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Not Quite Through
the Looking Glass:
Reconciling the
Virtual-Physical Dichotomy in the New Media
Classroom
by Dougie Bicket and Diane
Gromala
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Click below for:
Introduction
Integrating
Journalism and Visual Communications in the New Media
Environment
Bringing
Together Theory and Practice in the Lab
Understanding the
Cultures of Calculation and Simulation
Computers as
"Objects to Think With"
Making Greater
Use of Literature and Film
Utilizing
Cultural Theory to Understand the Web
Conclusion
References
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Introduction
A great deal has been written in
recent years about the shift in general cultural values from
a modern to a postmodern paradigm, and all that that
entails. Within this broader debate has been a more focused
discussion about how academia should adapt to this perceived
shift. This debate, which has touched on journalism and
communications mostly through the academic fields of
psychology, feminist theory, and cultural studies, has
remained, for the most part, limited to a swathe of
professorial and graduate research, and has not yet filtered
down in significant fashion to the undergraduate new media
classroom. Also, the nature of the debate, at all levels,
has remained primarily rhetorical and theoretical. While
much academic effort has been sustained in an attempt to
understand and articulate what these changes mean, little
has been done to apply the fruits of these efforts to the
development of pedagogical procedures that properly
articulate the form, as well as the content, of the change.
While academics such as George Landow and Sherry Turkle have
helped to clarify the tangible links between cultural
studies' high theory and the development of
graphics-oriented computing and the Internet, less has been
achieved -- or at least written about -- relating this study
to students' everyday classroom experiences. This is so even
in areas of undergraduate education which cry out for a new
approach, such as the new media and journalism tracks
popping up in Communications and English departments across
the country. While some positive steps undoubtedly have been
taken at different institutions and in different ways, it is
probably fair to say that much still needs to be done to
fully reconcile the societal changes instigated by the new
media with the way communications educators teach their
classes. As this paper hopefully makes clear, we have much
more to do than simply recount to our students the seismic
changes in the world of digital communications while leaving
them alone to play with the Internet; we need to integrate
our teaching practices directly and visibly with the very
changes we perceive, since it is necessary for
undergraduates to fully understand the experiential aspect.
In other words, we need to start practicing what we preach.
In doing so, we should appreciate the full use to which the
physical space of the computer classroom or lab can be put
in our pursuit of this goal.
A brief review of the literature shows
that a good deal has already been written about the
developing role of new media in the classroom. In addition
to what some see as the seminal work in this topic, Robert
O. Blanchard and William G. Christ's Media Education and the Liberal Arts: A
Blueprint for the New Professionalism (1993), the subject has been well covered in
the pages of Journalism and
Mass Communication Educator by
authors such as Thompson (1995), Friedland and Webb (1996),
Smith and Mendelson (1996), and Gunaratne and Lee (1996), as
well as in the pages of The
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Combining some of the points made by the aforementioned
authors with observations of my own, some general points can
safely be made about the current position of the Internet
and its impact on journalism and communications
departments:
1. The once clear boundaries between
newspaper and magazine, print and broadcast, television and
radio, information as news and information as data have
rapidly eroded in an emerging practice of multimedia
journalism and communications that no longer respects such
divisions.
2. Distinctions between sequence-based
academic tracks in journalism, new media, and visual
communications have become much less necessary or relevant,
in part because the computer has effectively taken over the
physical territory within which these sequences operated,
such as the video editing studio, the darkroom, the graphics
lab, and the news writing lab. Further, the very nature of
the evolving new medium has caused the conceptual
underpinnings of these tracks to converge also.
3. Experiential learning must be
grounded in a foundation of conceptual thinking, and vice
versa. Media students approaching multimedia communications
have to learn both the principles of the new medium and a
new way of thinking about and conceptualizing the topic.
This is so whether the subject is journalism or visual
communications. This provokes a potential dilemma -- the
need to teach new skills used in the workplace at the same
time as focusing on the meaning of such skills and their
place in the industry.
