Willing, I think.........

The challenge this week was to think about incorporating multimodal assignments into the classroom. Our readings, of course, were targeted towards the  writing composition classroom, and as such offer a variety of justifications for including multimodal composition alongside alphabetic composition, most of which seem to highlight the advantages of pushing students to think and act rhetorically outside the traditional comfort zone of written text.

            From the perspective of the music history classroom, however, the situation is reversed. Instead of considering how to move composition assignments away from text-based activities towards developing a competence with multi-modal ones, musicology professors deal with students often well-versed in the multi-modal arenas of music, dance, and performance and who must instead be challenged to learn about music from the perspective of text and text-based information. As well, as an historical discipline, music history demands that connections between abstract information and sounding music itself are forged. Making these connections is often difficult for students, as is the production of a written document that offers description, analysis, and synthesis around a work involving other modalities. The music history classroom can become a stressful environment as activities involving reading, writing, and other book-based learning that must be confronted within the traditional writing assignment.

            Like Takayoshi and Selfe in our readings for today, I do not advocate doing away totally with the written essay as an important product for music students – it is already a multimodal activity for them to attempt to explicate music through text, whether that is descriptive, analytical and historical, and in many ways creating a formal writing assignment is one of the best ways to get them to learn to choose points, structure those points into a coherent framework, and practice description and analysis. But I do think it would be a good challenge for me as a teacher to allow them to work in media other than alphabetic text in an attempt to validate skills they have in these areas that are often not credited in the music history classroom. As well, more and more music is disseminated and explicated on the web, and students should be able to feel that they could contribute to these environments for music outside tradition written music criticism, and are given some practice in some of the skills they might need to do this kind of work and the opportunity to consider some of the issues involved.

            Despite some of my reservations – I myself do not feel at ease yet with various kinds of multi-modal production involving the manipulation of visual images, audio and video, and so I worry that I will not be able to give students the help they need to do these kinds of assignments – I am willing to give it a try. So in my Music History I survey class next semester I am going to assign a multi-modal project.

            The class covers the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods and certainly most of my students know little of Medieval and Renaissance music. They find it difficult to understand and they struggle to create a useful historical context for the music. Though we cover visual iconography and primary sources in the class, they have a hard time connecting that material to what they hear and the more abstract information contained in their textbook. So I thought I would ask my students to create a multimodal presentation around a piece from the Medieval or Renaissance period, linking visual images and text to a performance of the piece. Images could include artworks from the period, examples of visual iconography, photographs of places or architecture, and/or still or video clips from performances. Texts could include excerpts from primary sources, manuscripts, contemporary analysis, or other writings. The idea is that the students would produce a storyboard for a video that would present their chosen visuals and text excerpts while an audio track of the music was running behind, a historical and/or associative digital story with sounding music at its core. If they wish (or if I feel that most of the class can do this easily) students can produce their videos. As well, students will need to include a written explanation of how the images and texts relate to the piece they have chosen.

            Assessment is always difficult, but I think I will provide a rubric that emphasizes evaluation based on the relevance of the chosen material to the piece and the extent to which the visual component of the story can be seen as an appropriate creation of a context for the work.

             The purpose of the assignment is to give the students the opportunity to produce a virtual contextual space for a musical work that they construct for themselves. This should allow us to discuss the elements of choice when it comes to making those kinds of contextual connections, and relate it to the more abstract “spaces” created in alphabetical texts. Finally, it should give students who feel more comfortable with non-alphabetic production the opportunity to tackle issues of historical context in ways that highlight these strengths yet still forces them to deal with the creation of context from unfamiliar and strange-to-them sources.

            I’ll see how it goes!........

Resisting the Hackers: Activism and Metaphor

I knew absolutely nothing about hacking before I tackled the topic for this week’s class. I mean, of course I had heard vaguely about a hacking attack on Pay Pal (I recall I had to change my information afterwards) and it has been a common trope to hear that a site had been hacked, or the ubiquitous, “someone hacked into my Facebook account” to explain embarrassing non sequiturs. As I wrote to a friend Tuesday morning, “I have to go start my reading for my 614 class this week. The topic of the week is hacking – I’m not sure I care! But I’m open to being convinced I am wrong!”

            A few days later I’m not sure I am convinced, but two aspects embedded in the whole discussion of hacking did interest me, and have allowed me a way in to an intellectual curiosity about the issue; activism and metaphor. Activism allows me to consideration a motivation that I otherwise can’t understand for the doing of hacking. Metaphor allows me to consider the issues of communication and rhetoric that underlie the divide between the technology of practitioners who do and the rest of us who seek to understand why.

                        The issue of activism caught my interest since I had never encountered that element as a justification for hacking. I had a fairly naïve, unsubtle understanding (and still do!) of certain motivations for hacking based on mischief-making, monetary gain, and general mayhem. I wish now that I had been more aware of where and when I came to develop these understandings, since I would like to reconsider whether my understandings were the result of my own avoidance of the issue or a legitimate bias in the ways that hacking is reported in the news and is represented in popular culture such as television and film. Is the more altruistic, philosophical, or political agendas for hacking being edited out of the versions of hacking that get reported to the public? From the perspective of someone like myself, with my generally liberal and socially-conscious beliefs, activist sympathy is an easy button to push, and as I read Olson’s chapter on Anonymous, I was noticing how easily I was being pulled into a more sympathetic view towards hacking. Emotional appeals aside, I felt I needed to be more analytical, and of course, at a second glance, all sorts of complexities present themselves. Is this a thoughtful and targeted activism by those concerned? Or is it anarchism and egotism adopting the dress of activism? What are the social goals of such an activism? I think Olson’s ultimate point in the chapter that the large-scale hacking of groups like Anonymous are dominated hugely by the egotism of a few rather than the social ideologies of the many, is a valuable one. But the activism angle did open up the possibility that a few activist-hackers, working as the technological spearhead for a larger social interest group, could engage in what might be a “good” activism via hacking. What troubles me, though, is whether it fits my definition of good activism by being a peaceful act of civil disobedience, or whether it transgresses into damage and aggression.

