“Decolonize the Media argues that in the 21st Century, the global economic system’s most precious resource is human consciousness. From social networks to popular culture, corporations use media to exploit and colonize our attention. But with insights drawn from grassroots activism, sustainability, ancient wisdom traditions and media literacy, we can create sacred media that defies the parasitic strategies shaping planetary communications.”

If you are interested in reviewing the book or interviewing me as part of the launch, I’m compiling a media list to be submitted to the publisher. They will send you a preview copy when it is ready (after x-mas, probably). Please send me an email: info@worldbridgermedia.com

Thanks in advance for your support and interest.

Up to this point most of the chapter discussions have involved language, jargon and references from thinking and schools of thought that are outside my own particular expertise. Though I find those discussions quite interesting, I have not really been able to participate in them with any depth. For chapters 5 and 6 I’m going to discuss the material from the perspective of my particular interest, which is media education. I apologize in advance for not adding much to the previous conversations. Hopefully you will gain something from my perspective.

Chapters 5 and 6 launches Part II of the book, which focuses on the “Who, What, and Where of Integral Ecology.” Chapter 5, “Defining, Honoring and Integrating the Multiple Approaches to Ecology,” is an ambitious effort (as is all the other sections of the book) to group and define the various schools of ecological thought according to the AQAL grid.* Chapter 6, “Ecological Terrains: The What That is Examined,” is a more extended examination of the first of three major concepts laid out in chapter 5.

I find the approach of both chapters quite useful, actually, and like the idea of mapping ecological theories according to their various perspectives. I’m not immersed enough in any of the specific theorues to quibble about their placement, so I suspect others who are more steeped in a particular tradition or attached to a method might object to their location. If anyone wants to argue the specific classifications of ecological perspectives in these chapters, by all means use the comments section to do so. I’m going to apply this method of mapping to relevant media theories for my own work.

Simply put, who = epistemology, how = methodology and what = ontology (these are not meant to be in any particular order because they are enacted simultaneously). Any stakeholder will come to the table with some kind of configuration of these, and E/Z point out that no human is wrong 100% of the time, so everyone will have a partial perspective that has validity according to his or her perspective (who, how, what) based on a number of possible configurations. Again approaching this from my own bent as a media educator, this model helps clarify how media practitioners will approach media differently according to a variety of contextual and environmental factors. They will chose to use media in unique ways as opposed to the view of most media critics that treat audiences as uniform.

The authors use the term “holon” to describe any node in the network of these relations. The holon can be a “member” of an ecosystem (biophysical and noospherical) but not a part, reflecting its relative autonomy to choose an interaction (however limited or expanded it might be given the perimeters of its structural coupling—here I’m borrowing from Varela and Maturana’s explanation of why an ant will be limited in what it can do versus a human). The holon’s reality will open up according to its worldspace.

According to E/Z each quadrant is a “terrain.” The integral ecology perspective takes into account all four terrains of the AQAL grid. So when we see a tree, there are actually many trees within different perspectives. This concurs with how media texts are viewed according to different theories. For example, in my survey of media education texts I found that most look at media from the LR perspective, in other words, from the view of only one terrain. In recent years there has been research that looks at what audiences do with media (UL, LL) as opposed what it does to them (LR). Unfortunately most debates about media (and media literacy) are either about the interior versus the exterior point of view, but rarely both. The UR is rarely discussed in media studies except for one field—media ecology —which tends to look at how the the LR’s technology shapes the cognition and behavior of individuals. This interests me greatly, in particular how different kinds of media correspond to different brain functions (i.e. TV is right brained, whereas as literacy is left brained). An integral approach would definitely look at cognition and behavior as important elements of how we engage media.

The beauty of the quadrants model as applied to media education is that it allows us to see how our experience of media is enacted according to differing affordances. The quadrants are not separate but emerge together. So if we look at a media text as a boundary object, it can be understood from the point of view of economics (LR), its impact on physiological behavior (UR), phenomenology (UL) and culture (LR). I think from Varela’s view, all these factors co-enact each other. This would be a tough pill to swallow for critical theorists who believe that political economy (LR) is the root structuring mechanism that drives consciousness. In Marxist terms LR and LL would be the “superstructure” and the UL and UR would be the “base” (I think). What gives the appearance of a stronger influence of a particular area, such as political economy, would be the center of gravity it has to pull behavior towards it. So though it would appear that Britney Spears is just a phenomena of the culture industry and is only popular because of economic forces that shape taste, the individual who encounters Spears and is her fan is also enacting her desire (I’m thinking out loud here) according to the worldspace that opens her reality. Her worldspace could be shaped by family, religion, education, mental development, emotional state, age, gender identity, etc.