4. The role of the instructor has
changed drastically in the new media environment.
Instructors now facilitate and collaborate with their
students, who as often as not now work on projects in
teams.
5. The importance of visual literacy,
or the ability to create and understand visuals in the
converging new media, is now recognized as being of utmost
importance to all communications workers and teachers --
photographers, graphic designers, editors, and journalists.
Students lacking visual communication knowledge and skills
will have an incomplete understanding of how to communicate
effectively. Any integrative approach to communications
therefore must recognize the centrality of visual
communication.
Another seminal source for
understanding the role of technology in the classroom comes
from the article "Implementing
the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," by Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C.
Ehrmann, which appeared in the March 1987 edition of the
AAHE Bulletin. Chickering and Ehrmann included the following
seven basic principles:
- Good Practice Encourages Contacts
Between Students and Faculty
- Good Practice Develops Reciprocity
and Cooperation Among Students
- Good Practice Uses Active Learning
Techniques
- Good Practice Gives Prompt
Feedback
- Good Practice Emphasizes Time on
Task
- Good Practice Communicates High
Expectations
- Good Practice Respects Diverse
Talents and Ways of Learning
Having recapped all these
aforementioned points at the outset, the remainder of this
paper will attempt to articulate a mode of teaching and
learning that takes into account these points, while at the
same time reconciling some of the pedagogical issues related
to the teaching of new media and computer-mediated
communications in the physical, real-world space of the new
media laboratory or classroom. As David R. Thompson points
out, digital, computer-mediated communications encourages
and requires both students and professors to think in
multiple dimensions: aural, visual, and tactile, i.e., with
an interactive media interface (1995, p. 39). It is
these multiple dimensions that we need to access and
articulate in our quest to find a pedagogical style
appropriate to the Internet.
The task before us, then, is to find a
way to reconcile and integrate the most appropriate and best
aspects of what Sherry Turkle refers to as the "culture of
calculation" and the "culture of simulation" (see below). On
a broader level, any study of this kind should lead to an
appreciation of the concepts of modernism and post-modernism
in the university classroom or lab -- itself, of course, a
quite modernist construct. While virtual classes, in the
form of distance learning, might well be the wave of the
future (although this may not necessarily be a good thing),
most of us remain grounded in the physical space of the
classroom, in face-to-face contact with our students. The
physical presence of both instructor and students in a
classroom is still a strong advantage, however. How we use
that advantage to articulate ideas and concepts that are
often more at home "out there" in cyberspace than in "Real
Life" will determine whether we succeed or fail. The goal is
to produce graduates who are well-rounded and educated in
both the practical aspects of new media, while maintaining
an appreciation of the theoretical positions that help them
to understand how the Internet is changing their lives. It
is a delicate balance that we seek to maintain in this
endeavor, and this paper outlines some suggestions for
achieving it.
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Integrating Journalism and Visual
Communications in the New Media Environment
The new media classroom or laboratory
is the common physical space where the orientation of
students to the computer-mediated realm will invariably take
place. Rooted as it is in the modernist, tactile environment
of the university department, it is nevertheless the most
effective window, or looking glass, through which students
can peer into the very different realm of cyberspace. Within
this space, video, sound, graphics, and computer animation
join traditional text in a multimedia panoply that provides
students with the tools to work and research in the
Internet. In the School of Communications' New Media
Research Laboratory at the University of Washington, for
example, the lab functions as a classroom, laboratory,
production facility, and community for undergraduates and
graduate students alike. It absorbs a tremendous amount of
traffic from students in the New Media concentration, but
its doors also remain open to students who study traditional
journalism in the electronic environment. In fact, the
emphasis in this department is moving toward greater
integration of the traditional functions of a news editorial
sequence with the more design/visual communication-oriented
new media track. Already, the two tracks share a common
computer type (the Power Macintosh) and a common local area
network for communication purposes. Soon they will also
share a common physical space when the new media lab moves
to an area adjacent to the current News Writing Lab.