            The other issue that interested me, particularly in the Parmy Olson chapter we read, was the complex ways in which metaphor featured in the explication of what the hackers were doing. Mediating the exchange between the technological complex and publicly accessible was a wide range of interesting imagery and metaphor that attempted to offer a way in to understanding what hackers do. This chapter and our other readings were riddled with allusions to pathways and roads, tunnels and circuitry, weapons and assaults, hives and pods and all the rest. It left me bewildered because there seemed such a disconnect between what was really happening within these groups and the technologies they were utilizing, and how it was being explained. I fundamentally wanted to know how they did some of these things, not in great depth, but just in a way that would help me understand how the whole process worked. The vehicle for communication made itself very apparent, and the signifier seemed dangerously removed from what was being signified. While I can see why a certain amount of metaphor can help us to conceptualize these complex activities, I am still pondering how the ways in which these things are rendered simple condition how we view them. If we can only understand hacking via certain stereotypical and widely applied imagery, how does our perception also lack in complexity, ideological as well as technological? A stereotypical language of imagery and metaphor, saturated with certain conventional ways of explication probably does indeed narrow our understanding of hacking, possibly in profound ways. Even as somewhat of a technological nitwit, I feel frustrated that I am being controlled by a language that keeps me at a distance while demanding an intellectual and/or emotional response.

Dabbling my toes in the ocean that is Wikipedia...

While I use Wikipedia regularly to check dates, opus numbers for pieces, correct titles and countless other bits of information I need for my work but can’t quite be bothered actually remembering, up until this point I have never edited a Wikipedia article and I had no idea what was involved in doing so. When I saw we had the option this week of doing just that, I figured it was time to get over my hesitation and explore the process.

            Before totally committing to the idea, I wanted to make sure that I felt there was someplace that I could actually contribute something useful. I looked at the entries for some of the composers I know well – Elgar, Vaughan Williams, among others – and topics I deal with, like the English Musical Renaissance. These were long and complex articles, and most of the ones I looked at I felt had been well-written and well-vetted. I simply didn’t see any obvious lacunae, and thought that any contribution would be more political/ideological on my part than substantive. There is a general sense in academic musicology that it is part of our “job” to oversee things like Wikipedia entries, and there seems to be a lot of contribution by my colleagues towards policing things that fall within our realm of expertise.

            Eventually I got around to looking at the entry on the English Masque – a genre I know well and from which I drew case studies for my dissertation/monograph -  and found that there really was nothing there drawing attention to the fact that composers continued to write masques during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then there was an odd mention of two 20^th century masques by Vaughan Williams and Lambert. I thought I could easily add a paragraph or two, just mentioning that there is more history there to explore.

            The process of creating an account was ominously easy; the choice of a username ‘scholargardener’ and a password granted me almost universal ability to edit anything I wanted. Once I had created my account, Wikipedia suggested I participate in the mundane work of a Wiki of this size by suggesting that I offer to do editing on articles they recommended by improving clarity, adding links, or fixing spelling and grammar. I appreciate that people need to do these things for the system to work, but I was on a mission.

            I chose to return to the Masque entry page, where I had new links and choices on the top I had never seen before. I had a new notification, welcoming me to Wikipedia and giving me a link to control my settings, which I had a quick look at. I had a link for preferences, a “watchlist”, and a “contributions list,” and an edit and history tab.

            I figured the place to start was with the “history” of the article, since I was curious what kinds of edits had been done to the article. I have to say, my expectations were that the article would have been written quite a while ago, and that there would have been a limited number of edits done by a very limited number of editors. I was quite surprised, then, to see a very long list of edits spread over a long period of time. The most recent edits were done in early September, and there were quite a few edits done in May and June, but going back several years. I wonder if the article didn’t come up as one of the “recommended for editing” list, since most of the edits seemed to be about creating links and importing citations. Again, I was surprised at the number of people who had worked on the entry, and relatively few of them had worked on it repeatedly.

            At one point the article had been vandalized, and had been fixed; I didn’t quite get exactly what had happened. And there were some substantive changes and comments made that things needed supporting citation. None of it seemed particularly fractious; this obviously was not a forum for the latest debates on aspect of the English masque. One feature I found interesting is that you could question an editor about a particular point or a particular change. Editing was frequently undone as well!

