I’ve taught this course more than any other course – probably more than all the other courses I’ve taught combined. This course keeps me out of debt and gives me much needed structure in an otherwise unstructured life, all while providing me with plenty of time to complete a dissertation. I really like my job these days, and I am extremely lucky to have teaching work that is (relatively) stable, as well as highly rewarding.

This semester, I’m teaching four sections of the same course. That means I run a 4-hour seminar (mostly lecturing), and then I repeat the exact same material three more times within 48 hours.

When I tell people this, they often grimace and ask how I stay sane. “Don’t you get BORED repeating yourself like that?” Then I tell them that I taught the same course last semester, too. And the semester before that. I’m on track to deliver the same lectures at least 10 times this year (fingers crossed… )

I should be bored to death with this material by now. Sure, I get to add and drop bits and pieces each time I give these lectures, and I tweak the overall narrative of the course at least once a year, but still… I’m giving the same four-hour lecture on the Frankfurt School, four times in a week.

Why don’t I feel bored?

I thought about this for a while last week, and was reminded of an idea I picked up from various comedy podcasts (notably shows from the Sklar Brothers and the Nerdist).

Several comedians on these shows have shared their thoughts on doing stand-up comedy in two cities – New York and Los Angeles. They describe a key difference between the types of comedian who thrive in these cities, which they connect to the types of comedy spaces available there. (Yes, for those paying attention to my own recent work, this is a kind of scene-based analysis of stand-up comedy… )

In Los Angeles, it’s argued, there are lots of clubs, coffee shops, and lounges where young comics can get stage time. These are often set up for open mics, where comics are given 10-20 minutes on a Thursday night. The audiences expect a mix of seasoned vets and painfully green rookies. A duo with guitars (or a zany comedic ventriloquist?) may spice things up, if you’re really lucky…

The strength of this comedy scene seems to be its willingness to let comics develop their own voices, however strange they may be. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco are central to the rise of so-called ‘alternative’ comedy, in large part because these open mics allowed comedians to get creative. It was ok to go on stage with a notebook filled with casual observations, or to perform 10 minutes as a character you’d created (possibly through a sketch troupe such as the Groundlings or the UCB). You could build a small following in and around L.A. through word of mouth and a few key venues. To many comics, this environment supported tremendous creativity that might not have emerged elsewhere.

Many comics, on the other hand, see New York as a much ‘harder’ city. Audiences in small comedy clubs have less patience for ‘experimental’ acts. More importantly, though, the geography of New York’s comedy scene allows young comics to get a short amount of stage time at several locations in a night. Where L.A.’s lounges and cafes are peppered around a sprawling city, there are many comedy clubs in New York in a relatively small area (accessible by subway) offering 10-minutes for those who want to get onstage.

Many comics have been able to use New York’s scene to their advantage, both financial and professional. It’s possible to hustle your way from one venue to the next, into the wee hours of the morning, Friday and Saturday, every weekend. You’re getting a short time at each, and you’ll be lucky to get paid much of anything, but the quantity of gigs is what matters. Doing seven 10-minute gigs each week in New York allows comics to really polish a few jokes each week. Repeat the same material seven times in a night, and you quickly find the variations and iterations that work best. You trim the unnecessary filler from a joke, and find the beats that play well to any crowd. Instead of developing a new character, you write 10 jokes and make 3 of them work really well. Do that for a few months, and you’ve got a solid act.

Comics who spend time in this New York scene often say that the hardness and intensity can be draining, but that it made them better stand-ups. While L.A. can provide you with more space to develop your own voice, New York forces you to work on the mechanics of comedy: timing, pacing, delivery, etc. In New York you are forced to make jokes work, through sheer repetition and (often brutal) failure. By the time you work out the kinks in a joke over a single weekend, you are ready to take that joke on the road and deliver it to any audience, anywhere.

That’s how I’ve come to think about teaching multiple sections of the same course. I love the thrill of working with a new course, where I have to write 12 lectures, select classroom materials, and piece it all together into a coherent course narrative. Having the time and space to figure these things out is fantastic. That’s the Los Angeles comedy model.

But I really appreciate the repetition of having multiple sections. By the time I’ve given a lecture on Orality vs. Literacy for the fourth time in three days, I know what works, and what doesn’t. I’ve made minor adjustments with each delivery. I can go back to my lecture notes and make revisions for the next semester. By this point, many of the lectures in my first-year course are polished and ready to go ‘on the road’. Drop me in any lecture hall and ask me to do two hours on Innis and McLuhan, and I’ll be fine. The New York comedy model has taught me about the mechanics of a good lecture. I’ve had to think about audiences/students, and not just my own voice/goals in the class.

Ideally, of course, a great stand-up likely benefits from a healthy mix of both models. (Louis C.K. may be the current darling of the sophisticated comedy crowd, but his own TV show makes clear that he works very hard at his craft. Doing time in New York clubs helps focus his material so that it’s good enough for a one-hour special…)

If you teach in classrooms, which of these two models do you think is more helpful in developing your own pedagogy? If you’ve had the opportunity to teach the same class more than once, did the experience of repetition bore you, or compel you to re-work and improve the old material? What makes you a better teacher, and why?

The Globe and Mail reviewer certainly didn’t.  Slate, Salon… academic blogs… you name it. It’s extremely easy to write a review if you only skim the first few pages. Reading is hard.

Lanier certainly makes himself an easy target. I mean, where are his academic credentials? How dare this hobbit of a man write about the Internet – that’s OUR Internet, and only WE are allowed to talk about it!