For its part, visual communication is
an area which has a background in journalism photography and
advertising tracks as well as design, and whose importance
is expanding in communications departments with the
increasing convergence of traditional and new media.
Nevertheless, such classes are often under threat. Smith and
Mendelson note that the expense involved in maintaining
traditional visual communications programs meant that some
programs were being eliminated because of departments'
unwillingness to invest in the switch to digital technology
(p. 66). Given the centrality of visual communications and
designing our increasingly visual-oriented culture, it
should be the goal of any new media environment to embrace
these areas and merge them in turn with news editorial
courses to create a strong, unified sequence.
This paper takes one fundamental
position that underpins everything else written here: that a
student's full understanding of new media, as well as
communications and journalism and their place in the world,
can only be arrived at through a course of study that
seamlessly integrates theory and practical applications.
It's not enough for students simply to attend lectures two
or three times a week and write a term paper about, say,
cyberpunk and post-modernism; nor is it enough to learn how
to program in HTML or Java, or know the working of a
Macintosh G3 inside out. Any course or sequence that pursues
only one of these options at the expense of the other will
not turn out well-rounded, valuable, or particularly
employable citizens or members of society. Furthermore, this
paper posits that journalism and visual communications
sequences should be converging in academia just as they are
in industry since, to all intents and purposes, they now
cover similar ground -- both conceptually and in terms of
required skills. While significant differences of course
remain, they can be easily accommodated in a combined
curriculum that recognizes such differences while
emphasizing many of commonalities. New media journalism and
visual communication can work well together.
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Bringing Together Theory and
Practice in the Lab
Having touched on the practical and
material boundaries of new media education, the next step is
to examine some of the pedagogical concerns contained within
these boundaries. The need here is to recognize that
students come into new media and communications programs
with very different sets of priorities. These priorities
might not, however, always be the most appropriate for them.
As things stand now, many students of journalism,
communications, and cultural studies -- both at graduate and
senior undergraduate levels -- know a good deal about the
writings of Barthes and Baudrillard, for example, or the
concepts of structuralism and post-structuralism, yet have
never built their own Web page or logged on to a chat room.
Meanwhile, there are a huge number of people entering or
desiring to enter higher education who still have never
encountered a personal computer screen on more than a
fleeting basis. To people in the first group, familiarity
with, say, a Windows-based operating system often precludes
a deeper understanding of how they are interfacing with the
computer-mediated world through that system. To people in
the second group, an education conducted primarily in a
pre-Windows age might seem to preclude them from any
understanding at all of how a graphics-user interface can
enable them to function in our developing cyber-society in
the first place. Perhaps the most fundamental task of any
new media educator is to make the members of the first group
realize that there is a great deal about what they do with
their computers that they don't really understand, while at
the same time reaching out to members of the second group to
assure them that there is much to computer-mediated
communications that they can quickly grasp and understand.
For some, in other words, the task is to make them realize
what they don't know about new media (and direct them toward
rectifying that); while for others, it is to show them that
they probably do know more than
they think they know, and guide them toward filling in the
blanks for themselves. This might seem an awkward, even
contradictory task, but since we, as educators, are likely
to find substantial numbers of both groups in any given new
media class, it is one that we must accomplish with the
minimum of fuss.
The dichotomy alluded to above can be
expressed in another way: on the one hand, there are the
computer "whiz-kids" who know (or think they know) all about
HTML and the latest applications for creating Web animation,
mounting streaming video on a Web site, and so on. However,
the skills gained by these "practical" or utilitarian
students have often been acquired in the absence of any
deeper theoretical understanding of the cultural and
societal changes that have underpinned the new media
developments they see before them. On the other hand, there
are plenty of theory-laden students out there who are
positively technophobic. The types referred to above are of
course extremes. In reality, the majority of courses would
exhibit a range of abilities among their students, from
practical-oriented to theory-oriented, with class members
being oriented to some extent one way or the other.
