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This is how uncool I am: until I read about Klout at Wired.com, I had no idea what it was. In case you are an Internet loser like me, Klout is a service with a proprietary algorithm that scores how much of a net “influencer” you are (its tagline: “Klout is the Standard for Influence”). Upon my first try, I scored a measly 16, which classified me as a “dabbler.” A 50+ score is for the super savvy, whereas 20 is the average for most users. But when I “liked” one of their partners, WWF, I jumped to 45, making me a “networker.” With such a drastic increase with one Facebook like, I find their scoring methods suspect.

Ultimately I don’t really give a damn about my rank, but at first I have to admit that my initial score left me feeling like one of those kids in the park that no one will play with. Then I got a quick high from my score boost, fulfilling my inner desire to be liked and connected (these are part of the psychological motives that Sherry Turkle writes about in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other). Now that I have been confirmed as an insider (albeit by some kind of software glitch–I’m more likely still a 16), I have to ponder the meaning of this status.

Is it too simplistic for me to say this is just another popularity contest in which the jocks and cheerleaders prevail? Or is it revenge of the geeks? Is this wisdom of the crowds? Or just a measure of the mobs?

The first thing that makes me suspicious of this entire phenomenon is how it defines its particular ecosystem of cool. The only way to generate a score is to connect Klout to predetermined social networks that it dubs worthy. They mostly happen to be corporate platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, LastFM, etc.). There is no way to link my Klout score with my personal blog or presence within independent media communities. Nor does it measure my role within my own communities of practice. It also doesn’t gage my capacity for cultural citizenship. It merely measures how much of these activities have been filtered through the balkanized Web. In this sense, it may just reinforce the branding of social relationships and lead to a kind of digital fascism.

All media systems can be gamed. Klout just allows you to do it for dominant social media platforms. This is both good and bad. If you are a band, writer, activist, musician, etc. it’s good to have a tool that gives feedback for the kind of reach you have. As the graph above indicates, it has a matrix that defines different levels of participation, which allows one to make an action plan for attention.

It’s really hard to get a sense of how quality is measured, however. In fact, it really only shows us quantity. It appears that the algorithm rewards gratuitous and excessive networkers, even those who like to tweet when they are taking a crap. In the end, this just may very well be a refined engine for networked hubris.

I’m a little behind with the following announcements, but I wanted to let you know about a few recent books that feature chapters I’ve written.

From the folks at Reality Sandwich and Evolver Editions, What Comes After Money?: Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community is a great compendium of essays about envisioning a world running under a different monetary paradigm. My chapter, “Poverty (UnConsciousness),” actually started as a blog post here, but evolved into a longer piece about the spiritual dimension of money making and happiness. FYI, you will notice a link in the righthand column for my upcoming book (due July 10), The Media Ecosystem, also published as part of Evolver Editions. If you want to pre-order it now, you can click on this Amazon link.

International Perspectives on Youth Media: Cultures of Production and Education (Peter Lang), compiles a number of leading-edge essays related to media education and youth media. My particular chapter, “Practicing Sustainable Youth Media,” is probably the first essay to link student media making with sustainability issues. Many of the ideas I grapple with are at the core of my PhD research. Publisher link.

I’ve been a media literacy educator for over a dozen years. And since participating in the punk movement during the early ‘80s, I’ve been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I’ve worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time in under-served communities. Consequently, working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted.

While working on the rez, at one point a Native American elder said of the information highway: “any road can get you somewhere.” Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the “somewhere” we are moving towards. It was during the period when I worked on the rez that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of “progress.” More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work.

As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve  the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American university in Rome, I find myself in the unlikely position of having to argue for a greener approach to media. I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of media studies. What follows, then, is a field report from my most recent effort, which was to green a digital media culture course.

The Root of the Problem

Last Spring, about halfway through the semester of my undergrad Digital Media Culture class I asked students to raise their hand if they expected the course to be about ecology. None did, which didn’t surprise me. But I did in fact incorporate ecology as a major element of the course material. Was I forcing an unrelated issue on an unsuspecting class? Is there a legitimate connection between environmental issues and digital media culture?

