MiT6: Media in Transition
Apr. 26th, 2009 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwendolyngraceI don't think it's entirely coincidental that over the past few years, every time I have found myself at a potential crossroads, there happens to be an MIT media studies conference I've gone to at just about the same time.
- Futures of Entertainment was two weeks after I left Mount Auburn
- MiT5 was two weeks after I was back out of work from BIDMC (after working briefly in the Surgery department), and two months before I started working there again
- MiT6 was this weekend (and we know that things at work are...less than stable)
The subject matter was *less* relevant than two years ago (which was all about fandom), but it still had a lot of context that is of interest to my various lives. I kept thinking all weekend that I basically had one foot in each of about four different aspects that related to the conference topics: author/editor, (modern) performer, fan consumer/creator, oral (medieval) traditionalist, musician, etc. It was very difficult (especially this morning!) to choose one panel to attend, knowing I'd be missing loads of other great content.
One of the other things that I realize when I go to these things, and it's both a good and a bad thing, is that in general, in my little corner of fandom, I'm used to being able to speak with some relative authority (regardless of whether or not I'm one of the more educated people in the room--sometimes yes, sometimes no). But in a setting such as this, I'm confronted with just how armchair my approach is...and how much organized, formal educational thought is out there that I have not absorbed. It's out there waiting, but I don't know if I'll ever have the time or the "leisure" (meaning available resources) to actively pursue all the pieces that feed into the collected research to date.
Another thing that I remember (and this is something I'm confronted by a LOT, but in an entirely different way) is that despite the lack of time or resources, I *need* to expose myself to this level of Intelligentsia on a periodic (frequent?) basis, because otherwise I start to lose my own cognitive coherence. By that I mean that because I spend 90% of my time among people who are, let's face it, not that smart - or at least certainly not *academically* intelligent - and because that reinforces my "head of the class" syndrome - I start to dumb down because there's nothing to challenge me in my daily (work) life. As human beings, we all need to be in a constant state of learning, so that we keep expanding our lexicon and sharpening our skills and adding to our understanding of the world, the future, our potential, fill-in-the-blank. I found that I started off the weekend feeling dumb and like a poseur, and doubted very much that anything I could say would contribute. By last night, I had rediscovered my eloquence, my lucidity and my facility with the topics - and damn if I didn't come up with some good thinky thoughts.
I went and filled up my brain again today, but man, I miss having that kind of stimulating, deep conversation on a regular basis. Not necessarily philosophical debate, or Platonic discourse, but certainly the idea that we can discuss ideas and achieve a little clarity around them.
My biggest, best thinky-thought this weekend, I think, was about the role of transformative works in the future of publishing, and the whole debate over whether authors can reasonably expect to control the reception and/or interpretation of their work once they have shared it with a public. Of course, my answer is that no, an author cannot and should not have that expectation, because frankly, the act of transmission is meaningless without the act of reception and interpretation of that message. And receiving and interpreting the message are too subjective and too fractionated (fractal?) to be expected to be consistent from one "consumer" to the next.
Moreover, the real point of this all is that stories, like songs, were never meant to be told only once. (This is not a new idea!) So as a songwriter, I *know* when I sing a new song that it will *only* succeed through the act of iteration. It will *only* survive if it is performed again, and again, and again, and moreover, it will *only* truly live if it is spread in a viral fashion, each person also experiencing and creating new performances through the act of reiteration. So with music, we *assume* that the "good" product is one that is repeated across many audiences and within many contexts. It must be taken on by others, made "their own," and reintroduced with the expanded power of the new presentation.
But with written word, the model has been that once it is written, it is fixed, and its success is measured by how many units of that string of words are consumed and/or accessed by a single, perpetual "audience." This fixedness is a myth, because it's still a question of how the message is *received*, interpreted, and *re-released* to be shared with another member of the audience. The idea that an author can or should tell someone else that a particular interpretation is *wrong* (and therefore invalid) is, to put it mildly, crazy. The idea that *consumers* can tell *each other* that one interpretation - one iteration - of a given work is "right" and the other one is "wrong" is similarly stupid. It disenfranchises not only that person, but anyone else, from receiving the work, internalizing it, and in turn fractioning and transforming the work in his own right.
Each permutation and iteration of the work, therefore, only serves to strengthen its overall popularity, ensure its continued life, and inculcate the audience with the ability to build upon what has gone before.
See? Really thinky.
I also have new ideas about methodologies to provide assistance to visually impaired readers (i.e., online users) and the transformative nature of vocal interpretations of fiction (i.e., fiction readings, which are themselves performances); the relationship of kennings to poetic mnemonic devices (and linguistic pattern-building); bards in a simultaneous role as performers, memoral agents, and editors; the history of reading aloud (and its relationship to dramatic performance vs. person-to-person file-sharing vs. transformative interpretation); sound and signal and the patterns of reception; collective memory and objectivity vs. immersive experience; and the effect of encapsulating specific stories within and without a fixed point in time as a device to create "safe" viewing distance; the status of queer (and queered) representations and interpretations and their future; and the selective process by which we choose what matters (and what lies outside the realm of the mainstream).
But those are posts for another time.
