Remix-ed world

In Remix, Lawrence Lessig is exploring the history and concept of copyright law. He begins with an anecdote about John Phillip Sousa, and his belief that without some sort of protection, the “manufacturers and sellers of phonograph records” (23) would be able to distribute music without paying the artist for the work. Sousa was also concerned that these “infernal machines” would damage the culture and discourage amateurism by making music production only accessible to the professional.

Lessig argues that today the “new infernal machines … will enable an RW culture again,” and that “they could also encourage an enormous growth in economic opportunity for both the professional and the amateur” (33). Unfortunately, the new “infernal machines still rely on a “professionalization of music.” They don’t put us back into the “everybody’s doing it” kind of time. The so-called amateur of today still requires access to the technology and a fair amount of knowledge, and much of their “remixing” relies on the professional production of music. Sousa’s amateur, on the other hand, required nothing more than a voice, and perhaps an instrument or two.

But Lessig is correct in saying that the new technologies allow for remixing more than some of the previous technologies. The industry controlled remixing with analog technologies that

limited the opportunity for consumers to compete with producers (by "sharing"). And its imperfections drove demand for each new generation of technology. Record companies thus sold bits of culture, embedded in vinyl records, then in eight-track tapes, then in cassette tapes, and then in CDs. With each new format, there was a wave of new demand (often for the very same work). The same with film. Film companies distributed films to theaters, and then films to videocassettes, and then films tu DVDs. The business model of both these distributors of RO culture depended upon controlling the distribution of copies of culture. The nature of analog tokens of RO culture supported this business model by making it very difficult to do much

differently. (37)

By controlling how analog productions were distributed, the industry discouraged sharing. And they encouraged consumers to spend, spend, spend by releasing the same material in new mediums, often touting the improvements in sound, picture, access, etc. Although there were some ways to share, with record/cassette combinations that allowed recording from one medium to another.

That is something the new “infernal machines” and digital technology has changed. It is now very easy to share a piece of music or film. Portability has promoted “share”-ability. And while artists and industry executives argue that people are stealing, others argue that this new technology allows consumers access to more artists they wouldn’t have had in the past.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Lessig’s book is the conversation in Chapter 4, “RW, Revived.” Lessig compares citation of written work with “quoting” from movies or music. He discusses using quotes from text and compares that to quoting “a section from Sam Wood’s film of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls”  or “a recording of Bob Dylan singing … lyrics in a video about” Vietnam (53). He claims that “the act is the same; only the source is different. And the measures of fairness could also be the same” (53). But they aren’t. Lessig then uses the example of “rap artists who had sampled another musical recording” (53) for their own recording. But this is a false analogy.  Fair-use allows for a limited amount of work to be used in an academic way, or for critical comment, but these rap artists were using someone else’s work for profit. When an academic is quoting from a text, they are not creating a new work to be distributed for profit. If they do, that is considered plagiarism. So his example doesn’t exactly work.

One thing Lessig does have right:

at a certain point, perfect access (meaning the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want it) will seem obvious. And when it seems obvious, anything that resists that expectation will seem ridiculous. Ridiculous, in turn, makes many of us willing to break the rules that restrict access. Even the good become pirates in a world where the rules seem absurd. (44)

Sketching Plans

After read Kaplan and Sullivan last week, this week’s reading from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences reminded me even more of the idea of a writing process. As a composition teacher, I am constantly talking to my students about their processes and encouraging different steps for them to take, whether they are prewriting strategies, data gathering, drafting strategies, or techniques for revision and/or proofreading.

So Buxton’s section on sketching reminded me of the prewriting and data gathering steps of the writing process. His sketches – because he suggests that many are created – are very similar to the  freewriting stage for our freshmen composition students. We tell them to write, and write as much as they can, and then go back and pick out what works. This relates to the “quick” and  “plentiful” attributes (111). We tell them to not worry much about details, just get the form and fill in the rest later. Here we see the “minimal detail” and “ambiguity” attirbutes (111-2). And we tell them to throw out what doesn’t work. Obviously, the “disposable” attribute (111). Then we tell our students to get feedback on what they’ve written – either through conferences, group/peer review, or workshops. And here we have Buxton’s idea that the sketch should be open enough to get suggestions and feedback from others, whether they are on the design team or role-playing the part of the user.

