Review: Rethinking Media Change
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn & Henry Jenkins: Like many collections, this is a mixture of the insightful and the tedious, sometimes in the same essay. The introduction promises comparative analysis of earlier periods of media transition, to add nuance to the milleniarian fantasies so common in discussions of the Internet’s effects on other media and on life in general, but too many of the essays speak only of contemporary media. Essays on TiVo and how to publish an electronic text are already outdated. What I found notable: Lisa Gitelman has a frustratingly short and provocative piece on uses of the phonograph inside the home and how the adoption of this new technology was connected to gender norms, available here.
Paul Erickson compares the reactions to electronic media to the condemnation and nostalgia evoked by the dime novel. More generally, he comments insightfully on the blindness of those who fear the disappearance of the “book.” His emphasis on the variety of non-electronic texts, from dictionaries to road signs, offers a useful corrective to the assumption in too much work that the novel is the paradigm text and therefore electronic media are inherently destructive to the experience of reading text. (I liked the essay a lot even though he doesn’t know “anyone who has ever read a novel in its entirety off of a computer screen, unless it was a class assignment,” whereas many people I know has done so. His arguments don’t depend on whether it’s possible or desirable to read novels on screen.) A version is here. Similarly, Gregory Crane’s entertaining and insightful essay on historical perspectives on the book offers the scroll, and imagined reactions to the replacement of the scroll by the codex (bound book), to show the persistence of change and the changes in what we think of as the default experiences of reading. Crane uses his discipline, classics, both to provide ways of thinking about texts and to offer an example of how the Internet can improve scholarship and teaching of a field that would otherwise be confined to a small number of classes, forgotten by most students after they left school. Read it here.
Oz Frankel’s contribution, available here, about Congress as a publisher in 19th-century America, doesn’t fit very well into the book’s stated aim, but it was quite interesting to me because of the stories it told of how Congress attempted to manipulate public opinion, and loyalty to particular representatives, through its publishing ventures, but was more often itself manipulated by individuals seeking help in disseminating their ideas. Going back further in time, Daniel Thorburn examines pamphlets printed about orally prophesying, semi-literate Protestants in repressive France, 1685-1710, and how their religious expressions were appropriated and transformed in meaning by being recorded in print.
Luis O. Arata’s Reflections on Interactivity, while slow to start, is better than most of what I’ve read on the subject. His defining characteristics of interactivity -- (1) it favors “multiple points of view that can coexist even if they appear mutually exclusive,” (2) it “celebrates the creative value of play,” (3) it promotes emergent systems that are unpredictable from the sum of their component parts, and (4) it is pragmatic in that it does not depend on an idea of universal, unchanging, objective truth -- made me think about fandom, of course. Feature (1) exactly describes the practice of having a thousand different stories about the same characters, who are thus not “statue[s] on a pedestal” like the traditional image of a creative work. As Arata puts it, interactivity shifts focus to the multiple viewpoints perceiving the object and thus directs our attention more to the subjects doing the perceiving, and we get multiple views of a common phenomenon - Rodney McKay the sex god and Rodney McKay the woobie, or sometimes both. Read it here.
Shelley Jackson, apparently the creator of a hypertext work based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and on L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, has an essay, “Stitch Bitch,” that seems deliberately frustrating, crammed with overwritten metaphors that bore me next to statements that excite me. For example, she points out that, though we have no idea what kinds of works hypertext will ultimately produce, it’s worth remembering that the surrealists “had their greatest influence on perfume ads and paperback book covers.” She follows the rule of thumb “Other people are wrong” with “keep in mind that you are someone else’s ‘other people.’” Unlike Donna Haraway, whose writing also emulates her preferred modes of thought, Jackson defends her loopy style in ways that persuaded me: “I can’t help seeing an analogy between the editorial advice I have often received to weed out the inessentials and lop off the divergent story lines[] and the life advice I’ve received just as often to focus, choose, specialize.” Not original (what is?), but well stated, and ultimately I found her writing had a rhythm that kept me moving forward, in fits and starts. The full essay is available here; I recommend it.
Sharon Cumberland writes about fan fiction in “Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture,” arguing that erotic fan fiction allows women to come together (pun intended), creating a community out of the expression of desires that would be too socially dangerous to admit to others without the (feigned?) anonymity of cyberspace. A different, shorter version of Cumberland’s piece is here. Some names will be familiar, though Killa’s is misspelled in the web paper, not in the book. The last piece I liked, though not the last piece in the book, is Henry Jenkins’s “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” available here, in which Jenkins uses Star Wars fan films to explore the ways in which the differences between artists, distributors, and audiences have collapsed and how large corporations can still assert control despite that.
