Currently reading Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz (Ha! he has a wikipedia page). It made me think of the image Your fictions become history (a current side obsession). It is reminding me that I have a very specific temporal position I work from. I think that it is something I need to… not get over… but be mindful of as I approach people working in different temporal frameworks. How/where we see the importance of time changing so much about how we approach the world. Truly. Also, I feel really dirty for having a temporal framework.
My Basic Temporal Configuration
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your fictions become history), 1983photograph and type on paper9 5/8 x 6 1/4 inches (24.4 x 15.9 cm
I believe the now is transient at best.
(really, it is fleeting.)
I believe the past is about the future.
(as such, we create both the past and the future)
I believe that this means that the past is the key to the future.
(and the now is a combination of both the past and the future)
I believe memory is how we remember the past.
(it is also the key to how we imagine the future)
I believe that what we remember is faulty.
(and the past determines how we fill in the gaps in the future)
I believe the Digital fundamentally changes how we conceptualize & interact with Memory.
(and this is a big part of what I’m exploring in my dissertation)
If I think that History & the Digital in a Post September 11th World, mean that history is no longer history as such due to the proliferation of new handheld media devices and social media and the pace and type of information exchange, it stands to reason that I’d also believe this has huge ramifications for the future of the Academy. Surprise! I totally do. I spent the first year of my PhD program trying to figure out how I imagined my work and my teaching in this new future. This was part of what I played with as a participant of Future Class, and experience I documented with an online field journal. And then I had to clamp down and work on my primary PhD project, teaching, etc, expanding how I was thinking through these things along the way.
And then, #Twittergate 2012: The etiquette (and ethic) of live-tweeting a conference or lecture happened. Tressie McMillan-Cottom wrote up one of her fabulous blog posts on it. And I was left with my question. What does all this say about the future of Academe?
Final say is this: if someone tweets you and attributes your ideas to you? It’s a citation not theft. #twittergate
— Jade (@jadedid) October 1, 2012
The two biggest changes that I feel we need to come to terms with in academe are the following:
- the changes in information access (the towers have been digitized and are slowly falling down)
- Ciatationality/Iterability (oh humanism, how you haunt me)
The ways people access our academic work, and the things they choose to cite are different now than they used to be. This means that citations are no longer just things that happen in papers. They happen in and from blog posts and social media. They are formatted to fit the medium where they appear. If you are giving a talk at a conference or a lecture, and someone tweets something from you, having disclosed their location (at your talk, usually done once with tweets following), and given an conference or lecture an appropriate #hashtag, I have a very hard time seeing how this is not a citation for the twitter age. The ability for others to then retweet (RT) or modifytweet (MT) with the username of the original tweeter just becomes the iterability of the ideas you are sharing.
The thing about this digital and the current situation that the Academy finds itself in is we no longer have years and years to make our arguments, formulate our ideas, practice them with a select group of people, write them out, have them edited and reviewed and modified and then sent to the public. Things have changed, especially in terms of how people interact with information. A majority of the people I interact with (mainly my students) do more reading on their smartphone and computer screens than they do from books. Just like with Journalism and History, they are used to being able to have a question, google it, and have it instantaneously. As a result, things get old really fast, especially if the interactive practice of questions and response, or response and modification aren’t built in to the format. If we are not up for real time feedback on our work, being questioned, or having people outside the room know our thoughts and ideas when this dialogue (and the writing sharing of it) is at least 50% of our job? I don’t want to sound fatalistic, but… I’m scared we are going to keep failing, especially in areas like the Humanities.
The ability of the greater public to latch on to our work and feed it is what, I think, makes the humanities and social sciences such a fun place to play. But we have to be willing to let go of some control and let ideas do that thing that ideas do: grow. Twitter is a great tool for that. And I still maintain that, if you are giving a talk that people find important, interesting, problematic, or challenging enough to tweet, that means your work is doing what it should supposed to do. Generating more thoughts, ideas and questions. Or maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t want to have the final say in the work I am doing. Instead, I truly do want to see it grow.