Absolutely! The impact of electronics on the biosphere is staggering. The entire production chain of our media gadgets damages the environment in several ways. Issues include:

• the toxins used to make gadgets and their impact on the health of workers and their communities;

• the CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic networks (which is now equal to the global aviation industry);

• the ecological “mindprint” on our perception of time, space and our sense of “place”;

• the enabling of a destructive globalized growth economy; and

• the e-waste generated from over-consumption.

It’s not all negative. There are many positive aspects to digital media culture that may also help us prevent an impending global ecological catastrophe, in particular the emergent culture of sharing, connecting and self-organizing prevalent on the Web. I also hope that the kinds of social revolutions occurring in the Arab world and Occupied movements will translate to the environmental movement.

A holistic digital media course should make connections between cultural practice and the environment. Even if we are teaching technical skills and aptitude, reducing these skills to an isolated digital literacy encloses them within a mental bubble that is likely to repeat the mistakes of our techno-scientific revolution that have brought on our ecological crisis. Moreover, no matter how neutral our educational model is, technology always has embedded cultural attitudes that impact our pedagogical approach and are ingrained within the tools.

So, if the environment is intimately linked with digital media, why is it so rare to see the two issues connected?

One of the misconceptions concerning environmental education is that it is a topic that is outside all subjects except those pertaining to “nature” (such as the biological sciences). Even though the primary cause of our ecological crisis is cultural, few who teach culture-related courses incorporate sustainability into their material. This is not to place blame. The cause for this goes back to the origins of modern academia, and even the creation of the term “ecology.” Based on the Greek oikos, which means household, “eco” also is the root of economics. Consequently, the combined meaning of ecology and economics is “household management,” which is an appropriate and holistic approach to thinking about humans and the natural world. We need to remind ourselves that the world is our home, and that we need to treat it with as much care as the places that we inhabit on a daily basis.

Yet, due to the prejudice of the techno-industrial-scientific revolution, material and immaterial issues were divided up between the different disciplines and we are left with the famous split in Western culture between mind and body. Earth, in this case, falls under the category of “body,” albeit abstracted by mechanistic science. Culture, being a subject of the mind, is usually not taught in conjunction with environmental issues. Curiously, though, the term “culture” originates from agriculture, and has to do with the act of cultivation: we cultivate food and beliefs (food for thought!).

Finally, environmental educator David Orr has made the point that all education is environmental education. What he means is that whether acknowledged or not what we teach has a bearing on how we view the environment, especially when it is omitted altogether. When we don’t talk about it, the lesson becomes, “The environment is not relevant to what we do. This is someone else’s problem.” Or, in the example of economics, we are taught that the ecological impact of growth and consumption is irrelevant to an economy’s bottom line. Given the state of our biosphere, we cannot continue like this, nor should we assume some technological fix is awaiting on the horizon. What we need is a human fix.

Conceptual Strategy: Open and Closed Systems

So how does a digital media culture class look when ecology is incorporated into its curriculum?

For starters, as a framework we discuss open versus closed systems. In agricultural terms, a monocultural crop of genetically engineered corn is a closed system. It is governed by numerous control mechanisms and a form of science that doesn’t allow for the open ended integration of natural systems. Open systems are like permaculture gardens, which are structured in such a way as to work with the given conditions of the local environment. It is not controlled with pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizer or laboratory engineered seeds. It is open to the conditions of its local ecology and interacts with unpredictable elements, such as weather, insects and native plants. And since agriculture is humans acting upon the environment, the kind of approach one makes entails a worldview. Societies that engage in monoculture are far different in outlook than those that use permaculture.

How does this translate in the digital media world? Numerous scholars are concerned with the difference between open and closed systems, be they gadgets or the Internet. Jonathan Zittrain talks about the iPhone (“iBrick”) versus Google’s Android. Tim Wu looks into the rise and fall of media empires, examining how monopolies are essentially closed systems. James Boyle believes there is an information ecology that is threatened by enclosure. And Lawrence Lessig talks about the difference between Read-Only and Read-Write information economies.

