it works in practice, but what about theory? media literacy troy davis :: media services librarian...

It works in practice, but what about theory?

Media Literacy

Troy Davis :: Media Services LibrarianUniversity of Tennessee Libraries

Boone Tree Library Association - March 17, 2005Boone Tree Library Association - March 17, 2005


Outline

•The Studio

•Information Literacy and Visual Culture

•The Diffuse Library and its tactics


Production in The Library


Studio Stats Summary


Visual Culture

“...a world picture...does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture...The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.” Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”

the audio-visualization of everyday life


Visual Culture

•“Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought [by individuals] in an interface with visual technology.”(3)

•“...visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence.” (3)

Mirzoeff (1999)


Visual Culture

“Visual culture directs our attention away from structured, formal viewing settings like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life.” (Mirzoeff, p.7, emphasis added)


Information Literacy - Incomplete

“Information is not knowledge and getting information is not thinking.”(Jane Kansas, Mockingbird FAQ, http://mockingbird.chebucto.org/faq.html)

•What is “information” in the context of The Studio?

•User’s of The Studio don’t seem to interested in information, but want to express themselves, to create meaning, in short, to be authors


Information Literacy

“The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants without having to undergo a training program.” (emphasis added)

Wilder, Stanley (2005), “Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(18), B13


Information Literacy

“Information literacy is...harmful because it encourages librarians to teach ways to deal with complexity of information retrieval, rather than try to reduce that complexity.”

Wilder, Stanley (2005), “Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(18), B13

Reducing complexity can be achieved by cultivating meaningful “experiences.”

(for an analysis of why librarianship has a problem with this, see LQ’s Tunnel Vision and Blind-spots issue 73:1)


Information Literacy - Incomplete

•Incomplete in that it seems to devalue experience or approaches the “experience” of information as arbitrary

•Utilitarian: computer as tool rather than computer as “text” or medium

•User instead of author

•Focuses on the transparency, rather than the awareness of interfaces


Aesthetic Experiences

•“It is misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a culture dominated by things. The consumer lives surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies.” Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self

•Aesthetic experiences are just refined prosaic experiences. (see John Dewey’s Art as Experience)


Computer applications

not just used, but

“experienced.” (Brenda Laurel,

Computers as Theatre)


My “unscientific” conclusion

People can tolerate complexity if the payoff is meaning, not information, if the experience is “framed” and supported as a contribution to an individual’s “everyday life.”


An example from Daniel Chudnov

“libraries could merge the functions of weblogging, reference management, and link resolution into a new library groupware infrastructure, helping users to better manage the entire lifecycle of the bibliographic research process. Several scenarios explore how such an application suite might help library users by integrating their bibliographic research more closely with communication -- scholarly and otherwise, from private annotation to public discussion.”

http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/writings/blm.html

Library Groupware for Bibliographic Lifecycle Management


Media Literacy

•media messages are constructed;

•media messages are produced within economic, social, political, historical and aesthetic contexts;

• the interpretive meaning-making processes involved in media reception consist of an interaction between the reader, the text, and the culture;

•media have unique languages, characteristics which typify various forms, genres, and symbol systems of communication;

•media representations play a role in people’s understanding of social reality

(source: National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy - 1992)


Expanding the Concept of Literacy

•The multimedia language of the screen has become the current vernacular.

•The multimedia language of the screen is capable of constructing complex meanings independent of the text.

•The multimedia language of the screen enables modes of thought, ways of communicating and conducting research and methods of publication and teaching that are essentially different from those of the text.

•Those who are truly literate in the twenty-first century will be those who learn to both read and write the multimedia language of the screen.

Elizabeth Daley (Dean, USC School of Cinema-Televison)


Media Programming as a Tactic of Diffusion

“With the incorporation of of distributed technologies and more open models, the library has the potential to become more and more involved in all stages, and in all contexts, of knowledge creation, dissemination and use...diffusion refers to the spreading out of elements, and intermingling of molecules.”

(Wendy Pradt Lougee, Diffuse Libraries: Emergent Roles for

the Research Library in the Digital Age, August 2002, CLIR.


Tactics of Diffusion

•Instruction Efforts

•Documentaries in The Library

•Recycled Video Contest & Festival


Instructional Efforts

•Digital Video Courses (iMovie, Final Cut Pro)

•Digital Imaging Courses (Photoshop)


Documentaries in The Libraryingredients

•“I want my students to make a movie.”

•Decent (and rare) documentary film collection

•Increasing use of films as “primary texts” rather than illustrative or supplementary

•Library as space for the “intersection” of individual research interests, library collections, and visual experiences


History

•ALA Public Programs Grant (Spring 2004) - Research Revolution: Science and The Shaping of Modern Life

•Fall 2004 - Africa in Latin America: An Enduring Legacy

•Spring 2005 - Environmental Semester

•Fall 2005 - “Resistance”


What is a Documentary

• “creative treatment of actuality” (John Grierson)

• “fables and myths are also creative interpretations of reality” (Satyajit Ray)

• “reality-fictions” (Frederick Wiseman)

• “discourses of sobriety” and require a “representation, or argument about the historic world” (Bill Nichols)

• “The documentary is a recording of modern history. History, is, after all, a recreation of the past by those who have recording tools.” (Haskell Wexler)

• “Sometimes you have to lie. On often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” (Flaherty)


Independent?

“It’s a film made outside the traditional Hollywood studio system, often with unconventional financing, and it’s made because it expresses the director’s personal vision rather than someone’s notion of box office success.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times, April 13, 1987


Propaganda & Promotion

Press Releases

Flyers

Web site

www.lib.utk.edu/mediacenter/docs


Benefits

•Can be a good collection development tool

•PR factor with university and local community

•Collaboration between library and teaching faculty

•Fun


Recycled Video Contest

•Idea: Develop an “experience” that would encourage the “recycling” of pre-existing content into “new” creative works

•Emphasize the “creativity” of editing process (the experience of creativity through technology)

•Infinite ends...finite means

•Tie-in to Documentaries in The Library AND The Studio

•Promote an awareness of the value of the public domain (constantly under attack)

www.lib.utk.edu/mediacenter/studio/recycled


Conclusions

•Bringing the “technologies of production” into the library is a good thing

•Information literacy is important, but as currently defnined, incomplete

•Diffusion, not specialty

it works in practice, but what about theory? media literacy troy davis :: media services librarian...

Documents

experience of information

visual culturevisual

visual technology

visual events

modern age

daily experience

wrong assumptions

chronicle of higher