Reading Notes

This article is meant to be a resource for students as a way to review the reading materials. I understand that people will probably use this page as a way to get the material down without having to do the reading. Don't do that! People should register and use the talk pages!

Danah Boyd "Why Youth [Heart] Social Network Sites"
Article deals with popularity of social networks, focusing on Myspace via ethnographic data. Boyd is interested in the ways that social networks have unique identity-forming capacities; she's trying to draw conclusions about identity, status, and communication. Posits social networks as "networked publics" with properties of persistence, searchability, copyability, and invisible audiences.

Ethnographic Info - teens who don't use social networks are typically disenfranchised or they consciously object to social networks. When teens don't have Internet access, a participatory divide emerges in which users are able to access Myspace from home typically have much richer social media experiences.

Boyd attributes Myspace's popularity to the site's unique music features which encourage interaction between fans and artists. Boyd also focuses on the fact that almost all facets of Myspace are public - including comments, profiles, and friends. This public aspect is important, as it differs from most interactions in that online social networks are mediated publics. According to Boyd, social networks encourage publics and are public themselves, though of a special sort - "mediated networked publics" bound together by technological networks that mediate interactions between users.

Boyd differentiates between unmediated publics and social networks in four areas:

1. Persistence - social networks save records of all communication that can be easily located and accessed

2. Searchability - easy to search communications to find other users

3. Replicability - expressions in the networks public are able to be copied verbatim via text

4. Invisible Audiences - networked communication can be accessed by anyone anywhere at any time

At this point, Boyd focuses on how identity is created in these social networks. A typical first time user of Myspace usually looks at the profile of another in order to deem what's appropriate in terms of self-representation - a kind of socialization in which the new user learns the social (and sometimes technological) codes for how to present oneself. Boyd uses an impression management model of identity creation consisting of performance (in which an individual shows their created representation), interpretation (in which the individual gauges the reaction of other social network users), and adjustment (the individual changing their representation to elicit a different reaction); for Boyd, this model of identity describes most users of online social networks who "write themselves into being" through their online profiles. Since most teens who use Myspace use it to interact with people they already know off-line, the majority of users create identities that will be accepted by those who already know them.

Boyd moves on to discuss privacy and its place in mediated networked publics. When social media users create their profiles, they do so with an 'invisible audience' in mind - unknown users that may come to see anyone's profile. Brings up question of privacy - who's in these invisible audiences and how much do users want to let them see? Boyd expresses this privacy question by stating "In mediated spaces, there are no structures to limit the audience; search collapses all virtual walls" (16). Most users create barriers to limit access to their online selves via page content and site structure - teens may purposely misrepresent themselves in their profiles (common adjustments are changing location and age to reflect a sense of randomness) or change overall Myspace privacy settings (thus restricting access rights for those who can view one's content). These efforts to make one's Myspace private are effective in that they help by restricting information from online predators of any sort (financial, sexual, etc.), though the trade off is that these increased privacy settings limit the amount of possible interaction among users. For teenage users, the frequent question is how to balance having a rich and open social experience with issues of privacy (usually raised among parents and caretakers).

The article then moves on to talk about the teenage social experience as a whole. Boyd expresses that youth have little access to public space; their socialization with public audiences is often in very controlled and limited situations, such as primary school. The history of the term 'teenager' is rooted in cultures of education, consumption, and labor. Boyd states "Collectively, 4 critical forces - society, market, law, and architecture - have constructed an age-segregated teen culture that is deeply consumerist but lacks agency" (21). For Boyd, online social networks change the architecture of being a teenager by creating "unregulated publics" (online social networks) within "adult regulated spaces" like schools and homes. Boyd ends by expressing a desire for public interaction - the public is a site of identity formation that teenagers need access to.

Identity Performance - Because we can't communicate with vocal inflection or body language over the internet, we have to relearn how to manage peoples impression of ourselves. People carefully choose what information to post, and the capacity for deception is there, as well as conflict with the real world. Boyd notes the case of a potential college student to a prestigious university. While his application was good, his myspace page revealed possible gang ties. Boyd points out that this could simply be his own identity performance, a way of surviving in that environment. But it came back to haunt him, because the college didn't understand the context of his page, they just assumed it was a reflection of the real his life.