A keystone essay I use is Benjamin Barber‘s “Pangloss, Pandora and Jefferson: Three scenarios for the future of technology and strong democracy” (published in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) In it he argues about potential scenarios facing the future of the Internet. Pangloss is the status quo, and has a do-nothing stance in which the Internet evolves according to the needs of governments, corporations and consumers. If this scenario continues according to its internal momentum towards closed monopolies, we end up with the Pandora scenario. Pandora is represented by two-tired Internet, DRM, Great Fire Wall of China, increased repression and surveillance, and the use of anti-piracy measures to shut off dissent and peer-to-peer sharing (as is the case with Wikileaks and ACTA). The Jeffersonian model represents hope, and would entail the active participation of users to continue developing and utilizing the Internet for opening up democratic participation.

The status quo (Pangloss) has elements of both a cautionary and hopeful future, but we are at a crossroads and it remains to be seen how open or closed the future Internet will be. In terms of the environment there are similar parallels. Closed, monopolized media systems further the interests of those powers that refuse to solve the ecological crisis. Climate change has to be resolved through democratic processes, and sustainable culture has to be cultivated through sharing and connecting. The Jeffersonian scenario goes hand-in-hand with transitioning from the centralized and closed energy system of petroleum, natural gas and nuclear power, to the decentralized and democratic potential of clean energy. One is corporate powered, the other is people powered. There also is middle ground where some corporations are choosing open systems as their primary operational model (such as many of the Web 2.0 start-ups), but it’s still not a guarantee that the climate crisis will tackled by technology users.

It’s important to not be overly Utopian or dystopian. Ultimately the key is to think systemically. Ultimately my goal is to encourage a shift from the standpoint of mere consumerism to a kind of practice based on cultural citizenship. Or, more importantly, green cultural citizenship. What follows is my experiment to move in this direction.

Design Strategy: The Four Perspectives

My design strategy is based on a four-pronged approach inspired by cultural studies’ circuit of culture model and sustainability design. The circuit of culture looks at media phenomena from as a set of iterative, interacting forces that include identity, regulation, representation, culture and consumption. It sees the development of consumer gadgets, like the Sony Walkman, as not an isolated economic practice, but coming from an interactive feedback loop between culture and economics. But it also reflects the bias described earlier: where is the environment in this matrix? Surely it needs to be part of the mix.

Enter sustainability design which is holistic and approaches problems from multiple angles. Gaia Education has developed an Ecovillage Design initiative that approaches human experience according to four dimensions: lifeworld, ecology, economics and society. I hybridized both the circuit of culture and ecovillage design approaches to divide up the course according to the following disciplinary lenses:

Worldview: the phenomenology of time and space. This section covers topics like technological determinism, the history of media technologies, and the impact of digital media gadgets on the user’s perception of time, space and place. Assignments include keeping diaries of gadget usage and to get lost in Rome (which is where I teach) without any media devices, including pens, paper or maps. Students then write and share their experiences in a class blog.

Environment: the material reality of digital media, including extraction, production, e-waste, energy and emissions. To get a picture of the environmental impact of gadget production, we watch the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. We also view the Story of Stuff and the Story of Electronics. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about e-waste. We also look at material relating to “cradle-to-cradle” design and Green IT. Additionally, we read and discuss the various reports on ecological impact created by critics such as GreenPeace, and internal communications from parent company Web sites of gadget makers.

Economy: Drawing on themes from political economy, we look at the ideological structure of the global economics system, paying attention to the reasons why designers design what they do. We compare consumer designed products (Sony’s Walkman, Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Apple gadgets) with computers designed for low-income education, such as the One Laptop Per Child project and the Open Source Ecology project. The goal here is to understand how intention influences the production process of our gadgets. During this section we watch Objectified, a documentary about industrial design.

