New Media Education and Its Discontent

hi, all. trebor scholz posted this interesting piece to the sarai
reader list. thought some here might be interested…

i'm particularly interested in the discussion of "the apparent
tension between teaching theory and
production." it does seem (given my own experiences as a perpetual
phd student) that so many of the programs have this polarized,
alienating curricular dichotomy going and i have found myself
frustrated at the lack of middle ground. when i was in the uk, it
impressed me that art practice programs had theoretical research
components built into their degrees, whereas the two are so separated
in the US. in the context of the media arts, there seems to be a bit
more of an impetus to "present" both, but my sense is that many of
the people steering the programs are doing so under the mark of
intimidation by the so-called "new" media and, also–more
importantly, that there is a general lack of synthesis between
criticism/theory and practice. so that courses will focus on the
"right" new media readings, and possibly introducing critical theory
vets (jameson, baudrillard, foucault, etc.) in this light, but
without engaging with an application of those ideas to a reading of
any real art work. and, on the other hand, there are nuts & bolts
practice courses that (perhaps sprouting out of the
anti-intellectualism scholz mentions) snub theory as divorced from
their engagement with director or perl, and focus simply on
production.

the rapid development of the technologies (hard and soft) associated
with "new media" is a bittersweet thing. book production timelines do
not jive with software upgrades. this we know. but, still, it would
be great if the "production" (and hiring!) of scholars equally
engaged in practice and criticism (not that i don't seem criticism as
a sort of practice, and vice-versa!) and comfortable merging the two
would catch up to the work.