What goes for the students can apply
equally well to faculty, we should note. Most of the same
traits found in students of varying levels of new technology
competence can be found just as easily in professors and
instructors. And in these cases the pedagogical tasks of the
new technology instructor are essentially the same -- except
we have to realize that professors, and especially older
professors, are often more resistant to new ideas and
methods than are students. That has been my experience over
the past two years of instructing both students and
professors in new media and new technology. Often,
therefore, a gentler, "kid gloves" approach is necessary in
such cases, so that professors and instructors can be eased
into a better conceptual framework for using and instructing
new technology.
In sum, the most important step in
bringing together these two groups to a common purpose is
making them understand both the limitations of their current
knowledge in certain areas, while recognizing that the
knowledge that they do already possess in other areas is
extremely valuable and can aid them in filling in those
blanks in knowledge, be it practical or theoretical or (as
would most often be likely) some asymmetrical mix of the
two.
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Understanding the Cultures of
Calculation and Simulation
In any course that is intended as an
introduction to social theories that underwrite technology
and culture, as well as the ways that people interface with
computers, the first step is to show students that all the
aspects previously mentioned in this paper are, in fact,
already closely integrated, both in form and content. This
is a goal that can be achieved quite effectively in the
environment of the computer classroom or lab. And the most
effective way to make students' appreciation of the world of
personal computing and cyberspace real is to focus their
attention on their window to that world: the personal
computer. By understanding more fully how they interact with
that box in front of them, they take the first step in
really understanding how they can interact with the virtual
world beyond. This is the first major conceptual leap a
student must overcome on the way to appreciating the world
of new media and cyberspace. It calls for an appreciation of
the relationship between the aesthetics of computing and the
formal characteristics of computers, networks, and the
Internet. An excellent source for getting into this subject
is Sherry Turkle, whose Life on
the Screen (1995) opens with
an exploration of the different subcultures, or aesthetics,
of computing. Turkle contrasts the "hacker" and "hobbyist"
subcultures -- precursors, respectively, of the Macintosh
and DOS operating systems -- and shows how, in recent years,
the former has been gaining ground in the culture wars at
the expense of the latter. This relates directly with a more
general perceived shift in society, from a primarily
modernist to a primarily post-modernist aesthetic. As Turkle
sees it, objects like the Apple II, DOS, or UNIX "support a
modernist interpretation of understanding, according to
which understanding proceeds by reducing complex things to
simpler elements." Her "stripped-down Apple II both embodied
and symbolized a theory that it was possible to understand
by discovering the hidden mechanisms that made things work."
In other words, "Analyze and you shall know" (Turkle, 1995,
p. 34). Macintoshes, on the other hand, encourage users to
stay at a surface level of visual representation that gives
no hint of inner mechanisms. Unlike DOS or UNIX, the Mac
operates a graphic-user interface, complete with a simulated
"desktop" and assorted icons, allowing the user to navigate
around a simulated, surface environment that looks somewhat
like (in fact, is a metaphor for) "the real thing." Although
of course the Mac from the beginning worked the same way as
other computers, its workings were kept well hidden, and
"the tools of the modernist culture of calculation became
layered underneath the experience of the [postmodern]
culture of simulation" (Turkle, 1995, p. 34). In many ways,
then, the experience of working on a (non-Windows) PC is
very different from that of a Mac. The simulated desktop
environment of the Macintosh points to "a new kind of
experience in which people do not so much command machines
as enter into conversations with them" (Turkle, 1995, p.
35).
Thus, by the late 1980s, the culture
of personal computing found itself split between "IBM
reductionism vs. Macintosh simulation and surface" -- one a
modern aesthetic, the other post-modernist. Then, "With the
introduction of Microsoft Windows in 1985, the modern and
postmodern aesthetics of computing became curiously
entwined" (Turkle, 1995, p. 37), and the culture of
calculation (epitomized by UNIX and DOS) continued its
now-irrevocable shift to a culture of simulation.
