media and musings of joshua mcveigh-schultz

Here are the default life-events categories. Right now they’re just icons, but I thought they needed titles so I invented my own.

Self-improvement:

This timeline category is for bragging about how awesome you are.

Adversity:

This category is for things to include in your college application essays in order to demonstrate you’ve had a rough life but still managed to kill it on the SATs.

Stuff and status:

This category is is about annotating things that you’ve bought… and roommates.

Love and Death:

This category is available so that the juicy awkwardness of announcing your relationship status in your newsfeed can now be applied to losing a loved one.

Level Up:

This category is available so that FB can map its data about your consumer profile onto different phases of your life. Soon to be added categories include: menarche (and its boy counterparts), losing your virginity, gaining the ability to shoot fireballs at goombas, posting lewd pics on twitter that jeopardize your political career, reinventing yourself after said scandal, becoming a vampire.

I’m sitting here testing out Facebook’s new timeline feature, and a couple things jump out at me:

1. For a platform that has, for years now, promoted a false sense of ephemerality in order (I’m assuming) to get us to share more, they are now actively trying to reinvent themselves as a personal narrative platform (think 21st century version of the family album or scrapbook) as opposed to a serialized communication platform where you don’t worry about what you posted 5 years ago having an impact on how people perceive you now.

‎2. Towards this end, the timeline’s UI asks us to participate in life annotation by highlighting certain posts, photos, etc. as well as actively choosing to annotate particular life events in our past. (I include screenshots of suggested life-events in a follow up post here.) The emphasis here is decidedly on human-annotation as oppose to algorithmic analysis, which is somewhat surprising considering the extent to which algorithmic analysis of our data figures in Facebook’s business model. I’m guessing they have killer data visualizations available but they’re keeping them behind the curtain. It would be interesting, for example, to be able to see posts that achieved “top story” status graphed on a timeline, or even to see how different kinds of user-activity have ebbed and flowed over time. When do I spend most time uploading photos, for example, vs. doing other sorts of activities? How has this distribution evolved? I would also love to be able to see general data on how much time I’ve spent on Facebook at different periods in my life. Can you imagine a visual representation of your last 6 years of procrastination? Scary! There are reasons why revealing this kind of activity (even if it’s private) might be detrimental to Facebook’s business model because it helps us to see ourselves as marketing agencies see us. But, it’s not clear yet whether this emphasis on human-annotation vs. algorithmic analysis is just a matter of developers wanting to grab low hanging fruit for the beta version or whether Facebook plans to actively encourage us to think of timeline as something human rather than machine authored.

Here is my recent talk at the DIY Citizenship conference.

I’m really interested in this notion of “hacking contexts.” This seems aligned with what I’ve been thinking about as ‘ritual design’ (in contrast to platform design). It feels like an area that’s calling out for a more clearly defined methodological tool kit, so I’m excited by Grenzfurthner’s explanation of his approach. And I love his “BIG FAIL” comment.

Elephant in the Relationship from Joshua McVeigh-Schultz on Vimeo.

A game that I’ve been working on with Andy Uehara, Michael Annetta, and Casey China was just accepted to the Game Show NYC exhibition. We’ve been working on this concept for over a year now and are thrilled to have a chance to show it off.

Here’s the talk I mentioned in my last post. I couldn’t find Wesch’s talk from OVC online yet, but this seems to be the same material at TEDx.

Lindsay Grant recently posted a provocative argument about the purpose of redesign over at the HASTAC blog.

In work for the Beyond Current Horizons project, Gunther Kress argues that contemporary conditions call not so much for taking a critical stance towards media, but an approach of re-design. Rather than analysing and deconstructing media artefacts, re-design draws on notions of “rip, mix and burn” in which young people appropriate the digital media texts and resources around them, arrange them into new configurations with new meanings, and share these widely amongst their networks. Re-design acknowledges that the “consumer” of media can also be its author. Rather than just deconstructing and critiquing in order to resist the ways that we are influenced and positioned by media, we are able to create and circulate new, alternative messages and meanings, even imbuing existing media texts with very different meanings through a process of editing and juxtaposition. Texts, in this view, are resources to be mined for the creation of new meanings, dramatically recasting issues of authenticity and authorship, and making questions  such as “where did this come from?” or “who is the original author” less pertinent. In education, this focuses attention on the learners’ own texts and meanings, rather than on a media text under analysis.

