Making Media Theory

Thinking Critically with Technology

Marcel O'Gorman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501358609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Making Media Theory is about the study, practice, and hands-on design of media theory. It looks at experimental research methods and engages in media analysis, inviting readers to respond to and shape the materiality of media while carefully considering the implications of living in a technoculture. The author walks readers through the creation of digital objects to think with, where critical design practices serve as tools for exploring social and philosophical issues related to technological being and becoming.

1

Making, Media, and Theory

Erudition is important. A sense of history. A willingness to get into the guts of machines. It’s not something that I do well, although I think it’s really important.

—John Durham Peters, Interview with Chris Russill

Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of ­knowing.

—Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

A small rabbit lives in my home office, hopping about freely, but mostly sitting still, staring into the distance. When he’s not in his litter box, which also holds his food bowl, he moves between three distinct home bases to pass the time. The first is a hand-stitched rag rug under a window, where he sits in the sun. The second is a neglected laptop bag lying on the floor in an alcove of loaded bookshelves, a site he visits sporadically. The third and newest landing spot is a straw basket, designed for rabbits and woven to act like a burrow of sorts, with a front-facing aperture. When this cozy place of refuge was first introduced beside the litter box, it was quickly transformed into a site of labor. Within a week, the rabbit had chewed a hole in its side, thereby creating a second conduit for the burrow and providing direct access to the litter box. The straw that was chewed to make the hole now serves as bedding on the floor of the two-holed basket.

There are many risks inherent in opening a chapter with the description of a domestic animal, let alone a cute little house pet. First of all, I am not trying to compete with Jacques Derrida, who used his nakedness before a cat to launch into a discussion of human animality. Nor am I exhibiting repressed jealousy over the “darter-tongue kisses” Donna Haraway received from her dog, Miss Cayenne-Pepper (2007: 15). Certainly, the rabbit in my office has provided me with several hours of quiet rumination on radical otherness and companion species. I often pause during sessions at my desk to question him fruitlessly about his umwelt.¹ What is it like to be a rabbit? What do you see with your nearly 360-degree infrahuman vision? And yet, I turn to the rabbit in my office not as an animal studies scholar, but as a media theorist. The operative question then is something like this: What does a rabbit hole chewed into the side of a straw basket have to do with media theory? Getting to the punch line of this joke requires a rather capacious understanding of the terms making, media, and theory.

Making

When President Barack Obama announced a National Week of Making and hosted the White House Maker Faire in June 2014, it was apparent that the word maker had gone beyond mainstream, finding itself lodged in the rhetoric of an administration trying desperately to connect with both a beleaguered manufacturing base and a STEM-obsessed technocracy. “America has always been a nation of tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” says the White House, a legacy strengthened by today’s supposedly easy access to “3D printers, laser cutters, easy-to-use design software, and desktop machine tools” (2014). This equipment list has become synonymous with what is meant by a makerspace, a term made famous in part by TechShop, which attempted to turn the concept of a grassroots, tool-and-information-sharing cooperative into a franchise. The project failed, and in 2017, all TechShop locations were shut down, including the one in Detroit, Michigan, which was sponsored in part by the Ford Motor Company. This failed attempt to monetize the makerspace model coincided for me locally, when a start-up named MyShop, housed in the same building as my lab, closed its doors in 2018. Meanwhile, back on campus, a heavily marketed makerspace for students sits empty most of the day, a lonely row of 3D printers quietly gathering cobwebs. Is the STEM-inspired build it and they will make gambit destined to fail? One lesson to be gained from this failure is that it is not the tools or the space that matter but the product of those tools and the specific aims of the community of makers working in that space. Above all, makers need a meaningful project, which is one of the reasons I decided to write this book.

Already, the term maker is sticking in my throat like a cube of sweaty cheddar cheese. Do we need this word? What is the point of using it at all? I’ll get to those questions later. For the moment, I’m interested in asking why researchers in the arts and humanities might adopt the discourse on making. It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss humanities makers as wannabe’s who are trying to gain institutional legitimacy by adopting the tools and nomenclature of better-resourced STEM colleagues on the other side of campus. My own dean openly admitted to despising the STEAM acronym for this very reason—it just seems like a desperate plea for recognition. Rather than latching onto the STEAM train, humanities scholars might adopt the light-hearted motto “STEM, SHTEM” not to be dismissive of other disciplines but to identify a tactics of humanities making that wants to impact STEM disciplines while remaining critically ambivalent about STEM methods, products, and politics. By adopting the maker moniker, researchers in the humanities might occupy a parasitic position in the production of technoculture, pulling, bending, and folding² humanities concepts into the STEM arena.