            I then went back to the entry page and clicked the edit button. I scrolled down to the end, where I was going to insert some of my own material. The original section looked like this:

While no longer popular, there are later examples of the masque. In the 20th century, [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]] wrote ''[[Job, a masque for dancing]]'' which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a [[ballet]] than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern [[choreography]] typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

[[Constant Lambert]] also wrote a piece he called a masque, ''Summer's Last Will and Testament'', for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from [[Thomas Nash]], whose masque<ref>It was a "comedy" when it was printed, in 1600 as ''A Pleasant Comedie, call'd Summers Last will and Testament''<!--correct as entered-->, but, as a character announces, "nay, 'tis no Play neither, but a show." With Nash's stage direction ''"Enter Summer, leaning on Autumn's and Winter's shoulders, and attended on with a train of Satyrs and wood-Nymphs, singing: [[Vertumnus]] also following him"'' we are recognizably in the world of Masque.</ref> was probably first presented before the [[Archbishop of Canterbury]], perhaps at his London seat, [[Lambeth Palace]], in 1592.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what the characters meant and the appropriate Wikipedia marking indications to use when, eventually figuring out how to do italics and how to create links to other entries. In the end, I decided on two things. First, I decided as much as possible not to change what someone else had written, and instead to try to incorporate their material. So the slightly odd, tacked on paragraphs about Job and Summer’s Last Will and Testament I left in, even though I might have talked more generally about VW and Lambert if I was starting the entry from scratch. Second, I decided not to include citations. This was such a basic, brief, and general account of the masque during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I thought citations would be overkill and overly specific for the information contained. I didn’t want to self-cite, and I didn’t want to open a can of worms by having to offer long lists of citations for general information. It will be interesting to see if I get queried about that in the future!

In the end, here is the new version of that section of the entry:

Later Masques

While the masque was no longer as popular as it was at its height in the 17th Century, there are many later examples of the masque. During the late 17th century, English semi-operas by composers such as Henry Purcell had masque scenes inset between the acts of the play proper. In the 18th century, William Boyce and Thomas Arne, among other composers, continued to utilize the masque genre mostly as an occasional piece, and the genre became increasingly associated with patriotic topics. There are isolated examples throughout the first half of the 19th century.

With the renaissance of English musical composition during the late 19th and early 20th century (the so-called English Musical Renaissance), English composers turned to the masque as a way of connecting to a genuinely English musical-dramatic form in their attempts to build a historically-informed national musical style for England. Examples include those by Arthur Sullivan, George Macfarren, and even Edward Elgar, whose imperialistic Crown of India was the central feature at the London Coliseum in 1912. Masques also became common as scenes in operettas and musical theatre works set during the Elizabethan period.

In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote several masques, including his masterpiece in the genre, Job, a masque for dancing which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern choreography typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

 Constant Lambert also wrote a piece he called a masque, Summer's Last Will and Testament, for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from Thomas Nash, whose masque^[3] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.

When I was finished, I went and checked out the “Watchlist” tab in my commands above, and noted that the masque article was now on my watchlist. I provided an email address, which I am presuming means that I will be notified if anyone edits the entry in the coming weeks. And as a little reward for my efforts, I had my first entries there for me to see on my “Contributions” list!

            I’m glad I took the opportunity to try this out and look behind the scenes a bit. I have a much better understanding of how the process works now, and perhaps an even more heightened sense of anxiety about how fraught the process can be. It is so incredibly easy to edit anything, and things need to be aggressively policed for misinformation not to happen. It all comes down to how much people care, doesn’t it?

Find the entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque

“Yet another item for the collection…”

So, a more personal and chatty blogpost than usual this week….

I found the topic and readings on video game cultures and gaming literacies for the week to be very interesting, and each of the readings gave me plenty to think about from the perspective of an “outsider” who has never played video games. I will confess that most of the time I struggle to see the point of games, apart from FIFA in its yearly incarnation (I like the idea of playing with MY Arsenal team rather than Wenger’s!) and games that are designed to help build children’s skills through another mode of “play.” As someone who really knows nothing about what is out there, I have always worried about the violence many games seem to encourage, the huge amounts of time games like Civilization seem to require, and the real addiction I see among friends and the children of friends. Despite my doubts about the video game “thing,” I came to the readings willing to engage with the issues. In the end, each of the articles made me think about the relevance of theorizing about gaming in a much deeper way, and I thought the readings reflected the richness of the topic through their breadth and scope.

That being said, I am not going to write about video games! And yes, that may yet be rooted in my ambivalence still towards gaming. However, one of my the issues I have been struggling with in my teaching this year has been the significant one of striking a balance between teaching content and teaching skills, and the fact that Patrick Gee addresses this issue overtly in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy seemed fortuitous, given that yet again this week I tweaked my Teaching Philosophy Statement for yet another job application!

The traditional model of teaching music history is similar to other historical disciplines in that it rests on the transfer of content. Particularly in my history survey classes for music majors, there is a huge amount of information that I am expected to impart to my students regarding style, periods, genres, composers, schools, and particular musical works. It is an often overwhelming amount of material, and one that has increased over the past decade with the inclusion of new topics previously considered non-canonical but now necessary, like that of women composers and women’s patronage. The message still predominantly seems to be that our students need to know ALL of this material; somehow we try to get through it, because it is difficult to make the decision to leave something out when there is so much of value to study.

It is an issue that musicology friends and I often talk about, and I am always surprised at how many of them are deeply committed to the idea of content. I am also surprised at how often they transfer the problems of student learning to the students themselves; music history is “hard,” the students don’t work hard enough, they don’t have the writing or reading skills and so on!