The terrains model concurs with what I had already noticed when I worked Native American communities. On the rez I could see that the social science perspective only told part of the story. According to the culture industry model, Native culture should be obliterated, but that is not the case. What made some more resilient to the influences of technocratic culture than, say, a suburban white person? To explain what I was encountering, I developed something based on the medicine wheel (I call it a “media wheel”) which also has four quadrants: cognition, culture, environment, and individual. The integral model I think is clearer and better thought out.

Quadratic and quadrivia:

Who: The quadratic approach is represented by the quadrant of ontology (being). In this quadrant we place the individual (holon) at the center. She has four simultaneous modes of enacting reality (going clockwise): experiential phenomena (UL), behavioral phenomena (UR), social and system phenomena (LR), and cultural phenomena (LL).

What: The quadrivium is the quadrant of epistemology (knowing, a way of seeing). This is how we look at any phenomena (such as a dying fish in a lake). For my purposes, this would be how one approaches a boundary object (such as a Pepsi commercial). Unlike the ontology quadrant, we put the boundary object in the center and look at if from four perspectives (going clockwise): psychological and phenomenological inquiry (UL), behavioral and physiological analysis (UR), ecological and social assessment (LR), and cultural and worldview investigations (LL). This seems to come close to Peirce’s semiotic elements.

How: The corresponding methodologies for looking at the media text would be: phenomenology (UL), physiological properties of media/textual elements such as color, sound, motion, editing as they relate to cognitive/sensory experience (UR), economic factors of media/critical theory (LR), and the cultural aspects of it—anthropology/semiotics (LL).

In chapter 6 E/Z write about 12 niches of ecological perspectives. For them, each terrain is comprised of three levels of complexity. This is where I get a little lost and I feel they are cramming too much into the model. I’m not even going to get into it because it give me an ice cream headache trying to integrate it.

The rest of chapter 6 is devoted to examples of perspectives that focus on each terrain. This is very helpful. I appreciate the abundance of examples used to help explain these rather complex models. The final example, the 12 niches of a stream restoration project, shows how exhaustive the model is. Personally, I find it a bit too exhaustive. It’s hard to get an overall picture when there are too many perspectives to take into account. Sometimes there is a benefit to simplification and for my personal tastes, the 12 niches pushes me over the edge. However, as demonstrated earlier, the four terrains combined with the quadratic and quadrivia perspectives are very useful mapping tools that allow for the combination of differing theoretical camps.

* If you are entering this forum without the context of the previous discussions and chapters, these initials correspond to the All Quadrants All Levels grid developed by Ken Willber (see above graphic). Here is a brief summary:

Upper Left (UL) – “I” is the interior first person view and can be characterized by phenomenology/umwelt/subjectivity.

Upper Right (UR) – “It” the exterior reality of the individual that is described by behavior and can represent the objective conditions of a person, such as her cognitive and sensory structure.

Lower Right (LR) – “Its” represents the holon’s environment and can be characterized by an ecological or economic system, depending on what aspect we are investigating.

Lower Left (LL) – “We” is the interior plural reality that is identified with culture, language and semiotics.

The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World

Hands down this is the most practical book on sustainability education available. It consists of 32 short five page chapters with concise concepts and activities. Topics include (but not limited to) media literacy, culture, systems thinking, technology, ecocriticism, economics, commons, permaculture design, community gardening, ecological intelligence, materials awareness, complexity theory, and so-on. The book’s Website has additional downloadable chapters. If you were to get one book on sustainability literacy, I would get this one.

Mediactive

A very practical book for any media practitioner. It combines both useful advice for promoting alternative and independent journalism, and is an excellent primer for “crap detection,” or media literacy. You can download a PDF for free from the book’s Website. This is an accessible book that can be assigned to undergrads.

Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability

I assigned chapters from this to my digital media culture class. It is clearly written and looks at IT from various perspectives. It is both critical and pro-active, with excellent conceptual tools for thinking about how to convert power-hungry IT to a greener future.

Making is Connecting

I admit that I haven’t read too much of this book yet, but based on blurbs and some of the videos from the book’s Website, this is very promising. In particular David Gauntlett connects DIY crafts activities with the Internet, featuring a lengthy chapter on Ivan Illich. I like the approach. As an old punk who got into media and online publishing from my experience of DIY, connecting the online and off-line worlds through the discussion of appropriate technology tools is a good way to connect the dots.

