Because the form of any given archive structures its effects and content, changing methods of knowledge preservation and dissemination demand particular attention. In October of 2006, the MacArthur foundation announced a $240,000 grant given to the University of Indiana to create a massively multiplayer online game, Arden: The World of Shakespeare. Given that the MacArthur foundation’s purpose is to “investigate the role and impact of digital media and technology, and to seek out the implications on our schools, institutions, families, and democracy,” one has to wonder how creating an immersive Shakespeare world fosters this goal. On the one hand, this project would appear to be nothing specifically new: historical re-enactments and recreations have long been a part of how public memory is created and preserved. But on the other hand, the digitalization of this type of historical re-presentation points to a differently framed set of concerns: What do we preserve? How much agency should “players” have? And, perhaps most importantly and given the increasing fascination with such a projected world, what role do these simulations have in the construction of a public memory? For, if one can re-create the literary world of Shakespeare, are we really that far from Surviving in Auschwitz: the online game? And if these types of games seem almost inevitable, what are the broader effects of such simulation-representations on how we archive knowledge?

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The creation of easily portable cameras and film recorders (primarily cell phones capable of recording digital images) has made it easier for nearly everyone to quickly record, document, and share images and events that would normally go unseen or unnoticed by those not immediately affected by their occurrence. Such technology, especially in conjunction with egalitarian systems of mass transmission like YouTube or Google Video, allows any and possibly every event to be recorded and distributed. Behavior deemed inappropriate by one person is widely distributed (for potential communal judgment) to his/her community. Regulation of behavior, potentially even behavior that is personal and/or private, quickly becomes possible. In many situations, this has a seemingly positive effect. Recent images of police brutality in California, USA and irresponsible behavior at the hanging of Saddam Hussein have both been recorded on camera phone and distributed through the internet have drawn attention to troubling situations that would otherwise not be afforded to them. Like the passive user of media who becomes, through its production, an active user, citizens can take an active part in the regulation of behavior by distributing images and recordings of events. But if every citizen is armed with a portable digital recording device and ability to widely distribute almost all of the events he or she is able to record, how far away is a community from creating its own version of the establishment fears most, the Big Brother himself?

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While many academics bemoan the numerous hours students spend with Facebook and MySpace, with YouTube and various RPG’s (role-playing games), they rarely offer an alternative, a way to channel some of the energy and excellence students devote toward these social pursuits into their academic work. Thus, while new media scholarship is increasingly rampant, a concomitant pedagogy is far less so. We must find a pedagogy that incorporates student production of new media, while it also demands intellectual rigor. As a remedy, I want to use new media to effect a sustained reading of my student’s multimedia projects, particularly for a course I taught for two semesters called “Multicultural America.” These pieces blend research and autobiography as students struggle to reconcile their own idiosyncratic experiences of the world, with the larger structural forces of racism, sexism, classism, age stereotyping and the like. These student projects combine the personal and the political—the identity politics, in other words—of life in the highly mediated 21st century. As such, they can offer both a view of the potential for multimedia in academic settings, as well as a blueprint for future work on student engagement in the university classroom. The “reading” I will conduct will be informed by the disciplines of both cultural studies and new media. Most importantly however, the student projects will not be either appropriated or denigrated by me: that is, they will be shown in their totality and this is only possible in such an environment at that offered by MediaCommons.

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Praxis is the organic and necessary integration of theory (thinking) and practice (doing) if one’s aims are political (changing). Since cinema’s invention, artists committed to social transformation have engaged in a media praxis: the using and theorizing of film (and its later-coming, sister forms, video, the telelvisual, and the digital), towards world- and self-changing. MEDIA PRAXIS is a web-site that continues and honors this tradition by making the most of today’s digital technologies. Its backbone is thirty theoretical texts, spanning close to 100 years of media history, and written by mediamakers who were active in social change. Then, 12 essays will be written for the page by specialists as entry-way essays. But the posting of all this media theory and history is not for mere contemplation, the celebration of words on a screen. Rather, the page creates possibilities to read and write about, as well as make media, as a mediated step towards action and interaction.

MEDIA PRAXIS brings the inspiring words and images of past media revolutions to the attention of contemporary audiences; puts ideas into action through pedagogic exercises, connections, and conversations that make both media theory and media making available to non-artists and non-academics; and links the political projects of contemporary media artists, activists, and intellectuals into collaborative dialogues and activities. MEDIA PRAXIS enacts the very tradition under scrutiny by using digital media to promote the circulation, archiving, and creation of a living media praxis.

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Due to recent developments in digital video technologies, film scholars can now “write” using the very materials that consitute their object of study — moving images and sounds. But using these new technologies to present scholarship demands a rethinking of the forms of criticism that have dominated film studies to this point. This joint submission — by Christian Keathley (Middlebury College) and Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida) — proposes a site, La Camera-stylo, facilitated by Media Commons, for cinema scholars to present work that experiments with these new technolgoies and with a revised rhetoric for the presentation of film scholarship.

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For my thesis I will be analyzing community arts, and how the different types of media which artists employ directly affect the product and process of the projects. If “the medium is the message” as Marshal McLuhan posits, then there is a direct relationship between the media that community artists utilize, and the products and group processes that result from the interaction. Different types of media allow communities to reflect and break down issues in different ways. I will be focusing my research on UCLArts ArtsBridge America, a not-for-profit arts organization which partners UCLA scholars with inner-city schools to develop arts-based curriculum.

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In a time where both the types of media we consume and the ways we consume it are rapidly converging, the once-passive viewer becomes an active user. The apotheosis of this emergent phenomenon are the do-it-yourself video and music movements. These movements have been spawned by individuals that have transformed their viewing experience into a using experience by using non-original material in “original” ways. Yet how original are these creations with our culture? Is this phenomenon new or merely an extension of the remote control, an inevitable development? Why do we do this?

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