I’m only half-joking here. I really am alarmed by a kind of intellectual snobbery when it comes to tech culture. We can be a very exclusive, petty, mean-spirited community, and it doesn’t serve us well at all. (In fact, it doesn’t serve anyone very well…) Lanier has as much qualification and more reason to write about the current state of the web in 2013 as any tenure-chasing academic with a penchant for shitty prose. If you’re going to savage the man’s arguments, how about at least taking the time to properly understand those arguments? Just saying…

As with his last book, ‘You Are Not A Gadget’ (which I wrote about last year), Lanier brings together two fields that don’t see enough of one another these days: thoughtful critique of digital media and forward-thinking political and economic analysis. Basically, ‘how are we supposed to run an entire civilization when these new tools of ours keep changing the rules of the game?‘

It’s very easy to imagine a future economy based on the present you think you already understand (‘in 100 years we’ll all wear Nikes and drive space-Nissans!‘). It’s also easy to breathlessly claim that new technologies are changing the world for the better, without taking any stock of actual (and often unintended) consequences happening all around you (and often to other people). Trying to hold both the tech and the political in your head at the same time is scary, but I’m very glad some people are willing to give it a try.

Despite what you might read, Lanier is NOT saying that the Internet is destroying everything around us and must therefore be stopped. He’s making a deeply humanist argument about the role of technology in our lives, and how we are slowly starting to imagine a future where people are less important than the machines around us. To build a fair, equitable society, we must recognize that it is people who make machines, people who make technology meaningful, and people who use technology for their own purposes. Thus, as he writes, we should stop giving away so much of our time and talent to websites that valorize the crowd rather than the individual. Instead, we should realize that “monetizing more of what’s valuable from ordinary people, who turn out to be the uncompensated sources of the data that make networks valuable in the first place, will lead to a better future” (Lanier 2013: 3).

Such a simple argument. How so many reviewers saw this as “Lanier is confused by Pinterest!” is beyond me…

Rather than going through the entire book in detail, I’ll briefly focus on a few minor points that stood out for me. I strongly encourage you to read both of Lanier’s books (in order, preferably) and grapple with these ideas yourself.

1. The major points of wealth accumulation on the internet today are what Lanier calls ‘siren servers’ – the ‘big data’ players who profit off of the information provided to them by hundreds of millions of users. Every time you make a purchase, share a photograph, search for a restaurant, etc. you are freely providing information to businesses who then sort and analyze that data for their own benefit. There are dozens of siren servers shaping our online experience each day, and their common points of interest are as interesting as their differences. In a nice little summary, Lanier makes the following distinctions:

“Facebook suggests not only a moral imperative to place certain information in its network, but the broad applicability of one template to compare people. In this it is distinct from Google, which encourages semistructured online activity that Google will be best at organizing after the fact. Twitter suggests that meaning will emerge from fleeting flashes of thought contextualized by who sent the thought rather than the content of the thought. In this it is distinct from Wikipedia, which suggests that flashes of thought be inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure. Wikipedia proposes that knowledge can be divorced from point of view. In this, it is distinct from the Huffington Post, were opinions fluoresce” (Lanier 2013: 188-9).

Every major online business has a particular vision for the future of the internet. Most of them don’t try to hide this. This is precisely why I chose to stop using Facebook (no, I didn’t just do it for the smug sense of superiority we ex-Facebookers get to enjoy.) Monsanto has a vision of the future. So does Exxon-Mobil. So does Disney. It’s pretty difficult to avoid engaging with some of these major industries, but where you DO have a choice, why not attempt an informed decision? Thinking about the future we want isn’t doe-eyed idealism. It’s precisely the kind of question asked by engaged, informed citizens in every country on earth.

(Gosh, this Lanier fellow sure is controversial, huh?)

2. For my own rather selfish reasons, I find Lanier’s analysis of digital media and its effects on so-called ‘knowledge work’ particularly interesting.

We all applauded when networked computers ‘broke’ the old corrupt model in the music industry and gave us Napster – free music anytime we wanted it. This was proof that art and creativity WANT to be free, and that evil capitalists had simply been keeping it from us all these years. Other creative industries soon followed, to the point that we now sort of expect our media content to come to us online, instantly, at no cost. I want Game of Thrones, the New York Times, Louie C.K.’s new hour of stand-up, and the complete Beatles catalogue, all for free, and I expect it to work on my tablet, thanks.

Lanier points out that the past century gave us a whole series of “levees”, designed to help the middle class eke out a decent wage. Unions help groups of labourers to negotiate collective agreements and advocate for safer working conditions; taxi medallions have helped recent immigrants turn potentially dangerous service work into a stable source of income (which is why the recent efforts by misguided techies to ‘app-ify’ this system make my head hurt); copyright helps ensure that authors and musicians can profit off of their creations – not indefinitely, but long enough to ensure financial security (and thus encourage more acts of creation). Each of these levees is prone to corruption and abuse. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t added tremendous value to our world – they have helped establish a thriving middle class, which acts as a political counter-balance to the well-established wealth of the upper classes.

Digital media, however, has the power to overflow these levees. That, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away, as Cory Doctorow likes to say. What is dangerous, however, is the rapid disappearance of a middle class, without the creation of NEW levees to replace the old.

Once Google figures out how to make self-driving cars that are safer than our current system, truck drivers and cabbies will be out of work in a hurry. As outsourcing customer service and manufacturing jobs continues, a greater number of people (in both the global North and South) will fall farther below the poverty line. And as creative work becomes more and more devalued (that is, the owners of Apple and Amazon servers get to profit off of music, but musicians themselves must tour to make money), we risk losing any number of skilled trades and professions, from teaching to nursing.

Lanier notes, for example, that the nasty old model of the music industry did include an important levee for musicians, one that does not exist in the new “go on tour” model. Simply put, playing live gigs isn’t enough for most musicians, and never will be: “If we demand that everyone turn into a freelancer, then we will all eventually pay an untenable price in heartbreak. Most people won’t be able to pull freelancing off through the contingencies of a lifetime. We need those levees, not because we’re lazy, but because we are real” (Lanier 2013: 254). If an artist creates something great, the old system would pay royalties while the artist took time off to work on their next project, or started a family, or suffered a health crisis. Yes, levees are subject to corruption and abuse. But they are also the mechanism that made middle class life possible in the 20th century. People get sick, and have children, and have to deal with all kinds of emergencies. Having a system in place to continue some payment for a lifetime of work and achievement makes sense, and helps everyone in a society to achieve more.