Language and Learning in the Digital Age

A new offering from James Paul Gee (co-authored with Elisabeth R. Hayes), this book is a very accessible discussion of the debates around language and digital literacy. In particular it argues that digital media are indeed examples of oral cultural expression. It also takes the perspective that literacy is a technology. I would recommend this as an excellent and accessible introduction to the highly contested debate about the impact of digital media on learning.

Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing

Although old in terms of Internet years (it was published in 2004), Digital Ground remains a truly prescient book. Written from the perspective of architecture and design, the book approaches the emergence of pervasive computing from outside the tech bubble. It has the best explanation for why humans ultimately rejected virtual reality, and challenges some naive assumptions about interactivity. I got the book on a tip from my friend and mentor Kathleen Tyner, who is one of the top media literacy scholars in the world. If she says this is her favorite book, then I take that as a five-star recommendation,

Design Literacies: Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age

Recommended by blog reader Davey, this has turned out to be a wonderful find. For me design is where it’s at in terms of really understanding why things are made to do the things they do. This book focuses largely on interactivity, and comprises interviews with some of the key innovators of Internet Web design (here we are not talking about the aesthetics of design, but rather the usability of it). The authors interview business people, artists, educators and techies. An excellent example of ethnographic research.

Films:

Objectified

I stumbled upon this while looking for a documentary about computer design for my digital media class. Though the film focuses mostly on industrial design, it does features interviews with people from the computer industry, including Apple. Made by the folks who brought us Helvetica, this film was a big hit with my students. It does a good job of going into the minds of designers and describing the kinds of decisions they make as they develop their projects. It even nods to sustainability.

Manufactured Landscapes (US Edition)

Based on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, this documentary takes a troubling look at how our demand for consumer goods has transformed the Chinese landscape. The film impacted my students greatly, giving them a deeper sense of how our media gadgets directly impact the environment. Bonus: here is a link to a short video about Burtynsky’s latest project on oil.

Can American Beauty‘s famous plastic bag scene generate as much introspection about beauty as the social Web?

Are social media fragments like plastic bags, which at first seem perfectly convenient and useful until you start seeing them blowing everywhere like wind through the hive mind? Obviously it’s a false analogy, because bags don’t network with each other (at least not for now). But ephemeral little posts float past our lives and at times can feel just as polluting as plastic waste.

I often wonder if the social media world is a solipsistic self-referential bubble that is only relevant to itself. Though I’m still not settled on how I feel about it (I continue to participate), there seems to be a some indications emanating from the bubble’s membrane that many people are not convinced of the hype. Douglas Rushkoff, whose book Program or Be Programmed I just blogged about, is a known skeptic. But there’s also now rumbling’s from some unexpected places. I just picked up Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, which is a wonderful polemic against the dangers of the social Web reducing humans into binary bits (if you are old enough to remember, Lanier was an early proponent and designer of virtual reality). And then there’s Sherry Turkle, who has always been ambivalent about life on screen. Her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, steps up the criticism.

This Fast Company interview with Turkle starts out with the statement, “I didn’t realize MIT hired Luddites.” Such usage is pejorative. It is part of the flak that keeps people from honestly confronting that which we take for granted, namely the ubiquitous presence of the net in our lives. To its credit, Fast Company is airing these views, albeit in guarded, qualified terms (also, it would appear that one must be from MIT, home of Nicholas Being Digital Negropante, to be authoritative enough to say something).

The trouble is that whenever anyone critiques the Web or technology, they are immediately attacked as Luddites. This is an abuse of history, and people should not use the term without fully understanding its implications. Luddites were not anti-technology. What they were against was the dismantling of their livelihood by automation. They destroyed factory machines because of how they disrupted the social fabric of their communities. Luddites did not accept uncritically the notion that they had to pay a price for so-called progress. Unfortunately we live in a day and age when “progress” and “growth” are dogma that can’t be criticized. They are sacred in the same way that once we were not allowed to say the world was round. I suggest that if people want to really understand the Luddites, they should read Kirkpatrick Sale’s excellent historical account, Rebels Against The Future: The Luddites And Their War On The Industrial Revolution: Lessons For The Computer Age (great title, isn’t it?).

Lanier is right to point out that technology criticism should not just come from the so-called Luddites. It should be coming from programmers and users alike. Otherwise how can we argue for a more humane and sustainable system?

