a Communication course on Media and Culture
UMass Amherst
The unreality of DayGlow’s Escape Reality tour provides reprieve to the 24/7 demands of the socially-wired digital world. Some of my students think I would enjoy the concert. It seems possible, although the behavior required to secure tickets does not appeal. Descriptions of the emotions raised by the keyboard-and-mouse competition carefully calibrated to the timing of a ticket release has all the characteristics of addiction. A fan, however, might just call it passion. To be sprayed with paint while mass dancing to great music at eardrum-blasting decibels: you’ve always dreamed of it, right? Most of the young adults taking this class could hardly imagine anything better. The encompassing sensory experience fundamentally connects them with their bodies and each other in a shared physical space and time: it is as far from online social interaction as you can get. I suppose DayGlowers may text or Tweet or update their Facebook statuses just to tweak their friends – haha, I’m here and you’re not! – but the point of DayGlow is to experience an entirely different way of being together.
It’s about Identity, Stupid!
In the final small group discussion with the teacher, one of the students in class made an identity claim about technology that encompassed everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and (to a lesser but still relevant extent) socioeconomic class. “Technology,” Jamar said, “is what makes us normal.” Orienting to society via the specific types of technology known as social media defines the digital native and simultaneously signals a potent site of contest over the future. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of person are you now? Although these questions were not asked overtly, they underscored the Red Pill/Blue Pill debate over the prominence of technology in student’s lives. While embracing what they like and accommodating to what they must, many members of this first generation of digital natives are also deeply concerned about what it all means.
Doing Collective Intelligence
In an example of what I call social metonymy, the students’ final team video projects expose individual ambiguity about their personal responsibility for choosing the reality that will define their lives. At the same time the two videos serve to represent this choice as an either/or dichotomy between the Blue Pill and the Red Pill. In “DayGlow Makes Us Normal,” students blend a sharp knowledge of context with an unapologetic stance in support of ‘the blue pill’ – meaning an uncritical embrace of technology, particularly in terms of how it can be used to serve the needs of the self. These young people show us that they are doing their best to deal with everything; however surviving means sometimes choosing not to know in order to have the ‘escape’ that recharges them to be able to carry on. Dfoley explains:
…when Steph approached us and asked us to research deeper into DAYGLOW, ask questions and look into the three social relations, we as a class became defensive and responded first with a stern “NO!” and then eased out of the conversation with “What if we learn bad things?” We didn’t want to know how they targeted their audiences, what producers or distributors they went through, if they were in fact illegally using music or did they work with certain music industries and is the paint made in an un-ethical environment? At this moment, we didn’t want to know any of these answers; we didn’t want to know if the three social relations that applied to DAYGLOW were good or bad. Because the truth is, DAYGLOW was and is are [sic] escape, we leave all of our troubles at the door and it facilitates an environment that is blind to color or cultural difference but sees the common ground of the human race as a whole and understands that when we enter we all are in an agreement that we simply want to be. And enjoy the overpowering feeling of the love for life you feel as you live the music.
The other video is less ambiguous, showing more of the Red Pill approach through some critical juxtapositions that seem to ask “Do We Have to Be This Way?” If you enlarge the Facebook commentary photograph, you’ll see a student’s explanation about the DayGlow footage being replaced by activism by teenagers in Arizona regarding changes to the curriculum there. Taken as a package, the two videos provide a fairly transparent perspective on a particular demographic subset of the Millennial Generation. What isn’t necessarily evident in the videos is learning some students described about ethnic components of their identities:
Steph talked about the fact that many of us saw things in a “white way”. We never thought about seeing things this way but it was seemingly apparent that we did. Seeing in a “white way” is similar to the idea of heteronormativity. Heterosexuality is unconsciously perceived as the correct way to live and therefore heterosexual individuals are unfairly privileged in the same way that white individuals are solely because of their race. As Sgershlak said, many white college students do not think about the opportunities they are presented with because they have always been there. Many of them have not faced much adversity if any at all and this has influenced their perspective on the world. (Kim Delehanty)
Until I was 10 years old, I lived in Boston, where the lifestyle was much laid back. Many of my friends parents would often stay home, either unemployed, laid-off, or fired. There was never a real need to have a intellectual conversation with anyone, mainly because people around you did not complete much schooling. However upon moving to the suburbs, my identity changed in order to fit in with my surrounding environment. Conversations now stemmed to “what do you want to be when you grow up”, “what colleges do you plan on applying to”. Coming from a schooling system which did not produce many graduates, to one which produced more college graduates than Boston did high-school graduates, I would say my identity changed dramatically and maybe for the best. Being the most Americanized Hispanic, also meant when it came time to identify with relatives and family, my identity would also have to change, to incorporate an Hispanic culture which has not been present for several years. (Steve Baez)
Cultivating a Growth Mindset
I assigned the students in this 100-level course a nearly impossible task – to complete team video projects representing their understanding of how media and culture combine in their personally lived experience of college today. I wanted them to demonstrate to me that they understood the concept of articulation as it is used in communication theory.
With inadequate tools, little-to-no experience, and minimal guidance, they exceeded my expectations. We all wish the production values were higher but the meaning of these videos is the thoughtfulness with which these young people have illustrated the incredible tensions of being among the first human beings to live immersed in the digital age.
The intellectual prompt provided as an anchor for the course was obscure at first: “Digital Realities and Analog Living.” We also viewed the 1999 movie, The Matrix, for use as a guiding metaphor as well as an example of transmedia storytelling. The students composed individual videos for their midterm projects, absorbed my critique, and went to work to show me how it really is.