I’ve been hearing this kind of rethinking of critical thinking more and more lately. Michael Wesch gave a great talk at OVC last month where he argued that, while critical thinking is still a key part of the toolbox, we need to recognize that we’ve moved beyond the read-only mindset of a television dominant era. It no longer makes sense to think about critical thinking as a kind of inoculation for the spectator. Critical thinking may still be the spark and the fuel, but it needs to be let loose out into the world for the promise to be realized. This means focusing on processes of making, design, and distribution. And in the classroom it means teachers are increasingly having to relinquish the authority as expert. Instead teachers play the role of facilitator and coach as students reach beyond the classroom walls as they grapple with new modalities, resources, and audiences.

This semester I’m excited to be taking Henry Jenkins’s new Civic Media course at USC. As one of our first assignment, we’re reading a few of the recent white papers that focus on new directions in civic media. These included: The Center for Social Media’s Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, The Knight Commission’s, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, and the Media Consortium’s white paper, The Big Thaw: Charting A New Course for Journalism.

In true white paper fashion, these documents not only describe the phenomena (new directions in civic media), but also deliberately prescribe various actions to take (through efforts of policy, philanthropy, etc.). I found myself reacting to these position papers in various ways — as an academic, citizen, designer, etc. But after reflection, I found these various perspectives to be in dialogue with another identification — that of the frustrated media consumer.

We were asked to document our responses, and I’ve chosen to do it here in blog form in order to practice bridging the gap between my public and academic voices. This attention to voice felt apropos considering the ways that academic authors of white papers shift their register when reframing their ideas in relation to a particular policy position.

Before I delve into my reaction to the white papers, though, it might help to know a bit about the intellectual soup of ideas circulating for me during the first week of class. This week we looked at Clay Shirky’s blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable — a classic post about the past and future of journalism and the nature of technological revolutions. Last week Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities also figured strongly, along with James Carey’s Communication as Culture. During our first day of class, we found intersections between these works by focusing on the practice of reading the newspaper as kind of civic ritual.

For Anderson, the newspaper functions similarly to literature in the way it calls forth an imagined community of readers and fictively traces connections between variously juxtaposed stories. The logic of calendrical coincidence is part of what binds this imagined community together. But the readership is also bound together through their shared identity as an implicit “us” addressed by the newspaper. Anderson sees the newspaper as “an ‘extreme form of the book, a book on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity… one-day best sellers?” (33). And Anderson describes the activity of reading the newspaper — borrowing from Hegel — as a mass ceremony in which the linkages between seemingly unconnected news stories form the backbone of a shared experience.

Carey goes further in describing this relationship between the dramatic role of storytelling and the ritual function of the newspaper. In particular, he underscores the ‘ritual’ features of the newspaper by opposing this interpretation to the more traditional ‘transmission’ model.

A ritual view of communication… view[s] reading a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed. News reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world.

Taking this ritual understanding of communication as a starting point, what kind of rituals do the white papers, then, advocate?

I think this is a valid question, because even if a particular policy position is couched in the language of a transmission model of communication, the reality — a la Carey — is that any form of civic media will also encourage particular ritual practices. So when interested parties aim to shape a new civic media future, they advocate for particular technological platforms, particular policy efforts, and particular philanthropy models, it’s important to think about what sort of rituals those structures will support and — likewise — what kind of new imagined publics they might call into being.

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Just saw this nice summary of the event over at HASTAC. The Mobile Design Boost is a hosting a 4-day entrepreneurial design workshop. Looks like its part of a partnership between Startl and IDEO. Nancy Kimberly explains.

Following up on NPR’s ear-stabbing economic coverage, here are some interesting comments from Brad Delong in response to David Weigel’s firing. I think they apply equally well to the kind of obligatory false balance that has become par for the course from NPR.

[They] never wanted to be perceived as impartial in the sense of an umpire with good eyesight who called balls and strikes as he or she saw them. The Washington Post wanted to be perceived as neutral in that roughly half its calls would go for the establishment Democrats and half its calls would go to the establishment Republicans. There are very big differences. For one thing, a neutral paper is bound to be untrustworthy as a source of information.

In response to Delong, Paul Rosenberg recently added this point about the Democrats’ failure to recognize the basic rules of the game:

Just to add some further detail: If the Post and the rest of the not-strictly rightwing Versailles press aim for such “neutrality”, then the incentives are quite clear: (1) Move as far to the extremes as possible in your own statements, in order to shift the neutral point in your direction. (2) Attack the other side continuously for its “extremism” in order to deter it from doing the same–and perhaps even to get it to do the opposite. This is precisely what the conservative movement has been doing for most of the past 30+ years, and Democrats–with a few lonely exceptions like Alan Grayson–still have yet to catch on.

So why is this still the case? And why are so-called strategists like Rahm Emanuel considered “smart” politicians when they fall into this trap?