One problem I had with this reading was the ceramics class analogy on page 141. The students in a ceramics class were divided into two groups, and one half of the class was graded on quantity while the other was graded on quality. The result was that the students who were creating just to fulfill a quantity ended up with pieces that had the highest quality.

While this analogy would seem to support Buxton’s ideas on sketching, it sort of subverts it. For starters, Buxton says that as designers, we should not jump in and start creating, but that we should sketch. In this analogy, the students do jump in and start creating right away, without any plans or sketches. Second, the fact that the quantity students had the highest quality because they were “busily churning out piles of work –and learning from their mistakes” (141) implies that they were drafting their works, not just creating sketches (which is arguable in itself). There were no rules against the quality students sketching and reworking their pieces, but the analogy implies that they didn’t. Since they ended up with “little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay” (141), that only implies that the students were procrastinators. Again, there were no rules against reworking, so if those students had started work right away one their one piece, they too could have learned from their mistakes and created higher quality pieces. This would have illustrated Buxton’s point more strongly, because this would have been analogous to creating sketches and making them disposable, while the quantity students need to keep all of their work, making it not so disposable.

Overall, this section was helpful to me as a composition teacher. This semester, my students must create a multi-modal project. The assignment I settled on was for them to create a three minute video which is essentially a presidential ad campaign for a fictional character. Thanks to Buxton, I can more clearly explain to them why a storyboard is necessary for such an endeavor. Not only will it serve as a sketch for their video, but as Buxton says, it is cheaper, easier and more timely to create many sketches than it is to create a video and then go back and edit it (299). 

Technological Advances

 In “Ideology, Technology, and the Future of Writing Instruction,” Nancy Kaplan discusses the impact of computer technology on writing instruction. Admittedly, the essay was published in 1991, so much of the discussion has become irrelevant or even archaic. But she brings up some important points, and makes the reader realize that even twenty years later, some things remain the same.

While Kaplan is examining the role that the computer will play in the writing classroom, she also looks at hypertext and how it might create an interactive writing/reading experience.  She compares how a traditionally published work differs from that of a hypertextually published work, by saying that

As readers interpret or make sense of a printed work, they can, of course, mutter and muse in the margins of the page, can (in memory at least) produce sets of conceptual links that obliquely traverse the whole collection, representing their constructions of the text's meaning, as the theorists would have it, against the strictly linear tug of the work's representation on the page. Readers' annotations and their conceptual representation of the text's meanings comprise the reinscription or understanding of the work. If readers choose, they can photocopy "their" versions, complete with their commentaries, or write, on separate pieces of paper, rejoinders or reinterpretations. And readers can distribute the new document. But the traces that originate with these readers always remain distinct and visually differentiable from the "primary" text. (Kaplan 19)

A hypertext work, on the other hand, has the potential of being revised and edited without creating a distinction between the primary work and the reader’s contributions. Kaplan also says,

The power of these new tools of publication leads to hopeful, even utopian, visions: in a brave new electronic world, anyone with access to the right technology will be able to produce and distribute texts, both in print and in electronic form, which cannot be easily distinguished by visual signs from those which have issued from the keyboards of highly acclaimed authors and which have been privileged by the process of "official" publication. In theory, at least, electronic environments potentially offer a free flow of information and ideas from all to all. (Kaplan 21)

Having the advantage of looking back from a distance of twenty years, readers are reminded that the both situations are still relevant. Pages like Wikipedia demonstrate her claim that hypertext works can be edited without a clear distinction between authors. (Although it should be noted that Wikipedia does track all changes, so this seamless appearance is only on the surface.) But readers are still faced with the traditionally published – static – text, even on the web.