my two cents…
~marisa

>Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 16:41:17 -0400
>From: trebor scholz <[email protected]>
>To: Sarai List <[email protected]>
>
>
>New Media Education and Its Discontent
>
>"S home are the people for whom I take responsibility."
>————–Vilem Flusser in "The Freedom of the Migrant"
>
>The Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser wrote much about the exile freely
>taking responsibility. I am in the fortunate position to enjoy teaching in a
>technology-based university department in the United States. I chose to take
>responsibility for the (new media) education of my students. And yet I
>experience conflicts among which student anti-intellectualism ranks first.
>
> A few anecdotal examples: one student reports how her high school teachers
>incessantly lied to her in their "interpretation" of world history and how
>that stirred up suspicion of "the intellectual." Another student claims that
>because of the availability of material online he feels less inclined to
>study the conclusions that other people draw from these texts as he himself
>can make up his mind. A graduate student recounts experiences he had as a
>critical technical practitioner in the early 90s when intellectuals applied
>the knowledge in their field to what he calls his own and quickly received a
>lot of visibility while not really understanding the issues due to a lack of
>technical insight. Students ask what it means to be intelligent and raise
>concerns that the class overlooks the type of knowledge that their
>grandmothers have, a very local and emotional insight. Maybe not
>surprisingly most distrust intellectuals in this country, calling them
>elitist, out of touch with this world, and view them as irrelevant.
>Completely quiet until then, one graduate student suddenly erupts in a
>candid impromptu lecture about the history of anti-intellectualism in the
>United States (he surely was trained to defend his position throughout his
>high school years). He traces it back to President Andrew Jackson, who
>received "sporadic education," wiped out Indian tribes and did not hesitate
>to shoot verbal contenders. Jackson hated people who knew more than he did.
>Coincidentally they were the Jews, homosexuals and immigrants of the time.
>John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president said of Jackson that he "cannot
>spell more than one word in four." The brave student then linked Jackson's
>presidency to the history of the extreme right in the United States and the
>prevalence of anti-intellectualism in this country up to this day. The
>California recall-election is a good example in which the candidate with the
>most "personality" may win over those with intellect and experience in
>politics. The last presidential elections also proved this point.
>
>The debate about anti-intellectualism has become more vocal in classrooms
>across America for the past 10 years. "Anti-intellectualism," in my
>encyclopedia, is described as "hostility towards, or a mistrust of
>intellectuals, and their intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in
>various ways, such as an attack on the merits of science, education, or
>literature." The definition continues: "In another sense,
>anti-intellectualism reflects an attitude that simply takes
>'intellectualism' with a grain of salt–inasmuch as intellectuals may be
>vain or narcissistic in their self-image, so too may they be understood by
>'common people.'" And let's add some more from this source (leaving aside
>how problematic the term 'common people' obviously is):
>"Anti-intellectualism is found in every nation on earth, but has become
>associated in particular with the United States of America. It existed in
>the US before the nation itself; the New England Puritan writer John Cotton
>wrote in 1642 that 'The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act
>for Satan will you bee.' Anti-intellectual folklore values the self-reliant
>and 'self-made man,' schooled by society and by experience, over the
>intellectual whose learning was acquired through books and formal study."
>
>Concretely, anti-intellectualism manifests itself in the class room by not
>reading assignments, not contributing to class discussion, complaining about
>a high work load, skipping class, giving low evaluations to instructors with
>high standards, not bothering to do extra work, by dispassionately
>condemning intellectual debate as "boring." Incidents of racism and
>xenophobia in the classroom can be seen as part of the same problem.
>
> bell hooks describes the "pleasure of teaching" as an "act of resistance
>countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathyS" In her book,
>"Teaching to Transgress," hooks describes teaching as a site for resistance,
>a place where the teacher must practice being vulnerable, and wholly
>present. I agree with her- the teacher's vulnerability brings a sense of a
>real, conflictual person to the classroom that encourages students to
>develop a similarly genuine expression of their position, free of sarcasm
>and false irony. This approach is more about learning than teaching- it is a
>process full of productive conflict in which the instructor is also
>transformed. Isn't it more fulfilling to be skilled than unskilled, to know
>than to not know, to inquire than to be self-satisfied, to strive than to be
>apathetic? What does learning mean? What does it mean to be in a place like
>a university where you have the opportunity of knowledge being presented to
>you, and time to reflect and navigate your own orientation?
>
> Media Study Departments bring together the most relevant sources of
>knowledge– from cultural theory, and literature to technical skill, from
>the vocational to the conceptual. It is important to create an understanding
>of the importance of conceptual work in students. New media education faces
>other issues like the apparent tension between teaching theory and
>production, between those who "think for a living" and others who are on the
>"cutting edge" of technological innovation. In my classroom I experience
>much careerism, which I see both, as a result and a cause of student
>anti-intellectualism. Increasingly, career-minded students see college as an
>imposition between high school and the good life. The focus for many
>undergraduate students is on acquiring software and programming skills,
>which they value as the only stepping-stones to a corporate job. At the same
>time new media educators all over the country find it increasingly painful
>to prepare the next generation for their career as HTML slaves. In this
>"tech prep" atmosphere, emphasizing employability, art becomes increasingly
>"applied art." On the other hand, there is a severe problem for those
>talented graduates who decide not to seek shelter in the "industry." They