I’m in the weird zone of being between the blind media progressives (not liberals but those who celebrate progress at any cost) and the anti-technology polemicists from the ecology movement. I’m trying to find a middle way, but like the noise generated between the left and right, it’s hard to find compromise. I think part of the problem is that for those of us who like technology and use the tools, we take it personally when critics like Nicholas Carr come out and say that Google is making us stupid.

However, I think it is our responsibility as cultural citizens to not just be consumers, but to critically engage our reality. Because most of us are not engineers or programmers, we often feel like we have no choice. And given the political and economic climate where Comcast, Verizon and ATT can have their way, it often feels like we users are pretty small in the greater scheme of things. I don’t have the solution, but I think it is important to at least understand what is at stake. We can start from an empowered position that we are cultural citizens, or more importantly, green cultural citizens. To quote Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell from Climate Change and the Media:

“Economic citizenship predicated on limitless media growth diminishes potentially egalitarian and sustainable production, consumption, and participation, because it omits the impact on climate change of media technology and uptake…. Green citizenship looks centuries ahead, refusing to discount the health and value of future generations as it opposes elemental risks created by capitalist growth in the present. This necessitates an eco-ethical orientation toward the media.”

As I have stated at other points, I’m a Net agnostic. There is much I like, but at the same time I want to caution against blind Utopianism. Let’s just say that for now in term’s of the Net’s longterm impact on society, the jury is out having a picnic with their friends. I think it is fair to heed Lanier’s advice to be cautious of the social Web’s promiscuity, and to not just clutter the world with plastic bags of the mind.

I’m in the process of deciding whether or not I should use Rushkoff’s latest book, Program or Be Programmed, in my course. I agree in sentiment with his basic argument: use or be used, program or be programmed. But without having read the book and the scant info on its Website, it’s unclear what he means by “programmer.” I think a diverse society with different skill sets is necessary, and I wouldn’t agree that everyone should be a programmer. For example, back in the day when I was co-owner of an alternative magazine distributor, I found it necessary to rely on accountants, lawyers and warehouse managers. I couldn’t possibly function if I was an expert in each field. However, what did enable me to survive and thrive to some extent was the capacity to design and understand the company’s system.

Moreover, being in the field of alternative media at the time of the zine explosion in the early ’90s I had access to hundreds of new publishing ventures inspired by the ethos that anyone could publish. This fulfilled my punk rock/DIY dream of everyone learning to become mediamakers. Unfortunately, quantity did not result in quality. I was pretty disillusioned by the amount of crap that was coming out of so-called alternative publishing circles, which led me to conclude that maybe some people should just stick to accounting.

What I think Rushkoff is alluding to here is really about design, and not necessarily a programming issue. A systems design literate person will know which tools are better, such as those that promote the cultural commons versus enclosure, or the benefits of open versus closed design approaches. From a sustainability perspective this would enable people to make better choices about how to invest their energy, because they would know the difference between shallow and deep systems change.

In spirit I think Rushkoff is on the right track, and hope to have more clarity after I read the book. I’ll let you know how it goes.

PS This is a great watch: Rushkoff’s rants at a brand manager’s conference about the infinite regress of brands using social networks and blasts the oxymoron of social marketing. (H/T DK)

Which begs the question, who in the social media world is talking about ethics and not just hype?

Thank the Great Whatever that I picked up Patti Smith’s Just Kids at the Rome’s Fiumicino airport on my way to the US. Not only did it get me through the 12 hour flight to the states, but it inspired great thoughts and insights about one of my favorite artists.

As you probably have heard, Just Kids won the National Book Award. One has to wonder why there hasn’t been any right-wing chest thumping about this choice, given their perception that American artists promote communism, homosexuality and drugs. There is little in this book that would dispel this myth.

It takes place from the late-sixties to mid-seventies, covering a formable period of New York artistic life. This book is perfectly bookended by Warhol’s POPism: The Warhol Sixties and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s biography of early punk. This would certainly be a solid trilogy for American Studies, and would provide welcome relief from the false myth of the wholesome and “morally pure” American. In fact, among these artists you will find more honesty and moral backbone than anyone on the Christian Right.

Just Kids revolves around the relationship between Smith and her long-time companion and collaborator, Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of you may remember that Mapplethorpe was a target of the late Jesse Helms, a far-right art critic and nemesis of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS and was known for his erotic gay photos, but that wasn’t his only subject. Aside from being a great love story, the book is also an honest look at a life of art, and the sacrifices it entails. Though Smith and Mapplethorpe dreamed of fame and better lives through out their youth, they struggled through homelessness, illness, starvation and an ascetic, if not Bohemian, kind of life.