Ironically, while Kaplan discusses Bitnet and its shortcomings, we are reading the unchanged text in a world where it is possible to send large chunks of texts, containing their original formatting, anywhere in the world that has the technology to receive them. Yet, we are still reading the text as it was written, along with the margin notes (presumably those of Dr. Howard), as they were printed on the page.

What does this mean for those of us in RCID 805? Taken with Patricia Sullivan’s article “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing,” we are reminded of the hope that technology would create a more equal means of text production. For Sullivan, the computer in the classroom was seen as a way to change the writing process, not just as an aid to the writer. When producing a text, the writer in an electronic classroom could move away from a more linear writing process which involved prewriting, writing, then rewriting, and could merge all of the steps into stages of writing. As Sullivan says,

the electronic drafting process could be seen to make the distinction between early and late drafts increasingly seamless and less distinctive. Writers and readers often interact with segments of an emerging draft, a draft that becomes final only in those minutes before it is printed or mailed to the teacher. In this way, the segmented stages that have contributed to our linear writing paradigm of prewriting, writing, and rewriting begin to dissolve in the electronic classroom. (48)

For those of us teaching first-year composition, we can view the writing process in a new light. No longer do we need to require a first draft and a revision if we are aware that much of the revising goes on during the drafting process. For those of us not teaching, we can take these two essays and apply them to the projects we are producing for class, or that we may someday produce for the industry. For many people, the use of the computer and the internet is a natural thing (much like Kaplan’s comparison of the index of a book.) Getting the perspective of what was expected as early as twenty years ago and comparing it to what is available today can help us design for the user. Realizing that much has changed, and much has also stayed the same, can give us new perspective on what is possible in digital publishing, whether we are creating an interactive web page, a forum, or designing a user-experience/marketing product, such as the wine label.

"If it ain't broke..."

I found it somewhat timely/appropriate to read Buxton’s case study on Apple (and Steve Jobs) in Sketching User Experiences this week. With Jobs recent passing, there was an outpouring of information and emotion, and this chapter felt like another piece of the puzzle. After seeing post after post on Facebook with the “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” quote, and the posting of the Stanford commencement address, it was interesting to read a business study of Jobs without the sentiment.

According to Buxton, the first step that Jobs took to turn Apple around was the redesign of the product. Buxton says of the iMac, “that virtually all of the changes were … on the front side of the glass” (46). It was the look of the machine, the neon colors and shape of the body, that made it popular, not the “guts.” In fact, “underlying these systems was the old familiar graphical user interface (GUI), with perhaps a bit of an updating in graphical style” (Buxton 46). Of course, the updating in graphical style is just another instance of redesign, which is Buxton’s point. There was no need to reinvent the wheel, Jobs just made it more visually appealing.

While function is important, many designers forget that visual appeal is just as, if not more, important. After all, we as designers can create an amazing web site that does things no other has done before, but if it is over- or under-designed, it’s not going to get a second look from the user. Even though Buxton points out that Jobs make mistakes and encountered failures, it was the risk he took with design that saved the company. Or more than saved it. So while we must be concerned with design, we must also take risks. Mistakes can be reengineered, and signature elements can be improved upon.

When the iPod was introduced in 2001, it had a mechanical scroll wheel (Buxton 56). This scroll wheel and the shape of the screen became the symbols for the iPod. (As well as the white ear buds that make the iPod recognizable, even when it’s tucked away in a pocket (Buxton 53)). While the mechanical scroll wheel had its issues, the idea behind it was solid. Today, the iPod still maintains the circular wheel, but it is now a touch-sensitive controller. The functionality it the same, the design is (somewhat) the same, but the mechanics have improved.

As designers, we sometimes create our initial design and then put all of our energy in function. But what can we learn from Steve Jobs? Buxton says that “each generation of the iPod has its design problems, but these were more than compensated for by the iPod’s strengths as a fashion item” (50). I think what we can learn from Jobs it to put just as much thought into design as we do into function. If a product is designed well enough, the customer can become loyal through all of the functional improvements. And once the bugs are worked out, we shouldn’t rest.  After all, we’ve all heard “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t redesign it.