So I have been “collecting” challenges to the notion of content over the past nine months or so, due largely to the viewpoints I have encountered in my writing seminars. I use the word “collecting” self-consciously: I am accumulating a master list, I “take items out” and examine each one regularly, I look forward to finding yet another instance of resistance. A lot of the items in my “collection” stress the importance of writing as a way of learning, and the value of allowing time for the processes and transformations that occur when writing is an important part of the classroom experience. From the WID movement, I have “collected” the concept that, beyond content, we need to introduce students to what it means to be a part of a discipline and to encourage them to practice the skills they need to be a member of that community, in this case musicology. My “collection” has challenged me to begin to find new ways of balancing my teaching of content and my teaching of skills. As non-tenured faculty, my risk-taking can only be limited, but things are happening there.

So why am I adding Gee to my collection, and perhaps thinking this might be a more featured, showcased item than some of my others? First, I enjoyed playing with Gee’s concept of social domains and thinking about musicology as a social domain from several perspectives. His discussion of social domains echoes ideas of communities of readers and disciplinarity that are at the forefront of how I think about my field. Beyond this, Gee got me thinking about ways in which musicology participates in multiple social domains and therefore requires multiple literacies. Of course what we do is a product not just of content but also a set of distinctive social practices. I think it would be valuable at some point to list what might be included in the musicology set of social practices! It might be scarily David Lodge-like!

I’m not saying that Gee’s concepts are necessarily new, but they are very clearly stated and supported by good examples. For instance, active learning is not new to my vocabulary, but I feel when I discuss it in the future I can draw on his clarity and common sense approach. I found myself asking questions of how what I do in my classroom to promote active learning relates to points he make.

Gee also validated me as a teacher and my developing attitudes towards content vs. active learning. It is occasionally nice to read something and think that, oh yeah, I’m sort of doing that already - for example, in some new lesson plans I am doing with my 101 students that attempt to give them a perspective on classical music today on the meta-, critical level.

From a less reflective and more practical perspective, Gee provides vocabulary and terms that I feel will be useful for future statements about my current teaching and goals for the future. I only wish I had absorbed his concepts before I wrote my latest teaching statement! Terms such as internal and external views of semiotic domains, affinity groups, design grammars, specialist and lifeworld domains, among others, refer to concepts that I can usefully incorporate into statements of my teaching philosophy.

So far I have focused on Gee’s chapter 4, which I found very pertinent to some of the challenges I have been facing this year. Of course there are incredibly practical things to consider and possibly use in formulating the why, if not the how, of my attempts to reach my students in ways that create more valuable learning situations for them. The eight principles he discusses at the end of chapter 4 and his insistence on the need for embodied as opposed to rote learning are really validating for my attempts at modest experimentation. I found chapter six less specifically applicable to my “collection” but thought provoking.

Usually I love my theory, but it was interesting to see practicality take over in my response to this week’s reading!

Edna and I at A5u: Thoughts towards my new digital story

For my digital story assignment, I have decided not to do something related to my final project, but something more personal. My final project is still a little fuzzy, and when I heard we were going to have to do something more “creative” as one of our requirements for this course through the creation of a digital story, I wanted to take the opportunity to be free and make it a personally meaningful work. I also wanted a topic that would challenge me to tackle the technological elements that go into digitally creating a project like this and yet have content that was not so much challenging as fulfilling.

 So now some backstory to my project…I have an allotment plot in a very large community garden in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field. It is an odd place for a community garden, since there isn’t really any “community” around it, unlike the other community garden I belong to which is really part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Instead, this community garden is located in the Gateways National Park, at what used to be New York City’s first municipal airport, though the airport long ago ceased to operate. The space was left, and eventually became incorporated into the national park system. In the meantime, tempted by so much empty, unused space, squatter gardeners began to colonize a large area near the now-empty hanger buildings, and the Floyd Bennett Garden Association (FBGA) slowly evolved from those first pioneers. It is now one of the biggest community gardens in the country, and much more similar to British allotment sites than the typical American urban community garden.

I have been a member of the garden for four and a half years now. My first plot was a very tiny “starter” plot, all of fifty square feet. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was small, and I looked with envy at plots that were two, three, or even four times the size of ours. I was incredibly excited, then, when during the early Spring 2012, we received a notification that our application for a bigger plot had been approved! We had a double plot! One hundred square feet! I immediately began to dream very big dreams indeed.

We went to visit and were incredibly impressed with the garden. It was full of weeds, but had three big raised beds in the middle and beds around three sides. As an extra bonus there were two large shrubs planted in both of the back corners, which we later found out were a mysterious kind of cherry tree. The soil was amazing, and while the paths were a bit of a mess, the whole plot gave off a feeling of fertility and generosity.

As we worked the plot that first spring, we came to find out that the plot had belonged for many, many years to one of the founders of the garden, a woman named Edna, who had died the previous summer. As a little tribute, people who knew her and those who had neighboring plots kept the plot weeded and planted while she was too sick to garden, but of course, the plot couldn’t remain empty and it was assigned to us the following year. While she had been alive, she had been a central figure in the garden, and many people came over to tell us how fortunate we were to get this plot, and how wonderful Edna had been. And we came to believe it last year as we worked the plot; it had a spirit, a character, all of its own, which, as an experienced (previously professional) gardener, I have only encountered in garden spaces that were much loved by the amazing people who gardened there.

I don’t even know her last name! So for my digital story I would like to tell the story of that plot at FBGA, A5U, and get to know the woman whose spirit still resides in my garden plot. On the way, I think I hope to capture a little of what it is like to be a part of a community garden, and the connection that community gardeners feel to their plots.

