Setting the Agenda

by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Modern Language Association
February 28, 2007 – 18:46

The MediaCommons editorial board is going to be holding its first meeting at the end of March, spending a day and a half discussing a number of the significant issues involved in the startup of this network. Avi and I (along with our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have a sense of what some of those issues are: the kinds of features we'd like to develop, for instance; our workflow model; the open review process; the role of the editorial board; the institutional connections that we might develop. In short, we want to spend time with the board thinking about what it is we're making here, and how we should go about it. But we're crucially invested in ensuring that MediaCommons is not simply used by a lot of scholars, but that it develops in concert with the needs and desires of those scholars, and thus that we build our human network at the same time we're building our digital network. To that end, we want to open our agenda for discussion here, both amongst the board members and amongst any other interested parties, any network member who wants to contribute to the direction we're moving. We'd love for this discussion to be as wide-ranging as possible, and so we're going to open with some extremely general questions: What were your initial thoughts when you first heard about MediaCommons? What hopes and desires do you have for the project? What would you like MediaCommons to become? What kinds of issues do you see the network facing as it develops? What we'd like to do, ideally, would be to collect as many issues as possible, and then to take on those issues one at a time here on the blog, ultimately using these discussions as a means of setting the agenda and defining the issues for the editorial board meeting. So what are your desires, and your concerns? What should we discuss?

Comments

I discovered this today, so

by dougcarmichael
March 01, 2007 – 00:32

I discovered this today, so I may be treading on unseen toes… apologies.

Monasteries did this kind of conversation in some important ways. But now we are too dispersed, and too married, and too secular, to make that work. How do we get the intensity, the discipline - but with openness and cross fertilization?

In my consulting I see it as always true that shifting the way people (in an organization) connect on the Internet also requires rethinking the way they are organized socially. Generally, which means not always, Internet connection alone has been a weak form of social connection, and hence issues of trust and loyalty reduce to issues of agreement rather than respect.

The crucial issue is taking on big issues more than one at a time, and developing the group discipline to deal with them outside normal lines of expertise. This means broad reading and experience and creativity are allowed to function withut being brushed off. It means being accountable to take seriously others’ lines of thinking and reading.

Issues: what is the role of “the West” in current thinking about the future? How central is Christianity to the West? (and implied in our current culture the meaning of individual, science’s search for “the truth”, and many other hidden connections) How are new technologies going to be related to democratic choice? Was Democracy a phase, and now we are into something more akin to the governance of Florence or feudalism? How can we integrate the promise of technology with humanism?

Lots to think about.

What were your initial

by Clancy Ratliff — University of Louisiana at Lafayette
March 01, 2007 – 02:06

What were your initial thoughts when you first heard about MediaCommons?

I was skeptical — I didn’t think it wouldn’t be an interesting and worthwhile project; on the contrary, I just suspected that most people wouldn’t be motivated enough to contribute to it, and these things need a critical mass, you know?

What hopes and desires do you have for the project?

I want it to be well-known and respected in academia and the web-at-large alike. I want it to acknowledge both audiences. I also want it to challenge current copyright laws, which I believe are too restrictive. MediaCommons is already doing this, actually, and I hope to see more of it.

What would you like MediaCommons to become? What kinds of issues do you see the network facing as it develops?

I would like MediaCommons to be primarily a place for creative intellectual work and research. My university’s research category (for tenure and promotion purposes) is actually called “Research and Creative Activity,” with the idea that they’re both equally important. I think the “creative activity” part is meant for professors in the fine arts, but it may also be the case that creative nonfiction works — personal essays and the like — could fall into that category as well. I want MediaCommons to be a space for that creative activity in the various digital media.

At the risk of ruffling some feathers, I’ll add that what I don’t want it to be is simply a scholarly journal on popular culture, essentially like the Journal of Popular Culture with movie and/or television clips interspersed to support points. Not to single anyone out or disparage any contributions to MediaCommons thus far, but some of the In Media Res works have led me to think it might be going in this direction.

When I first heard of Media

by Dave Parry — University of Texas at Dallas
March 01, 2007 – 03:55

When I first heard of Media Commons my initial thoughts were legion. What is it going to be, how is content going to be decided, what is the framework going to be, what is it’s relation to the academy?

I think this is probably my way of answering your last two questions mostly. (What to become? and what type of issues?) Inside Higher Ed published a piece today about the response academic presses jointly wrote in response to the “open-access” movement. To me academia has been problematically conservative in this historical moment, hesitant to embrace a technology that seems so useful. If the university exists to help further discourse and knowledge production (I realize I am being idealistic here—but I am young allow me this conceit) then these new publication and syndication technologies seem the first place to advance this goal. But for reasons too complicated to articulate here (which I am sure many of us are aware and have our own take) this has just not been happening.

Ideally I would see Media Commons as one of the places that thought about and enacted what it would mean to have a University Without Condition. I would think of this more as a social space for the sharing of ideas (and to echo the comment above this doesn’t mean just becoming an online journal).

The primary issue I see is the way that the logic of the web works against the kind of nuanced conversation academics requires. That is the speed of conversation and the requisite back and forth doesn’t lend itself to easily (or at least in the ways we are typically trained) to our scholarly techniques. As an example I think of how short the commentaries on the Media Clips must be in order to fit in the time of reading one is likely to allow, but also substantial enough to not be just a glib retort. But this feature also lends itself to what I have already seen as one of the uses to Media Commons—a large repository of source material for in class conversations, a substantial resource for class material.