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has a Whispering Gallery. It is a 40 foot long sroom covered in metal. The thing is, when you stand at one end, you can whisper the quietest whisper you can manage, and the person at the other end can HEAR you as though you were speaking right into their ear. That moment when you realize that your little voice has made it to the other side, because the other side replies and you experience what happened to them when they heard your whisper, is a moment of glee. And then you keep doing it until other people show up because even though you may have heard that voice before, you know get to hear it as breath, a whisper, loud and clear. Digital media, for me is like that whisper. There is loud talking about what it means to be black and what it means to be a black woman and what the black experience is supposed to feel like, look like, sound like, taste like, etc. that we have a hard time letting it just be. When I say be, I mean it in terms of being a state of becoming.
Ghana 1881/1895
Digital media is the place where I can’t see the other side of the whisper room, but I know it is there. I hear the whispers that make their way to me, across time and space, through cables (as light, yay fiber optics!). Digital media is the space where I can find a photograph and post it with the whisper “did you know she was this beautiful?” and I can hear back “she really is”. And while yes, she might be and/or represent all those things that define the black experience, in fact, I may be even placing her as “the Black Woman” at that moment of whisper, we are allowed to just see her and see that yes, she was, is, and will always be beautiful. And we are allowed to see her and say yes, she is and will always be, like me.
I go into my project knowing it is not a critical mass project. However, I know how whispers affect feeling and how seeing affects world making. My only hope is that by sharing these photographs of women who were here before us, I help keep their images in mind. Having that image creates a new world. This is, of course, the moment when things move from media to performance.
We were sponsored by Mozilla Labs (of course as this is part of the concept series) and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill.
All in all, the event was very successful. The three things I heard the most from attendees were:
- “I’ve learned at least as much as I’ve put in if not a lot more”
- “I’m having a lot of fun!”
- “This has really changed how I think of group work”
Unfortunately, as is often the case with free events, some of the people who registered didn’t show up. We had space for 32, at our high had a registration number of 28 ended up with ~20 registrations once cancellations came in, and 15 people showed up, 1 of whom was a walk-in that I had extended an invitation to. So, small group. I’m not sure how to combat this phenomenon. I had the same experience with THATCamp RTP. In the end it was a really good size though. I put people into three groups of 5. Each group had a smart room with projectors, Internet access, etc (something that wouldn’t have been possible had we had more). Needless to day, all things have their blessings.
As an organizer I was forced to be in on the outside looking in. I spent a little bit of time with each group usually listening, occasionally speaking. Two of the three groups were so in to their design that there really wasn’t room for late/outside contributions. Our mentor, Joyce Rudinsky, had the same experience as she moved from team to team. This was a good thing. They all produced some pretty amazing stuff, that they have posted (and are continuing to post) to the wiki.
In terms of things that were successful, my top 3 things that went well were:
- Teams of 5 (seemed like just the right number)
- Lunch (we were able to provide it, and people socialized the entire time and got to know each other)
- Spaces/Stationary (it seemed like people had access to everything they needed so they were okay “locking” themselves in their rooms.)
Three things that could have been a bit better:
- A bit more time to plan (we were constrained based on space availability)
- Finding ways to get broader outreach (We had a good group, but would have loved a little bit more diversity)
- More structured input points (I think if the teams knew at point x someone will stop by and critique it would have been easier)
All in all though, the event was a great success. If anyone is interested in seeing what we did, please check out the wiki!
I am looking forward to seeing what the other Design Jams come up with.
I totally survived. In fact, I kind of sort of had an amazing time. By far though, the most amazing for me thing was the Echo Park Film Center:
http://www.echoparkfilmcenter.org
I first saw them at the Mozilla Science Fair, on Thursday night, the night I arrived, and was exhausted (the super shuttle took 2 hours!!!). I also presented at the Science Fair on Future class (more on that later), and was put next to this table with tons of DVDs, prop films, buttons, and two super charismatic guys (I wish I had taken a picture. I’m sure someone did, and I’ll find them and add them later).