I enjoyed reading about New York before it became a corporatized Disneyland. I remember the City in the ’80s when it was still a gritty and raw place. Though I don’t want to romanticize poverty, I liked the old, decomposing NYC when artists lived to push the boundaries of what society offered, living in the margins of capitalist decay. The book’s depiction of Chelsea Hotel (where Smith and Mapplethorpe lived for many years) and its mix of vagrants, eccentrics and rock stars brought back memories of what life was like in downtown LA during the early ’80s when punks mingled with Bukowski and various fringe artists. Not to be nostalgic, but I really miss those days.

This is a beautifully written book full of passion for life, art and love. It offers lots of insight into how a young woman from Jersey who worked in factories as a teen followed her love of Rimbaud down the rabbit hole to a life-changing odyssey of poetry and music. I think Smith would be the first to say we don’t need any more heroes, but she definitely ranks as one for me.

I just jammed through two fast reads that simplify big debates about the the world of media and where we’re going. The Unidentified is a Young Adult novel that depicts a dystopic vision of education and Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking is a pragmatic but optimistic manifesto for the power of social media to further progressive activism. Both offer strikingly different Web 2.0 scenarios.

Like its YA counterpart Feed, The Unidentified is not a hifalutin text about digital media’s impact on youth culture. Rather, Feed and The Unidentified are novels written for young readers that offer literate, critical takes on the downside of corporatized social media. Feed, in case you haven’t read it, is about a future world with a dead ocean and kids who are wired from birth into an augmented reality that is always trying to sell them something (via the “feed”). Their speech and vocabulary have been reduced to a kind of text-messaging slang. It’s pretty depressing and not too far from some of the ideas in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (a must see). I only mention Feed in passing because it bookends well with The Unidentified, which is more up to date with current media fads.

In The Unidentified, school has been entirely privatized and branded by a hybrid of technology, gaming, fashion and security companies. School is now The Game, and takes place in a repurposed shopping mall. Kids graze experiences, all branded of course. The administrators have cleverly appropriated many of the cool cultural practices many of us libertines celebrate, such as crafting, remixing, gaming and so on. Surveillance is everywhere and welcomed by the students because it enables them to be seen and observed by cool hunters. The goal of The Game is to get branded. Yes, a sickening reality, but also a logical consequence of our current neoliberal push to privatize education. This is a cautionary tale not only for adolescents but for us adults who are designing future education strategies that are potentially complicit with the corporate agenda. In particular, as we move into models of open education we have to be vigilant and ethical in how these tools and environments are shaped and informed.

The Unidentified grapples with rebellion, identity, anti-marketing and co-optation. Given that many young people today don’t think critically about these issues (I’m basing this on my observation of lots of the undergrad students I work with), I think the book is provocative, albeit a bit cliched in terms of rehashing the typical Hollywood high school narrative of geeks and freaks versus the snob clicks. The characters are also stereotypically suburban American (i.e. not too culturally diverse), but they are cartoony in order for younger readers to think more critically about their media habits. It’s a call for an ethical response to the consumptive habits we take for granted.

Share This! is a different kind of book. It is a feel-good, optimistically toned manifesto for sharing and utilizing social network tools. Deanna Zandt, who writes and edits for Alternet, is also cautious and critical of the utopian assumptions we have about the Net. Through a careful application of stats, we get an interesting picture of Net usage and demographics that will likely surprise you. This is not an academic book, so for those steeped in theory it might seem a little pedantic. However, sometimes it takes simplification to ground and remind us of the central ideas behind Net activism and social Web tools. It draws on a best-of list of contemporary Net theory (i.e. Shirky, boyd, Rheingold and the like) and also business thinking about new media (which also can be useful).

As an old school netizin, I can’t say that I learned anything particularly new, however the book does distill strategies for using the Web that are obvious once you see them laid out, but are somewhat hidden in the muck of day-to-day practice. I would recommend this book to a newbie because it will provide a coherent and contemporary framework that is practical for promoting any worthy cause. As Zandt reminds us, authenticity rules the net and our authentic presence is required. Likewise, the central characters of The Unidentified are searching for authenticity as well, but get caught up in faux-interactivity that gives the illusion of democracy and choice. I suppose I have a position somewhere between the two books, my pendulum shifting day to day from celebration to despair.