Movie Extras

I was a big fan of The Matrix – the original one, anyway. But when The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions came out – notably both in the same year – I was (pardon the pun) disenfranchised.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins dedicates a chapter to The Matrix, and the “transmedia storytelling” (106) of the movies, the video games, and the comics/graphic novels. He claims that “this is probably where The Matrix fell out of favor with the film critics, who were used to reviewing the film and not the surrounding apparatus (106). He also states that the viewers who were invested in the video games – such as retrieving a letter from the post office and getting it into the hands of the heroes in Enter the Matrix, or getting Niobe to the rendezvous point – are more invested in the movies because they have the knowledge that fills “the gaps” for those who only viewed the movie (105-6). ). (Ironically, Jenkins mentions several films in this chapter, and they all seem to be science fiction. What does this say about “transmedia storytelling?”)

Admittedly, I did not play the video games, nor did I read the graphic novels before the second and third movies were released. But I’m not sure that Jenkins claim that I would have enjoyed the movies more if I had is entirely correct. In fact, one of my critiques of the third movie was that it was too much like a graphic novel. It’s not that I don’t enjoy graphic novels, I really do, and have even written papers about graphic novels translated onto the screen. But that isn’t what I wanted from the Matrix franchise.

Perhaps one reason for my discontent was the fact that there was a four year wait between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded, with only a few month wait for The Matrix Revolutions. The suspense of waiting for the second movie went on too long, and the immediacy of the third was too soon. Granted, had I been playing the games, watching the cartoons, and reading the graphic novels, the wait might not have seemed so long. But that’s not what I want from a movie franchise. Not that I would begrudge those who do like the peripherals (although Jenkins is arguing that these are no longer peripherals), but they shouldn’t be necessary for the storytelling process. And I don’t really think they were necessary for The Matrix; I followed the storyline just fine. I just didn’t like the second and third movies.

I think if the sequels had been less “transmedia” in the movie, then I really could have enjoyed them more. There isn’t anything wrong with making the franchise transmedia, but the movies should be strictly that – a movie. For those who want the transmedia experience, they can pursue it with the games, books, cartoons, and such, but for those who don’t want it, leave it off of the screen.

(I’ll also just say that I think the reason I like the first movie the best was because it was chock full of philosophical elements, and I think the Wachowski’s raised my expectations for the sequels and then didn’t deliver.)

With all that being said, how does this help us in this class? One idea is that as we are designing for a user experience, we should keep in mind that some users will enjoy a transmedia platform, but others will not. While they can be tied together, they shouldn’t necessarily be tied together. As a consumer, when a franchise (or a TV show) requires that I be familiar with or participate through some other platform, I will purposely avoid these experiences. Part of it is my cynical nature – I don’t want to be charged texting fees or have to buy video games in order to enjoy my entertainment. I understand that people in the entertainment industry are in it to make money, but when it costs more and more money to maintain a feeling of inclusion, I’d rather be excluded. So when we are creating for our audiences, we should keep in mind that we can provide these peripherals, but we should not require them. 

I'll Publish, You Filter

In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky extends a discussion on media as publication – whether it be weblogs, MySpace (or Facebook for today’s readers), or Wikipedia – over three chapters: “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” “Publish, Then Filter,” and “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production.”  What these three chapters seem to have in common is the “replacement factor.” In “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” Shirky discusses the replacement of professionalism with amateurism in regards to print journalism being replaced by blogs. He explores how the rise of new technology has also impacted how we see professionals and experts.

In “Publish, Then Filter,” Shirky looks at how social media has replaced intimate relationships, which leads to a misunderstanding of what is being published on social media websites. When faced with the question “why would anyone put such drivel out in public,” Shirky answers with “they’re not talking to you” (85).  He also looks at the ratio of readers to the author: in a personal site, the author has interactions with (almost) all commenters, while in a widely read site, the author rarely is able to respond to most commenters.

