Last Tuesday, since I’m touching on two weeks in one, the winter weather rolled in. We were on campus, because I rode in with my lovely bride. This was the before.
She had her two classes to teach. I sat in the office for a while and tried to get in some work.
My students were reading and writing about Tarleton Gillespie’s Politics of Platforms. The abstract, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.
It’s a 2010 piece, and it reads like it. There’s nothing wrong with it, but those 15 years are about 40 in social media years, I think. Despite it feeling far away from the students, in perhaps more ways than one, it remains an excellent foundational piece for what is to come in the class. And I have to read 71 students reactions to the piece. And also comment on what they say. It’s fun. Sometimes it is challenging in the best kind of way. But it is time consuming.
In the afternoon I visited another class that I’m not teaching, but I am working with a bit this semester. Students are making videos and I guess I am acting as a client-consultant. Two weeks ago, I gave them their first briefing. Last Tuesday, they came back with proposals. And they had to get that in quickly, because of that weather that was rolling in during the early evening.
We left campus at 4:45, as campus closed and the snow was starting. There are a lot of commuters on our campus, and so they wanted to get everyone back to where they needed to be, just in case some real weather hit the roads. Sensible. We made it safely. It looked like this.
And the snow, in the end, wasn’t that bad. But I’ll right about last Wednesday tomorrow. Today, I must turn to today.
While last week was so busy, I am returning to my normal pace this week. Just a few days on campus, and much of my work done in the home office. While those students were reading Gillespise then, I am now looking at the work they’ve put into the next reading assignment, Bernie Hogan’s The Presentation of Self. The abstract:
Presentation of self (via Goffman) is becoming increasingly popular as a means for explaining differences in meaning and activity of online participation. This article argues that self-presentation can be split into performances, which take place in synchronous “situations,” and artifacts, which take place in asynchronous “exhibitions.” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (including the notions of front and back stage) focuses on situations. Social media, on the other hand, frequently employs exhibitions, such as lists of status updates and sets of photos, alongside situational activities, such as chatting. A key difference in exhibitions is the virtual “curator” that manages and redistributes this digital content. This article introduces the exhibitional approach and the curator and suggests ways in which this approach can extend present work concerning online presentation of self. It introduces a theory of “lowest common denominator” culture employing the exhibitional approach.
I find this to be a challenging piece, because Hogan brings in several really important concepts and weaves them together. He does a nice job with it, but there’s Goffman, there’s the ancient (to modern students, anyway) German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, environmental psychology with Roger Barker, some computer science with danah boyd (who not everyone understands), electronic media with the impressive Joshua Meyrowitz and on and on. There’s a lot going on.
Everytime I read this one, I pull apart something new. And I find it is a good litmus to see where students are. One part of this assignment asks them to ask a question about the reading. I answer the questions. Some of them ask about elements that are very practical, or otherwise operational, and that’s great. Some of them ask about the conceptual or theoretical elements of the reading, and that’s terrific. And, for whatever reason, what they ask about here is a self-sorter for the rest of the term. Neither is bad, and both are necessary, but you can get a real sense of most of the people based on how they approach that particular reading. It’s interesting, and I’d like to know more of why that is.
Anyway, last week, and last Tuesday were busy. Today, I’ve just begun reading about this Hogan paper. And then I took the recycling to the inconvenience center across town.
On the way back, I finally stopped at the local library for the first time. I got a card. Paid two bucks for the privilege. Listened to two old volunteers struggle through the new library member process and, then, bicker about world events. One couldn’t believe this was going on, and surely it won’t get worse. The other could not stand to talk about it, saying it made them ill. They were discussing Medicare and Medicaid at the moment, and if that’s the prism through which they see everything, that’ll tell them enough. And it will get worse.
I found this inside one book, which I did not check out.
It’s a small enough library that, even though there’s only one fiction series I read — Craig Johnson’s Longmire is a guilty pleasure. I generally read history and biography, but I have stacks of those, floor to ceiling, here at home already.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to get to that library for what seems like ages, and today was that day. I got the three most recent books from that series the library holds, but I’ve already read two of them. I’ll read the third next weekend. After that, I suppose I’ll be taking advantages of the wonderful interlibrary loan system. I too, could benefit from reading a tiny bit less news. Where I’ll cram it in, I don’t know, but I’ll start with weekends, I think.