Finally, I am very committed to the recording of oral history, and feel strongly that oral history is a precious resource we need to try to preserve. I feel it is an important way to connect to a community and to grow that community. Perhaps I have been subconsciously influenced by the ethos of the turn-of-the-twentieth century folk music collecting that is part of my musicology research involving figures like Ralph Vaughan Williams! I see this project as part of a bigger project in which I am involved, where I am writing down bits of FBGA garden history and publishing them in the garden newsletter. This will be a wonderful opportunity to explore how that oral history can be captured multi-modally, using real voices in all sorts of ways.

I plan to tell the story using photographs, voiceovers, text, and background music. I have photographs of the garden, and can take more of what I need, so the visual content is pretty much already available. Of course it would be wonderful if I could find some photographs of Edna, and it is possible that back issues of the garden newsletter might contain some of these. A definite part of my project will be interviewing some old-timer FBGA gardeners about Edna. There are a few that are still active in the garden, and many, many people knew Edna, so I feel that once I put out some feelers and start talking to people, I will be able to draw on others’ memories of the past. I will juxtapose this with my own experience gardening there over the past couple of years. I’m hoping that a few of the people I talk to will actually let me record them speaking and let me use their voices in my story.

I don’t know yet what software platform I will use to produce my digital story; I’m hoping that we have a discussion in class about this, and that I can try a few of them out during our workshop time in the computer classroom, in order to get a feel for the advantages and disadvantages of what is available. I am leaning towards IMovie, since I am a Mac user. I also want to explore Audacity for many reasons, some related to this project and others to my musicological research. I may ask some of my musicology colleagues what they use to edit sound clips.

I think an important area to consider regarding my project touches on the issues discussed by Nelson and Hull in their essay “Self-Presentation Through Multimedia: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Digital Storytelling.” Nelson and Hull draw on Bahktin’s concepts of heteroglossia and addressivity to problematize the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and “addressees” that are engendered by the interplay of modalities in multi-modal works such as digital stories. As I have described above, one of the central goals I have for my project is the incorporation of the voices of others in my story, both descriptively and literally. Nelson and Hull made me think more deeply about what this might bring to my project, both in terms of presenting problems but also in celebrating the heteroglossic potential in my little digital story.

 I see this working on several levels. The first will be very concrete, as I choose what to include in my story from the various interviews I conduct with FBGA members who knew Edna. Do I just describe what they say? Do I quote from interviews, and if so, which ones and which parts? Do I actually include a voice over from another garden member? The degree to which I allow others’ voices to be “present” in my story will introduce aspects of heteroglossia, literally and symbolically. It will be interesting to see how much control I feel I need to exert over what they say and what I want my story to say. How comfortable might I be with competing meanings? Where will I find the balance between what I want to communicate and my story being open to other meanings suggested by the voices of others?

Other decisions related to heteroglossia center around the bigger issue of whose story will be told in this digital production. I see three stories here; Edna’s, of course, the garden and the gardeners who a part of the community, and my own. They are intertwined and there is no way to separate out one and exclude the others. This will be a story that is created as the greater amalgam of all three of these small stories, in a way, I hope, that mimics the fuzzy boundaries of individuals and communities to which they belong. I feel that heteroglossia is one of the goals of my project. This is easy for me to say, absolutely, and I do know that, like the two young women used as case studies by Nelson and Hull, the difficulties will come when actual decisions need to be made about the choice of voices to represent and when, and my own need to communicate central meanings that I see in the relationship between Edna, the garden, and myself.

From MySpace to Facebook - Are Teens using Social Media in Different Ways?

I was glad to see that one of our blog post prompts for the week focused upon danah boyd’s work on teens using MySpace and the ways in which they created, manipulated, and projected online identities through social media that worked within the agendas of the social communities to which they belonged. Several times as I was reading boyd’s fascinating and detailed analysis in her chapter “Writing Oneself into Being,” I jotted a “still?” or simply a “?” on the margins of my copy of the text. While the material made for compelling reading, I was equally compelled to consider how relevant boyd’s conclusions were in light of close to almost six years of evolution in the world of social media (I like Nakamura’s point that web years are like dog years, so that we should think of 6 years as a seeming 42!).

            What changed during the intervening years? Boyd’s UC Berkeley dissertation was completed in 2008, a time in which MySpace reigned supreme in the world of social media among young adults, though Facebook was beginning to become popular among college undergraduates. With its emphasis on music sharing, it was particularly attractive to teens, for whom the recommendation, transfer and discussion of music is a key element of identity and social interaction. Between 2005 and 2008, MySpace was the most visited social media website in the world, and for a short period during those years it was the most visited website, surpassing Google. After 2008, with the emergence and growth of Facebook, MySpace’s dominance quickly eroded, and now has a much smaller number of consistent users.

            The differences between MySpace and Facebook offer strong clues as to why Facebook eclipsed MySpace. While MySpace was (and still is) very useful for sharing, promoting, and even selling music in ways that Facebook does not allow on its platform, the number of features available in the creation of an online identity is far more limited. Facebook has features such as the “Wall” that allow for an interactive exchange with “friends” (people you have admitted into your list of people who can access varying elements of your Facebook presence), and a status update feature that allows you to quickly let friends know what you are doing, thinking about, or feeling. It is coordinated with photo-sharing programs in a way that allows photos to be easily posted. It has chat and private messaging capabilities. Above all, the “like” and the “share” buttons on Facebook are extremely powerful tools that instantly link users to friends in extremely easy ways. Such is Facebook’s massive presence in contemporary culture that so much webcontent already has links to Facebook built in to make such sharing easier. Finally, responding perhaps to the analyses of boyd and others which demonstrated the extent to which the control of accessibility was a key concern for social media users, Facebook is constantly developing and changing its “privacy settings” in ways that create controversy and invoke larger questions of privacy, ownership, and access to personal material posted on the web.