In “Personal Motivation,” Shirky spends much of his time on how Wikipedia has replaced traditional encyclopedias, and how the collaborative environment keeps Wikipedia somewhat accurate. His analogy comparing Wikipedia to a car company posed a problem for me, however. It really is a false analogy, comparing not only a service oriented collaboration to a tangible product, but setting up a problematic comparison between a site where false or erroneous information is not physically harmful to its users and a product that is subject to government safety regulations to avoid physical harm. If Wikipedia were a product that users were paying for, and contributors were being paid to update, I have a feeling it would function, at least slightly, similarly to the car company.

How these chapters relate to our class and our projects is quite obvious. In the social media analysis for the Clemson University Libraries, we must be aware of how social media functions, what is expected from a site administrator who has potentially twenty-thousand-plus readers, and what sort of collaboration could be expected from library patrons. While Ms. Reid does try to greet each new follower on Twitter, as the social media expands, this may be an unrealistic goal. As Shirky says, “someone writing for thousands of people … or millions, has to start choosing who to respond to and who to ignore” (93). Keeping this, and all of these chapters, in mind can only prove beneficial when analyzing the library’s social media use.

RIBS in the Real World

While reading Tharon Howard’s RIBS model in Design to Thrive, I found myself constantly thinking about the arrival of Google+ and the recent changes that Facebook forced upon its members.  As far as social networking, Facebook has been the most popular site in the past few years, practically pushing MySpace off of the radar. When Google announced that it was releasing Google+ (G+) to compete with Facebook (FB), the social networking world was filled with excitement. What could G+ bring to the table that FB was missing? Would G+ feel more like the “old” FB, the more exclusive one? With G+’s invitation only platform, many hoped it would.

Unfortunately, instead of creating the “social capital” that Howard explores in his chapter “Significance,” G+’s exclusivity felt more like isolation. Each member was allotted 150 invitations to spread to friends, but the requirement of a gmail account kept several people that I know from being interested in joining. Ironically, many people were using FB to announce that they had invitations to spare, or to ask for an invitation from someone, anyone, who had already been invited to join. Even with this widespread “conversation,” G+ remained a lonely place to “hangout.”

But with FB’s recent changes to their newsfeed, and announcement of more changes to come, G+ has become a livelier place to visit. Because FB has taken control away from the members as to how their news feed is organized, FB has violated the remuneration rule in Howard’s book: it has taken away a benefit that was once available to its members. FB has also created a messier, more cluttered interface, creating confusion and redundancy for its members.

When FB forced its changes on the membership, without any forewarning, the newsfeeds were filled with complaints and requests to change FB back. Obviously, these complaints and requests fell on deaf ears because FB has not changed back, and in fact, is planning even more changes with the rollout of its Timeline. When members’ pleas for help are ignored, they no longer feel as if they have influence, as explained in Chapter 5 of Design to Thrive, and start seeking new places to spend their online time.

In fact, on my G+ account, my circles more than doubled in the two days following FB’s changes. While there are still some complaints on G+’s stream that it isn’t any different than FB, there has been increased activity in the network. And there are differences between the two sites; now that G+ has gone public and no longer restricts use to invitation only, there seems to be much more remuneration, influence, belonging, and significance in the G+ world. Now, let’s see if G+ learns from FB’s mistakes and listens to its membership.

(Un)evenly Grazing Sheep

Clay Shirky opens Here Comes Everybody with a story about Ivana, who left her phone in a cab. When her friend Evan created an online community – what Tharon Howard would call an “adhocracy” in Design to Thrive because of its temporary status and purpose in solving a problem before disbanding (25) – to get her phone back, it created a whirlwind of media attention. The questions that Shirky raises about the fairness of this community are ones of race and class. He points out that Evan is a “grown-up doing the work that lets him take countless hours off to work on the retrieval of a phone” while “Sasha is an unwed teenage mother” (Shirky 12). Sasha has the support (no matter how warped it may be) of only her family and friends, while Evan can garner the support of countless (online, unknown) people who can come together – at least virtually – to get something done. The safe bet is that the members of this group are also from a privileged class, allowing them the access and the time to follow the story and lend their support. Sasha, on the other hand, did not have the technology, time, or privilege to create a following, and was only supported by the close relations that helped shaped her sense of moral value; for instance, the belief that she didn’t need to return a phone that she found because it was expensive and she felt she deserved it. 