Anyway, Out the Window consists of many film and media centers that are doing outreach to marginalized youth. It gives them a space to create, express themselves, explore etc. They brought a group of kids that had participated in the various programs to speak during their panel, well, really during the question and answer session. They were AMAZING!!! All of them said that they were empowered, and all of them, without prompting, explained their experience as a chance ot think critically. I LOVED it. So I had to ask a question, that is related to my research interests of course. I asked them if participating in these groups, and learning how to and actually creating these alternate narratives and representations of themselves and their neighborhoods and communities had changed how they view their communities, neighborhoods and how their role in them. One kid stood up. He was latino, tall, lanky with long hair and a red ski cap on. His name was Walter. Let me tell you, Walter blew us ALL away.
He talked about how all the representations he’s ever seen were made by people who had the money to control all the messaging that gets out on a massive scale, and all that messaging made people like him and from his neighborhood seem bad, less than and not worthy. But the project had allow him to see what he can do, and explore the rest of LA and see what it was like, and he was just like everyone. His participation made him feel empowered, and let him think critically about the situation and it allows him to show it for what it was.. and you could just feel the love and empowerment and it was seriously, tears. I talked to other people and they had the exact same experience. Just phenomenal and mind blowing.
The best part of all of this is of course that there is a big blue bus called the film mobile that has been gutted and turned in to a mobile cinema and production studio and it will be coming to North Carolina over the summer. I am SOOOOO there.
Even cooler, I got a couple of the DVDs of things the kids have made and I’m planning on sharing them with some of my classes and of course, guarding them as the sacred items they are for years to come.
Then there was the DML Showcase, which was amazing! I will have to write more about that later (probably with video), but it was soooo inspiring.
On to what I did
SCIENCE FAIR: Future Class
So, there was a Mozilla Science fair at DML2011. I exhibited as Future Class. I had my drumbeat site up and explained that my role in the class was to see how digital media could be used in ethnographic projects. The best comment was “isn’t that just a blog?” my response was of course, yes, and I explained that the purpose was to show a quick and easy way to create a discursive space where you field site can visibly say yay or nay to your observations. Even if it is just a blog, most people aren’t allowing for that type of exchange yet and blogs are easy and simple.
I also had a very small activity. I explained that future class was about thinking in the digital age and exploring what that means and what the challenges are in the university setting. It was a project based tutorial for the most part, but we also had to determine what needed to be different than the traditional classroom experience. I had tons of post its and pens and let people cover the table with words, sentences and paragraphs of what they needed to be changed. Almost everything centered around assessment and community/engagement. There were also quite a few on media.
A Taste of Mozilla Drumbeat: Storming the Classroom Grading and Community
The next thing I did was have a workshop session at the drumbeat workshopping session. The purpose of this was to create a foundational idea of what we want grades to do so people could then move on to brainstorming tools and methods to get them to where they needed to be. I had the smallest group but we had a wonderful time. I brought a ton of markers and a roll of paper and we created a “cloud” of thoughts (there were 4 of us), first on what was bad about how grading currently works, then what was good about how grading currently worked and finally on what are wishless was for how grading should work in the future. Everything ended up being that grading needs to be a community driven type of thing that allows for continuous feedback rather than relying on test that are incapable or measuring what people actually learn. Oh, and collectives. Classroom spaces need to be more community driven. I think the paper we had ended up being at least 14 feet. We taped it up on the wall. Even though we were few, we did something big, literally.
PANEL: New Collectives HASTAC Scholars as a Case Study
The last thing I did was a panel with Cathy Davidson, Fiona Barnett and Dixie Ching, on the HASTAC Scholars. I showed a short film (final edited forth coming) and share a website: http://jadedid.com/dml2011
The other three women on the panel? Simply amazing. I continue to be humbled to be sitting with these people.
I also shared my big revelation from DML2011.
ACADEMICS are just HACKERS and REMIXERS and FORKERS of KNOWLEDGE! By that I mean, what is a dissertation or a thesis other than taking the existing body of knowledges, mixing them, remixing them, forking them, modifying them, changing them, breaking them and coming up with something new and then publishing them? We just do it on paper (and that is starting to change slowly but surely).
I don’t know why it took me so long to come to that realization. When I think about academic work like that though, it makes me super happy.
So, all in all… wonderful amazing trip. There are so many people out there doing amazing work, and being around them is simply inspring. I’ve got to do more. I just have to.