This strikes me as similar to something Ian Bogost suggests in the end of his book Unit Operations, the idea that disciplinary borders need to be rethought in the age of convergence and perhaps more importantly that we need to rethink ways to create networks across disciplinary practices, units that can adhere or dissolve as context requires.

While this is a noble goal, one in which I am personally in favor, having been in front of faculty who ask, “how is what you are doing English,” I think we should also consider the ways in which knowledge production in “Web 2.0″ runs in contradiction to many of the philosophic and institutional goals of the university. It seems to me that one of the functions of web communication is the ability to share and contribute, to discourse, without being limited by spatial concerns. I read blogs, exchange emails, engage in discussions with people in different locations, not to mention radically different theoretical backgrounds, and these conversations are more often than not tremendously productive. (Two of the most thought provoking books I have recently read were “history” books that were recommended to me by people I would not have likely encountered in a “literary” setting, despite the fact that we share similar interests.) By academic institutions have a very real investment in keeping control of space. MIT is a spatial location which confers power based on its ability to control who is “in their space,” both in terms of faculty and students, who has access to those spatial resources. We should not forget that the icon image of many universities are their respective gates, images designed to control space. And, so while the dissolving of these boundaries might benefit particular scholars work and contribute more to the public sphere, it doesn’t always align with the interests of a university, to say nothing of the departments which also value “their space.”

And while I find much to agree with here in Jenkin’s piece I think he doesn’t always recognize the ways in which “public conversations” might in many instances work against institutions which want to control said knowledge, perhaps most obviously large corporate interests. Notice how Jenkin’s piece seems to gloss over the fact that businesses might want students to gain certain “skill sets” whereas many academics, including myself, often teach critical thinking practices which might make an individual a “poor” corporate employee, the complaints about liberal arts education. Businesses might not recognize the “real world application” of critiquing media that my students learn in the class. All this is to say that there are divergent interests here that cannot always be made to mesh. (For a practical example head on over to http://kairosnews.org/ and read the posts about adopting Open Source software and how business teachers resist this because students need to learn Microsoft Office. Or, why for instance is Jenkins article published on a for pay site?).

The more we share knowledge outside the contexts of the university classrooms the less those classrooms seem to matter, and while this might not be a bad thing we shouldn’t expect schools to quickly jump on board.

There is a lot to talk about in this piece and I want to simply focus on one passage that I have pasted below.

First, media studies needs to become comparative, teaching critics to think across multiple media systems and teaching media makers to produce across multiple media systems. The modern university has inherited a set of fields and disciplines structured around individual media — photography, cinema, digital culture, literature, theater, and painting are studied in different departments using different disciplinary perspectives. Programs have taken shape through an additive logic (with members of each new generation fighting for the right to study the new medium that affects their lives the most). For a long time, my institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had a program in film and media studies, a redundant term that strikes me as the rough equivalent of calling the English department the books-and-literature department.

As someone who is not only interested in media histories of all sorts but wants to deepen something that I feel is still lacking (i.e. there are so many items and issues in terms of media histories and archives that need to be written and cultivated), I think we need to be wary of opening our arms to a Media Studies 2.0 when its 1.0 version was never as robust as I believe it needed to be in the first place.

Of course, that’s my opinion and little more at that. Still, I think that one of the ways that we can better negotioate and develop a Web 2.0 environment and an ever-convergent media atmosphere is something that I argued for last year in a Flow column about “New Media”, a term that engenders in me something a kneejerk reaction that is less than, well, positive. Here I obliquely argue for a sort of “convergence-across-the-media curriculum” that emphasizes history that proposes how we recognized that every media revolution has been a “new media” revolution. While I would like to comparative media departments, I would hope that they teach how convergence and media revolutions began with media such as the development of the alphabet (which was a revolutionary technology that makes Web 2.0 look like small potatoes if you ask me). It demands that by embracing the possibilities of the future, we recognize the similar charges of the past. To an extent, I believe Jenkins would agree with that statement.

Anyways, I have said enough and will leave it at that for now.

Here’s the short version of the Jenkins:

Always compare; make stuff; network.

I like it. ;-)

add to mkirschenbaum -

also - never lose touch with how knowledge building happens through praxis. Or academics will no longer be at the forefront (if we ever were)

:)

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