- Futures of Entertainment was two weeks after I left Mount Auburn
- MiT5 was two weeks after I was back out of work from BIDMC (after working briefly in the Surgery department), and two months before I started working there again
- MiT6 was this weekend (and we know that things at work are...less than stable)
The subject matter was *less* relevant than two years ago (which was all about fandom), but it still had a lot of context that is of interest to my various lives. I kept thinking all weekend that I basically had one foot in each of about four different aspects that related to the conference topics: author/editor, (modern) performer, fan consumer/creator, oral (medieval) traditionalist, musician, etc. It was very difficult (especially this morning!) to choose one panel to attend, knowing I'd be missing loads of other great content.
One of the other things that I realize when I go to these things, and it's both a good and a bad thing, is that in general, in my little corner of fandom, I'm used to being able to speak with some relative authority (regardless of whether or not I'm one of the more educated people in the room--sometimes yes, sometimes no). But in a setting such as this, I'm confronted with just how armchair my approach is...and how much organized, formal educational thought is out there that I have not absorbed. It's out there waiting, but I don't know if I'll ever have the time or the "leisure" (meaning available resources) to actively pursue all the pieces that feed into the collected research to date.
Another thing that I remember (and this is something I'm confronted by a LOT, but in an entirely different way) is that despite the lack of time or resources, I *need* to expose myself to this level of Intelligentsia on a periodic (frequent?) basis, because otherwise I start to lose my own cognitive coherence. By that I mean that because I spend 90% of my time among people who are, let's face it, not that smart - or at least certainly not *academically* intelligent - and because that reinforces my "head of the class" syndrome - I start to dumb down because there's nothing to challenge me in my daily (work) life. As human beings, we all need to be in a constant state of learning, so that we keep expanding our lexicon and sharpening our skills and adding to our understanding of the world, the future, our potential, fill-in-the-blank. I found that I started off the weekend feeling dumb and like a poseur, and doubted very much that anything I could say would contribute. By last night, I had rediscovered my eloquence, my lucidity and my facility with the topics - and damn if I didn't come up with some good thinky thoughts.
I went and filled up my brain again today, but man, I miss having that kind of stimulating, deep conversation on a regular basis. Not necessarily philosophical debate, or Platonic discourse, but certainly the idea that we can discuss ideas and achieve a little clarity around them.
My biggest, best thinky-thought this weekend, I think, was about the role of transformative works in the future of publishing, and the whole debate over whether authors can reasonably expect to control the reception and/or interpretation of their work once they have shared it with a public. Of course, my answer is that no, an author cannot and should not have that expectation, because frankly, the act of transmission is meaningless without the act of reception and interpretation of that message. And receiving and interpreting the message are too subjective and too fractionated (fractal?) to be expected to be consistent from one "consumer" to the next.
Moreover, the real point of this all is that stories, like songs, were never meant to be told only once. (This is not a new idea!) So as a songwriter, I *know* when I sing a new song that it will *only* succeed through the act of iteration. It will *only* survive if it is performed again, and again, and again, and moreover, it will *only* truly live if it is spread in a viral fashion, each person also experiencing and creating new performances through the act of reiteration. So with music, we *assume* that the "good" product is one that is repeated across many audiences and within many contexts. It must be taken on by others, made "their own," and reintroduced with the expanded power of the new presentation.
But with written word, the model has been that once it is written, it is fixed, and its success is measured by how many units of that string of words are consumed and/or accessed by a single, perpetual "audience." This fixedness is a myth, because it's still a question of how the message is *received*, interpreted, and *re-released* to be shared with another member of the audience. The idea that an author can or should tell someone else that a particular interpretation is *wrong* (and therefore invalid) is, to put it mildly, crazy. The idea that *consumers* can tell *each other* that one interpretation - one iteration - of a given work is "right" and the other one is "wrong" is similarly stupid. It disenfranchises not only that person, but anyone else, from receiving the work, internalizing it, and in turn fractioning and transforming the work in his own right.
Each permutation and iteration of the work, therefore, only serves to strengthen its overall popularity, ensure its continued life, and inculcate the audience with the ability to build upon what has gone before.
See? Really thinky.
I also have new ideas about methodologies to provide assistance to visually impaired readers (i.e., online users) and the transformative nature of vocal interpretations of fiction (i.e., fiction readings, which are themselves performances); the relationship of kennings to poetic mnemonic devices (and linguistic pattern-building); bards in a simultaneous role as performers, memoral agents, and editors; the history of reading aloud (and its relationship to dramatic performance vs. person-to-person file-sharing vs. transformative interpretation); sound and signal and the patterns of reception; collective memory and objectivity vs. immersive experience; and the effect of encapsulating specific stories within and without a fixed point in time as a device to create "safe" viewing distance; the status of queer (and queered) representations and interpretations and their future; and the selective process by which we choose what matters (and what lies outside the realm of the mainstream).
But those are posts for another time.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-28 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-28 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-28 08:03 am (UTC)Seriously: why not? Why not you?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-28 07:54 pm (UTC)Henry's leaving MIT, too, so the program's future is in doubt and they're not accepting any students. Anything I did would have to be either correspondence at another school (not likely) or necessitate a move.