[iDC] Interview with Megan Boler

[Trebor Scholz]

Politics and New Media Education

as part of WebCamTalk 1.0
http://newmediaeducation.org/

Trebor Scholz: Please introduce us to what you describe as hegemonic
relationships between today's emerging technologies and media ownership.

Megan Boler: As media scholar, educator, and activist, I see this as the
best and worst of times.  The best, because there is increased access,
production and use of new media; the worst, because we are in midst of the
greatest political repression and absence of free press within mainstream
media perhaps ever witnessed in U.S. history.

It is helpful to situate our relationship to technology and communication,
and ask how this has changed over time, by reviewing briefly three schools
of thought in media theory.

First, consider the combination of nostalgia and technological determinism
reflected in the work of Neil Postman (or we might look here at Marshall
McLuhan or Jacques Ellul). "In Amusing Ourselves to Death" Postman argues
that the telegraph and photography displaced print, resulting in a culture
that lacks the kind of intellectual rigor and rational, and debate is
instead run by the gods of television and computers.  There are obvious
appeals in accounts like this:  we do have to inquire about who owns the
public sphere, and what aspects of technology have become so commonplace
they are naturalized and hence not easily seen and observed through a
critical lens- i.e., what do we take for granted and assume cannot be
changed?  Such as one way broadcast as opposed to interactivity?

Neil Postman is a technological determinist as he sees technologies such as
TV and computers as profoundly defining our epistemology and relation to the
world.  One of the dangers of this view is that determinism ignores agency
and resistance, and nostalgia assumes an innocence and moral good to the
past which is deceptive. Early America was not a utopia; many voices were
disenfranchised from the public sphere; and a return to print and rational
dialogue will not ensure equity or equality.

 A second school of thought, closely related to Postman and McLuhan with a
Habermasian spin, is a recent book called Rebel Sell. The thesis of this
2004 book is that culture jamming is dead in the water.  Culture jamming is
as dead as any hippy counterculture ever was, according to the authors. They
vehemently oppose the views of those who follow Gramsci and Marx, and
notions of hegemony and ideology.  Those of us who do accept notions of
hegemony believe that interventions in ideology are possible through
re-appropriations and consciousness raising; our hope lies in ³intervening²
in ideology by making small incremental changes in consciousness.  In this
book the authors argue‹ counter to all Gramscian conceptions of
hegemony--that the sphere of culture and politics must be separated
entirely. However, these authors‹ who don¹t seem to be right leaning but
rather of progressive mindset‹ state that cultural interventions make no
difference whatsoever. Buried in their slam of culture jamming as a waste of
people¹s energy,  one finds a hidden revival of Habermas! ­they state that
what made the civil rights and women¹ liberation movements in the US
successful was rational debate, democracy, and legislative change (thereby
dismissing cultural change as part of those revolutions). What are the risks
of this analysis?  First, it¹s absolutely not possible to separate culture
and politics.  Second, we need alternatives to Habermas¹s notion of the
public sphere and rational dialogue as only route to democracy.  Culture,
and politics, are complex, riddled with power inequities, and highly
divergent and inequitable authority granted to many voices in our so-called
pluralistic democracy.  Classical models of political institutions and
political economy tend to overlook micro level of social change, which
includes everything from emotions to anarchistic resistances to tactical
cultural interventions.  You cannot argue that the civil right movement was
successful only because of political and nor cultural work and change.

(Related to these concerns, it is interesting to note that leading media
scholar Robert McChesney, at a recent conference, argued that he feels the
blogosphere is not robust enough a challenge to mainstream media.  For him,
hope lies in public outcry against FCC change in ownership.)

Finally, there is a third school of thought represented by Stuart Hall‹and
this, combined with the work of media activists, that offers the most
hopeful frame‹ one that would support the kinds of intervention represented
by Situationists or contemporary culture-jammers.  Hall discusses in
Encoding/Decoding, dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings of media.
The value of Hall¹s model is that we do not need to assume the passive,
couch-potato model of viewing but rather understand that no meaning is
guaranteed: meanings are always negotiates and/or opposed by audiences and
viewers.  Thus hegemony has no guarantees.

TS: How does tactical media fit in with contemporary visions of the
relationship of ³civic engagement² and the public sphere of media?

MB: I began by saying that this is in some ways the ³best of times,² because
I am optimistic about media interventions.

TS: Please describe some of the hopeful examples that you referred to.

MB: 
First: The most watched nightly news show among the demographic of age 18-30
is Jon Stewart¹s Daily Show.  Whatever its limitations‹ there are many- this
satirical show represents a counter to mainstream media that significantly
intervenes in dominant network and cable news discourses.

Second: I have been studying and writing about online political digital
multimedia, and how these forms of tactical media represent significant
political interventions in civic and public discourse about U.S. foreign
policy, Bush administration policies, and the invasion and occupation of
Iraq.  The wide circulation of these kinds of counter-discourses is
extremely inspiring and represents a creative use of tactical media in the
best sense [URLs listed at end].

[Whether or not one considers these ³art² is fruit for another conversation,
but I would urge one to look at the variety of expressions online, and if
one considers none of these art, then perhaps one believes that by
definition art cannot be explicitly political? A huge topic of course.]