And here in academia, we look at the decline in tenure-track positions and imagine that this is entirely the fault of neoliberalism, in its most abstract forms. No good jobs available to me right now? Well, something something Harper government yadda yadda, the state, war on science, hurr hurr Zizek and capitalism…

Perhaps, Lanier notes, we ought to look at the necessary and built-in implications of the very digital technologies we’ve all been enjoying these past few decades… Maybe that hard drive filled with free MP3 files was a dead giveaway that the future wasn’t going to be as simple as you’d hoped. Computers allowed you to copy knowledge for free, and you expect to make a living (with health benefits and a pension) doing what, exactly? Selling your knowledge work? Uhh yeah… about that…

3. Finally, Lanier’s rough sketches for a better future – how are we to continue innovating and building new tools, without creating a world that none of us wants to inhabit?

The simple solution he proposes is to look back at older, alternate ways of networking computers… Before the current World Wide Web took over the planet, another system existed, based on the network logic of 2-way, rather than 1-way links. That way, any piece of information you add to the web, no matter how it gets used, abused, re-mixed or monetized by others, is always traceable BACK to you. If you provide several translations of books, and those translations allow Google to translate thousands of strings of text using their proprietary algorithms, then YOUR original contribution (without which Google can’t do anything) is worth something, and is clearly documented (both from your end and from Google’s).

On the value of 2-way links vs. 1-way links Lanier writes:

“If everything on the Web were two-way linked, it would be an easy matter to sort out which nodes were the most important for a given topic. You’d just see where most of the links led. Since that information wasn’t present, Google was needed to scrape the entire Web all the time to recalculate all the links that should have existed anyway, keep them in a dungeon, and present the results in order to lure so-called advertisers” (Lanier 2013: 227 italics in original).

Yes, Lanier’s solution is… a system of micropayments.

But it’s not the pragmatics of these tiny financial exchanges that really matter here. Rather, it’s the guiding logic of a different kind of network – one that acknowledges the only real source of value online: human activity.

No one is proposing a world where we all get paid ‘just for using Facebook’. If the information you create is valuable to someone else, then you should be rewarded for that in some way. This is hardly a radical idea.

Well, instead of simply writing about WHY I haven’t posted (major health issues, holidays, and an insane teaching load this semester), I’ll just dive right into the post-Oscar media frenzy.

I intended to write something on this issue last year when comedian Daniel Tosh decided to make rape jokes about a heckler in his audience. Thankfully, the internet neatly summarized my feelings on the issue (particularly Lindy West’s piece on Jezebel), so I didn’t have to contribute yet another voice to a rather loud debate.

I also realized that the last thing the internet needed (or ever needs) is another privileged white male explaining things, telling others how to think about an issue.

For those unfamiliar with the term, this is what’s known as Mansplaining.

Full disclosure: I actually enjoyed Daniel Tosh’s first stand-up special, and I am quite certain that if his TV show had been on when I was in undergrad, my friends and I would have been huge fans. I consume a lot of stand-up comedy – it’s a passion, bordering on a minor obsession. Which made it particularly disappointing to see so many comedians defend Tosh’s rape jokes without any real thought. (For the record, NO, that was not an issue of ‘free speech’. To say so is to demonstrate a shocking ignorance of how actual free speech works…)

I did not watch the Oscar awards this year – I was too busy watching The Walking Dead. But I’ve seen clips of the ‘highlights’, including Seth MacFarlane’s delightful song about seeing boobs in movies, many of which feature scenes of rape and abuse. Get it? Boobs! Ha!

This was quickly over-shadowed by The Onion’s now infamous tweet, and the subsequent backlash it generated.

All of this compels me to write on the topic of comedy, privilege, and outrage. NOT because I’m a white man, and therefore fit to make judgments and rules. Rather, I’d like to address this post to other white men, particularly those who feel the need to defend Tosh, MacFarlane, and The Onion. So here goes…

Dear White Men, and particularly Straight, White, Middle Class, Able-Bodied Men…

Let’s start by admitting that we have things pretty good. Not as individuals, of course – you might have a bad back, or a shitty job, or financial insecurities, or just an iPhone that gets lousy reception… but as a group, we kinda have more opportunities and advantages than any other group of people on earth.

If this idea shocks or offends you, stop reading now, go dig a hole in the ground, crawl into it, and wait for the world to end. Because if you can’t acknowledge privilege at the most basic level, you’re probably too stupid to function in society.

Seriously. No one is asking you to feel guilty about privilege. No one is asking you to give up everything you have in life. Start by ACKNOWLEDGING privilege. Be aware of it. Don’t go around acting like the things you have were all earned from moral goodness and genuine merit. Maybe you were born with a bit more privilege than others have. This doesn’t make you a bad person. Failing to at least acknowledge this, however, does kinda make you an asshole…

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about comedy for a moment, shall we?

As I said, I’m a huge fan of comedy. Not just the cerebral, edgy, anti-oppression comedians like Hari Kondabolu, either. I like fart jokes. I like poop jokes. I am, in many ways, a 12 year-old boy who looks 32. If something makes you laugh, it makes you laugh, period.

That said, I have more respect for the comedians in this world who can tell the difference between an easy laugh and a good laugh.

Consider this: if you went on stage in any comedy club in America tonight, and spent 10 minutes saying the word ‘diarrhea’, and making fart noises with your mouth and hands… odds are good that someone in that audience would be rolling on the floor with laughter the entire time. To that person, you are a comedic genius. I mean… diarrhea… am I right?

