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Remix This: Magazines as Media for Stable Narratives of Dissent

5 Sep

The parody New Yorker cover produced by the Church of Scientology.

I recently noticed an interesting magazine-related story on the New York Times site regarding the Church of Scientology’s publication and distribution of a new parody magazine. It attempts to counter The New Yorker‘s reporting on the church:

…the church has produced a 51-page glossy magazine and an accompanying three-part DVD that try to discredit The New Yorker, its writers, editors, fact-checkers and sources.

“The New Yorker: What a Load of Balderdash,” reads the cover headline on the publication, Freedom, which is registered as a copyright of the church and bills itself as offering “investigative reporting in the public interest.”…

The church singles out editors, fact-checkers and other New Yorker staff members who worked on the article by name and prints their photos. The church also uses what appears to be a surveillance photograph taken of Mr. Wright while he was conducting an interview at an outdoor cafe in Texas.

This strategy is creepy, ridiculous, and probably ineffective. However, the desire to create a magazine to spread an unusual (to say the least) perspective is intriguing. Why go to the expense and bother? Why not just use the Internet to mount a campaign against The New Yorker?

Maybe it’s that Internet campaigns are just too commonplace these days. Maybe the Scientologists thought the act of handing out paper magazines in front of the Condé Nast offices might garner more media attention. (I find only about 20 articles about the event in Google News Search, however.) I’m beginning to wonder if there is something else about magazines that makes them appeal to people seeking to propagate an unusual and easily modified (or even widely ridiculed) message.

My interest in this issue stems from a study I recently conducted on the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which unlike Freedom is entirely a digital publication, but is decently designed, and which co-opts many popular culture themes and styles in its content. Though its topic is vile, the medium used to present it is interesting. Why create a digital magazine, instead of continuing to use YouTube videos, message boards and the like to distribute digital terrorist recruitment materials?

I think that in this age of user-generated content, print and digital magazines may find a new role due to their ability to present what I’m calling “stable” narratives of dissent. Their paper form (or, when digital, unitary design) makes their content more difficult to modify and remix.

The benefits of the magazine form are probably valid for all activist or fringe groups. Some groups’ particular goals may intensify the risks of losing message control that accompany digital materials, making the magazine form even more useful. These advantages are added, of course, to magazines’ physical nature, which permits pass-along readership and confers a sense of legitimacy on their topics.

Scientology and Al Qaeda have different goals, to be sure, but the ability to present their own version of reality in the magazine format offers different opportunities from those provided by other lower-cost media. This unique, emerging sociocultural role and potential of magazines in our digital age is something I plan to explore further in my writing and research.

More ideas for me? Comment, please!

Mapping the Magazine

4 Jul
Porthcawl Seafront

Another reason I'm excited to go to Wales: family heritage. This is the seafront in Porthcawl, in south Wales, where my mother spent every summer as a child.

It may be a holiday in the U.S. today, but I’m busy doing the final edits on the paper I will be presenting at the “Mapping the Magazine 3″ conference this week at Cardiff University in Wales. This conference is going to be incredibly interesting. Check out the paper abstracts, and watch for tweets with the hashtag #mtm3 once we get started on Thursday.

The research I will present is, at last, a fulfillment of my January blog post about my interest in digital activist magazines and how activist publishers are using digital platforms for their work. (I also looked at this topic in a MediaShift story.) It took me a while to complete the project — and the paper itself is still very much a work in progress — but I’m excited about it, and so grateful to the 15 individuals at various publications who agreed to be interviewed. I’ll provide an update on the project as it develops.

After I return from Wales, I’ll be packing, moving to Oregon and getting ready for a new academic year (oh, and also attending the AEJMC conference in St. Louis in August!) so I expect things may be a bit quiet here on the blog until August. Have a great summer!

Connections to the Scholarly Past

27 Jun

I realized today that due to my job transition this summer, I will be without access to scholarly publishing databases until I get a login and password to the library resources at my new college. I also realized that I haven’t used a print version of a scholarly article in over three years.