Paul Erickson compares the reactions to electronic media to the condemnation and nostalgia evoked by the dime novel. More generally, he comments insightfully on the blindness of those who fear the disappearance of the “book.” His emphasis on the variety of non-electronic texts, from dictionaries to road signs, offers a useful corrective to the assumption in too much work that the novel is the paradigm text and therefore electronic media are inherently destructive to the experience of reading text. (I liked the essay a lot even though he doesn’t know “anyone who has ever read a novel in its entirety off of a computer screen, unless it was a class assignment,” whereas many people I know has done so. His arguments don’t depend on whether it’s possible or desirable to read novels on screen.) A version is here. Similarly, Gregory Crane’s entertaining and insightful essay on historical perspectives on the book offers the scroll, and imagined reactions to the replacement of the scroll by the codex (bound book), to show the persistence of change and the changes in what we think of as the default experiences of reading. Crane uses his discipline, classics, both to provide ways of thinking about texts and to offer an example of how the Internet can improve scholarship and teaching of a field that would otherwise be confined to a small number of classes, forgotten by most students after they left school. Read it here.
Oz Frankel’s contribution, available here, about Congress as a publisher in 19th-century America, doesn’t fit very well into the book’s stated aim, but it was quite interesting to me because of the stories it told of how Congress attempted to manipulate public opinion, and loyalty to particular representatives, through its publishing ventures, but was more often itself manipulated by individuals seeking help in disseminating their ideas. Going back further in time, Daniel Thorburn examines pamphlets printed about orally prophesying, semi-literate Protestants in repressive France, 1685-1710, and how their religious expressions were appropriated and transformed in meaning by being recorded in print.
Luis O. Arata’s Reflections on Interactivity, while slow to start, is better than most of what I’ve read on the subject. His defining characteristics of interactivity -- (1) it favors “multiple points of view that can coexist even if they appear mutually exclusive,” (2) it “celebrates the creative value of play,” (3) it promotes emergent systems that are unpredictable from the sum of their component parts, and (4) it is pragmatic in that it does not depend on an idea of universal, unchanging, objective truth -- made me think about fandom, of course. Feature (1) exactly describes the practice of having a thousand different stories about the same characters, who are thus not “statue[s] on a pedestal” like the traditional image of a creative work. As Arata puts it, interactivity shifts focus to the multiple viewpoints perceiving the object and thus directs our attention more to the subjects doing the perceiving, and we get multiple views of a common phenomenon - Rodney McKay the sex god and Rodney McKay the woobie, or sometimes both. Read it here.
Shelley Jackson, apparently the creator of a hypertext work based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and on L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, has an essay, “Stitch Bitch,” that seems deliberately frustrating, crammed with overwritten metaphors that bore me next to statements that excite me. For example, she points out that, though we have no idea what kinds of works hypertext will ultimately produce, it’s worth remembering that the surrealists “had their greatest influence on perfume ads and paperback book covers.” She follows the rule of thumb “Other people are wrong” with “keep in mind that you are someone else’s ‘other people.’” Unlike Donna Haraway, whose writing also emulates her preferred modes of thought, Jackson defends her loopy style in ways that persuaded me: “I can’t help seeing an analogy between the editorial advice I have often received to weed out the inessentials and lop off the divergent story lines[] and the life advice I’ve received just as often to focus, choose, specialize.” Not original (what is?), but well stated, and ultimately I found her writing had a rhythm that kept me moving forward, in fits and starts. The full essay is available here; I recommend it.
Sharon Cumberland writes about fan fiction in “Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture,” arguing that erotic fan fiction allows women to come together (pun intended), creating a community out of the expression of desires that would be too socially dangerous to admit to others without the (feigned?) anonymity of cyberspace. A different, shorter version of Cumberland’s piece is here. Some names will be familiar, though Killa’s is misspelled in the web paper, not in the book. The last piece I liked, though not the last piece in the book, is Henry Jenkins’s “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” available here, in which Jenkins uses Star Wars fan films to explore the ways in which the differences between artists, distributors, and audiences have collapsed and how large corporations can still assert control despite that.