But to most fans, and certainly to most comedians, that’s an easy laugh. It’s not a good laugh. You might manage to make a living telling this same joke, year after year, in clubs all around the world. But no one thinks you’re a good comedian… no one respects what you do. You can make some people laugh, but you’re pretty shitty at your job, so to speak.

On the other hand, a really well-crafted joke about, say, dead babies, or Catholic church sex scandals… that might not get many more laughs in the average comedy club, but it can demonstrate a far greater talent as a comedian. Look at someone like Jimmy Carr, for example, who clearly works very hard at crafting ‘classic’ 2-line jokes – premise, punchline, repeat. This may look easy, but to craft a full set of such jokes takes a lot of time and skill, even when the topics may seem obvious, or offensive.

This, in a nutshell, was at the heart of the Tosh incident… I don’t think anyone was really calling for a BAN on the word ‘rape’ in stand-up comedy. As West herself points out, there is such a thing as a good, funny joke about rape. What is key here, is that the joke is about rape, and NOT about rape victims. Standing on stage, pointing at one person, and saying “look at THAT idiot, don’t they suck?” is easy, and it may get a laugh. But it’s not a thoughtful joke. Jokes can point to bizarre power imbalances in society; they can mock commonly held assumptions about identity, class, race, etc.; they can serve as a tool for those without power to savagely attack those who run the world. To point to someone in a vulnerable position and joke about their plight is easy, pointless, and quite frankly below anyone who thinks they are a professional comedian.

Is it possible to use the word ‘retard’ in a comedy act, in a way that is not demeaning to people with physical and mental disabilities? Sure. Is it also possible to get a cheap laugh from a few idiots by pointing AT a person with disabilities and mocking them? Sure. And I don’t think anyone would see the two jokes as equivalent.

Making jokes at the expense of rape victims, the disabled, etc. is easy, and it isn’t funny. Making jokes about race is very different from making racist jokes.

And this brings me back to the mess that was the Oscars this year.

As a white dude in a tuxedo, Seth MacFarlane stood on stage and occupied all kinds of positions of power. To make fun of another rich white dude in a tuxedo, like George Clooney, feels fair. To make jokes about young women who often perform roles semi-nude because of the artistic decisions made by other rich white men, on the other hand, feels… tacky, obvious, and more than a little bit cruel. No one told Mr. MacFarlane that the only way he’d be taken seriously in his profession would be to show his genitals to millions. He got to make his money and earn his fame by… mocking those with less power in society. (Count the number of jokes ABOUT women, minorities, and the disabled in MacFarlane’s shows, and a pattern starts to become symptomatic of a much deeper problem…)

Was it just ‘all in good fun’? I don’t know… why don’t we stop asking white dudes on the internet, and maybe pay attention to the many, many voices expressing anger and frustration at MacFarlane’s shtick. The unending stream of mansplainers online wants to assure us that the Oscars were just fine, and that MacFarlane is actually an ally of women, the LGBT community, etc. I mean… he won an award for something once, right? That proves he’s not a misogynist!

The Onion controversy was, in comparison, tame, despite the use of far harsher language. As I read it, from a position of privilege, they were making a joke about celebrity culture – the Perez Hiltons of the world. As others read it, the joke was at the expense of a young girl, and a young girl of colour at that. And as still others read it, the joke WAS about celebrity culture, but it still wasn’t an appropriate way of getting to that end; if you want to mock the stupidity of the Oscars as a cultural event, talk some shit about MacFarlane himself, rather than a 9 year-old.

The Onion removed the tweet, and apologized. And I think they absolutely made the right decision. They were not bowing to popular unrest, nor were they in ANY way denied their right to free speech. They made a joke, and they realized that it wasn’t a very good joke. Since 99% of their jokes are quite good, they decided to apologize for this one, and get back to making good jokes. To me, they stopped making fart sounds and went back to crafting actual comedy.

So if you were upset that Tosh, or The Onion ‘had to’ apologize, I think you’re missing the point. To work as a professional comedian often means walking a fine line, and you often end up offending people. This doesn’t always mean that you need to apologize, or ‘take back’ a joke. But a little bit of self-awareness really goes a long way. To understand that a particular joke might only be funny at the expense of someone else – someone far less privileged in society than you, someone who is vulnerable, marginalized, or powerless in society – can cause you to change your mind. It can make you realize that fish in a barrel are an easy target. Remember – fish don’t usually put themselves into barrels… they’d rather be swimming in a river or ocean, far away from you and your stupid gun.

Maybe Seth MacFarlane should look in a goddam mirror sometime and ask himself a few questions. He might decide to apologize, too.

Or he might just continue grinning like a colossal tool, making the same jokes about ‘women, blacks and Jews’ in every episode of Family Guy, week after week…

I’ve been ignoring this site for the past several weeks, as I’ve been rather busy putting my entire life into boxes, moving those boxes, and then unpacking them in a new place. I am now a proud resident of East Vancouver, mere footsteps from the best pho in town. Life is good. (If you are someone who would need to know my mailing address and I have not already sent it to you, this would be an excellent time to email me, wouldn’t it?)

Now it’s back to work, as multiple deadlines are fast approaching for the next round of conferences. After being shot down by the monkeys at AERA (blind review? More like pig-ignorant review…) I’m hoping to make several appearances at Congress this year. For those of you thinking of attending this year, it’s in Victoria, which is quite lovely and not all that far from Vancouver… just saying…

A couple of quick updates on the academic part of my life, as that is the purpose of this blog…

I’m back at SFU again in January, teaching a Media History course. This will be in addition to the current teaching load I’m carrying at FIC, but I’m very excited to get to teach this course again. I get to geek out about old media, talk about mapping and cartography, and show clips from ‘The Name of the Rose’, featuring Sean Connery and a painfully young Christian Slater. Sometimes I really do have the best job on the planet.

