multimodality

On Multimodality and New Media Literacy

One of the reasons I’ve been studying different forms of media for so long is because I am interested in how the world works. A lot of my theoretical research boils down to advocating media literacy in less advantaged groups. There are data that shows those with less access technology are at a disadvantage of staying informed or being able to reach specific goals. This said, the first half of Gunther Kress’ Multimodality (Routledge 2010) seems to be leading up to advocacy of new media literacy. He notes three features that mark our contemporary media landscape – forms of knowledge production, forms and principles of text making composition, and social and semiotic blurring. These concepts stuck out at me because they recognize that new media literacy entails not only being able to navigate technology but also becoming a participant in authoring and composing new media as well as understanding how society is negotiated through communication.

I kept returning to Kress’ explanation of how simple grammar can signify positions of power under a lens of social-semiotics. He writes that the first part of the question “I wanted to ask, could I have an extension for my essay?” distances the speaker from a weak position of not being able to complete a task by putting in the past tense. Furthermore, when this question is auditory, there is nuance in inflection and tone that give the receiver of the message cues of its meaning. I would say this translates into atheistic design choices as well. Kress touches on the concept that choices in color, form and mode are part of sign making and meaning making in multimodal communication. Kress only mentions creativity in passing but it is fairly obvious that a good design by the sender can incite interest of the end of the receiver. For that reason, if a message is to be welcomed by a specific group, the sender needs to be aware of their audience, its culture and the signs that are meaningful within it.

Kress writes that he has a problem with the notion of universals like the ‘universals of language’ or the ‘universals of communication.’ He writes that “the universe of cultures and of cultural difference on our small planet is too vast for such generalization.” While I agree with the whole of this, it does not mean that we cannot make sense of different cultural modes of communication and meaning making, especially when concepts of globalization makes virtually everything so accessible and leads to repurposing. This is to say that there can be one end message – say new media literacy for example – but the way the message is presented can - and needs to - change for each intended audience. The message sent to inner city kids advocating media literacy may differ from the message intended for rural citizens which shouldn’t be the same campaign for the elderly.

where is my mind?

Click here to check out an interactive story project I did based on ideas in Marie-Laure Ryan’s Avatars of Story. Read about "metatextual interactivity" and the role of narrative in the digital age here.

Attends Own Funeral Services

Letter to the Editor and Open Invitation to the People of Hamilton County
May 16th, 1904

Dear Fellow Residents,

I, Stephan R. Patten, am a great man. As a founding father of Valier, Illinois, I have paved the way for commerce and industry and to have bestowed upon our society a place on the map. I, as the rest of the community will be agreement, will be sorrowed at my passing for a number of reasons which I will now state. I am renowned in Valier as a charitable gentleman blessed with the fortune to advance this community in the ways of business and education. I have made contributions to those less fortunate townspeople in order for their sons to attend the nearby universities in St. Louis and Carbondale. Insomuch as these students recognize my kindness and generosity, they return to Valier to try their own hand at business and oft start fledgling factories, and while none have been as successful as I, it furthers the opinion of this town of outsiders to be the foremost community that traveling politicians and businessmen seek out on their journeys between Chicago and Memphis.

As older generation and my peers may be aware, the Lord has chosen not to bless me with any sons to carry on the family name and business, unless you count young Stephan, who we had to lay to rest at the fragile age of two in our modest family plot that has providence to be otherwise barren. However, my wife and five daughters shall inherit my wealth and I mistrust their decorum to demonstrate dignified taste in such matters as burial as not to squander hundreds dollars on unnecessary grandiosity such as gilded casket handles and opulent flower arrangements.

As any great man should have it, my death ceremonies should take place in a venerable and noble manner. Considering this factor, I shall be extending my eightieth birthday celebration to honor my death. In this manner, I will be privy to the good, kind things the people of this town have to say about the prestige I have bestowed upon this town. The ceremony will be restricted to family members only, however every townsperson is invited to festivities immediately following provided they bring a covered dish to share and be prepared to impart a short speech about the effectiveness of my generosity and demeanor upon their life.


Forever yours in life and death,
Stephan R. Patten

That Is Me

“It’s insidious,” she cried. “of being and nothingness is absolutely nothing at all.”
Thriving and writhing, she cried. “I hate my life but there is nothing that can keep me from this society.”
“It hurts,” she said, trying to unplug.
In time where nothing meant nothing at all, this was a society where skin meets the spirit, where she could not scrape off the flesh that encoded her being.
Eternity and fractals, fragments of existence. Fight for the resistance.
Typewriters have no subsistence in this meaningless world where stories unfurl
Again and again through past remembrances;
a train ride, a car wreck, no diligence.
Parallel universes,
a million souls enfold into a story a thousand times sold.