Alan Kaprow "Happenings in the New York Scene"
Alan Kaprow's work in the Happenings reflects a strong desire to break down the wall between the audience and the creator in art. However, Kaprow's methods are entirely different from others who reflect the desire to include the audience in action, such as Augosto Boal; Kaprow simply wants to enjoy the experience of his Happenings, whereas Boal wants to use the Theater of the Oppressed to affect social change. The Happenings raise an important question about the role of the artist as an editor and director of the process - is this restructuring of the experience really different, or is it just accepting a little amount of audience input for the artist's manipulation? Are the Happenings really interactive?

Kaprow starts his essay by describing the feelings that Happenings bring out in people, using jarring language, making the experience seem bizarre and incomprehensible. He then begins to describe how Happenings came to exist, pointing out that those who create Happenings are a small group mostly consisting of painters, who merely want "no separation of audience and play" (NMR 85). They don't their artworks and installations to be presented, the artists want them to "happen." Kaprow also makes it clear that the focus of these artists isn't to make artworks that are adhere to typical 'good taste', but instead to create new and unknown experiences. As Kaprow states, "A Happening is generated in action" - what's important isn't necessarily what is made, but what happens, what experience occurs. This desire for creation is also reflected in the use of chance in Happenings, as the creators use chance to introduce spontaneity into their works as a way to reflect vivacity and unpredictability. Because of this precarious balancing of chance and planning, Kaprow explains that happenings cannot be reproduced.

Kaprow feels that Happenings represent a great hope for art; he compares Happenings to abstract expressionism in its importance as he says "Happenings are not just another new style. Instead, like American art of the late 1940s, they are a moral act, a human stand of great urgency" (NMR p87). Kaprow feels that art is stultified, success makes artists capitulate to good taste; his response is the Happenings, which reject standard artistic notions of making money from your work, letting it become successful, etc. Kaprow tries to redefine the American artistic notion of success.

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) "Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance"
From introduction to the essay: "[CAE] demolished the idea that it is impossible for power to co-opt network and hypertext technologies" (NMR p.781)

In this article, the Critical Art Ensemble articulates the point of view that entrenched powers have the ability to inhabit virtual space, which makes subverting those entrenched power relations even more difficult. Though the 'virtual nomad' was a hopeful concept for technoliberationists who believed that being removed from a physical base of operations would help to fight entrenched power relations, CAE posits the nomad as a model that entrenched power relations can occupy as well. CAE uses the metaphor of the Scythian power model, based on a nomadic tribe that attacked anyone it encountered - incredibly powerful because the tribe could never be found to be defeated, the Scythians could only be located by those they were attacking - they almost appeared out of nowhere and their power came from their enemies inability to locate and defeat them. CAE uses the Scythian model as to descibe contemporary entrenched institutions as "where speed/absence and intertia/presence collide in Hyperreality."

CAE then goes on to question how the problem of entrenched power has been fought in the past and what means could be used to fight against the nomad as a model for capitalistic institutions. In particular, CAE questions subversion as an effective practice against institutional power relations on the grounds that subversion implies a fixed, static entity to oppose. CAE suggests that since nomadism gives institutional powers the ability to remain physically dislocated (intersecting between speed/absence and intertia/presence), a new act of opposition must be created. Though the article doesn't go very far in depth with this concept, CAE suggests the disturbance as an act of opposition - though what disturbance is remains unclear and ambiguous.