Granted, the course will be offered at the Surrey Campus, but don’t let the media give you the wrong impression: not EVERYONE in Surrey wants to stab you for drug money. It’s actually quite a nice little campus.

Oh, also, the course is on Saturday mornings. So, yeah… goodbye weekends.

I’m wrapping up the final round of interviews for my dissertation work, after meeting some really interesting folks at this year’s Media Democracy Day here in Vancouver. Still on the lookout for more community groups working with youth and media, but I think I’ve covered most of the ‘big’ players now.

Meanwhile, I’m taking 2-3 days each week for writing and reviewing, and hope to have 4 full chapters ready to send to my supervisor as a Christmas present. After several years of this, I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The fact that this imagery also applies to near-death experiences is a truth not lost on me…

Finally, I’m quite excited to be playing a minor administrative role in the ongoing affairs of ARCYP – the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People. We’ve got a few great panels coming together for Congress, as well as a very cool event in January focusing on youth and film. (Check the website for CFPs and details on events.) If you or someone you know is interested in this work, please share these links widely. Membership is nice and cheap, and you get access to the fantastic journal Jeunesse. 

Hope to have a lengthier post in a week or two, in which I shall share some of my thought on Foucault, Straw, and the question of space in education research.

I know… pretty exciting stuff, huh?

For those interested in ‘scene’ as a research tool:

Call for Papers

Scene Again: Social Life, Research, and Cultural Studies – Special Issue intended for Cultural Studies

Scenes are bounded worlds set within the fabric of everyday life. Participating in scenes produces shared experiences, affects, and identities. They are places to see and to be seen, but they hide behind the everyday – to find them you have to know where to look. The concept as we use it here was introduced by Will Straw in a Cultural Studies article just over twenty years ago (Straw 1991) as a way to characterize the cross-fertilization and transformation of popular-music practices in specific locales and communities. Straw has since revisited the concept and extended  its reach to embrace other kinds of cultural life, “particular clusters of social and cultural activity” that do not always have secure “boundaries which circumscribe them” (Straw 2004, p. 412).

It is in this spirit that we contend “scene” was a concept ahead of its time, a resource for a robust, empirically oriented cultural studies or sociology of culture. Rather than simply studying scenes as cultural objects, however, we believe the term is most generative for cultural studies research when employed as a structuring tool for analysis – a “sensitizing concept.” Learning to see “circulatory matrices” (Gaonkar & Povinelli, 2003) of people, practices and objects as scenes enables us to pick out objects of analysis from the flux and flow of everyday life. In our Internet era, terms such as “network” are also available, but we believe that “scene” is a more materially oriented and inclusive methodological resource that forces us to consider the shared spatial and affective dimensions of social life. Using “scene” in a broader range of research areas, beyond music scenes and art scenes, allows us to identify the prevailing conditions and structures of feeling that bind people together in education scenes, healthcare scenes, activism scenes, and so on.

As a concept and metaphor, “scene” is provocative and flexible, but what difference might it make to the way that we approach and report on cultural life? We wish to showcase the usefulness of “scene” as a research concept in cultural studies by collecting together new scholarship in critical dialogue with Straw and the scenes perspective. We invite contributions that work with and test the limits of the scenes perspective through rich, historical and material analyses of empirical case studies across a range of cultural spaces and practices. Some potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Histories of scenes, including those which explore the dissolution or dispersion of a scene.
• Comparative analyses of scenes across geographical or historical spaces.
• Analyses of hierarchy and power within and between scenes (particularly those which deal with race, gender, sexuality, and/or class).
• The intersection of online and offline practices which co-constitute a particular scene.
• Institutions and intermediaries central to the growth and reproduction of a scene.
• Nodal places where multiple scenes intersect (libraries, cafes, community centres, etc.)
• Scenes produced in suburban, exurban, or virtual environments.
• Efforts to map or visualize the materiality of scenes as they develop over time.

Please submit an 800-word abstract by December 15^th, 2012 to spoyntz@sfu.ca.

Editors:

Stuart Poyntz
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University

Jamie Rennie
Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education, OISE at the University of Toronto

Benjamin Woo
Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities, Simon Fraser University

I thought about a ‘Lance Armstrong is Innocent’ post, but decided at the last minute NOT to share the inane ramblings I typed up in the wee hours of the morning…

Perhaps a “Republicans are all BLAH, but Democrats are all BLEH” post… but anyone who follows me on Twitter (god help you) knows how little I care about party conventions. (Can we at least agree that you don’t NEED to frame comments about Clint Eastwood with terms like ‘great’ or ‘legend’? He’s old. That, in and of itself, doesn’t translate to ‘greatness’. He squinted his way through one-dimensional character performances for 40 years. That’s it. He’s also an ignorant asshole with no relevance to contemporary politics whatsoever…)

So I thought I’d put up a quick post to share some of the latest work I’ve been doing. (That kinda was the ‘point’ of this website in the first place… as my colleague has reminded me after some recent ‘tangential’  posts…)

Quite simply, I’ve spent my summer with Foucault.

(Apologies to Caitlin Currie here… I’m breaking my own rule about grad students dropping the ‘F word’ to look smart.)

After some really useful feedback on my dissertation proposal (and early drafts of my first three chapters), I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking through some methodological questions that have been nagging me for a while. In short, I keep using a particular vocabulary to describe what it is I’m doing with my dissertation… and a committee member finally called me out on this, asking me to explain more clearly WHAT I mean, and WHY I’m using these terms.

Fair questions.

So I went back to a body of literature that I first encountered in a doctoral seminar a few years back, looking for a nice, neat justification of the methodological tools I’ve been employing ever since. (Note to future grad students: this isn’t really the best way to do things… ) I mean, I’ve understood my own reasons for doing research the way I do, but it’s been very refreshing to have to ‘explain it’ to others, even those supervising my work. As with much of my dissertation work, this will be of little interest to most people, but I find it helpful to articulate some of these ideas for a slightly wider audience. If you kept reading after ‘summer with Foucault’, you are either sick or related to me. Or both.