The importance of the shift among
computer users from a text- to graphic-oriented interface,
first with the Mac and then with Microsoft Windows, cannot
be overemphasized. Turkle sees this battle for the hearts
and minds of computer users as of central importance to the
way our culture is developing. "Computers support different
styles and cultures because they can be approached in
different ways." Some philosophers of the mind have seen
"the computer's hardware-software interplay as evocative of
the irreducible relationship of brain and mind" (Turkle,
1995, p. 33).
Part of the educator's task of
acclimation to new media is to make her students appreciate
the resonance of these aforementioned points. Since most
students in a new media class will probably be most
comfortable working with a Mac/Windows environment, it would
be illustrative of the concepts outlined above for the
instructor to orient these students toward a UNIX, or
command-line, system in addition to the more familiar
graphic user interface (GUI) environment. The very obvious
differences between these two aesthetics provide a
wonderfully effective articulation of the sort of abstract
theories that students of new media and journalism now need
to be familiar with. This articulation can even be used as a
sort of "ice breaker" to help orient students who are fresh
to the new media experience.
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Computers as "Objects to Think
With"
Abstract concepts such as modernism
and post-modernism can help us to understand concrete
concepts such as computer-mediated communications, and vice
versa; the Mac-UNIX dichotomy referred to above is only the
first important example of this two-way process. Its
application can help open the way to a whole new way of
thinking about the computing machines we use every day,
their place in the world, and their collective impact on our
minds, and on our culture. Such an understanding is
essential for journalists, designers, and visual
communicators alike.
Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991)
characterizes post-modernism as follows: the precedence of
surface over depth, of simulation over the 'real,' of play
over seriousness, many of the same qualities that now
characterize the new computer aesthetic. At that time,
Jameson noted that the postmodern era lacked objects that
could represent it. The turbine, smokestack, pipes, and
conveyor belts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had
been powerful things-to-think-with for imaging the nature of
industrial modernity. Jameson suggests that the new
postmodern era required a new "aesthetic of cognitive
mapping." Well, according to Turkle, post-modernity seems to
have found its object-to-think-with: the computer.
"Prefigured by Neuromancer's
matrix of informational space, post-modernism's objects now
exist outside science fiction. They exist in the information
and connections of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and
in the windows, icons, and layers of personal computing"
(Turkle, 1995, p. 45). And it is this interplay of
computerized icons, windows, and environments that needs to
be emphasized so that students can feel intimately
associated with computer and the Internet on a personal,
even phatic, level. From this stage, students can then be
introduced to more advanced concepts that are directly
relevant to their work on the Web, such as those of
prosthesis and telepresence (which involve the extension of
the self into cyberspace). Understanding how these concepts
relate to and alter the self, and how they can be
articulated through practical applications such as e-mail,
chat lines, and ftp, allows for a far more rounded and
richer appreciation of the importance of these latter
artifacts in the functioning of the Internet.
However, alongside this examination of
the virtual, hyperlinked side of the Net (the
software-oriented side of things, if you like), there needs
to be a thorough accounting of the hardware aspects of the
Internet: computers, networks, servers, nodes, and so on.
This comes under the rubric of "Knowing Where Things Live in
Cyberspace," and is the element that can best be explored in
the physical space of the new media lab. For example, when a
student first experiments with creating an HTML document on
her local computer, then sends it via ftp (file transfer
protocol) to an external server, she needs to be able to
conceive of where her document "lives" at each stage of the
process. The physical space of the new media laboratory is
an excellent real-word environment to show students that,
while in some sense cyberspace is "out there" and all around
them, in another sense its components "live" in computers
and servers just like the ones they directly deal with every
day.