A third point of hope are weblogs that have developed specifically as
alternative sources of news about war‹ war blogs, as it were‹
and blogs that function, collectively, as a ³fact checking² in relation to
the representations of mainstream media.  While no one blog is sufficient,
as a collection blogs functions as a powerful counter and check on
mainstream news reporting.  Mainstream news has been forced to change its
story, change its timeline, apologize, and essentially be on its toes as a
result of the power of blogging.

(I would also argue that the blogosphere as a political space is presently
dominated by a very distinctly white, male, middle class voice, and we
urgently need greater diversity of voices in the ³recognized² blogosphere).

A final point of hope is the use of new media for digital storytelling:
young people given access to means of production who tell their identity and
cultural stories, often through a partnership of university and
community/school.  [URLs listed at end]
 
TS: How do you re-frame these interventions in the current political
context? 

MB: This is arguably the worst of times in recent political history
particularly given US foreign policy and the Bush administration¹s
stranglehold on power and media.  ³Free press² is an oxymoron if one of
talking about mainstream news.  Even in Canada, most recently the three
major newspapers were taken up with the spectacle of democracy in Iraq, a
fantastic propaganda moment that will fuel the Bush Administration¹s
leverage on more tax dollars and increased foreign support for occupation
and continued imperial expansion.

I have spoken in numerous countries about my website Critical Media Literacy
in Times of War (http://www.tandl.vt.edu/Foundations/mediaproject).  I have
learned a great deal through this collaborative project, which uses new
media as an educational tool to have the news tell on itself.  How much
contact do people have with the news?  Do they read international news?  Do
people take time to read different and international sources?  The answer to
all of this is a bit discouraging. Additionally, people continue to ask, ³If
I could read just one source, what should I read?²  or ³Thank god the CBC
[the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] is objective!²  Such questions make
me aware of how far we have top go in engaging educated people in think
critically about the media.

TS: What are the challenges educators, media theorists, and activists face
in the current climate of political repression?
 
MB: Yesterday, a colleague sent me a CNN article
(http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/31/students.amendment.ap/index.html)
that shows that a majority of young people in the U.S. feel that the first
amendment goes too far in its assurance of rights. Data like this simply
confirms that those of us who have the privilege to teach in colleges and
universities must gather even more courage in what and how we are teaching.
It is incumbent upon those who have tenure and job security to introduce the
most unpopular ideas, to engage critical thinking it the best ways we can
understand this, and to encourage active participation that engages new
media.

In 1950 Jacques Barzun wrote critically of what he terms ³popular history:²
history learned through course textbooks and through popular media.  These
versions of history are reductive, partisan, and fail to show complexity of
historical events.

 As scholars interested in media and education, we face a double whammy in
the face of popular histories: neither education nor news media are helping
us grasp the complexity of the contemporary political moment in its
historical frame. 
 
Education is not teaching students about basic concepts such as the bill of
rights.  Rather, the media is doing a superb job of creating a new form of
virulent racism and anti-Muslim climate.  Dissent is penalized not only
through absence of free press but silencing of expression in schools:
through threats to teachers and directives within schools not to discuss
issues such as the war in Iraq.  The absence of school curricula alongside
media blackout‹ no images of bodies returning to Dover Airforce base;
blackout on questions raised about recent presidential election results in
Ohio- these factors are some of what creates a culture of fascism [URLs
listed at end].

Within teacher education, for example, the interest in media literacy and
media education is minimized not only in US but also Canada.  At the same
time, new media educators, teachers, and literacy and media studies scholars
are acutely aware of a shift to ³multimodal literacy.²  What literacy means,
how it is defined, is radically changing given young people¹s media
practices.

We urgently need more conversations between people involved in instructional
technology and engineering, and critical theory.  There tends to be a split
between these two communities and discourses.  By engaging more
conversation‹ as you are doing here‹ we have hope of engaging
new media in ways that take seriously the challenge of counter-hegemonic
work and implementing tactical media within mainstream educational and
software programming.
 

References:

-Tactical Media Links

Bush in 30 Seconds
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/

Polygraph 
http://www.trumpfiresbush.com/

Lying Action Figure
http://www.praesentia.us/archives/dishonestdubya.html

Grand Theft America (Stolen Election 2000)
Bush ASCII 
http://turbulence.org/spotlight/ASCII_BUSH/index1.html

Spliced Republican Sound Bytes on Terrorism
http://home.earthlink.net/~houval/gopconstrm.mov
 
How to Spot a Fascist Regime
http://www.kontraband.com/show/show.asp?ID=1843
 
-Digital Storytelling Links

Youth Media Distribution
http://www.ymdi.org/index.php

Listen Up!  Youth Media Network
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/listenup/

Global Action Project: Youth Making Media
http://www.global-action.org/

=====================

About Megan Boler:

Knowledge, Media, Design Institute (KMDI)
Megan Boler is Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, University of Toronto, and works in the area of new media and
cyberculture studies. See her website Critical Media Literacy in Times of
War. 

http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/
http://www.tandl.vt.edu/Foundation/mediaproject