Had Sasha had access to the technology that Evan had, this story might have had a different ending. Instead of the book jacket reading, “A woman loses her phone and recruits and army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it” (Emphasis added). The media attention has shifted the story to one of theft, even though Shirky points out that Sasha “gets a very cool phone that someone found in the back of acab” (7). If not for Evan’s website titled “StolenSidekick” and the group pressure on the NYPD to treat the phone as stolen, this would only be a story of someone refusing to return a lost item, not one of a 16 year-old girl being arrested for theft.

If Sasha could have painted Ivana as a careless, entitled woman who could leave and expensive phone behind and afford to replace it, she might have garnered the same amount of support (provided that the group who would identify with her would have access to the community). As much as society might have a wish to “right a wrong” (Shirky 8), there is also a segment of society who could be convinced that those who are well-off are selfish and undeserving.  

It could be tempting to compare this story with Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (Shirky 51). In the example of grazing sheep in a common access field, Hardin discusses the weighing of individual needs against the community. The difference between the two is the question of common access: Sasha, Evan, and Ivana clearly do not share common access. The issues of class and race create an imbalanced access, to which Hardin’s theory would not apply. Sasha is not concerned with the good of the community, because the community appears to not be concerned with Sasha. And the only reason the community is concerned with Ivana is because she was privileged enough to have a well-off friend with (seemingly) nothing but time and money to help her.

Virtual "Realities"

In Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel examines the ways in which the production of a drama is similar to the creation of a computer interface. She uses metaphors to explain how the user is like an audience, albeit an interactive audience, the computer is the stage, and the interface is the combination of the actors, props, sets, lighting, and dialogue. Her argument that “interface metaphors can fail in many ways” (5), and the “point that the design of an effective interface-whether for a computer or a doorknob-must begin with an analysis of what a person is trying to do, rather than with a metaphor or a notion of what the screen should display” (7) doesn’t stop her from utilizing her own metaphors (Besides, her argument that “many people failed to employ the word ‘desktop’” (5) is dated, to say the least.) But instead of thinking about the metaphors we use when creating or using computer interfaces, maybe we should consider how the interface is itself a metaphor. Laurel almost reaches this point in her discussion of the components of the interface as representations of actions or objects on pages seven through nine, but she doesn’t quite get there. Thinking about the interface as a metaphor can open up different ways of thinking about what Laurel deems “reality” and “representations of worlds that are like reality only different” (10).

Laurel’s goal is to create an analogy between theatre and computer design, but she introduces psychology early in her chapter. Unfortunately, she seems to drop psychology and only focus on drama. Had she more carefully thought about psychology, she could have used both fields to support her argument. Instead, she sets up the differences between psychology and drama (rather simplistically) by giving the following definitions:

In general, psychology attempts to describe what goes on in the real world with all its fuzziness and loose ends, while theatre attempts to represent something that might go on, simplified for the purposes of logical and affective clarity. Psychology is devoted to the end of explaining human behavior, while drama attempts to represent it in a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is informed by psychology (both professional and amateur flavors), but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology's province through the art of representing action. (6)

While it may be one goal of psychology to “explain human behavior,” that is not the only goal of the field. It could be argued, quite easily, that one goal of psychology is to “provide intellectual and emotional closure,” which Laurel reserves for theatre. Also, her claim that “the art of representing action” is “outside of psychology’s province” is not well informed at all. One only has to think of the act of role-playing, writing letters to those who have caused us pain with no intention of sending them, or relaxation techniques that involve imagining a safe place to see that psychology is mired in representation. Along with that, the field of psychology is built upon Freud’s ideas that dreams are representations, and that psychological disorders have their origins in representation. 