I read both books with my students in mind. I’ve been throwing a lot of theory their way the past few years and was looking for some alternative resources that they will actually read. If time permits, I would assign The Unidentified because it offers an entertaining entry into some very critical territory. I would also use Share This! in a situation in which I was assigning students an activist project. I don’t consider either book particularly rigorous in terms of academic norms, but on the other hand, what is normal doesn’t seem to work anymore, so I’m open to trying something different. We’ll see what happens.

Sci-fi great William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here– it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That could also be said of sci-fi protagonists: the depiction of non-whites is unevenly distributed. In fact, Gibson–who I admire and respect greatly– has been critiqued for focusing on characters who solely work within the networks of elite power. They are technically literate and savvy, and though may on the surface appear to be on the fringes of society, more often than not their lives spin centrifugally towards money and global corporate power brokers.

This is why I have found Octavia E. Butler‘s work so refreshing. In Parable of the Sower (and its sequel Parable of the Talents) it is easy to imagine the novels’ characters inhabiting the same world as Gibson’s cyberpunk sprawls. The difference is that Butler’s characters don’t have access to technology, money or power. Most are barely literate and live in a semi-medieval reality that rims the Emerald City of Cyberspace and sexy hi-tech. They forge and self-organize to defend themselves against an indifferent political disorder that re-legalizes slavery and privatizes the public good. Police, education, water and the fire department are privatized entities beyond the access of poor people, in particular blacks and Latinos. Even television is rare for this population, let alone the ability to read and write.

So while we can imagine cyberpunk cowboys trolling virtual reality and jet-setting at the behest of multinational corporate bosses, in the desert exburbs encircling Butler’s near-future Los Angeles, the planetary underclass struggles to survive amidst the walled communities and ruins of capital’s primitive accumulation. It is in this realm that a New Age religion emerges–founded by a young black woman– which is non-hierarchical and serves the poor. This is a far more hopeful post-collapse vision than one offered by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ll have to read the series to see how the Christian Right captures the flimsy threads of democracy and predictably use that power against the anti-slavers and self-empowered “minorities” who threaten white supremacy.

I think Gibson and Butler are complimentary: they offer parallel visions of a world characterized by the neoliberal logic of social disintegration. These are “alternate” realities, yet also offer stark scenarios that we can hope and pray never transpire. Yet for billions of people, this is a world that also exists today. As any aficionado of sci-fi knows, these books are always about the future present. In an age in which science and rationality have disorganized the world, sci-fi authors are natural prophets. Reluctantly, me thinks.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

I hate to borrow books. To my detriment I have to own them. It’s a weird psychosis, but there you have it. Even for one reference I buy the book. Too bad they don’t pay rent for the space they take up, but I guess it’s better to have books as squatters than relative or friends!

Are e-readers the answer?

I have yet to be sold on e-readers–I’m still old school enough to like holding books in my hands. I can see using an e-reader for page-turning novels, but not for deep-reading and cross-referencing (my thumb still remains the best reading technology available). I constantly check footnotes and the bibliography, and also write notes and underline all my books.

Nonetheless, the concepts presented in the above video by IDEO–a very innovative design studio– has gotten my attention. One of the “battles” of ecologically designed media literacy is to convey the intertextuality of any media–the relationships that help shape the text, such as genre codes, “paratexts” (related texts that contribute to our understanding, such as reviews, interviews, Wikipedia, past interpretations, etc.). (For a more in-depth expanation, Jonathan Gray’s Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, And Intertextuality has one of the best discussion of intertextuality in print.) If there were an app that helped people discover a text’s ecology–that is, its vast relations with other contexts (readers, writers, commentators, other texts, etc.), we can start to view media more systemically and not just as a series of self-contained, atomized things.

Which brings me to its application for sustainability education. As Mary Catherine Bateson argues,

“The tools that will be needed to communicate about the process of climate change have the potential for further broad changes in habits of thought, leading the individual child or adult into a sense of being a part of the biosphere. Such tools include systems metaphors, narratives of connection, cross-overs between disciplines, and cross-overs with ways of knowing such as participant observation. The ultimate goal is an education for global responsibility that unfolds in a pattern of lifelong learning.” (p. 282*)

Such techniques, she suggests, entail incorporating the following approaches:

1) working with environmental metaphors and systems analogies;
2) using narrative;
3) making connections across contexts; and
4) participant observation.

Based on what I’ve seen in the video, the EIDO prototypes could incorporate the above functions and bridge media literacy with systems/ecological understandings of texts. The prospect is quite exciting.

Bateson, M. C. (2007). Education for global responsibility. In S. C. Moser, & L. Dilling (Eds.), Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (pp. 281-91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I want this book for xmas!