.

S. Craig Watkins: In the work that we did for the Digital Edgethe core focus was on addressing the inventive ways Black and Latinx youth navigate social, educational, and digital inequality.  The Digital 'Edge' is a recognition of the tension that shapes how people of color engage technology.  On the one hand, "edge" represents the cutting edge or the ways in which Black and Latinx youth have been leaders, innovators, and early adopters, especially when it comes to social and mobile media. Black youth were the first among their generational counterparts to adopt Twitter at scale, leading to the rise of the highly influential Black Twitter.  But "edge" in this context also points to marginalization and inequality.  Thus, even as Black and Latinx youth have asserted a strong presence in the digital world, they do so under social, educational, and economic constraints not of their own making.

As we did the research for the Digital Edge we also explored the home life of students and this gave us an opportunity to learn more about their parents. The educational levels among many of the parents were quite low, thus severely restricting their employment prospects.  Most of the parents in our sample worked in low-skill, low-wage occupations.  Still, the parents that we met were extraordinarily savvy and had a sharp understanding of society.  

Many of these parents made enormous sacrifices to ensure their children had access to computers, the internet, and mobile devices.  And although consistent and robust access to these technologies were often marred by economic precarity, parents felt it was important that their children had internet connectivity even though it was difficult to afford. Over the years research has shown that the presence of a child in the home is a strong predictor of whether technology will be in the home.  

I've always been struck by the "technology dilemma" that parents grapple with.  Even as they may have some concerns about screen time  or more specifically the kind of content their children are exposed to, most parents tell us that they believe they must make computers, internet, and mobile devices available to their kids.  They understand in some opaque way that mastery of these technologies is now required to find opportunity in the economy of tomorrow. When it comes to providing their children access to technology, parents feel as if they are damned if they do and damned if they do not.

We learned that parents in low-wage occupations have the same concerns as parents in high-wage occupations.  All parents want their kids to be safe, happy, and able to access good schools and meaningful opportunities to pursue the aspirations.  But not all parents have the full stack of resources--money, good schools, extra-curricular activities, robust social supports, or a stay-at-home parent-- to bolster their children's life chances.  Likewise, not all parents have access to the social and informational capital that deepens their knowledge, parental efficacy, and ability to support how their children navigate the digital world.  Meryl, I really appreciate your assertion that parents who care for kids with learning disabilities struggle to find the adequate social and technological supports to engage their children’s potential for learning and development.  I also like how you draw similarities between the challenges they face, “being socially distanced and heavily technologically mediated,” and the challenges millions of families with kids restricted to their homes for learning and recreation now face.

We must figure out more effective ways to support parents and their efforts to support their children.  This includes finding culturally relevant ways to introduce parents to ideas and potential strategies they can employ in their efforts to equip their children with the resources to participate in the connected world.  Now more than ever, young children must learn how to protect their privacy and data rights while also increasing their accumulation of social, civic, and educational capital via digital technologies. As Sonia and Meryl note, one of the outcomes of COVID is the increased reliance on social and digital platforms. Among other things, this means that we are all subjected to more surveillance, scams, and disinformation campaigns as Sonia explains.  

Sonia’s point that we should forever do away with the “young people as digital natives” and “old people as digital immigrants” perspective is well taken.  The framework overlooks the fact that parents have a lot to offer young people including experience, wisdom, and the importance of empathy in the connected world.  Most parents are looking for answers instead of fear mongering and misinformation.  More affluent parents have access to the social and informational networks that enhance their capacity to support how their children navigate the digital world.  But many parents do not have access to these resources, hence their ability to support their children's digital activities face severe challenges.  

I'll end with this question: how do we design ways for parents and guardians who manage resource-constrained households to access the social and informational networks that empower their desire to support their children's participation in the connected world and secure pathways to opportunity? 

Bios

Meryl Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she researches the social and cultural implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability and digital media, children and families’ technology use, and mobile communication. She is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities(MIT Press, 2014) and Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality(MIT Press, 2017), which was awarded a 2018 PROSE Award Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers and the 2018 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award from the American Sociological Association. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on over 15 years of professional experience in educational children’s media as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Her new book is “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (Oxford University Press, with Alicia Blum-Ross). Sonia currently directs the Digital Futures Commission(with the 5Rights Foundation) and the “Global Kids Online”project (with UNICEF), among other projects. She blogs at www.parenting.digital.