Nonetheless, Laurel makes her claim that interface design is equivalent to theatre. She talks about how the actions on the screen are only representations of “real” actions, and how these representations pose problems for designers. She mentions several times about “barking up the wrong tree” (14, 20), and I think that she may be doing so when she tries to talk about real worlds and actions versus representations of these.  

She talks about how users may switch modes from experiential to productive when interacting with the computer. In defining productive modes, she calls to the “seriousness vis-à-vis the real world” (23) of the outcomes of productivity. She even admits that “a printed paper … has ‘real’ implications … even though it is itself a representation” (23). If she would take this realization a step further, she would see that even the “concreteness” she is concerned with is a representation. The printing on the paper, the words we speak, the “language” we use for thought are all representations with no grounding in the objects we are representing. And going even further, many philosophers have argued that the “real” world is just what is represented to us through our perceptions. So instead of focusing on how representation may cause problems, perhaps it would be more useful to use psychology’s “attempts to describe what goes on in the ‘real’ world” and figure out the different ways that different representations pose problems of interaction. Much like the attempt to use linguistic theories to help understand interactivity, an understanding that all interaction relies on representation and metaphor will help designers understand how to create more effective interfaces, instead of more “realistic” ones.

Visual Interpretations/Interpellations

Anyone who knows me knows that I have postmodern/post-structural leanings, and that I am constantly fighting against those who write off the ideas of postmodern theory because they lead to relativism or nihilism. I admit, this is often a tough defense, because it is difficult for many people to admit that there is no objective capital-T Truth, or that we are created by language (or culture), and that we have little or no control over “who we are.” But as difficult as it is to defend postmodern theory, I continue on that track.

Reading Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright has thrown me back into this defense of postmodern theory. Many of the theorists they cite – Barthes, Foucault, or Althusser – have complex, complicated ideas on authorship, author function, authority, interpellation, ideology, and reader/audience created meaning. But while Sturken and Cartwright attempt to explain these theories as support for their claims about visual texts, I felt that many times their explanations were over-simplified or were just “not quite there.” Without fuller discussion of the complications of these theories, Sturken and Cartwright have left the door open for the spiral into relativism and nihilism that so many people believe postmodern theory leads to.

For instance, on pages 59-61, when Sturken and Cartwright are discussing Bourdieu’s theory of “taste” and how it is “learned through exposure to social and cultural institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste” (60), they fail to examine where and how these social and cultural institutions are constructed. While it may seem that Althusser himself is not interested in the origins of ideology (see the section title “Ideology has no History” in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”), without even acknowledging that culture and society have some sort of origin, Sturken and Cartwright have left their readers to wonder where culture and society get the values that they (seemingly insidiously) pass on to the individual.

Sturken and Cartwright’s discussion of ideology even seems a bit simplistic. Their definition – that “ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures” (23) – leaves the reader believing that they have a full understanding of ideologies. In fact, the term “ideology” is used in many different ways with many different connotations. Cultural Studies theorists are still struggling with the definition of ideology, and how it influences individuals, and likewise, how individuals influence it. The ideas of dominant ideologies and counter ideologies have filled many pages, and for Sturken and Cartwright to so simply define ideology and then use it to explain how meaning is made, could be dangerous.

Please don’t get me wrong – I find Sturken and Cartwright’s explanations of how viewers make meaning of visual texts and how cultural context influences that meaning quite helpful, even if they are somewhat simplistic and incomplete. Yes, I was exposed to these theories about texts, authors, and meanings before, but I don’t always keep them in the front of my mind. Reading Practices of Looking has reinforced the ideas that visual texts are subject to the same examination and interpretation that literary texts are. It is a helpful reminder for me to think about culture, society, and ideology, and how meaning is made by the viewer that is placed within these structures. The authors’ claims and explanations will no doubt serve me well when I am examining – or even creating – visual texts, and not just for this semester.