I am she, he is mine.
Heroic and Freudian, Posthuman and cyborgian.
“I laude my maker,
Please won’t you take me?”
Writhing in sin, she trys to link to the one
who can rid her of binary obsoletes
while spider webs of desire seep through every vein.

“Has anyone seen this guy”?

A woman’s voice pierced through the scattered laughter and the mélange of music. The voice repeated the question and sounded closer as the minutes past. Raj and his group were around their campfire. Morning was approaching and it past the hour the group had agreed upon for their curfew. They were sipping warm beers and telling the tales of their day. They were a laid-back group and didn’t mind regrouping before the next experience, the next forgotten moment, the next sight you’d-have-to-see-to-believe. Out of their group, many of them had been attending Burning Man for only a few years, but the oldest of them who called himself Faeroe, had been losing his mind at the playa for over ten years. He kept recalling previous incidents that no one really cared about but kept asking him polite questions every once in a while to indulge him. Raj was staring into the embers thinking about everything and nothing at all while the two women sitting on either side leaned over him to gossip about another woman they had spent the day with. He had tuned them out, as well as the voice that kept repeating “has anyone seen this guy?”

“Oh my God!” Scarlet snorted and started choking on her beer. Raj looked up as all the heads turned to see what caused such an outburst from Scarlet. A little woman approached their camp, her short arm outstretched which at the end was a Polaroid. Scarlet was starting to laugh giddily and Raj sidekicked her in the shins and muttered for her to “shh” and to behave herself. Faeroe paused from the yarn he was weaving and addressed the woman in his slow, Matthew McConaughey ala Dazed and Confused drawl.

“Hey, little lady. What’s it that you're looking for?” Silent for a few seconds, she stomped over to him, arm outstretched the entire time. When she neared, she replied, “Have you seen this man? He has my things and I think he might have stolen them.” Feiro casually plucked the Polaroid from her had and took an interested look at it. “Naw,” he said, “Can’t say that I have. When did you last see him?” He passed the picture to the next person who passed it along. “I took off my backpack to get out the brownies and when I turned around, they were both gone. I can’t believe it! I thought this was a community!”

“Hey, man! It is a community and sometimes people in a community steal stuff and are jerks!” Scarlet snickered as she reached for the picture. She was sipping her beer and as she looked down it sprayed out of her mouth. She was gasping for air and was making half-formed sentences involving leprechauns and asking the skies about the location of gold. Raj grabbed the picture as she doubled over her knees in hysterics. The little woman stomped over to where they were sitting, chirring at Scarlet. “Well, er, how would you like it if all your things were gone? No one will help me around here. Unh, well, if see him, let me know.” She snatched the Polaroid from Raj’s hand and clomped off into the shadows.

“Did you see that her? Did you see that picture? It was like a match made in Dublin!” Scarlet said incredulously. “Why did she have a Polaroid? Those have been gone for years! She must have known him from before. Ha! That made my night. Now I can sleep happy!” Bemused, Raj thought for a moment to the last time he saw a Polaroid and agreed Scarlet had a point. His thought did not linger long. It had been a long couple of days and sleep overtook him as the coals replayed his recent memories.

The next morning, Raj was on ice duty. He stood in the long line waiting with an empty bucket for his turn for an overpriced bag of ice. His group didn’t bring many perishable in the way of food, but they didn’t want their supply of beer or beverages to boil in the desert heat, either. As he stood there, he thought of what it must have been like to be at Woodstock 40-years ago. His eyes stopped and gazed over when they reached the garbage. Both the black garbage bin and the blue recycling container were overflowing. Evian bottles lay next to Mountain Dew cans and wax paper wrappers fluttered with a threat to escape every time someone walked by. This was a long way from the 3 Days Peace & Music, he thought. Feeling some benevolent disdain for the trash, Raj made a mental note to not throw his broken toaster oven in the Dumpster when he returned to his New Jersey apartment. He was about to shuffle forward in the queue when the little woman from before dawn suddenly appeared in his peripheral vision. At the same moment, the man from the photo was on the other side of him.

“Booop,” he said in Raj’s ear. Raj was at a lost as to where to focus his attention or what to do. “Excuse me?” Raj asked, unsure if he had misunderstood.

“Booooooooooooooooooooooop booooooooooooooooooooop! I think she loves me!” Raj stood stunned still, even though there was room to move up in line. The man hopped, not unlike a caricature of a rabbit, hands curled underneath his chin to the person in front of Raj. “Boop?” he questioned. The person nervously laughed and the man seamlessly posed with an invisible mic, first holding it to his own mouth, then to his unsuspecting prey.

“Ask me 'what did I learn at Burning Man.'”

“What?”