My project, in a nutshell, is a genealogy of media literacy in Canada. I am drawing on Foucauldian research methods to better understand how a relatively young subject area in (capital-E) Education has been produced – in classrooms, in Faculties and Ministries of Education, in teaching organizations, in community organizations, etc. I am thus considering ‘media literacy’ as a unique discourse, or set of utterances, statements, claims, etc.

Analyzing a subject area in this way – as a discursive domain – has a number of advantages within Education research. The most well-discussed (bordering on clichéd) reason is that Foucault’s methods for analysis draw out attention to the nature of power and its circulation in society. (This is where I’m supposed to cite page 19 of the History of Sexuality, Volume 1… that seems to be the only page ever read, understood, or referenced in academia… {grad student joke}… ) Rather than thinking about power as a top-down ‘thing’ that certain people in Education ‘have’, Foucault encourages us to think about power at the ‘capillary’ level – that is, where it comes into actual contact with the daily lives of ordinary people. In Education, this means an analysis of curriculum documents, professional development seminars, pre-service teacher training materials, etc. These are the everyday, trivial sites where power is actually exercised – this is where many teachers develop an understanding of what ‘the media’ is, and how young people can become ‘literate’ in new media languages.

As a researcher, it’s important to consider how to ‘DO’ Foucauldian research – and not just how to cite examples of the work done BY Foucault himself. His genealogies, as well as his archaeologies, are only useful models for future research if we understand the structuring elements at work. In the case of studying a unique subject area, or discursive domain, in Education, this means paying particular attention to certain KINDS of statement or utterance – formation criteria, for example, that define which future knowledge can and cannot be counted as ‘media literacy’. (In some jurisdictions, early media literacy educators happened to work in English classrooms, meaning a text-centered approach to media emerged, coalesced, and propagated itself as ‘the’ way to ‘do’ media literacy.)

Tracing the genealogical strands that form the untold or overlooked history of media literacy in Canada also requires that I look well outside the traditional, institutional sites of knowledge production. While one official history of the subject has been told through established channels (Ministry archives, doctoral dissertations, etc.), genealogical methods draw attention to the ‘forgotten’ histories, alternative pathways, and unofficial versions of what media literacy HAS been. Plenty of educators here in BC, for example, seem to be ‘doing’ media literacy in their classrooms. But if their actions occur outside the discursive boundaries established over the past 25+ years, then they may not even recognize that what they are doing can even be called media literacy. In a way, the walled gardens of institutionally-produced knowledge can convince us over time that there is no world beyond these walls – this is what Media Literacy, or English Literature, or Western Philosophy, or Mathematics looks like, what it’s always looked like, what it will always look like.

In the context of Education research, the methodological usefulness of Foucault’s genealogies is a lovely match for my other major framing device – Will Straw’s notion of ‘scene’. There is a rich temporal component of Foucauldian genealogy that allows the researcher to see how current iterations of discursive domains continue to be produced through banal acts of bureaucracy (or, in the case of Education, everyday classroom pedagogy); in ‘scene’, I find an equally compelling nod to both temporal and spatial contingencies – cultural scenes are produced through circulation and exchange, but they are often anchored in specific places, meaning a kind of mapping is essential to their analysis. The combination of these two elements – ‘scene’ as the methodological consideration (or ‘sensitizing concept’, as I’ve come to see it through work with colleagues), and genealogy as the specific methodological tool for mapping/tracing the scene itself – gives me a way to study media literacy over time without any risk of abstraction or over-theorizing. There is, in effect, a highly grounded materiality to scene-based analyses, which I believe complements Foucauldian ‘histories’ quite well. (This is certainly not to say that genealogies, in and of themselves, are inclined to overlook the importance of place. I do think, however, that too much time ‘in the archive’ is an open invitation for researchers to ignore certain spatial realities in their work… Education, like any human activity, happens in very real places. While these places rarely produce their own easily-accessed archives, they are essential to understanding how and why particular discourses emerge, mutate, and travel as they do.)

I certainly won’t recommend Foucault and his methods to everyone – or, for that matter, to most. I happen to work in Education, so I tend to deal with (capital-K) Knowledge an awful lot. And when thinking about the production and history of Knowledge, there are few better resources out there than Foucault. As with many other scholars, a quick overview doesn’t really help all that much (page 19 of the History of Sexuality Volume 1…) I resolutely avoided Foucault for many years, before taking a full seminar with my doctoral supervisor at OISE. And it was another couple of years after that before I really began to see the methodological usefulness for my own projects. (It’s always a little tricky to ‘give up’ your favourite scholars from your undergrad or MA days… realizing that McLuhan really has no place in my doctoral dissertation was tough, but will ultimately make my work an awful lot better…)

That said… if you’d like to go beyond ‘impressing other grad students in coffee shops with the clever books displayed on your table’, Foucault is extraordinarily useful for many researchers, and generally pretty damn fun to read. (not Žižek fun, but really, who else is?) As much as this thought would have nauseated me even five years ago… I can definitely see developing a Foucault-based methods course at some point in my teaching career. Not ‘applied’ Foucault… ‘Implied’, as my supervisor would say. 

And that’s how I spent my summer. Writing 25-30 pages of a Methods chapter, spelling out very clearly why I use the word ‘genealogy’ so much in my dissertation, and connecting this methodological approach to the notion of ‘scene’ that continues to creep further and further into my work.

Living the dream…

Will take time next week to write a proper post. But for now, I just want to mention the fantastic dissertation defense I attended on Monday morning.

Ladies and Gentlemen, DOCTOR Benjamin goddam Woo.

Good friend, colleague/collaborator, partner in crime-fighting. Not to mention a rather intimidating scholar.

Look for info on his book (coming soon) on this site.