Culture: Multiple strategies are used in this section, but predominantly it is hermeneutics. Throughout the course we look at promotional videos and advertisements to deconstruct the thinking behind the marketing of gadgetry. This reiterates the point that that though these categories are distinct sections of the course, they spiral around each other. None are completely separate, they are embedded within each other. In the culture section, however, we go more deeply into how digital media usage is impacting by cultural practice. This includes looking at Henry Jenkins‘ model of convergence culture, Lessig’s Read-Only vs. Read-Write model of cultural production, participatory/social media, and the cultural commons (intellectual property, mash-ups, etc.). None of these are isolated from economics, environment and worldview.

These zones are then explored through the perspective of a “boundary object.” For the purpose of this course a boundary object is a media gadget (iPhone, Ipad, Blackberry, laptop, etc.) that has different purposes according to how it is used and how its potential is perceived. So even though a gadget has objective properties in the sense that we all know what an iPhone is, it can also be many different things to different people. It can be a way to call your friends, an instrument of revolution, or a tool for triggering a roadside bomb. To get my students to think in terms of boundary objects, I show clips from the 1980s film The Gods Must be Crazy to demonstrate how a coke bottle, though on the surface is something fairly neutral and innocuous, can do completely different things according to people’s culture.

For their final project students analyze their personal media gadget of choice according to the four zones of experience. I also incorporate a multiliteracy approach. In addition to the content elements of the course, I also want to embed certain skill literacies. So for each section I assign a specific skill-related task. For the first section it is autoethnography and blogging. The ecology section is about tool literacy: what is the “nature” of our gadgets? The third and fourth section are a mix of information and visual literacy, i.e. how to read and deconstruct marketing and information about the gadgets, including how to research the design and production aspects of the gadgets online. Students do mixed activities ranging between collaborative, solo, writing and multimedia. The final project is a paper and a Prezi presentation.

You can only do so much in a 14 week course, and a lot is left out. Ideally this would be a year-long (let alone lifelong) process.

Conclusion

The model I offer here is experimental and not definitive. My main goal is to argue for sustainability as multidimensional, and to integrate ecological issues into a standard digital media course that typically eschews the environment. My vision for the future of education is that “green” subjects are not ghettoized and treated as distinct or off topic from those subjects that are familiar to us. I imagine that all media courses one day will incorporate sustainability, and it will be “natural” to do so.

Barriers to such a project include a lack of familiarity with ecoliteracy (pedagogy and a basic literacy of environmental issues), resistance from academic gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge the connection between the environment and social studies/humanities, and a lack of concern or desire to change cultural practice. I think all these can be overcome, but it will take concerted effort and will be up to the practitioners (i.e. teachers, scholars and learners) to push for more integrative approaches to teaching media.

Please feel free to contact me for more information. I plan to do an online training for educators to learn this model. If you are interested in participating in the training, contact me at info@worldbridgermedia.com

* My book, Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century deals with this topic in more detail.

The above clip from Fox News (link) cleverly inserts riot footage from Rome, making an erroneous connection between Occupy Wall St. and the antics of violent protestors in Italy. Such footage is meant to scare viewers and to discredit the thoughtful and nonviolent people who pose a serious threat to the system. As I go on to explain below, violent insurrections like the one on Oct. 15 have essentially sabotaged the occupy movement in Rome (for now).

Saturday Oct. 15 was an internationally coordinated event meant to extend the momentum of Occupy Wall St. In Rome, when we first arrived at the launch point (Piazza della Repubblica), the energy was fantastic. Lots of excitement. People felt energized, but the mood was bit dour as well. The day before Berlusconi had survived another no-confidence vote. The demo was massive–I heard that it was as high as 700,00 people, though that figure seems a bit exaggerated. All I can say is that from where it started it took over three hours for all the people to enter into the march.

After about 45 minutes of moving slowly while serenaded by all kinds of sound systems blasting the protest classics, once we began seeing the hooded black block infiltrate the crowd, we decided it was time to leave. One of them even threatened to punch me when I tried to take their picture.