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of six books including The Digital Edgeand Don’t Knock the Hustle.  Craig is also the founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation, a boutique hub for research and design. Among other things, the Institute is currently working on projects that address technology and mental health, bias in the deployment of artificial intelligence, and the social, racial, and economic aspects of a post-COVID world.

Launching our Popular Culture and Civic Imagination Toolkit

Welcome to our Popular Culture and Civic Imagination Toolkit! Here we tap the stories, TV shows, games, movies and folk stories we love (and love to hate) to activate our imaginations as we work through the social challenges our communities face. Our playful easy to do activities engage popular culture, imagination and issues of collective concern, tackling questions like: How do we want to live with one another? How do we resolve conflicts in our community? How do we know what’s fair for us and for others? How do we work together to solve big problems? 

​The toolkit is intended for a broad age group - parents and children (5+), peer-groups, those working in educational settings and really anyone interested in watching, remixing, creating, and having fun with popular culture!

 Our number one goal here is to help adults and children (and others) to have fun around shared media experiences, moving us beyond the negative focus on “screen time” to a more generative mode of co-creating our culture. These activities are shaped by concepts such as perspective taking and emotional intelligence, but more broadly, designed to help young people to think about how they live in communities and physical spaces with other people, how they work together to achieve a social order that is fair to all, how they might learn to appreciate each other’s different perspectives and experiences, and how they might look at their physical surroundings, both places and things, in new, even magical, ways. We also see these activities as an childhood entry into media literacy (understood not as a school subject but as part of our everyday lives as media consumers and fans.) 

​Each activity in the toolkit can be completed as a stand-alone unit. Unless otherwise noted, these activities here emerged from brainstorming sessions with the members of the Civic Paths research group.

 This is a work in progress and we welcome feedback and new activity suggestions! Do you have activities that you would like to submit to the Toolkit? Please, reach out to us via this form.

​You can also download the printer friendly version of this toolkit here.

Rethinking "Screen Time" In the Age of Covid-19 (Part Three)

Sangita Shresthova: Yes, screentime is an incredibly blunt, and largely ineffective tool for navigating children engagement with media. As Susan pointed out “screens” are just a piece of hardware. I would add that “time” measures duration and tells us nothing about what is actually taking place. Clearly. we need more nuanced approaches that take into account everything that has been brought up in our exchange.  And, we need them now more than ever.

This summer, I got quite excited about the possibilities of online interest-based learning for young children when my son took several classes though Outschool (outschool.com).

The classes (taught over zoom) were generally small (ranging from 4-6 kids) and short (15-30 minutes, over several days or weeks). The offerings were staggeringly diverse, with classes on almost any topic imaginable (from butterflies to photography, from drawing superheroes to Bollywood dance).  While somewhat uneven because some instructors were more experienced than others, the classes all helped my son connect learning to a subject area that interested him. He learned a lot and enjoyed it. 

Perhaps it was this positive experience that made the first days of distance-learning kindergarten such a shock over the past week. Responding to critiques of how distance learning happened in public schools this spring, California has passed legislation mandating duration of instruction for every grade level. For kindergarten it is 180 minutes. To meet this mandate, my son’s school leaned into “screentime” and implemented a three hour zoom call, which the teacher now has to fill with programming. It is early days yet, so I am working hard to keep an open mind about how this may play out. And yet, seeing my son stare vacantly at the screen as he moved into hour two on day two, I can’t help but think that there are better ways to do this.

I know that many educators and parents are in the thick of it right now. We are all navigating uncharted territory and the desire to hold on to the “old” normal as a measuring stick is overwhelmingly tempting. It is also dangerous as it obscures the fact that we are living through, what might be, a once in a life-time opportunity to re-evaluate our assumptions about media in our children’s lives.