Before I flesh out these parasitic tactics in full, it is useful to take a quick survey of how the humanities have adopted making in recent years. Rath er than striving impossibly for a complete history, one way of undertaking such an appraisal is to look at wide-ranging, multiauthored books on this subject, especially two recent offerings: Applied Media Studies, edited by Kirsten Ostherr, and Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers. The problem with anthologies is that they cannot be comprehensive—not everyone is invited to contribute to such books. In fact, Ostherr’s book was inspired by a single conference panel. What these books do offer, however, are case studies in humanities-based making, as well as a general overview of how people define this type of activity and position it intellectually, politically, and affectively. Consider this critical book review then as a freeze-frame image, a field report on how maker culture has made its way into the humanities.

In Applied Media Studies, Ostherr argues that “experimental praxis” in the humanities can offer “new models for understanding humanistic knowledge formation as a productive field that can be ‘applied’ to solving ‘real-world’ problems” (2017: 3). While Ostherr is not uncritical of arguments rooted in a desire to make the humanities more practical, the focus on productivity and the “real world” here suggests that “applied” means pragmatic and useful, which is not how humanities research is typically described. It should come as no surprise that Ostherr—an applied health studies scholar who works in a medical context—champions the STEAM concept, and she easily adopts the bureaucratic language often used to justify it: “The STEM to STEAM movement argues that integrating the arts and design is a powerful technique for attracting and retaining a stronger, more diverse technology workforce, thereby producing more innovative results at a national level” (2017: 9). Fortunately, this innovation-tilted rhetoric, which pleases university administrators and city planners with a taste for Richard Florida, does not characterize the projects that Ostherr carefully chose to showcase in Applied Media Studies. The collection includes work like The AIDS Quilt Project, directed by Anne Balsamo, and crowd-sourced syllabi like #FergusonSyllabus, described by Elizabeth Losh as a tactical, “rapid response” form of pedagogy (2017: 117).

It is important to note that neither Losh nor Balsamo describe themselves as makers, which brings to mind some of the gendered and political inflections of this term, as discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. The one author in Ostherr’s book who does make regular use of the word is Jason Farman, whose specific focus is on “critical making.” According to Farman, “making is a mode of thinking” (2017: 86), and making technological objects can provide a means for critically assessing the relationship of humanity to technology. “Applied media studies,” he argues, “is one way to think about the relationship between the body and the objects that we encounter in everyday life” (2017: 86). While Ostherr suggests in the introduction that applied media studies concentrates on “electronic, screen-based media” (2017: 4), Farman demonstrates an interest in making media off-screen. What’s more, while the other authors in Applied Media Studies see technology as a tool for delivering humanities-based content, only sometimes for the sake of engaging in cultural critique, Farman’s focus is on a critique of the technologies themselves. Put otherwise, his focus is on the medium rather than on the message.

Farman’s understanding of applied media studies raises two very important distinctions (a) between screen-based media and non-screen-based media and (b) between media studies and media theory. These are the very distinctions that have guided the design of this book, which is about making off-screen objects that serve as vehicles for media theory. These distinctions are also why David Gauntlett’s Making Media Studies does not make Making Media Theory redundant. For Gauntlett, “the power of making” comes primarily from screen-based media created for dissemination on the internet (2015: 59). This helps explain the title of his most popular book Making Is Connecting, which is primarily about using social media to share DIY projects. To be fair, Gauntlett does address off-screen making at length, but only in the context of LEGO, a corporation with which he maintains an ongoing partnership, and which he claims is capable of “transformative cultural power” (2015: 110). Perhaps Gauntlett’s business relationship with LEGO renders suspect his claims about the toy building blocks’ ability to change the world (2015: 110). But this seems to be beside the point, and Gauntlett would likely view such considerations as the “despairing pessimism” (2015: 5) of a critical media theorist. What matters is that LEGO is designed for building, not making. The products created with LEGO are limited by the patented structure of each individual piece. To be sure, LEGO does lend itself to infinite design combinations, but at the end of the day, every design involves building a LEGO product. In an interview with Garnet Hertz, Natalie Jeremijenko goes so far as to say LEGO Mindstorms, for example, does not teach engineering; rather, “it teaches you how to consume LEGO.”

“Building” is the word used by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stephen Ramsey in their make-oriented essay “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities” (2012). Summarizing a discussion that took place in the journal Humanist, Rockwell and Ramsay present the following mantra, inspired by Lev Manovich and Willard McCarty: “it is the prototype that makes the thesis” (2012). This curious inversion, which casts the made product as the agent of theory, is precisely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Making, Media, and Theory
• 2 Workshop: Conductive Play Dough
• 3 In Defense of Uselessness
• 4 Workshop: Useless Box
• 5 Writing with a Soldering Iron: On the Art of Making Attention
• 6 Workshop: Smartphone Basket
• 7 Digital Rituals, Wearables, and Nonusers
• 8 Workshop: Resistor Case
• Epilogue: Dirty Media
• Index
• Copyright