Key pithy quotes:
Lisa Gitelman: “One of my points is that all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved –written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned–and why” (26).
Steven Levy: “the iPod was suddenly at the center of two of the biggest and most disruptive trends in digital media: a grassroots uprising of a wisdom-drenched crowd of the self-appointed and an à la carte disintegration of the traditional packaging of broadcast and cable programming. Would the iPod destroy the networks by allowing us to cherry-pick and shuffle all our media, the same way it lets us shuffle our music?”
Links that may become useful/interesting sidetracks within the discussion to come:
check out these fascinating old digitizations of tinfoil recordings: http://www.tinfoil.com/
and compare these versions of history to the ones Gitelman and Levy tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting
Questions to talk through:
★ “Disruptive” and “innovation” are quite big buzzwords these days and it seems STEM and business students especially are often pushed toward making big, game-changing, attention-getting moves in their fields and careers. But not all “disruptions” or “innovations” are worth the buzz, necessarily. How do we help students navigate and question the ways their ideas will change the world? What kinds of projects might train them in how to be thoughtfully and conscientiously disruptive?
★ Some of you assign podcast projects to your students. How could Levy’s and Gitelman’s pieces supplement these assignments in English 106? in other writing classes?
★ Gitelman describes how “the exhibitions provided a playful and collective engagement with good taste. In making their selections for recording and playback, exhibitors made incongruous associations between well-known lines from both Shakespeare and Mother Goose … They could participate together in the enactment of cultural hierarchy” (35). Where do we see this kind of participation and enactment online today? What cultural hierarchies emerge in networked/virtual spaces?
★ (Sorry for those of you not in posthumanism class with us, but I’m gonna make you think about materiality.) This class is called Computers in Language and Rhetoric, and for some reason it can be easy to leave physical, material, embodied things off to the side when wireless connectedness and ideas and words and virtual realities are so exciting. Where is materiality important when thinking/teaching/researching this kind of stuff? Where could/should it be more important than it seems to be here and now?
An Activity about Public Memory-ing and Multimedia-ing:
Pair up and assign roles: 1 person to scribe, 1 person to digitize. Extra people might double up on roles, or simply contribute discussion bits.
As you discuss the questions above, the scribe should document the discussion using ONLY a sheet of tinfoil and any chosen implement of inscription.
When you get bored enough of the questions/discussion, hand off your tinfoil transcript to be digitized. I am leaving the digitization/conversion process up to you. Somehow transfer the discussion notes made by the scribe into this google doc (handily repurposed from the day Sammy led discussion back at the end of September).
Feel free to comment on and reply to other groups’ efforts once your own tinfoil inscriptions are transferred. We will see how the conversation evolves (or doesn’t?) as it moves between/across media….