The other issue I see is one about Metadata, how to connect ideas, themes, and conversations that will necessarily take place across different posting and different prompts. Blogs get around this by using tags, something that would help in the in Media Res, but I am not sure tags would help with the larger issue of how to “see” the global conversation that is taking place here. As with Wikipedia much of the interesting conversation I think online takes place not around content per se, but around what counts as content-again the meta-conversation. I think the web really lends itself to this, but Media Commons needs a way to handle this (and I don’t think the Wikipedia model is the right way to go).

Let me end by saying that I don’t know if Media Commons is “it,” but I certainly think it is aiming in the right direction of the future of knowledge sharing in relation to the academy, but also is placed in the position of trying to predict and control a future of which no one is certain.

In general, I agree with

by Chuck Tryon — Fayetteville State University
March 01, 2007 – 17:31

In general, I agree with many of Clancy’s points. I’d love to see MediaCommons become respected in academia and on the web (and I’ve noticed several mentions on the GreenCine blog that suggest we’re reaching a wider audience).

While I initially shared Clancy Ratliff’s concern that the In Media Res clips and comments might risk becoming “simply a scholarly journal on popular culture” supported with clips, I still think there is value in preserving these clips and talking about them in a quick, impressionistic way (in fact, today’s commentary on The Sarah Silverman Show turned out to be useful for a student who is working on a paper of Silverman’s critiques of representation.

I do think that there might be a better way to provoke conversations about the In Media Res clips, but I’m not sure how to make that happen (less frequent updates? longer impressionistic responses?). Perhaps, as Dave Parry suggests, this is simply a problem of the web itself. But I think these public conversations about the direction of MediaCommons and what it can offer are important, and I hope they will continue.

I started to formulate a

by Michael Z. Newman — University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
March 01, 2007 – 18:28

I started to formulate a comment in response to the idea of MC becoming just an online journal with clips but it got much too long and so I made it into a blog entry instead. In short: I think Media Commons could do worse than to become an online journal, and I give some suggestions of how an online journal might exploit the possibilities of today’s web (e.g., by having comments, links, clips, RSS, modular form, and free availability). I hope some of you will see what I have to say.

I was thinking more about

by Dave Parry — University of Texas at Dallas
March 02, 2007 – 12:20

I was thinking more about this question especially after reading Michael’s comments, in relation to the issue of whether Media Commons should become an online journal or not. To be more specific I think Media Commons should resist becoming an online version of a print journal, as many online journals are. That is to say, even in absence of having a print version many online journals remain within the framework of print publications. Michael’s comments point to ways that one can break from this format, most of which I think are good, all of which I think are worth considering, but I think at that point we are no longer talking about a journal but something else. This might be a matter of semantics but I feel as if there is more to this.

“Commons” is the term I would want to focus on here, maybe “Commons” and maybe the one not used “Library.” That is if we think about the “Commons” as being a discursive community, then something the web opens up all sorts of new possibilities for this. Sure a journal is one type of discursive community, but why limit your model in this way. Seems to me that Media Commons can be a way to exceed the print journal as a discursive community for scholars interested in Media studies, a virtual library of resources, and maybe also salon of communication and events—working papers, plus online chats/presentations of these.

One other thing I want to add here in the realm of concerns. I was thinking about the book in general the other day. And it seems that the book is structured by a paradox, that is it “gathers” together knowledge so that it can “disperse” that knowledge. So the book is both a place for gathering and dispersal. A book does the gathering part of this equation really well, mostly on the strength of an author function, but also because of a physical sense of its fixed structure, but it needs help in the dispersal function. This is where libraries, bookstores, teachers, newspaper reviews, etc all come into play as ways of setting the book out there. The web seems the reverse case. That is its dispersal function is its strength, where as the gathering function seems more problematic, what to include, what not? how to prevent it from accelerating out of control etc. Which is to say, that I think the primary concern is about this gathering function, what kinds of things are going to be gathered? on the value of what criteria? and how are they going to be gathered, linked etc.

I'd like to second Clancy's

by Kari Kraus — University of Maryland
March 03, 2007 – 22:27

I’d like to second Clancy’s suggestion that MediaCommons find ways to challenge current copyright law. The technological infrastructure to realize the MediaCommons vision is in place, the cultural infrastructure is in place, but the legal infrastructure lags far behind. The question is, what concrete form(s) should such a challenge take? Understanding and asserting fair use—and not cowing to those forces that would try to erode it—is one important step, and subjecting the statutory language of copyright law to the kind of critical scrutiny that we normally reserve for other kinds of media content is another. What else can we do, and more relevantly, what are we as a community uniquely positioned and qualified to do? Lately I’ve been mulling over one small step that literary and media scholars might collectively undertake, which is to follow Alan Liu’s lead in extending and modifying the current MLA conventions for documenting web-based resources. If we could devise a set of MLA protocols for citing the kinds of collaborative remixes and mashups we now routinely encounter on the Web, we’ll have gone some way toward academically legitimating a ubiquitous cultural genre whose long-term sustainability is jeopardized by current intellectual property law. (As an aside, such protocols might also be used as a form of cultural critique. For example, a scholar citing a Mickey Mouse cartoon might tactically elect to treat it as a remix, crediting not only Disney corporation, but also Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., on which the character of Mickey Mouse was originally based. See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture [New York: Penguin 2004]: 22-23).

Might not MediaCommons initiate such a set of citation conventions?