Perhaps the most important pedagogical
point we can abstract from Turkle's work in this area is
that computers not only provide us with the tools to
interact in a cyber-environment; they can also serve as
excellent metaphorical devices which we can use to
illuminate the perceived changes in society, culture, arts,
and sciences from a primarily modern to an essentially
postmodern paradigm. Command-line-based machines are linear,
analytical, serious, hierarchical -- much like society used
to be, argues Turkle -- but they could be understood by
dedicated users, or "experts", who could get in "under the
surface", break the machine down to its basics, and rebuild
it like a kit car. Macintosh-type GUIs, on the other hand,
are playful, surface-oriented, and don't allow the user to
get in under the surface to alter the basic OS code; but
they are more accessible and user-friendly, and their use
can be extended over a greater variety of tasks beyond
computing. They allow users to ignore the workings of the
computer and concentrate instead on interacting with
the machine (or networks of machines) through the visual
interface. Instead of the "deep structure" world of DOS and
UNIX they can now enter the surface world of simulation --
simulated files, folders, tools, paintings, whatever -- that
characterizes not only the Mac, but also many other aspects
of the world around us. Once students understand this
essential distinction they can see in front of them in the
lab, they can gain new insight to the wider changes which
the machine in front of them has in some ways instigated and
in other ways reflected.
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Making Greater Use of Literature
and Film
Another way of integrating theory and
practice is to look at the fiction, both in literature and
film forms, that envelopes and in many ways defines the
concept of cyberspace. As the aesthetic of simulation has
become increasingly dominant in the culture at large, one of
its strongest literary manifestations has been through the
subgenre of science fiction called cyberpunk, which began in
the early 1980s. Cyberpunk displays an aggressive,
iconoclastic punk idiom, rooted in urban street culture,
alongside an excessively technological future where
distinctions between technology and humanity are fading
away, and all that is left is the cyborg, part-human and
part-machine. According to Claudia Springer,
cyberpunk revolves around a cartesian
separation of mind from body. When console cowboys jack
into cyberspace in William Gibson's Neuromancer,
Count Zero, and
Mona Lisa Overdrive,
they leave their bodies behind to soar mentally through a
"consensual hallucination" of three-dimensional data
inside the computer matrix. They refer disparagingly to
the bodies they have left behind as meat" (Springer,
1996, p. 31).
Neuromancer itself became a cultural landmark when first
published in 1984. Its futuristic hacker hero, Case, moved
easily through a matrix -- a type of Internet -- that
represented connections among social, commercial, and
political institutions of the novel's cyber-world.
"Neuromancer's hero yearned to fully inhabit, indeed be one
with, the digital forms of life. He was a virtuoso, a cowboy
of information space, and thus for many a postmodern
Everyman" (Turkle, 1995, p. 42). Gibson also coined the term
"cyberspace," meaning the space that exists within a
computer or matrix of computers. Cyberspace is not reducible
to lines of code, bits of data, or electrical signals, but
is instead virtual and "out there." Although we need to make
clear to students the concept of "where things live," as
mentioned earlier, me must not forget to impress upon them
that cyberspace is more than the sum of parts of all its
constituent hardware. There are rapidly evolving concepts of
community, art, and power out in the virtual realm, all of
which students need to be aware of. An examination of the
relevant cyberpunk and other science-fiction literature of
that ilk (as well as closely related movies which clearly
display a post-modern aesthetic, such as Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner) might be an effective means of making them
understand that. Questions can be raised and examined, such
as: Is cyberpunk a plausible portrayal of the future, or
even the present? What does Gibson's portrayal of cyberspace
have in common with the Internet we work in today? What does
the genre's resonance in present-day culture say about the
nature of this culture? and so on. Discussions of this sort
often come alive in the classroom. Cyberpunk, like the
cyborg, prosthesis, and artificial intelligence, is a
concept that can find elaboration and articulation in
real-world experience, academic theory, and science fiction,
as well as within both the physical and the virtual
(classroom news groups, listserves, etc.) spaces of the
classroom.