             Obviously, many of boyd’s points still hold true despite the migration of teens from MySpace to Facebook. Boyd’s thesis in this chapter is that teens use social media as one way to present a version of identity (“self-presentation”), and they manipulate that identity in ways that invoke Goffman’s “impression management.” Yet at the same time, as other of the authors we have read this week have argued, the potentialities and non-potentialities inherent in the use of these technologies and mediated environments in themselves affect the ways in which users can conceptualize their own identity.  I would argue that the features that differentiate Facebook from MySpace are for the most part features that fall in line with the needs that boyd sees in the teen experience of identity and social media, and that many of her points are even more true for Facebook than MySpace. It probably explains why Facebook has supplanted MySpace.

            Facebook to an even greater degree allows teens to do the two things that seemed central to their use of MySpace, according to boyd; first, to project a version of themselves that rides a fine line between difference and unity with their peers and second, to control access to their profile so that they are guarded against adult surveillance and perceived danger from unknown adults. The second, quite easily, is enhanced by Facebook’s myriad ways in which the content visible to the web onlooker is controlled by the user, most importantly through the “Friends List” but then by the division of those friends into various groups. Postings can be designated as visible on various levels to various groups. All of this, of course, is predicated on the user going and adjusting the visibility and privacy settings, which many, many users do not do. One would think, then, that teens would be particularly good at adjusting the privacy settings to control their web “signal.” I’m not sure I see this in my students, though I haven’t asked this extensively. When this issue comes up, students still seem to be relying on the idea that, “people who don’t care won’t find me,” similarly to boyd’s 2008 findings. Many times I have had discussions with classes and individual students about the necessity of “being careful” about who they are friending, and what kinds of messages they are sending to those who can access their accounts. This is always attended with varying amounts of surprise, concern, and perhaps a heightened awareness that was not present before.

            What I feel boyd’s analysis misses, situated as it is in 2008 before the development of features that make Facebook so attractive, is the degree to which it allows the user to be “present” and “connected” to friends in very immediate and intimate ways, despite RL distances between those friends. When I talk to my students, this seems to be the element they like about Facebook, even while they will complain about aspects such as time-wasting, advertising, friends who in some ways make a nuisance of themselves on their feed, or the discordance between social worlds, as when an older family member comments on a thread populated by peer comments. It seems to me that MySpace encouraged a more static relationship to the profile identity posted by the user, while Facebook encourages a constantly-shifting and changing identity. In many ways, the identity projected on Facebook at a particular moment, through newly-posted photos taken and posted immediately from a smart phone, comments on the wall by friends, the latest item shared by the user and the comments its engendered, and the items coming from larger Facebook communites made when the user “likes” something, has the possibility to be completely different 30 minutes later. If boyd emphasizes how hard teens work to maintain stable identities in MySpace, Facebook poses an even greater challenge to identity control, since the elements constituting that identity are constantly shifting, and identity boundaries are incredibly permeable due to friends’ ability to influence what shows up on your feed.

            Yet I feel that the impermanence of the Facebook identity in many ways predicates the idea that your friends are “present” in a manner that the more static MySpace did not. Your status and theirs, a photo of what just happened to me, my Spotify playlist popping up on my friends’ feed – community is always present. The fact that it changes so frequently adds to the feeling that one is part of the dynamic flow of RL, even if that flow cannot always be controlled. If we allow that teens are particularly clued in to the demands of belonging to a group and yet creating an individuality within that group, the wide array of features found on Facebook cater to just such a mission. I feel that this demand to be “present” is something that, while implicit in what boyd is saying in her article, would today demand a reckoning in an account of teens’ interaction with social media.

Rewatching "Scandal in Belgravia" after Rereading Hayles and Haraway

            The first episode of the second series of Sherlock (“A Scandal in Belgravia”) presents us with a fascinatingly complex character in “the Woman,” Irene Adler. Adler is a highly successful dominatrix in the sex trade, using her skills to attract a very powerful and well-known cliental. The nature of Adler’s cliental and her interactions with them often bring her into dangerous situations, and she takes a number of steps to protect herself from the possibilities, including using her smart phone to store information that might prove useful, including compromising photographs and other items that would allow her to negotiate with potential attempts to harm her.

            Adler is both visible and invisible, operating in a boundary area that both Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway might find interesting as a sort of liminal identity that involves both real and virtual space, realized through the mediation of technology. She is “visible” in that she has a website which gives her persona a wider circulation among potential clients and curious onlookers. In both virtual and “real” space, Adler’s movements can be tracked; at certain points in the episode, people comment that she can always be found. Given her profession, this is a curious openness about her presence, and more often than not it is a presence that is projected through the digital technologies of websites, smart phone photos, and Twitter. Her “work” on several levels involves an obvious, conscious attempt to use digital visibility first to create a persona that will appeal to a certain cliental, but also to protect her from the potential dangers associated with that cliental.