Read the man’s website. He’s a doctor, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Here’s what I know: premiers Clark and Redford are, equally and unquestionably, total muppets. I’m sure they’re lovely dinner guests, and responsible neighbours, and respectful children/parents/siblings. But politically, ideologically? Muppets. One is the lesser of two evils, the other is the more popular (for now) of two awful legacies. Ignore their party names – they are, in many important ways, the same.

Progressive conservatives. Compassionate conservatives. Cool new conservatives for a cool new world.

We don’t cancel important social programs… we just cut their budgets each year, under the guise of ‘fiscal responsibility’. We think families and churches and communities are just awesome, and we’d love to support them… but ultimately you’re on your own, so better start hiding money under your mattress, chump. We are nothing like the Harper government, so don’t ever confuse us with that potential train wreck… even though our parties enact identical legislation and we share their economic and social worldview and we often employ the same people behind the scenes…

So when Clark and Redford start fighting about the Enbridge pipeline, it’s really hard to ‘take sides’. If I suffer from both cancer and ebola, do I really care which one ‘wins’?

To be very clear: I’m not defending Clark and her terrible party. I’m not driven by any kind of weird ‘BC pride’, as ALL forms of provincialism baffle me. You are not defined by the invisible line that somehow connects you to the redneck towns you enjoy mocking. Vancouver has as much in common with Prince George as Calgary does with Lethbridge. Stop being offended when someone criticizes the actions of ‘your’ government. (Go ahead: talk smack about BC’s premier all you want. Make some hilarious jokes about the Interior. I won’t even flinch.)

But back to oil…

I’m happy to admit that there is a lot about pipelines, regulation, industry process, etc. that I don’t know. PLENTY I don’t know about this issue.

But here’s more of what I DO know: you don’t get to hide behind federalism when it suits you. That’s just lazy. IS this a provincial concern, or is it a federal concern, or (maybe?) both? Don’t just pick a side when it it convenient, then flip when it’s not.

There is oil in Alberta. Lots of oil. Most of the easily accessible stuff is gone. What remains is quite difficult to get at. But so long as there is a strong demand for the stuff, someone is going to try to get it out of the ground. If the process involved in expensive, those companies are going to try to save money where they can, such as royalty arrangements. If the process is extremely toxic and will impact life around the oil sands for hundreds of miles, those companies will do the bare minimum to pass what few regulations currently exist. Calling those companies ‘evil’ doesn’t address the fact that weak regulatory apparatuses helped facilitate their desire to save money.

Should issues like royalties be handled by the province itself? Well, for now they are. That’s the way it is. Which is, let’s be honest, the weakest argument you can make to defend anything. “Well that’s just how it is” is a nice way of saying you have given up on thinking about the issue. You accept your role as a passive spectator in life, and stop trying to imagine any other world than the one you currently inhabit. “That’s the way it is“, because that’s the current political configuration around us. There is no natural, universal truth to be found… just one possible situation among many. Your failure of imagination is not proof that I’m wrong…

Furthermore, I’m a little unclear as to why ‘oil’ is such a special item that Alberta needs its own offices in DC and around the world to ‘promote’ the stuff… Generally, when a Canadian industry wants to do business overseas, it does so in accordance with international trade arrangements handled by the federal government. We don’t need Bombardier to establish its own consulate in Sweden… selling snowmobiles overseas means working within trade frameworks established as part of broader foreign affairs agendas…

“But Jamie, oil is just a commodity. It’s a good, and can be sold on the free market as companies see fit.”

Go away.

Farmers don’t just sell their grain on an international market to get the best price possible… we created national structures for standardizing prices and practices, because ‘wheat’ is more than just a commodity. It’s an important element in determining how a country feeds its population. We don’t just let producers do whatever the hell they want: we establish regulations and restrictions to ensure the largest possible number of farmers can make a decent living, WHILE ensuring Canadians have adequate access to a vital ‘commodity’.

‘Ports’ aren’t just ‘water’ – they are a critical nexus of private and public interests. ‘Farming’ isn’t just about ‘wheat’ – it’s about ensuring that Canada can feed itself. And the ‘oil industry’ isn’t just ‘brown goop in the ground’ – it’s part of a country’s energy infrastructure (as Redford has clearly acknowledged).

So… Should a pipeline built through BC be handled by the province pumping the oil, the province affected by the pipeline itself, or a partnership of the two? Well, until a few days ago, I was under the impression that a new ‘national energy strategy’ would be developed by the premiers, since ‘energy’ was none of the federal government’s damn business (despite the evidence Mulcair presents that energy now affects the entire country, and is thus essential business for the federal government…)

But apparently BC needs to shut up and let … the federal government handle the assessment/application process. Because pipelines are infrastructure not unlike ports, and are thus the mandate of Ottawa. So apparently energy policy must be decided by the provinces, except when it’s inconvenient to one province?

Here’s a thought exercise for you…

What if BC started to insist that, like Alberta, it was ‘blessed’ by a wondrous natural resource: the ocean. Like the oil under Alberta, BC happens to have found itself with an abundance of glorious coastline, perfect for building large shipping ports. If provinces like Saskatchewan weren’t so LAZY and complacent, maybe THEY’D have some more oceans too! Our natural resources directly contribute to our sense of identity, pride, and swagger…

As with oil in Alberta, BC should insist that oceans are a provincial matter. It’s none of your damn business what we do with them. If we want to build a massive shipping port and ONLY allow BC companies to use it, that’s our business. The federal government should have no jurisdiction over OUR natural resources, right? And OTHER provinces? Well.. I don’t even know why they’re TALKING about our oceans… mind your damn business, prairie-dwellers!

Clearly, this would be absurd.