Trying to leave proved difficult, however. The police had cordoned off the side streets, making it impossible for anyone to exit the march. We ended up having to backpedal upstream to get out of the demonstration. I took that as a very bad sign because it seemed to me that the police were forcing everyone into a pressure point. Sure enough, fifteen minutes after we exited all the burning and smashing started.

Local articles have pieced together a confusing picture. A theory among many is that the massive riot that quickly exploded was a highly coordinated and well-planed urban warfare strategy. Various kinds of projectiles were strategically placed and hidden at different points along the streets. There was a very large group (at least 100) that cut the demonstration in half at the precise point that the front group had arrived at march’s final destination. The police did not do very much at the beginning and let the rioters go about as they wished. Some claim police inaction was out of fear of being libel, as was the case in the aftermath of Genoa (indeed, the hashtag for the militants to coordinate each other was #genoareloaded). The police officially say they held back out of concern for people’s safety. This, I find dubious, since when I tried to leave the police wouldn’t let me. There were also reports of “ultras” (soccer hooligans) entering into the fray (apparently this is par for the course–they are professional rioters, after all).

Many of the black block kids were quite young (minors) and from all over Italy. It was clear that they were well prepared and had tactics. Rumor has it that they were trained in Greece. What their goals were remain a mystery to me, because at the end of the day, the government and police are the victors: an opportunity to initiate a peaceful occupation was sabotaged and now the fascist mayor of Rome is calling for a suspension for all marches during the next month. This means that Fiat auto workers who were planning a big demo are now prohibited. Jasmina Tesanovic asks the right question, a chi giova–who bennefits? My impression is that police and the black block need each other the same way that Christians and Satanists are co-dependentent. They define each other’s actions and reality. I suggest they go have it out in the Colosseum and let the rest of us participate in something productive.

A Prezi for my presentation at the Media Education Summit, London 2011

I just returned from my first trip to London where I presented at the Media Education Summit, 2011. It was a slightly disorienting but invigorating experience. The conference itself was a success. I had a chance to network and learn from the various good folks who comprise the The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.

One of the strangest things I experienced was when I clutched my first handful of British pounds. I had never fondled British money and it felt oddly magical, as if I was handling something from global banking’s radioactive nucleus. I’m sure others have had similar experiences handling their first dollars, but for me seeing the currency’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth–something I’m more familiar with from a Sex Pistols poster–gave me chills. I’m not sure if these were the good kind of chills, but I felt as if I was crossing a threshold into the capitalist core.

For the US, England is the motherland–for better and for worse. As such, I wanted to experience the city’s genius loci–spirit of place. My first effort failed. The hotel was at one of those conference no man’s land that is not unlike the other nonplaces that dot the planet’s web of global business centers. Yes, there were some unique architectural elements that drew upon the former industrial character of the place, but it had an inorganic feeling common to so many current developments. It was most certainly an island unto itself. The hotel, comfortable though that it was, also had the feeling of virtual quality one gets from Ikea: design-wise the elements and details of the hotel room feel fresh and interesting, but highly fragile and toxic. From the future’s perspective, the materials seem flimsy and dated.

I have mixed feelings about how my talk went (you can see the Prezi above). Only five people attended, while next door there were dozens checking out a presentation about incorporating Facebook into educational practice. When it comes to sustainability, it’s hard to compete with Facebook. I also had technical issues. Prezi behaves weirdly on the new MacBook Pro (the navigation menu disappears and you have to use the arrow keys to move around, which is really awkward when giving a talk). Towards the end, the video projector frizzled. This was a huge drag because the most important part was demonstrating how a non-linear approach to media ed can be achieved through a circular design based on a media mandala. Oh well. Maybe Mother Nature was punishing me for trying to bring technology into the process of healing the planet.

Though I was a little dispirited, I also saw it as a growth opportunity. I think one lesson for a talk under any condition is to keep it simple, find a good narrative to tell the story and try to focus on one take-away message that can fit into a sentence. Using a presentation tool like Prezi can encourage all kinds of intellectual mischief. Maybe it’s better to not lean so much on presentation tools so much.