David Garcia and Geert Lovink "The ABC of Tactical Media" and "The DEF of Tactical Media"
Garcia and Lovink lay out their conceptions of tactical media as a loose group of artists and creators whose work contains common characteristics such as staging public interventions using 'sophisticated media techniques' to manipulate media images. As to why Lovink and Garcia focus on media images, they state "We continue to languish in a world in which many struggles appear to have left the street and the factory floor and migrated into an ideological space of representation, constructed by and through media." Rather than making large andproclamatory statements about what tactical media means, Garcia and Lovink instead choose to make short, fragmentary sentences and descriptors for new media. For the authors, tactical media is the use of cheap, manipulated media by fringe individuals to create situated and participatory art projects; oppositional, though sometimes stuck in that role; the work of some creators to recognize power reversals as central to their practice.

Some examples of Tactical Media projects include:
 * Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's project "Couple in the Cage"


 * The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are the public face)


 * Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Homeless Vehicle Project"

Augusto Boal "Theatre of the Oppressed"
The introduction of the essay urges readers to consider how Boal's "interactive techniques emphasize embodiment." Considering the ambiguity in the boundary between the space of new media and our physical bodies, it is important to ask whether Boal's strategies for crossing the divide between the individual audience member and the actor can be applied to the digital age. Boal describes theatre in four stages, the first two stages are not included in the excerpt in book. First Degree: Simultaneous Dramaturgy "This is the first invitation made to the spectator to intervene without necessitating his physical presence on stage." In this example, Boal dictates that a group of actors perform a ten to twenty minute skits, either with a script or through improvisation. At the climax of the performance, when the main conflict needs to be solved, the actors stop and ask the audience to provide solutions. The actors then improvise all of the suggestions, while the audience is free to contribute and to direct the skit. Eventually the debate over how the conflict should be resolved changes from the actors interacting with just one audience member at a time to the actors collaborating with the audience as a whole; Boal suggests a single participant ask the other members of the audience for input, thus turning the skit from individual direction to collective direction. Boal states that interpreting the collective is a much more difficult and creative process than interpreting the individual.

Second Degree: Image Theater  In this scenario, the participant is asked to express his opinions on a theme that everybody in the audience has already determined. The participant must express his thoughts solely through positioning the bodies of other participants, as if he were a sculptor. After composing the others, the participant discusses his work with the rest of the group which collectively must agree with his sculptures. The first grouping represents the actual image or the way the participant believes the way that theme is in real life; the next grouping is the ideal image, or how the participants thinks of the theme would be represented in an ideal world. Finally, he must show a transitional image, or how to carry out the difference between the present reality and the ideal reality. The importance in this exercise for Boal is to "analyze the feasibility of the change."

Third Degree: Forum Theater

'''Participants are asked to tell a story, grounded in political and social themes, with a conflict that is difficult to solve. The story is reenacted in a ten or fifteen minute sketch and the audience is asked if it agrees with solution presented. If somebody disagrees, the sketch is performed again and that participant must physically replace whichever actor of his choosing, thus presenting a new solution; the rest of the actors must improvise reactions to the new participant, "responding instantly to all the possibilities that [the new solution] may present." All the three of these degrees of theater are rehearsal of revolution because the spectator/actor actually practices a real action even though he's on the stage.'''

