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Questions for Culture Jammers..

1. Are the rights of culture jammers protected from legal action? Are they silenced, ignored, lampooned?
2. How is our current culture of commodity-based living contrary to what are commonly accepted as “american ideals” of freedom, free market, choice?
3. Why does it seem that no one pays any mind to this contradiction, why is no one paying attention…. Or in other words, what made it so easy for society to be blinded? this question is way too big.
4. How have consumers been subjugated by the media, the government, into accepting that possessions determine identity?
5. Has culture jamming contributed to the unveiling of corruption (etc)? How? Obviously they have, but in ways that are hard for the mass of society to ignore
6. Can culture jammers be compared to the archetypal tricksters of our world? How?
7. How does this concept tie in with McLuhan’s ‘outsiders’ of society, ie the uneducated child exposing the emperor, amateurism vs professionalism
8. Does the ‘Empire of Signs’ appear to be occuring?

These are some open questions I’m trying to formulate based on Mark Doty’s article. I’ll be editing this as I think of them.

I understand the angle that Prensky is getting at in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Students’ minds have changed and are continuing to change because of the technology that they’ve adopted as part of their daily pattern. I myself am a bit of both. I turn to the internet as my first source of information and am very accustomed to the instantaneous access of facts, entertainment, and socialization. On the contrary, I feel more comfortable proofreading a tangible copy of a paper, and analyzing literature on the page rather on the screen. Furthermore, I feel that my comprehension of a work lacks if I read it from a computer screen. I can’t determine why this is, but likely a combination of inability to jot notes down on the text and a conditioned mindset stemming from the fact that most digital reading that I do is for pleasure and so perhaps I have a hard time switching gears.
I believe changing the dynamics of education to include more digital, particularly game-oriented, programs can pose a lot of problems for future learners. As touched on briefly in class, for a student to breeze through school entertained to the point of “learning without conscious knowledge of it” would only make the transition from education to workplace far more difficult. For an educational institution to instill a method of learning upon pupils wherein they don’t even realize they are learning seems to forsake a few very important aspects of education in my opinion. One is that the idea of learning should be a conscious act that can be understood and even critically examined. More importantly, I think it’s imperative for schools to instill the love of learning (if possible) onto students, not merely pump them full of information and facts. The key is to teach students what they need to know, and take that further by teaching them how to teach themselves and continue learning. The system that Prensky is advocating appears to utterly neglect this portion of education and it worries me that too many schools will adopt this digitized ‘fun’ learning before really evaluating what will benefit students most. Other than more individualized instruction, I can’t see that great a benefit. I know in my own experience, no technology has ever helped (including the plethora of educational videos and a few computerized educational programs) as much as a discussion in class with a teacher and peers. Maybe that just makes me a digital immigrant.

I felt like the format of The Medium is the Massage enriched my overall experience of reading and understanding the text. I think that the images represented a different aspect of McLuhan’s message and helped me to more fully grasp it. It may be that the text panders to a society that is continually used to having constantly shifting images (even then, with television and commercials, but especially now) thrown at them but I would also argue that within the medium of commercial advertising, the goal is more often to promote some sort of easy to follow continuum or obvious associations that culminate in the presentation of whatever product is at hand. The graphic nature of the book, in contrast, appears to strive towards a confused or disjuncted feel. The book itself states that.. “when two seemingly disparate elements are.. put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.” This tension made the book delightful to read, I felt. The book strives to explain the media by being, (both visually and textually) as it said, a “collide-oscope of interfaced situations,” and for me it made the read very interesting, almost interactive in thought though I realize that word isn’t quite correct.
I don’t think that McLuhan literally anticipated websites along the lines of MySpace and YouTube, or of cell phones and text messaging, but I think he would not at all have been surprised by them. It does go along with the formation of the global village to which he refers often.
This text is relevant in several ways to the present time. Though Chaudhry’s article pointed towards a generation of narcissistic and self-centered youth, it also illustrated an awareness of a public self that is (or is capable of being) continually in contact with millions of viewers on the internet. While a person may be primarily self-concerned, this selfishness appears to stem from the knowledge that one may attain fame by means of amateur websites, and that this fame translates to a sort of power in the “Me Generation.” The global village presented may appear to be empowering in one sense that voices can be heard more easily and where, as stated, “the mass audience… can be used as a creative, participating force [in government].” It is my persuasion, however, that the book may largely caution against this mass citizenship. McLuhan states that technology has brought upon us once more a tribal, sensory-based mindset that values reaction over action. I can’t adequately explain why, but it reminds me very much of ‘groupthink,’ which would make a mass audience or global village far easier to subjugate. This seems to be backed up by passages referring to the ‘antisocials’ of culture seeing “environments as they really are,” as in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. I have no idea if this is in any way accurate but it is what I think.