“Ask me what I learned at Burning Man!” the bearded, bald-headed man asked, his naked-chest almost visibly growing redder underneath the rising sun.

“Uhh, what did you learn at Burning Man?” the person in front of Raj asked. It sounded like a question about a question.

“‘How to hide my single malt from the crazy bitch who decided it was the perfect complement to Mountain Dew!’”

Raj stared as the woman approached the man demanded that he hand over one of the backpacks slung across his arm. He booped at her in quiet tones and the woman fell silent. She nodded at him as he handed over one of the packs and stood waiting as he booped his way to the front of the line. Raj was close enough to the kiosk to hear the conversation.

“This booping ice melted! It is an injustice to sell water and claim it is ice,” the red-bearded man argued with the attendant behind the counter. The heat was making Raj woozy but it was only a few minutes before the attendant handed over a solid bag of frozen cubes without an exchange of currency. Ice was one of the few items everyone in the camp needed and would pay for. A refund on melted ice? Now he had seen it all. But then, Raj would be damned if the little woman didn’t run over to the man, clasped hands with him and they both paraded away, untwining momentarily to skip around a cluster of people, each dressed in individual colors of the rainbow. The person behind Raj leaned over his shoulder and said, “If there was one thing that I learned at Burning Man, it is not to be surprised at anything.”

Raj made his way back to his own group, hyperaware of the surrealism surrounding him. Every few steps, he looked down at the ground in order not to trip over his own feet. He saw a discarded yellow shirt imprinted with a banana, a CD cover with a dangerous looking mouse on it, and lonesome shoes. Looking up at the sky, the clouds shifted shapes to reveal meanings, only of which he forgot the next day.

(Inspiration was found here, here, here, and here. (And also from a recent text conversation between me and my friend.))

Glamour and Glitz vs. Gutz and Grit

In promotion of Dancing in the Dark Brooke Gladstone and Morris Dickstein discuss the importance of cinema as a cultural reference to the Depression era ("Hard Times," On the Media). To the causal viewer, films of the era may be dismissed as "cultural artifacts," but are really speaking to the reasons why there may have been a demand for escapist films. One does not have to read very hard into Bugsby Berley's Golddiggers of 1933 to see the allure of Hollywood that New York showgirls might have felt or to see political parallels between FDR and the Wizard of Oz (Okay, i never saw that one before but now it seems so obvious!) Their discussion also mentions the juxtaposition of highly budgeted show-stoppers by grittier films, especially those that fall in the gangster genre. While these connection are far from revolutionary, it is an important to know that example cinema is a reflection modern societies and cultures of the times in which a film is made.

As I was walking home today, I was listening to the Filmspotting podcast from April 3, 2009 (you can play the podcast from their blog. Adam and Matty's discussion of neo-neorealism is the first 20min of the podcast). The hosts were discussing Ramin Bahrani's movie called Goodbye Solo. The hosts were commenting on the movie because it was mentioned in an article in The New York Times magazine about "Neo-Neorealism." The Filmspotting podcast and the articles that sparked their discussion all mentioned the "escapist" films of the 1930's.

I'm not an expert on Italian neorealist filmmakers so I will default to wikipedia:

Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors. Italian neorealist films mostly contend with the difficult economical and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life: poverty and desperation.

Scott says neo-neo realism is a school of American filmmakers that are using similar aesthetics and are continuing the trend of a gritty story that often does not end on the brightside. Often, the characters in the neo-neorealism films are down on their luck and are scrapping together their pennies to be able to seek out better life. Scott's article generated a retort from the movies editor at the New Yorker "About 'Neo-Neorealism.'" Richard Brody said that Scott was a little too ga-ga over these "abstemious" film that are purposely gritty but in doing so are often cutting "off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue."

Scott mentions that it is obvious that cinema reflects cultural attitudes but sometimes the more "socialminded" films get undermined by escapist films. He mentions huge blockbusters of early 2009 and says that people are diverted but essentially misled from their troubles by happy endings and the glamour of Hollywood just as they were in the Depression Era. His solution is to "counter the tyranny of fantasy" by taking more stock in the social commentary embedded in neo-neorealism films. Brody counters this point by saying Scott is remiss not to mention the gangster films in comparison to the highly budgeted "escapist" films of the '30s. Even though films like Golddiggers were more likely to appeal to the population looking for escape, it is no less a cultural reference of the gritty realism portrayed in gangster films like The Public Enemy.

Dickstien and Gladston finish their discussion by talking about media artifacts that extend beyond the cinema. They mention T.V. shows and novels (I think it is safe to say that new media artifacts as well) are always going to be cultural artifacts - and probably more so in retrospect - no matter how epic or populist they may appear to be in the moment.