Fourth Stage: The Theater as Discourse Boal compares the theater of the bourgeoisie to the "people's" theater. He explains that the pre-rearshed, spectacle-driven aspect of bourgeoisie theater is a reflection of the class's dominance in the world; the bourgeoisie is confident in reproducing the world theatrically, because it's their world that they are representing. The people's theater, on the other hand, invites the audience to participate, and maintain a dialogue with the actors- a type or theater based in discourse. The people's theater is based in rehearsal theater instead of spectacle-theater. Several forms of rehearsal theater were developed in Latin America- Boal goes on to describe several of these forms. 1) New Paper Theater: The process of transforming the daily news into a dramatic performance by adding a new element to the reading (a musical beat, for example), thus offering a new context to the news. For example, in an crossed reading, two news pieces are read out loud in alternating order; each story sheds light on the other and adds new dimensions to the news. 2) Invisible Theater: First, a small script is developed and then rehearsed. Next the scene is performed in a non-theater setting in which the "audience" is not aware that the performance is a "spectacle" and are not, therefore, "spectators". Although the scene is already practiced, during the rehearsal the actors try to imagine every intervention from unaware "spectators" possible forming an "optional text." 3) Photo-Romance: A story is which is taken from an illustrative photo strips, similar to a comic strip, depicting a romantic story of the wealthy and beautiful. The story is then reenacted by actors who are unaware that the plot of the skit comes from a photo-romance strip. After the performance, the acted-out version is compared to the story as it was originally told in the photo strip. Boal says that the performers will compare elements of their own lives to the lifestyle of privilege depicted in the photo-romance and will be "prepared to detect the poison infiltrating the pages of those photo-stories, or the comic and other forms of cultural and ideological domination." 4) Breaking of Repression: This form of rehearsal theater calls for a participant to recall a moment when he felt particularly oppressed and then accepted that oppression by acting in accordance with the oppressor, repressing his own desires. The participant then joins a group that recreates the situation according to exactly how it went in reality. Next, the group then acts out the scene again except this time the participant does not accept the oppression and fights for his own wishes. Boal believes that merely acting out a resistance will prepare participants to resist oppression in the future; he also hopes, through this practice, that participants will no longer view repression as a phenomenon (just an occurrence) but rather as a function of social law. 5) Myth Theater: Boal believes that myths hide obvious, evident truths that can be discovered through analyzation and studying these stories. He suggests that theater could be very helpful in this process although he doesn't provide any specific examples. 6) Analytical Theater: A participant tells a story which is then performed by the actors. After the performance, the audience analyzes each character, deciding what each individual's social status and role is within the story; next, the audience must pick out an object which symbolizes a character's social role. The story is then acted-out again, only in this instance, the audience decides to take away or switch around the characters' symbols. For example, if a policeman's symbol of his social status is a uniform, then how would the story change if his uniform were taken away? 7) Rituals and Masks: "This particular technique of people's theater consists precisely in revealing the superstructures, the rituals which reify all human relationships, and the masks of behavior that those rituals impose on each person according to the roles he plays in society and the rituals he must perform." The best way to describe this rather abstract form of rehearsal theater is to use an example that Boal provides in the text; a man goes a priest in order to confess - rituals and masks theater demands that the social masks be switched around after each performance in order to explore the dynamics of human interaction.

Conclusion: Boal concludes the essay by proclaiming that "spectator" is a bad word and that all members of the audience are subjects with the same amount of agency as the actors. Individual audience members are spectators, liberated - in a way that they are not in dominant social structure- and, thanks to their training with Boal's theater techniques, prepared for social action.

Henry Jenkins "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture"
With the release of The Phantom Menace, fan spoofs and parodies abounded in the summer of 1999. The grassroots movement of claiming Star Wars through fan-made media began with the first release of the digitally upgraded original Star Wars trilogy which was released in 1997 and was cemented with the release Menace two years later. These reworking of science fiction movies and T.V. is a creative process which is no longer confined to fan culture but rather they have become representations of pop culture. Fan media works are an crucial and active members of the "current media revolution" that is changing the way the media industries operate. Star Wars fans have accomplished a sense of democratizing cultural production by widening the usually exclusive media production process through opening up the generals population's access to film production and film distribution tools. Because there are so many Star War fan films that have been made or are in production, the fan media makers' approaches are extremely varied and offers a wide variety of filmmaking. Jenkins determines two different models for media production in the modern age

1) Media Convergence 

Media ownership throughout the last decade has followed a current trend of consolidating media ownership in fewer and fewer hands (think Bagdikian and "The Endless Chain"). The old Hollywood studio system, with its method of vertical integration has been replaced by horizontal integration, or a convergence of various media industries. This "new strategy of content design and development" involves developing products which can reach across industry barriers, for example, a movie may be advertised through online viral video campaigns - such with Judd Aptow's Funny People. A simple way of conceptualizing this process is through an industry catchphrase: "books, hooks, and looks. As Jenkin explains "production decisions privileged films with pre sold content based on material from other media ("books"); easily summarized narrative "hooks;" and distinctive "looks," broadly defined characters, striking icons, and highly quotable lines." The franchise system promotes viewers to experience content through multiple media forms. Franchises are most successful when they can sustain a long-lasting relationship with viewers, thus deeply intricate worlds with many characters and settings are preferred by media companies. Star Wars is a prime example of this type of universe, and one only has to look at the countless tie-ins for purchase (toys, books, soundtracks, etc) to see that Lucas's decisions to forgo a salary for directing the films for a share of ancillary profits was a smart choice on his behalf.