Henry Jenkins: In Susan’s story, her son’s comment, “you should watch it,” was an invitation into his world, sharing his new favorite program with her and thus opening up a channel of communication. My experience has been that those invitations are most apt to occur when the family has created a history of such open conversations through the years and developed a shared understanding of media content as a resource around which the family might come together and work through its differences. This is very different from advice that parents should surveil their children, looking at their internet history behind their backs, say, or otherwise go where they have not been invited. The first is about building trust and respecting your children’s growing agency to make meaningful choices. The second represents a lack of trust and respect and is apt to further unravel communication within the family over time. 

Our children need adults who will watch their backs, not snoop over their shoulders. They need mentorship as they confront some of the challenges of the digital world and as they construct their own identities in relation to the culture around them. But they are only going to accept our advice when they actively seek it out rather than having it imposed upon them. Child development literature suggests that children adventure a bit further from their parents’ orbit each year they grow older but that this stepping out is inconsistent, that they also seek out their parents’ hands when they feel uncomfortable. A wise parent looks for those openings to provide the support they need. They let go of some control over their kids and instead empower them to stand on their own feet. The indirectness of conversations around television make it an effective middle ground for both letting go and providing support.

Sangita’s story shows something else. Restricting or imposing a specific quantity of “screen time” for children is misguided. Our relations to media should be understood in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Research on fandom shows that the average fan consumes less television than the general population, not more. Fans actively choose what to watch; they pay close attention as they watch; and watching springboards them towards other social and creative experiences. There are times in the life of a fan when their relationship to the medium is more intensive than others: they are absorbing a new program; they are working through some emotional crisis; they are feeling bored or lonely, so a regular time table does not serve us well if the goal is to ensure a more valuable engagement with the media in our lives. So if the changed circumstances surrounding COVID-19 and Zoom-based learning are forcing us to relax our quantitative control, we should be having the kind of conversation amongst parents and educators we are modeling here regarding what we think a valuable relationship to media might look like.

The Civic Imagination Project has been exploring how adults might learn a more playful way of thinking through the future together. Instead of becoming bogged down in frustrations over our current problems we need to stop and ask each other what kind of world we would want to share together if anything were possible. Then we can think from a fresh perspective about how to achieve that.  Adults need permission to play together.  Children are already playing with the contents of their culture, including media content. Play is how children learn. They don’t need to reclaim a sense of imaginative possibilities as adults do, because they haven’t lost them. They need to learn how to direct their imaginations towards fairness and caring in the world around them. They need to learn how to connect what they see on the screen to what they observe about their surroundings. This playful engagement with media content should be as much a part of media literacy as developing a skeptical understanding of who makes media and what interests are served by its production and distribution. 

In a few days, we will be sharing on this blog some new resources that parents can use to foster civic imagination through playful engagement with the media content that their children already care about. We see these exercises as offering parents some concrete models for how they might introduce these kinds of constructive relationships to popular culture into the context of their own family life, respecting each family’s values, but also respecting each family member’s emotional and social needs. And then we will have some more perspectives to share through two more conversations. So don’t touch that dial!

Susan Kresnicka: You are absolutely correct, Henry. My family has a history of tapping entertainment as an expanded vocabulary, and it's proving more helpful than ever in this uncertain and stressful moment. We need every recourse we can find to raise, express, and process the sprawling range of thoughts and feelings this era is provoking.

I agree, Sangita, that when kindergarteners are being asked to participate in 180 minutes of Zoom instruction each day, indeed, there must be a better way. And tired, trivializing, derogatory assumptions about media – and the judgment they can provoke – seem likely only to obscure it. I look forward to learning more about the Civic Imagination toolkit and how it can help parents forge a new, healthier path.

 BIOS

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CInematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has been a dedicated advocate for media literacy education, recently receiving the Jesse McKanse award for his life-time contribution to this field, including the publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which helped to launch the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Subsequent work here included Reading in a Participatory Culture and Participatory Culture in a Networked Society. His other work on children and media includes The Children’s Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He is currently writing a book which examines children’s media of the 1950s and 1960s in light of shifting understandings of childhood in Post-War American culture. His most recent books include Participatory Culture: Interviews, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among online learning, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Change (2020) and of  By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth (2016), both published by NYU Press. Her earlier book on Bollywood (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011 by Sage. She is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She enjoys engaging with diverse communities through her workshops, lectures and projects. sangitashresthova.com