            She is also invisible. So much of what is known about her is via a controlled and mediated visibility – a created avatar, or perhaps, more aptly, created avatars –and so much of the “real” Woman Adler is hidden. This is metaphorically projected by the shots of Adler constructing a version of herself as she prepares for her first meeting with Sherlock. The camera lingers on her applying makeup, deciding what to wear, essentially covering her “true” self (if there is such a thing) with layers of functional, second skins. These are our first glimpses of Adler in action, apart from a few digitally projected photos we see attendant to Mycroft’s description of her to Sherlock. From the beginning – as website media, as a construction in process -  we see Adler as a cyborg in many of the ways discussed by Haraway. As Adler prepares herself for Sherlock’s arrival, she employs the artificial so that creates a hybrid is created who is half natural, half unnatural. Ultimately she presents herself to Sherlock naked, without clothes. But this is hardly a gesture that projects the natural or the real. Instead, it questions the very reality and naturalness of our essential bodies in ways that resonate with several of Haraway’s points about cyborg identity. Adler’s body – her very skin, with its important tattoo – has a functionality about it, and it becomes one more arsenal in her tool box, complicating the concepts of unity and naturalness we tend to project on bodies, in a way that Haraway would find compelling in her search for the new cyborg-woman.

            Adler’s cell phone is a crucial element, not just in the plot of the episode, in which information contained on the phone is highly sought after by various individuals and groups, but more importantly, as a way of constituting Adler’s very being. The point is made repeatedly throughout the episode; the phone is Adler’s life in some essential way, both containing the information she needs to make the connections necessary in her busy professional life and as a way of limiting potential danger. But the episode’s subtext goes much deeper in its insistence that Adler feels that the phone actually is her life, and without it she will cease to exist. When she is separated from her phone, she is “dead,” though she comes miraculously back to life when she is reunited with it. And in a surprising twist towards the end of the episode, she has actually engraved her pulse – her life’s blood – onto the phone in the form of the unlocking password. The connection is insisted upon throughout the episode, as we are increasingly told that the phone goes far beyond acting as a functional tool. Instead, this is a woman who cannot exist accept through the mediation of the device and its digital technologies.

            For Hayles, the episode’s play with Adler’s absence and presence in real and virtual spaces both would point to the lack of stability surrounding a character who is so mediated through digital technology. The most central aspect of Sherlock as a character in both this series and in his multitude of other media incarnations is that he is obsessed with creating patterns. Hayles might argue that it is the seeming randomness of the myriad of problems presented by Adler that work to confute Sherlock and which create the bond that is formed between the two of them within the episode. The subjectivity – body connection is one that Hayles finds interesting and potent when exploring presence and absence, and in Adler’s multiplicitous “presences” using various faces, technologies, skins, etc., she is a constant roadblock to Sherlock’s obsessive search for meaning through pattern. Hayles might also focus on the issue of materiality with Adler, a point that causes tension within the episode; Adler’s power is in so many ways located in her body- what her body is and what her body does – and yet, through playing with a mediated availability, that body is both present and absent, depending on perspectives of virtual reality. In a more extended analysis, one might consider whether Adler is herself what Hayles might consider a “flickering signifier.” I’ll leave that for now, but certainly Hayles might point to her as a character that exhibits the lack of distinction between human and machine in her co-dependence with her phone,  the “biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is emeshed….the fascinating and troubling coupling of language (subjectivity?) and machine.” (35)

            For Haraway, it is Adler’s lack of essential unity, her hybrid existence somewhere between human and digital device, which forms the essence of her power. It is also because she exploits the unresolvable irony of a woman whose existence exploits the most public and most private sides of experience, available to the millions via her web and twitter presence, and yet its secrets locked inaccessibly away in the digital networks of her phone.  Haraway’s article validates the cyborg-like of Adler’s characteristics, particularly in her uses of technology to live a life of power on many levels, subverting traditional television and film stereotypes. In both her uses of technology and in her quest for power, Adler and the creators of this episode are willing to compromise a unified female character in the service of a character through whom explorations along the borders can occur. This is symbolically projected in the episode through Adler’s ultimate ability to enter into the virtual landscape by the river previously “owned” by Sherlock. Her penetration of that space reveals her access to that inner private space of Sherlock’s consciousness, and that very ability allows her to further exert her power over him.

            But it is also, in some ways her undoing, and possibly that of the episode as well. That encounter with Sherlock’s virtual world, represented by the landscape and the mysterious murder enacted in it, both augments her power and diminishes her power. It is no accident that in this scene we see a denuded, though not naked Adler, (she actually is wearing more clothes than she “normally” does) without the normal protective veneer we saw her self-consciously applying at the beginning of the episode. She appears vulnerable, though we are later meant to question if that was yet one more projected avatar or not. But this is the point at which the episode descends into the romantic, and seems at its very end to insist that we at least consider that vulnerability and the romantic attraction to be real. And if that is the case, then as Sherlock and Adler slip into a romantic relationship, Adler loses the power she has attained by her cyborg persona, ironically through the very power move, projected within the episode through the means of her penetrating his virtual space, that was meant to augment her power.

“The Lindeman-Tate Debate? So what?”

Recently I have been reading a few essays that offer different perspectives on the long-standing debate in composition studies on whether or not to use literature (fiction, creative non-fiction, etc.) in the first-year writing class. The terms of the debate were laid out in the famous Lindemann-Tate debate from the 1990s carried out by them and their supporters in the pages of College English. (The original articles were published in College English in 1993. See Erica Lindemann, “Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature,” College English, 5/3: 311-316; Gary Tate, “A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition,” College English, 5/3: 317-321.)