>become new media artists and apart from hard-to-get positions in academia
>there are few places that will finance them. In the North of Europe the
>situation differs somewhat as grants may cover the new media artist's
>livelihood.
>
>Career-minded students often think that the cutting edge medium will get
>them "that job," with the "new and hip" constantly being in transition. "I
>don't know why we look at work in the Internet- it is already 10 years old."
>Students make similar demands of texts: "I don't know why we read this, it's
>written in 1995- that's dated now." And universities often buy into this
>perceived industry standard instead of focusing on general skills such as
>independent critical thinking that get students much further.
>
> How could we develop a curiosity for (art) history that then leads to, for
>example- web based art or graphics programming? The pure application of
>software programs or programming creates the most boring people says John
>Hopkins, quoted by Geert Lovink in his recent book "My First Recession"–
>"it's like amateur photo-club members comparing the length of their
>telephoto lensesS" Many in the programming communities are distrustful of
>the humanities because in their view they have little to contribute to their
>field. In addition it is an almost impossible challenge for a single human
>being to keep up with the development of all those tools. Lovink writes,
>"universities still consider the computer/ new media industries as somehow
>emulating a film-industry model, with a stable set of skills each person
>goes out into the world with after graduation." He suggests that instead,
>the most important task is to loosen up to a transient world of employment/
>work/ play and disabusing students of the notion that there is an
>"industry." It needs problematic, off-track courses, Lovink argues, because
>they usually provide skills that last much longer than the software
>applications or programming languages of the day. What is in the long-term
>interest of students may not be immediately clear to them and it takes
>courage on the side of the instructor to insist on their vision.
>
> I have been asked about the difference between European and US American
>academia. Comparing teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany with my
>teaching in American universities I see indeed vast differences. The German
>educational system is heavily based on student's initiative. In Britain,
>where I studied for an M.F.A., most of learning took place within the
>student group. English tutors contributed inspiring cross-disciplinary
>anecdotes and encouraged a spirit of self-criticism. I taught art history,
>new media art practices and critical theory at universities in the North and
>South West of the United States and now on the East Coast. I experienced
>American students as often not willing to overcome the initial hindrances
>that are needed to make discourse joyful.
>
>Reading a text is like entering a room of people talking and unless we learn
>about their previous exchanges we will never be in the know but instead get
>frustrated. Knowledge is nothing innate, nothing we are born with or which
>we inherited. Often mistakenly introduced into this debate are the likes of
>Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison who had little schooling yet high
>intellectual achievements.
>
> All too often students judge texts based on their unwillingness to do the
>initial work that is necessary to enjoy theory. Rather than talking about
>building self-esteem (enough already) we need to talk about hard work and
>discipline (even if that may sound Protestant). How useful are Paulo
>Freire's notions of a pedagogy of dialogue and informal teaching in the
>context of today's US new media education that already is quite informal and
>horizontal? I see the disinterest in study caused by a widespread
>delegitimization of reading and print culture, and partially by popular
>culture that glorifies triviality, and mindlessness. Stanley Aranowitz in
>"Education and Cultural Studies" (ed. Henry A. Giroux) writes: "School
>should be a place where the virtues of learning are extolled (a) for their
>own sake and (b) for the purpose of helping students to become more active
>participants in the civic life of their neighborhoods, their cities, and the
>larger world." It is hard to bring everyday political events home, to make
>students realize how deeply linked our lives are to those of the people at
>the other side of town, or in Rwanda, Kosovo, Srebrenica, Afghanistan or
>Iraq. The trivial, localized focus of TV news reporting certainly does not
>help in internationalizing students, in opening up their views to a larger
>horizon. This false localism stops students from aiming with their artworks
>at larger international (new media) art audiences. By the same token this
>localism or regionalism should not prevent new media departments from
>developing international relationships.
>
> In the American consumer-driven educational system, mainly part time or
>untenured faculty's academic careers rely on student evaluations, which is
>where the system in itself is deeply at fault. How can an instructor be
>courageous under these constraints? The meaning of teaching can be found in
>the Latin word "professio," which means declaration. To be a professor means
>to declare your beliefs, which may not by any means go down well with
>students. This stance purposefully creates tension, which comprises true
>learning, a friction that makes it clearer for a student where s/he stands.
>Teaching, in the sense of Edward Said's notion of the public intellectual,
>cannot mean to please, it cannot aim at consumer sovereignty, and it cannot
>mean that the customer is easily and completely satisfied. The consumer
>model implies that the university offers "services." Courses are shaped to
>satisfy students who think of themselves as consumers who conveniently with
>next to no effort (as in shopping), graduate. If this is what teaching is
>about, it fails its mission. Students should open themselves up to
>successful learning. And the "success" in "successful learning," according
>to Bertold Brecht stands for being educational, creating change in the real
>live world. Students should get "electrified" by the widely unexplored field
>of new media.
>
>Trebor Scholz
>
> —
>Net Cultures: Art, Politics, and the Everyday
>http://molodiez.org/net/syllabus.html
>
>Fibre Culture New Media Education
>http://www.fibreculture.org/newmediaed/index.html
>
>Geert Lovink "The Battle over New Media Art Education. Experiences and
>Models." in "My First Recession. Critical Internet Culture in Transition"
>V2_/NAi Publishers, 2003
>
>
>
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_________________
Marisa S. Olson
Associate Director
SF Camerawork
415. 863. 1001