Susan Kresnicka

Founder and president of research firm KR&I, Susan is a cultural anthropologist with over 18 years of experience in the commercial sector. Specializing in foundational research to establish core human drivers for consumer behavior, Susan has led large-scale, multi-modal research projects for a range of industries. A student of fandom for more than a decade, Susan has conducted fan research for a variety of iconic entertainment IP brands, sports teams, and brands built around passionate hobbyists. Whether she is studying fandom or another topic, Susan specializes in tying consumer behavior to core human needs, allowing clients to establish more enduring and meaningful bonds with the people upon whom their commercial success relies. Susan holds an M.A. in social anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, sits on the professional advisory board for UCLA’s Master of Social Science program, and regularly speaks publicly on fandom, gender, morality, identity, and the value of anthropology in business. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Variety, and more. kresnickaresearch.com 

Rethinking "Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19 (Part Two)

Sangita Shrestova:  I was struck by Henry’s observation that parenting through media calls for a different set of parenting skills.  In reading what has been said so far, I am starting to see some of the contours of what such skills might need to be. Clearly, there is a lot to be said for a mindset that appreciates, rather than denigrates, the important role that popular culture plays in children's lives. We also need to be able to recognize the opportunities for discussion that TV shows, and other media content provide. And, we need to have the tools to encourage the imagination at opportune moments. For me, this all begins with a need for open-minded listening, which was so poignantly captured in Susan’s recounting of the conversation she had with her friend’s daughter about Disney princesses. As Jackson Bird, a trans-activist and former staff member of the Harry Potter Alliance, once said in an interview, “We need to learn to listen, to really listen.” On some level, this may seem to be an almost banal observation, and, yet, I see again and again, that we (adults) often do not really tune into what children are saying, and just as importantly, what they are not saying (but are communicating in other ways) about their relationship with popular culture. 

I am particularly tuned into the non-verbal aspects of “listening” because of my own background in dance and performance. I also spent years working with Bollywood dance fans, whose imagination is activated when they re-choreograph the dances contained in Hindi films. For these dancer fans, choreography becomes the space where the imagination is activated. This is where they engage, critique, re-interpret popular culture content.  I realize that this may be too far afield, but I actually have been thinking a lot about the performative and embodied possibilities for parenting through media, particularly at this moment when our physicality is limited in such profound ways and where I see so much desire for imagined and actual co-presence. Henry described action figures as “authoring tools” for re-imagined stories. I am really interested in encouraging improvised and staged performances inspired by popular culture as moments that allow us to embody and share our imagination.

Henry Jenkins: Amidst the many great questions that Susan posed for us, the one that struck me the most was the question, “When do we feel pride about our relationships to popular culture?” As a culture, we are programmed to feel shame and guilt, but rarely pride. Watching television, one of my mentors used to say, was like masturbation. We all do it sometimes, but we don’t like to talk about it, and never in front of the neighbors. I used to wear a button that said simply “I Love TV” and people would struggle so much to figure out what TV stood for, because it couldn’t possibly mean television. Why would you wear a button proclaiming your love for television?  

I think this is part of the hidden curriculum of the concept of “screen time.” We start from a logic which says this is something we should minimize because it has no intrinsic value and in many cases, is associated with some social harm, if nothing else because it takes time away from other, more valuable activities we should be engaging with, and “Aren’t you ashamed to let your children watch television instead of reading books or socializing with their friends or playing outside?” Well, Covid-19 is shifting our priorities on some of those other things, leading many people around the world to the conclusion that maybe it is better -- for now at least -- for children to socialize with friends (or go to school) through a screen. 