I’m not sure where to start because there is actually a lot within this article that interests me. First, I find the idea of democratizing fame and “the many wresting power from the few” to achieve nothing rather amusing. This idea of empowering the people doesn’t sound quite so useful when the constituents use it to lip sync to Romanian pop songs or feed baby rabbits to snakes before thousands of anonymous viewers. This is all so pointless. The idea of fame and the hero-worship of celebrities stemmed a lot, as the article stated, from advertisers fusing the materialism already present in our culture with Lifestyles of the Rich-type shows by.. well, it feels essentially like programming people to accept that the more one buys, the more fulfilling one’s life must be. Celebrities have almost unlimited resources to spend, buy, purchase, and so they are put on a pedestal not so much, it seems, for having any shred of talent or being any sort of admirable philanthropist, but simply for being rich, and possible more importantly, for being known. The idea of ’success’ is now based primarily upon two factors, money and fame, and in the age of YouTube (etc) that fame is more accessible than ever.
One of the concepts that piqued my interest was the constant reconstructing and redefining that is done because there’s a feeling that they/we must “reach the world with your product, and the product is you.” Though it may not be conscious, I would say that I think many people treat themselves, their persona and their bodies as a product. We plaster ourselves with name brands and become walking billboards for companies who just want to make a quick dollar, we “express” ourselves through other peoples’ words (usually poorly written, trite lyrics) and list preferences and favorite (movie,food, music) as though these things define us, or essentially make up who we are and that is a frightening thought. As though numbers of viewers will validate a person’s identity. This is really creepy.
Also, though I can not say for certain, I would not be surprised in the least if this mindset stems directly from American ideas of capitalism (also perhaps partially, the idea of the individual, self-esteem/self-worth getting bastardized into ‘I can do what I want so long as it makes me feel good about myself,’). I’m just remarking that it’s a possibility- I understand that other countries and ideologies are involved. The idea that the self is a product, whether it be conscious or subconscious, is remarkably market driven. Where is the real self? And where does the idea of it go when generations of children appear to be growing up with identities that can fall victim entirely to a backspace button? Furthermore, since fame and superficial recognition is the goal, one’s self is solely a product to be viewed and not, say, an art form, or a canvas or almost anything else besides “product”. The idea of individuality comes into place as the article states- “The idea that every self is important has been redefined to suit the needs of a cultural marketplace that devalues genuine community and selfhood in favor of “success.’”

The role technology has played in my life has been fairly average to my understanding. We’ve always had television which I watched consistently as a child though very rarely anymore, and my parents purchased their first computer in 1998. I’ve gone through phases where I did depend a lot on messenger systems to contact friends and had a few acquaintances that I only knew online, but even so I came nowhere near any of the statistics pointed out in Chaudhry’s article. Right now, I’ve been keeping both television and internet usage to a minimum because I feel far more productive and observant without the distractions. I do have a cell phone, though I use it primarily to solidify plans or keep in touch with my family however sporadic that may turn out to be. Text messaging is usually infrequent, but I have a few friends who communicate solely through it so I usually try to humor them for sake of keeping in contact. My cell phone is an older model without a camera and many of the other aspects that today’s phones are usually understood to include, but I don’t feel any great need to own a phone that becomes a hand-held computer/mp3 player/messaging device. I don’t have an mp3 player. The greatest impact technology has had (I believe) on my life thus far, especially as a student, is word processing and mobility. When I type, I can keep up with my thoughts more easily than with handwriting and editing is much simpler. A laptop makes this even easier because now I am capable of writing and editing essentially anywhere.
I do have a facebook account and one weblog (a xanga) that I use casually. I closed my facebook account for almost a year but reactivated last spring only to find that all of my information stays within their systems in tact. This bothers me. Actually, facebook itself bothers me, but that’s another story. I prefer not to divulge much through internet forums.