NY ♥ NY

Here it is. My rationale. The culmination of my undergraduate career at NYU. Well, it’s actually more like the 5-page written explanation of my upcoming colloquium – an oral exam with a panel of professors on a list of 20-25 books and how they all connect to the topic of my choice. Right, so think of this as the proverbial roadmap to that anxiety-ridden, two-hour-long, pass/fail culmination of my individualized major at Gallatin. And now for some disclaimers…

• I formatted my rationale as a guide to my intellectual trajectory at NYU, mapping the issues that most interested me according to the key texts that help me understand these topics. Gallatin has already approved this draft twice so I don’t need to edit it so much as dig into (and make sense of) the texts and ideas.
• Gallatin requires that every booklist contain seven (yes, SEVEN) ancient/medieval/renaissance classics, from before the year 1650. No joke. (Read: if you can think of any compelling connections between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Internet, feel free to leave a comment…)
• My actual colloquium will take place on the afternoon of December 11. I will preparing from now until then, so I appreciate any feedback you might have!

Title: New Media & Re-Imagining Communities

With three months remaining until I complete my undergraduate career at Gallatin, my concentration can be articulated as follows: the study of digital technology and the ways in which people utilize new media and the Internet to express their worldview; broadly, how media is produced by and simultaneously produces culture (as manifested in hierarchy, identity, community, knowledge, and so on); the Internet as an unprecedented medium that has transformed individuals from consumers to collaborators/producers, connecting people in real-time across the world; the decentralization of hierarchy in the spread of information and culture, and the power of “new” media in organizing collective action toward social/political progress; all of the above interpreted with an anthropological mindset.

The most basic foundation for my intellectual career developed relatively early in college and can be categorized into two themes: (1) reality/symbols/systems of meaning, and (2) race/Us vs. Them/the Other. In other words, how do we come to understand our reality and ourselves? Others who differ from us? How do symbols, prejudices, and stereotypes mold our beliefs and identities, and how can these symbols be exploited or manipulated? Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion form the epistemological basis of the first theme. Plato’s “Allegory” speaks to the façade of reality by positing a situation in which prisoners shackled in a cave can neither move nor turn their heads.  Though a fire burns from an elevated position behind the prisoners, they can only see what is in front of them – the shadows thrown onto the wall of the objects being carried by people behind the fire. Insomuch as the prisoners know of no other state of being, their perception of reality relies solely on these “shadows” as reality. Lippmann similarly labels this subjective perception the “pseudo-environment” that consists of mental representations (“pictures in our heads” of “the world outside”) upon which people act. Both Plato and Lippmann’s analyses apply to contemporary politics, mass media, and the daily struggle to steer the course of public discourse – to shape Public Opinion through vague symbols in “the manufacture of consent.” Whereas these two texts question the meaning of “the real” and the construction of popular beliefs, the next two focus on the dichotomous and Manichean worldview that sets the global East against the global West.

The Greek play, Persians, demonstrates this second theme in both its content and its broader historical context. Written by Aeschylus soon after the end of the Peloponnesian War, the play portrays its main characters – the defeated Persians – as suffering and deserving of pity. In that Greek citizens both performed and watched the play, Persians symbolizes a Grecian representation of the Oriental Other, an ancient statement of Western superiority. Edward Said’s Orientalism attributes the Occident-Orient relationship to a history of unbalanced power and domination, in which the Occident maintains its position of entitlement and superiority by colonizing the inferior Orient both physically and ideologically. Who has the ability to represent whom, and to what end? What is the status of the East-West binary today? How is fear and mistrust of the Oriental Other represented in Lippmann-esque linguistic symbols today (e.g. “War on Terrorism,” “radical Islamists,” and so on)? These four ancient and modern texts fundamentally address the psychological and cognitive underpinnings to identity, nationalism, and the need to be defined in opposition to an Other.

After revisiting my Intellectual Autobiography and Plan for Concentration (IAPC), I recognize that these two issues that energized me two years ago still comprise my core interests. They’ve simply expanded (or, rather, my interests have become more focused on the role of media in constructing reality, hierarchy, and race). When I classified my concentration in the spring of 2008 as “Power, Ideology, Representation,” I intended these three terms to implicate media as a function of identity, dominance and resistance, knowledge and interpretation. Drawing upon the inspiration I felt in my cultural anthropology courses – the first of two “major epiphan[ies] in my college career” – I began structuring my intellectual framework using concepts from Frankfurt School critical theorists.