“Screen time” talk starts from a series of normalized assumptions about what it means to consume media. The first of those assumptions is that what happens on screens is completely separate from the other activities in our lives. So, in Sangita’s example above, television is assumed to be a mental activity (of a relative low order) which has little or nothing to do with our physical bodies (or more accurately, it involves bodies at rest rather than in movement.) I wonder if the people who make this mind-body distinction have ever seen children watching (or perhaps playing with) television. They are rarely sitting still, they are only sometimes giving it their full attention, it IS integrated into a range of other activities, and they are often physically moving around in one way or another while they are “watching” the show. One reason they watch the same programs over and over is that they catch different bits each time, though the other reason is that the ritualized nature of certain moments are comforting and familiar. We know that children learn stories through their bodies and their voices, and contrary to our high-low culture assumptions, this is as true for television as it is for children’s books.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is socially isolating, ignoring all of the signs that television content becomes a social currency that enables conversations with others and that cutting kids off from shows that are part of the shared mythology of their peer group is going to be far more socially isolating than allowing them the time to watch the show itself. And of course, much of what kids do with screens already involves real time or asynchronous social interaction with others with whom they are chatting or playing games or just hanging out on Zoom.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that watching television is less apt to spark the imagination than reading a book. The logic goes that we have to construct in our mind’s eye the physical world where the story takes place and television’s visuals give us that information too easily. Fair enough, but books often tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling, where-as television requires us to interpret implicit social cues and thus fosters emotional intelligence through perspective taking. 

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is a site of pure consumption (often understood in passive terms) whereas the research suggests it is often a site of active cognitive interpretation and the starting point for a range of other creative and expressive activities for our children (go back to what I said about action figures as authoring tools.) 

“Screen Time” talk assumes too often that everything kids do with screens is more or less the same, rather than focusing on the range of activities in children’s lives, and what aspects of those activities get conducted on screens under what circumstances, and how those aspects are connected integrally to things that children are doing when they are not focused on screens. 

What I am calling for is that we move beyond the fragmentation and border policing that regulating “screen time” requires and begin to think about our children’s lives in a more holistic manner.

Susan Kresnicka: Funny, as I was reading through the deconstructions of 'screen time' we've been listing in this dialogue, I noticed for the first time how tellingly shallow the term itself is. (I suspect I'm way late to this realization!). We don't call it 'content time' or 'story time' – we've named it after the most superficial and non-dynamic attribute we could identify: the cold, hard, physical screen. Speaks volumes...

I've been incredibly grateful for this conversation over the last few days. It's been a difficult week for my family, with the start of this weird, virtual school year. My son, entering his sophomore year in college, is deeply resentful that we haven't agreed to let him move halfway across the country to live in an off-campus apartment while the school grapples with the intersection of a pandemic, an impulse-driven quasi-adult population, and its own financial realities. My daughter, starting her senior year in high school, has a heightened sense of anxiety surrounding this significant year. At varying moments, this week brought tears, cold silence, door slamming, and awkward dinners. Do you know where we found relief this week? TV. And not because we curled up in front of our respective devices and watched our own things to zone out. Content offered relief during this fraught week because, at moments when we felt disconnected from one another, it created an opportunity to reconnect. After a particularly tense few days, our son began to shift (slowly) into acceptance about the college decision. The very first signal that this shift was underway was when he told me how much he was enjoying watching The Boys. "What do you like about it?," I asked. "Well, it's about this guy whose girlfriend gets killed by a superhero and how he changes as a result. You should watch it." It was the first uncharged conversation we'd had in days, and it served as an invitation: "I'm moving past my anger," he implied, "and I want you to understand the ideas that are speaking to me in this difficult moment." I learned long ago that if my children tell me I should watch something, I should. I'm now on S1E5 of The Boys, and my son and I have a new point of connection to draw upon as we work through this. With my daughter, content has been our relationship salve for years. At the end of a truly wrenching tear-filled night this week, as we tried to patch ourselves (and each other) up, she asked if I would stay in her room and watch TV with her. We crawled under the covers, held hands, and watched Hugh Laurie demonstrate the tension between exceptionalism and human connection in an episode of House ("Sometimes, you just have to watch an episode of House," she told me.)

In my research and in my own life, I see time and again how shared content experiences – whether synchronous or not – help us forge, maintain, deepen, and repair social bonds, including those with the people we love most. When we dismiss and demonize entertainment media, we conveniently ignore this crucial function. An incredibly insightful friend once told me, "You can't understand something if you are judging it." I believe that this chronic cultural judgment of entertainment media, hypocritically embraced and lauded as a measure of responsible parenthood, cuts us off from a full understanding of how entertainment operates in our lives, including its potential for strengthening our relationships with our children