"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."Abraham Lincoln, Dec 1, 1862
There seems to be a continuum or at least a strange 'back channel' debate brewing around Web n-point-0 and its future -- there's a kind of twitter that has all a-jitter. I speak here of the recent statement by Google around the hostile takeover announced by Microsoft over search engine and 'web portal' competitor Yahoo!. The continuum that I reference here, is one that goes to the heart of the Jenkins discussions and his references to Pierre Levy's conceptions of 'community versus commodity.' In the following sense, quoted from the Jenkins article,
"Levy distinguishes between four potential sources of power - nomadic mobility, control over territory, ownership over commodities, and mastery over knowledge - and suggests a complex set of interactions and negotiations between them. The emergent knowledge cultures never fully escape the influence of the commodity culture, any more than commodity culture can totally function outside the constraints of territoriality."
So, on the one hand, Levy is clearly not 'enthralled' with the new communication constellation, for example, broadband networks and recognizes the inter- or arguably co-dependencies of the two systems coexisting. On the other hand, Levy seems to succumb to the utopianism that is uniquely American and that seems to temper the cold economic realities of online communities, and that Jenkins too seems to not fully accept, or perhaps, that he does accept but sees as something fundamentally unacceptable, and therefore should be manipulated accordingly.
I say this, because there does seem to be a great deal of subtext associated with the many discussion points raised by Mr. Jenkins, and also, the way that he has spoken on the subject of higher education and Web 2.0 (or 'n-point-0') - including this past week when I had the good fortune of hearing him at the ELI 2008 conference in San Antonio, TX, and in 2007 at the Annenberg Center on the YouTube University. And you all can have the opportunity to see Jenkins and others of his milieu, Feb 8-10, 2008, this upcoming week here at USC.
The main subtext that I refer to comes out in the lofty missive put out be Google that all but suggests that Google is above criticism and circumspection given the claimed way that Google will ride on its horse - way up high, on its very, very high horse. As with the immediate cynical reaction of many a critic to their corporate mission statement that "You can make money without doing evil," to the way that Google glossed over their dependence upon advertising revenues, many including TechCrunch are questioning Google's rather holier-than-thou attitude. I definitely wonder if Google, like Yahoo! before it, is self enthralled and cannot pull itself away from its own image - on a mirror that duplicates and morphs by the microsecond, and flickers in nearly every American home daily.
And it is precisely this self adoration that has many like me concluding that the 'media' as we know it is nothing more than a mirror reflection of all that we are to ourselves, while at the same time, a complete deception therefore of that which we 'really are.' This deception goes back much, much farther than the Web or multimedia.
In the 2oth Century alone it would seem that Adolf Hitler was quite the multimedia mashup artist, taking film, radio, and banners ( an important 'in real life' or IRL - in Rheingold speak - an important IRL harbinger) that mimic online icons and online banner ads in the form of swastika flags, pins, and banners across 1930s and 40s Germany; and it would seem that while at first rap music was considered something of a rip off of 'original' music; today is considered a precursor to the new millennium's 'mash up' culture phenomenon.
This self adoration seems to come up again and again in my short lifetime. Whether the so-called 'me generation' or the 'Pepsi Generation' that epitomizes the 1960s 'hippy' or 'SDS' or 'Baby Boomer' or whatever you prefer - this generation got seriously self absorbed and mesmerized by television and film, to the point that they too have succumbed to the seductions of watching oneself in the mirror. Whether the 'World's Greatest Rock 'n Roll Band' or the legendary 'Beatles' to the end all, be all event of 'Woodstock,' the 1960s generation is convinced that they are the most important generation that has ever walked the earth. This is what also gives Tom Brokaw the right to proclaim who is, after all, The Greatest Generation.
And now, beginning with the, in retrospect, rather pathetic early attempts by 'Generation X' to create an electronic neural network akin to Marshall McLuhan's Global Village, to the more pragmatist wing of the 1960s generation in the form of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog that brought us Howard Rheingold's beloved 'WELL,' to the Millennials or those in the generation featured in the recent PBS 'Growing up Online'; they all seem strangely and naively self enthralled to the point of obscene. Indeed, there is nothing necessarily obscene about the way that this new American generation interacts and the messages that they send amongst themselves. Rather, it is the predictable conclusion that they reach that is more difficult to swallow -- they seem to be completely self absorbed with themselves in a way that is uniquely American, or perhaps Western, or perhaps 'modern.'
What is more, this type of self absorption seems to be supported by those like Danah Boyd who comments in the PBS Frontline 'Growing Up Online' in a way that suggests that the real issue is one that is framed and encouraged by the traditional, television media (the one that has Boomers and X'ers self enthralled) - that it is a matter of 'yes or no.' That is, in a predictable American tradition, it is either 'good or evil,' as with the War on Terror, Star Wars, Christianity, and a host of other American dominant cultural narratives.
But it is precisely this sterilized version of what 'Growing up Online' means that this blog will implicitly and explicitly challenge; for we know that the world that we live in is not as simple as 'yes or no.' We know that pop culture, Christianity, free markets, advertising, and academia are alone and together much more than 'good or evil.' We also know that this world is at once a very, very harsh place and a very, very gracious and lavish place. Where we land is not necessarily up to us -- and while Jenkins and his milieu suggest strongly that we need to participate in the new media, excuse me if I hold my tongue while the chips are still falling.
All of this is to say that McLuhan's definition of 'media' is much broader than the discussion today that picked up primarily on his electronic network predictions. But the images, for example of 9/11 and NYC, are just as much a distinctly non-American viewpoint of capitalism as they are an attack on innocent American women, men, and children. That is, we have come out of a 'cold war' that clearly involved some very stark and awful images of what the ultimate 'medium' of a nuclear bomb or worse, set of nuclear bombs (nuclear 'media') would mean to the recipients of the not-so-subtle message.
So, yes, the 'medium' remains the message. But the question now, beyond the theoretical extremes of the distinctly binary trajectories of those like Jenkins and Boyd, is much closer to Manual Castells' question around the emerging (and arguably 'real') "Networked Society"; where he asks [paraphrased] -- 'What does it mean to really accept others? Can you really accept that the way others see the world is as legitimate as your way of seeing the world?'
I'm not sure I have the answer -- but I'll have a different point of view [guaranteed!] -- riding home on a crowded bus filled to the brim with differences and different people - after a day's work than right now, sipping a glass of wine on a Sunday evening!
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