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Utilizing Cultural Theory to
Understand the Web
It should be apparent by now that a
knowledge of HTML alone, without an understanding of
hypertext and its wider impact in and across the Internet,
is insufficient for any student. A theoretical approach must
accompany the students' development of Web skills. An
examination of literature might enable the student to gain a
different perspective -- or deeper "feel" -- for what's
going on around her, but at some point she needs to delve
into some of the academic writing that is relevant to the
Web and cyberspace. In this context, the impact of the Web
on more traditional narratives can be understood more
completely through the reading of those writers, such as
Barthes and Derrida, who first theorized Web-related
concepts. For example, Barthes argues that the modernist
conception of the author is dead, or at least dying, because
the standardizing, linear narrative structure of the
modernist author is being undermined by new, hyperlinked,
multiple narratives. In S/Z, Barthes
distinguishes between what he calls "readerly" and
"writerly" texts. This is an important distinction for
students of new media, since it helps to form part of the
theoretical framework for hypertext. Why? Because readerly
texts, where the reader passively consumed information in a
linear manner, can be viewed as the norm for print
technology (e.g., in reading a book). Writerly texts are
closer to the norm in an electronic environment, when the
reader can choose how to relate to the text by negotiating a
path through it using different links, nodes, and networks
in a web of information. (This is a gross
oversimplification, but it gets the idea across.) This
conception of text in terms of networks and links is also
shared by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, among others.
"In this ideal text," says Barthes, "the networks are many
and interact . . . this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not
a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is
reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances"
(Barthes, S/Z, 5). While Barthes was writing years before
the Internet evolved into a new type of medium, his writing
succinctly encapsulates the environment and the mechanism of
the World Wide Web. In this new milieu of non-sequential
reading (and, effectively, non-sequential writing) the
reader is no longer just a consumer of text and images, but
a producer also. (See also Landow, 3, 5).
One of the results of Barthes' and
others' work in post-structuralism has therefore been to
undermine the supposedly strict distinction between literary
and non-literary texts, and to look at discourse not as a
transparent glass through which we glimpse reality but as
the vehicle and creator of what he calls the reality effect.
This is something which can be seen -- and experienced --
quite easily by students surfing the Web. Combined with an
appreciation of the non-linear nature of the Web, it is an
aspect that should be understood by all students of new
media.
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Conclusion
Friedland and Webb's evaluation of the
traditional divisions within their School of Journalism made
them realize that "while we continued to teach along
divisional lines, the media that we are teaching are in fact
converging" (1996, p. 59). Today this issue of convergence
has only accelerated. All of the traditional media with
which we are traditionally familiar -- photography,
television, writing, editing, advertising, design, and so on
-- are converging and compressing. Because of the
convergence of these areas -- many of which were themselves
equipment-intensive -- into one medium, it is essential to
maintain adequate resources for the computing hardware
necessary to support that convergence to the digital realm.
Since, in total terms, the convergent nature of this new
media environment makes its use more cost-effective, per
student, than the traditional media, it only makes more
sense to fund it fully. After all, this is where all the
action is.
The steady convergence of academic and
industry orientations toward the use and role of new media
forms the background to the developing struggle to develop
these issues more fully in the classroom. The physical space
of the new media lab is still the best place to pursue these
goals. The outline presented here might help to reconcile
some of the pedagogical issues related to the teaching of
new media and computer-mediated communications in the
physical, real-world space of the new media laboratory or
classroom. The aim of this paper has been not only to review
and collate some of the more practical ways to achieve this
reconciliation of physical and virtual, but also to show how
the practical aspects of new media education can only work
effectively when synchronously combined with a close study
of the theoretical and literary underpinnings of the
Internet. It is this aspect which all too often gets ignored
in the technophilic rush by educators to adopt the latest,
fastest, all-bells-and-whistles computers and applications.
Yet any news editorial or new media sequence which pursues
only technical goals in the absence of a full and clear
elucidation of these theoretical underpinnings inevitably
becomes a structure built on sand. In an era when the
hardware and physical environment of new media is subject to
constant, sometimes dizzying, change, the underlying
theoretical premises touched on in this paper are perhaps
the most constant element in this heady mix. Theories change
much less frequently than hardware and software, while
retaining their symbiotic relevance to each new upgrade and
faster microchip that comes along. A strong theoretical
program can provide the common foundation and structure that
all new media-related courses desperately need. Theory and
application can still work well together, even in the new
media age.
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