2) Participatory Culture 

As technology becomes more invasive and cheaper, new media technologies begin to reach the hands of the general populations instead of just the media elite. What emerges out of this context is participatory culture, a new type of consumerism. Jenkins argues that these new medias allow the general public to "break down the barriers of entry into the media marketplace;" for example, walkmans (iPods) allow listeners to "create" their own soundtracks as they walk about their daily lives, video games allow players to embody their favorite character and act as if they actually were in a cinematic world, and photoshop allows users to assign new meanings to popular images. Because more and more participants are entering the realm of home-made media production and distribution, society is looking to the past and utilizing a "folk-culture" understanding of creativity- an emphasis on collective authorship rather than individual authorship. Unlike the folk cultures of early twentieth century, however, that dealt with issues of work and social action, modern folk culture speaks to issues about "leisure and consumption." Jenkins writers that it is important to emphasize the unique way that folk culture is being intertwined with mass culture, however, as fans respond to increasingly less diverse media by treating movies and television as material they can use to create their own content. "Fan fiction repairs some of the damage caused by privatization of culture, allowing these potentially rich cultural archetypes to speak to a for a much broader range of social and political views." These media producing Star Wars fan have obviously rejected the notion that there can only be one, "official" version of a story; instead, the fans feel free to add and diversify the tale, personalizing it to their own needs - similarly to a traditional folk tale.

Star Wars offers a rare and interesting combination between media convergence and participatory culture, a "third space." In this space, fans are changing the focus of grassroots media making from a focus on home movies towards a focus on public media, films, and TV shows. These amateur film makers are not only changing the focus of their movies but through changes in distribution technology, they are also mastering the art of getting a large, global audience to view their films. Jenkins maintains that this third space will flourish only if it is protected; a "effective defense" of the concept of "fair use" is necessary. As Jenkins writes, "At the moment, we are on a collusion course between a new economic and legal culture which encourages monopoly power over cultural mythologies which empower consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media images."

Again, a reading of Bagdikian's "The Endless Chain" in the New Media Reader might prove helpful for understanding Jenkins' article better.

Richard Stallman "GNU Manifesto"
"Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way" - Richard Stallman In his GNU Manifesto, Stallman outlines his plans to create free software so that all users who want to work with the material have a chance to. Stallman stands opposed to major softwares companies and their proprietary distribution models; he wants to give away the software so that more people will use it, thus making the experience better for all. Stallman believes that the individuals using the GNU software will contribute to building the software if they have a vested interest (such as being able to use the program). Stallman believes that there is no inherent right to intellectual property, that the sharing of information will lead to better experiences for all when it comes to computing and coding. Stallman pictures his GNU system like this: "The computer-using community supports software development [the GNU project]. The community decides what level of support is needed. Users who care which projects their share is spent on can choose this for themselves."

Elizabeth Losh "Submit and Render: Digital Satires about Surveillance and Authentication"
This essay starts off with the story of Christopher Soghian, grad student who posted a program online that would generate a ticket for Northwest Airlines. Federal agents came to his home without his knowledge and seized his property, including his computer. As Losh analyzes this event,


 * "The larger rhetoric surrounding the competing ideologies represented in the raid on the Bloomington apartment shows how the surveillance and automation made possible by computational media can be used to reinforce existing institutional hierarchies, and yet these same digital tools in the hands of empowered political subjects can be employed to subvert the authentication processes, security protocols, and data-mining functions of the very federal agencies that police the public."