PCL at UT-Austin

The Perry-Castaneda Library (aka PCL) at UT-Austin. I spent many, many, many hours here. Photo by Timothy Vollmer on Flickr.

As a grad student at UT-Austin, I was able to find just about any print journal I needed, including some very old issues from the 1940s and 1950s. I also used the university’s special collections to find old magazines for my research, which was fun. I made a special trip to Texas A&M once to look at some old editions of conservative political magazines for a research project [PDF link to article].

Since joining the faculty at Fresno State in 2008, I’ve used the library stacks a bit, but never to find a print journal article. The Fresno State library’s holdings are of course smaller than UT-Austin’s, understandably. But more significantly, I’m now relying almost entirely on databases like Communication and Mass Media Complete to find references I need, along with my beloved Google Scholar and other digital sources. I’ve used Interlibrary Loan a few times to request articles not available in full text or posted elsewhere online.

I love using the library. I loved going to find Warren Breed’s 1955 article on social control in the newsroom in a dusty old edition of the journal Social Forces. (Now it’s online, naturally.) It was compelling to me to see a half century worth of knowledge on the shelf, there for the exploration.

Of course, I’m also just as big a fan of the iPad and e-reading as anyone else out there. I taught a whole graduate course last fall without printing out a single journal article, keeping everything paperless by reading it all on the iPad.

I am curious, though, about what it means to lose a physical connection to the works of scholars of the past. A university library’s paper editions may be more accessible to community members seeking scholarly articles, so I suppose that’s an argument for retaining them, especially considering academic publishers’ grip on online distribution. (An example of the conflicts here.)

Some, uh, exciting reading. Photo by marlened on Flickr.

Do we researchers gain anything by being able to physically touch and browse scholarly journals? Are databases sufficient for journal articles, but academic books still worthy of print publication? (If so, what’s the difference?)

Maybe there’s simply a sense of connection to a scholarly legacy that is gained by keeping the paper around. When I strolled the stacks at UT-Austin during my Ph.D. program, I felt a growing sense of connection to the centuries of authors whose work surrounded me, as if it were part of my scholarly apprenticeship to simply spend time in the presence of their thoughts.

And perhaps that’s simply a romantic ideal now outdated — just as it now seems silly to think that the tangible feel of a book is irreplaceable, when I happily snuggle in bed with a Kindle book.

Research Post: Make Magazine and the Maker Faire

12 Jun

My article “‘We Need a Showing of All Hands’: Technological Utopianism in Make Magazine” will be published next month in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and is already available to those with access through the Sage website. If you’d like a copy, let me know. Here’s a short summary, but the article provides much more evidence and analysis.

It’s great when your research interests line up with your personal interests. I was always curious about the Maker Faire, an event sponsored by Make magazine in San Mateo, California, and other cities around the U.S. The Faire seemed like a great place for someone with both crafty and geeky tendencies to hang out. I had been reading Make occasionally and enjoyed the magazine, too.

As a journalism researcher, I was also aware of other trends in the magazine industry — specifically, the increasing popularity of real-world magazine events that reinforce the magazines’ brands and unite the “imagined community” of magazine readers by bringing them together at events. I was curious about this trend as both a business strategy and a growing cultural phenomenon. So, this geeky crafter headed to the May 2009 San Mateo Maker Faire ready not just to learn some new skills, but also with a participant observation research mindset fully in place.

What I found at the Maker Faire was so compelling that I ended up conducting an entire research project around the event and the magazine’s content. I was fascinated to see the nationalistic and political references throughout the Faire, such as flags on posters and quotes from then-newly inaugurated President Barack Obama on posters and stickers. The Faire and magazine’s promise of self-actualization and community building through “making” was also evident in various ways. It was a heady mix that, well, made you want to make.

Making in itself isn’t problematic. It’s fun. However, a closer look at the Faire and the magazine’s content showed that there was another, subtler promise being made about making. There was a deeply rooted sense of “technological utopianism,” or the concept that humans can, through the savvy development and application of technology, create an ideal world.