Ports, and the access to shipping they provide, are a federal concern. For good reason. Because the physical facility, and the jobs associated with it, happen to be in ONE province. But the port is not simply a tool to help BC residents improve their lives… it’s a national resource. Every private business in Alberta that wants to trade their goods overseas must arrange transport into and out of BC. You can drive through it on a truck, you can fly over it in a plane, you can pump oil through a pipeline until it reaches tanker ships here… but you gotta get your stuff out of a land-locked province with a small population/market. BC doesn’t get to act self-righteous about its ports, and claim them as a resource meant to serve ‘BCers first’. BC benefits from the jobs created by ports, but it also takes on a significant environmental risk by having minerals, chemicals, consumer goods and produce stacked up right next to its major cities. BC would like some say in the environmental and financial regulations affecting ports, but overall responsibility remains federal: this resource benefits all Canadians. The premier of BC doesn’t simply get to run the ports according to their own whims.

So again… why, exactly, is oil so special? There happens to be a lot of it in certain parts of the country. And those closest to it will likely benefit from jobs. They also take on significant risks (imagine if the tar sands were located 20km upstream from Calgary… bet you’d see a slightly more rigourous set of regulatory mechanisms in place…)

They would also like some say in the financial agreements, to help offset these risks and environmental losses. But actual jurisdiction over this ‘resource’ needs to be federal, as energy effects the entire country. Asking the premier of one province to make decisions that actually impact everyone else in the country is just plain ridiculous.

A pipeline spanning two provinces is a federal concern, apparently.
The port at one end that ships oil around the world is also a federal concern.
So why is the puddle at the other end strictly off-limits to Ottawa? If BC acted this way with respect to its coastline, we’d all be labeled greedy, selfish hippies.

The world is bigger than your city, your province, your country. If you have to call yourself ‘world class’, it means you really aren’t…

But my STUDENTS on the other hand… Oh man, do I have stories to tell…

No. Seriously. Let’s talk teaching for a moment, shall we?

 I’m trying something new this semester, and it’s failing quite miserably.

The problem is, I have a textbook in the course I teach. Students must buy it. And they all do.

And then NONE of them read it. ANY of it.

Each week, I assign a couple of readings. We’re talking maybe 30-50 pages each week. Usually journal articles or chapters from somewhat canonical works.

Some of these readings are pretty tricky, especially given the context in which I find myself teaching. Students need to spend quite a bit of time getting through these articles. And I fully expect them to come to class with questions about the readings.

I consider the textbook to be part of the course material. Readings complement the lectures and vice-versa. If you come to class having read the assigned articles, you will be significantly more familiar with the basic concepts I will then discuss at greater length.

At least, that’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work…

So this semester, in an effort to force students to do the readings before coming to class, I have introduced ‘surprise’ quizzes. (This was modeled on a second-year English course I took at Queen’s… Tim Conley, wherever you are now, thank you for forcing me to develop an actual work ethic…)

Quizzes are based entirely on the readings. They are extremely easy for those who did the readings, and impossible for those who did not. No minor details here… “Did you notice the 4-page section all about one single thing?”

Of course, my own undergraduate career should have told me this would be a terrible idea. I’m pretty sure I skimmed through most of my first-year textbooks, ignoring the point and learning nothing. I rarely missed lectures though, as those seemed far more important.

Eventually, I did the math and realized… I was paying an awful lot of money to NOT learn much at school… between the direct costs of textbooks, and the chunk of tuition going to a single ‘course’, PART of which was the material outside of lecture, I was wasting a lot of my own time and effort.

I also started to realize (embarrassingly late I might add) that being a ‘full-time student’ was pretty much like being a ‘full-time worker’. School was my job.
That meant working 40 hours a week.
Five courses each semester equals EIGHT hours, each week, for each course. If I spend three hours in lecture, then I should be spending another FIVE hours on that course, outside of class time.

Yes, yes, I’m instrumentalizing the hell out of education… blah blah blah the neoliberalization of higher learning, yadda yadda pursuit of knowledge, etc.

The point is, attending class was only ONE part of my ‘job’ as a student. It took me a while to figure this out, but eventually it clicked, and I started spending a lot more time working on being a student. Readings started to take longer, AND they made more sense. How odd. My essays got better, as I started researching a topic well before the paper was due. Hell, I even LOOKED AT MY NOTES AFTER CLASS, to see what made sense to me and what did not.

So now I’m trying to ‘force’ that epiphany on my students. I thought tying the additional work of reading to an actual grade would do the trick. It has not.

Perhaps a couple of short ‘book reports’ based on the readings? I certainly don’t want them ‘presenting’ this work to the whole class, as that NEVER ends well…

If you’re reading this, and have some thoughts on the matter, please leave a comment. I’m quite eager to hear some other strategies for ‘encouraging’ students to see that learning about something requires a major commitment of time and energy. Sitting in class taking notes is only one part of taking a course – and it’s not even necessarily the most important part…

I’m hoping to post some detailed thoughts on this subject later in the week.

But for now, I stumbled across this lovely bit of writing and fell right back in love with it. Just wanted to share…

This is a brief statement made by Michel Foucault in June of 1984, published in Liberation. Enjoy.

We are just private individuals here, with no other grounds for speaking, or for speaking together, than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place. 

Of course, we accept the obvious fact that there’s not much that we can do about the reasons why some men and women would rather leave their country than live in it. The fact is beyond our reach.

Who appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right. It seems to me that we need to bear in mind three principles that, I believe, guide this initiative, and many others that have preceded it […]:

1. There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims. After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.

2. Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of this international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, suffering for which it’s untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

3. We must reject the division of labor so often proposed to us: individuals can get indignant and talk; governments will reflect and act. It’s true that good governments appreciate the holy indignation of the governed, provided it remains lyrical. I think we need to be aware that very often it is those who govern who talk, are capable only of talking, and want only to talk. Experience shows that one can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us. Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Medecins du Monde are initiatives that have created this new right – that of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy. The will of individuals must make a place for itself in a reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly for themselves, that monopoly which we need to wrest from them little by little and day by day.

Damn straight.