Some of the feedback was interesting and unexpected. One gentleman who teaches production said that he simply had never made the connection between his work and sustainability. This view was confirmed by another attendee. This probably explains why so many people prefer to think about Facebook than greening media practice. I half suspected a low turnout since my current crusade (bad word, I know) to green media education has gotten so few bites. I have never felt so lonely. Either I am totally insane and what I’m talking about is useless, or I’m part of a minority of visionaries that the world hasn’t quite caught up to. I hope it’s the latter. But if I can plant the seed in one person that the connection is important, then I feel like I have helped evolve our species.

London was a little more surreal. I had only two nights and one full day while there, which made exploration limited. The weather was beyond fowl, but at a certain point the wicked winds and pelting rain blew away and I had a window of a few hours to see central London. First things first, I ate a good curry and drank a few pints (had my first hangover in over a year). Then I entered into the famous Underground and sailed into the city’s dreaming mind.

The tube really felt like a tube. Unlike NYC’s subways, it’s intimate and enclosed as I imagine a spaceship would feel. I entered central London through the portal of the Underground’s Leicester Square station. At first this was a little disappointing. I exited into a corridor of brand stores, video screen walls and tourist shops that had a slightly different flavor than Time Square and done on a much smaller scale. London should not try to outdo Americans with this kind of ostentatious display of capitalism. It’s way too tacky in the wrong context. Even Banksy was reduced to t-shirts in tawdry tourist shops

I did my best to get lost. I searched about for the genius loci but a mantra kept running through my mind: corporations destroy the spirit of place. This is, it seems, is their essence. A corporation cannot be successful unless it obliterates a sense of the local. For example, when a Taco Bell replaces a taqueria–as I have witnessed in some communities in New Mexico– this is a sure sign that the natives have been banished. I’m sure this has a little to do with London’s wildcat riots in which the inhabitants of culturally specific neighborhoods asserted their identity, albeit in a way most Londoners felt was unpolite.

I ranged through SoHo and Covent Garden, but could not quite get the gist of the place. I know two hours won’t do the trick, but there are other cities where one immediately gets a much stronger feeling for the local spirit. Most Italian cities, for example, have that affect. I suspect that because they emerged within such specific bioregional limits Italian cities are so particular. Maybe it’s because London peaked during the age of colonialism and grew according to an outward expression of ecological imperialism. It has a bold and fortresslike presence, as if it were a kind of command and control center.

My night closed with a descent back into the tube, where I entered into a sonic bath of Pink Floyd’s “Breath.” A busker at the bottom of the escalator noodled along to a Karaoke version of the track as if he were one of London’s many threshold guardians reminding its visitors that the city’s soul does express itself… through music. Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Radiohead are just a few of the great artists to emerge from the English dream that has so permeated my lifeworld.

Maybe this was the genius loci I was searching for.

Deer peeps, in May 2012 my new book, Decolonize the Media, will be published by North Atlantic Books as part of the Evolver Editions manifestos series (these are the same folks behind Reality Sandwich). Here is a short blurb (this is a draft):

“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.

Media Is… from Lori H. Ersolmaz on Vimeo.

A few years ago I was interviewed by Lori Ersolmaz for a documentary project about media literacy. Here is a new video,”Media is…,” that she made featuring some sound bites from our original interview. I’m honored that she considers me an “expert”! The video is a nice meditation and I hope you will take a few minutes to watch it and support Lori’s work.

Between teaching five classes, writing a book proposal, working on my PhD, being a parent and Twittering, my poor blog has become an orphan. I intend to correct that in the near future. Meanwhile, to reignite the blogging habit I thought I’d share my current reading list.

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.

Dear folks, lately I’ve been too addicted to Twitter to post any meaningful blog posts. I hope to change that soon. Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet, please join me at Twitter. I’ll follow you too.

For more, go here.