Moreover, I felt something different developing when I looked closely at the Faire and the magazine: the representation of a possibility for “technological rehabilitation” — the idea that, having fully exploited our ecological world to the point of serious damage, we might find ways to rehabilitate it through the use of technology. Make and the Maker Faire suggest we can develop those rehabilitating technologies ourselves, on our own terms, for our own enjoyment and satisfaction, but also for the salvation of our entire (American) nation.

While this is a tempting narrative for those seeking hope in challenging times, I was forced ultimately to question whether a narrative of “technological rehabilitation” was a positive one for readers of Make and participants in the Maker Faire, and for our world at large. While individual makers’ innovations toward the goal of ecological rehabilitation would be positive steps, they are not necessarily as effective as Make would seem to suggest, given that the efforts of individuals to, say, build rain barrels or reuse plastic bags in interesting ways unfortunately pale in comparison to the constant injury done to the environment by larger political and economic forces.

This is not to say that “makers” shouldn’t continue to try to find new and more environmentally sound ways to do things, but that the story that Make tells about making is not necessarily the best story for us to hear about the role of technology in the world. Instead, we have to look at other ways in which technology has damaged the world and ways we may need to innovate non-technologically, to live with less or different technology, as our ecological systems have likely been damaged past the point of no return. Stories and events that help readers think in that direction might ultimately be more productive for ensuring the survival of humanity long-term.

Like Robert Jensen, one of my mentors whose writing helped inspire this study, I am curious about ways journalism can provide alternative narratives for our future — not just revise old ones for an increasingly desperate time. Stories and events that can unite people around those narratives could be powerful.

Free to Be You and Me (Correctly) with Social Media

25 Feb
Project 365 33/365: Things I can't survive without: Liquid Paper Dryline Grip, Pilot G-2 gel pens, and SD cards.

Whiteout: the simple solution of a bygone age.

A recent Online News Association event in New York included a panel of New York Times representatives discussing the newspaper’s use of and policies concerning Twitter, as described in this eMediaVitals report:

“One of the best things the Times has done in the past few years is have a hands-off policy toward Twitter,” he said. “People screw up every once in awhile, but that’s OK. We have to be able to push the boundaries of what we can get away with.”

Though Stelter’s noted personality still can’t creep up in a news story, on Twitter he has more freedom to blend news and personality in his tweets, particularly depending on the time of day. “More and more we program ourselves online the way that a [TV] network does,” he said.

This report caught my attention, as it seems to confirm in part some of my previous research (described here) with regard to journalism organizations’ policies toward their employees’ social media use.

In a paper I published on this topic, I suggested that organizations that trusted their employees to use their common sense and good judgment in using social media — as opposed to creating strict policies or screening social media content — would find the greatest success in maintaining journalists’ loyalty, allowing them to develop their own voices and brands online, and in empowering them to use social media successfully to represent the organization. As Liz Heron, the Times’ social media editor, stated at this panel, the paper’s lack of “draconian” policies “allowed us to blossom.”

But what about those occasional “screwups”? One social media innovation that could increase journalism organizations’ confidence in their employees’ free use of social media is the development of standardized, simple correction methods. I agree with those who argue that incorrect tweets should not simply be deleted, but the problem remains that leaving inaccurate information out there in the Twitter stream is misleading. Twitter does not currently provide a way to edit an earlier tweet (and merely editing a tweet is not a transparent practice), yet users might miss a “correction tweet” that came later in the stream.

It would be great to see an error-correction function added to Twitter, or some way of noticeably linking an erroneous tweet to an update/correction tweet. Something similar to the Post Revision Display plugin for WordPress would be a great option. If we had this sort of function, an erroneous tweet could be marked with a message: something like “You are viewing a tweet that has been corrected or updated. Please click here for more information.” (Some great posts on this issue are available from Craig Silverman here and here, and from Scott Rosenberg here.)

Empowering journalists and others to spread corrected information just as widely and easily as an initial error would build journalism organizations’ confidence in allowing journalists to reach out to audiences more freely online — while also building public confidence in Twitter as a news source.

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