Seminal works such as Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” – evaluate the impact of technology and mass production on people’s lives; however, these two works directly contrast in their view of mass culture and mass society. Whereas Benjamin asserts that the ability to watch film (with close-ups, slow motion, etc.) will open up people’s perception of reality for conscious exploration, Horkheimer and Adorno consider film an instrument of the dominant used to force the masses to remain passive viewers of “reality” and automatic consumers of prescribed culture. In dialogue with Benjamin as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” analyze how shifts to new technology alter people’s sense of identity, community, and nationalism. Anderson identifies the proliferation of  “print-capitalism” as the emergence of “imagined communities” and nationhood; by transitioning from sacred religious texts interpreted by the few to mass reproduced newspapers/books in a common vernacular, formerly disparate groups developed a shared national identity. McLuhan, on the other hand, famously locates the “message” of technology in its form as opposed to its content. As such, the significance of “electric” media like radio and television is evident in the way they transform people’s actions and relationships and collapse spatiotemporal boundaries. All of these texts relate to my earlier themes of reality and systems of meanings by suggesting the following questions: How does media technology determine our experience of reality and of culture? In what ways does technology reflect or restructure power relations and hierarchy?

The summer after my sophomore year marked another “epiphany” for my intellectual and professional career. I started my first internship at Undercurrent, a digital marketing/social media startup. Undercurrent ushered me into the young, tech-driven world of Twitter, other budding social networks, bookmarking sites, blogging, and RSS feeds – essentially catalyzing my interest in the Internet as a field of study. The experience of working in this sphere of emerging media and engaging directly with individuals in vibrant online communities further reinforced the meaning of Benjamin, Anderson, and McLuhan’s work, provoking more questions. In what ways does “new” media differ from other media through which we consume culture? Is virtual reality less tangible than “the real world” or is that just a romanticized notion? With the prominence of mobiles devices and various digital screens in our everyday lives, how has the Internet changed the “speed and pace” of people’s lives and how have individuals begun re-“imagining” their social ties?

With my concentration further expanding in the direction of the Internet, the prominent themes in my area of concentration include networks, collective action, decentralization, globalization, as well as issues of access (always bearing in mind identity, community, information, and so on). Marx and Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto” and Eben Moglen’s “The dotCommunist Manifesto” logically follows the critical theory texts in that both pieces convey the relation between revolution, socio-economic class structure, and technology. In Marx and Engels’s time, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution drove workers into industrial factories; though the bourgeoisie owned the means of production, Marx and Engels concluded that the proletariat would come together while working side-by-side in these factories, form unions, and overthrow the bourgeoisie. Moglen’s piece presents a modern spin on this class struggle – a revolution in which digital technology enables the new proletariat of knowledge workers/digital creators (rather than labor workers) to overthrow the bourgeois system of private ownership of ideas and culture. The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman is useful as it relates the “shrinking” of the world and the “flattening of the playing field” over time as digital technology enables the East to compete with the West (a reversal of Said’s Orientalism?), communities to challenge multinational corporations, and individuals to collaborate with the rest of the world. Moreover, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody provides a more timely account of the decentralizing effect of the Internet. What with individual consumers becoming producers and broadcasters of information/culture/ideas, Shirky explains the hitherto unprecedented ability of individuals to collaborate on projects and organize for collective social action. Questions continue to arise such as: Can we ever be less connected ever again? Does the Internet actually flatten or decentralize hierarchy? Does it reinforce hierarchy? Who has access to media technology? How has access changed with the rise of cyberspace?

I decided to explore the professional realm of digital media and politics by interning at the Center for American Progress this past summer. In conjunction with my current Air America Media internship, I have become increasingly embedded in the progressive movement and its use of progressive communications platforms for online advocacy. Some remaining questions I’m tackling include: What are the legal and technical constraints on the Internet? What are the politics of new media technology and how does this affect access and governance? How can the government use the Internet to improve transparency and accountability (dubbed Gov 2.0)? In my colloquium, I hope to delve into the intellectual history of my topic by first discussing basic theories of communication and sociocultural anthropology, applying these concepts to the present-day use of digital media, and then exploring future possibilities for the study of media and culture.

BOOKLIST

ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, & RENAISSANCE CLASSICS

1. Plato, “Allegory of the Cave”; Phaedrus
2. Aeschylus, Persians
3. William Shakespeare, Othello
4. Homer, Odyssey
5. The Holy Bible
6. Ovid, Metamorphoses
7. Aristophanes, Lysistrata

MODERN HUMANITIES

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

& Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

1. Edward Said, Orientalism

10.  Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

11.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

12.  Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

MODERN SOCIAL & NATURAL SCIENCES

13.  Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message”; Playboy Interview

14.  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

15.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

16.  Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, “Communist Manifesto” + Eben Moglen, “dotCommunist Manifesto”

17.  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

18.  George Lakoff, Don’t Think of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

AREA OF CONCENTRATION

19.  Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

20.  Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

21.  Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

22.  Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (for criticism)

23.  Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government