 Lindemann argued no to the inclusion of literature from the perspective of what we would probably call Writing within the Disciplines (WID) Students need to be taught to survive in the world of the college and university, and to succeed they need to be initiated into the kinds of discourses set up by various disciplines within academe. Freshman English should ultimately be practical and give students important tools they will need for their actual course work. The reading and analysis of literature is a component of just one of these disciplines, and it should not take precedence over the others just because that field is the department from which most composition is taught. Tate, on the other hand, argued for literature in the freshman composition, saying that that he would miss considering the elements of imagination and style offered by literature, and that he worried that turning Freshman Composition into a “service course” that attempted to teach academic discourse in all its variety was not only bound to fail its mission to produce good writers, but also would fail on the more important level of teaching students to be good people, once they leave the academic world.

         The topic has continued to resurface in many guises over the past 15 years. It has an importance because it is still the case that most writing programs are housed in English departments, and there is an incredibly ambivalent relationship between composition and literary criticism, with literary criticism usually having the majority of tenure lines and having greater prestige within the university. As well, with the professionalization of the writing curriculum, many were – and are – eager to divorce the teaching of writing from the old pedagogical model in which freshman comp courses were essentially literary analysis courses. But during this time there have been several responses to the Lindemann-Tate debate by writers who advocate for a less strict division between writing and literature, and who have attempted to locate a place in the writing curriculum in which the activities involved in reading and writing about literature have a justification on a broader, pedagogical level.

         All interesting, but this has gotten me thinking about whether there is a place for literature in the music history classroom. What might the use of literature accomplish for us? Might some of these articles advocating for the use of literature as a basis for writing be useful for thinking about how we might generate writing assignments for our students? As well, I find that we need to think, as music history professors, how what we do in our classroom helps our students in other classrooms, and beyond the university, in the lives they choose to live in the future.

Over the next few blog posts, I’d like to reflect on a few of these responses to the Lindemann-Tate debate.

But what are your opinions? Do any of you use literature in you classes? How might it be used effectively?

“More Uncovered”

-->

            In my last post, I brought up the issue of coverage – how much? How little? – and mentioned an interesting article by Shelley Reid from writing pedagogy studies (“Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies 32/1 (2004):15-34). Reid uses the term “problem-based uncoverage” and this concept overlaps significantly with Melanie Lowe’s arguments in her Journal of Music History Pedagogy article, "Teaching Music History Today". Lowe says, “Coming to terms with my inability to survey Western music history and literature was the most liberating experience of my teaching career. To be sure, I still teach the usual assortment of music major survey courses, and I still use A History of Western Music and the Norton Anthology as my required textbooks. But when facing the task of taking my students on a mythical journey from Euripides to Bright Sheng, I have thrown up my hands and surrendered. I have given up.” (46) Instead, Lowe has made the decision to jettison supporting composers and condense the coverage of certain topics in order to gain space in her syllabus for projects that unfold over several class meetings and which focus on a particular problem or issue that will allow students to experience group and/or writing-based assignments that will allow for moments of reflection and experimentation.

            The rationale for this leads directly into the second of Lowe’s challenges: that of presenting music history in a way that allows for the subjectivities of our students to engage with the material in meaningful and enriching ways. “The real challenge for teachers of music history is to put this history in direct dialogue with our contemporary, everyday lives—to make music history not just musically relevant, but intellectually relevant, politically relevant, sexually relevant, spiritually relevant, psychologically relevant, even ecologically relevant not just in the ‘there and then’ of history but in the ‘here and now’ of today”.(46) These projects take the form of using small writing assignments, group and full class discussion, and peer review to allow students to investigate how their own current ideas of music’s function and meaning in society are determined by the music of the past and yet also differ significantly, highlighting the historical divide between “us” and “them.”

For Lowe, the sacrifice of coverage and teaching of detail is well worth it. Students may not study a Haydn piano sonata, but they can, “articulate how and why such issues, concepts, and ideas as those encountered in the history of Western European music have value in their everyday lives today—as musicians, students, responsible citizens, and thinking and sensitive human beings. Is this not more valuable than mastering a plethora of musical-historical facts? The question, of course, is one of quantity: how much information—how many facts per se—do our undergraduate students need to have at their fingertips to be able to think intelligently, meaningfully, and humanely about music? Perhaps far fewer than we may think.”(55)

To elucidate her ideas, Lowe describes three assignments that she uses during her unit on the Enlightenment and the First Viennese School that unfold over several class meetings. For example, the first of these assignments asks students to reflect in depth on what it means for a piece to be considered “high art” and whether light, entertaining music can fit into this category. Students write a short answer by answering several questions around this issue.  Lowe then uses students’ writing to fuel a class discussion, which she then steers into channels that allow students, through debate and disagreement, to become aware of their own “musical-historical prejudices and to think about how such prejudices inform their broader aesthetic worldviews. Only by becoming aware of these kinds of biases can they avoid anachronistic thinking in the music history classroom or elsewhere,” a necessary attitude for the music history student that Lowe argues cannot be easily taught through lecture.(48) This assignment opens students to a greater understanding of Haydn as both an important, canonic composer, and yet one who also realized the opportunities inherent in the composition and publication of accessibly, easy music designed for new kinds of late 18^th century audiences to both hear and play.

Of course, the “how much” is an extremely debatable variable in these discussions, and I’m hoping many of my readers voice their opinions in the comment section. Another blog post is in order, absolutely – what is essential material in the teaching of music history? How much can we jettison in order to make room for deeper encounters? What needs to stay, at all costs? This will be a question at the forefront of my mind as I sit down to tackle the semester’s course schedules. Will you be thinking about the same?