What's Missing from This Picture
In honor of the Martin Luther King Day holiday, Mark Marino has released a remix of Michael Wesch's portrait of increasingly wired student offline angst and anomie, "A Vision of Students Today." Wesch is also known for his much-viewed video on Web 2.0, "The Machine is Us/ing Us."
Marino's parody points out something obvious to anyone who teaches this short film in Southern California: the lily-white demographics of the students who are supposed to be emblematic of the "digital generation," a term that Siva and others have been interrogating in recent months.
The Original:
The Remix:
Marino explained his rationale to the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list as follows:
Recently I've been considering these two videos, "Us/ing" and "A Vision," in
light of each other. The one seems to capture the excitement some of us
feel about various new software applications (mostly in free beta release).
It creates a dream-like celebration o the software that is part of that
contested and derided category (Web 2.0). That first video seemed to give
us a teaser for today, a trailer for contemporary technologies in which we
are the full-access subjects, the transcendental eye balls floating through
all levels of media (from code to interface), able to make the internet
dance. This was the video that established Wesch as an authority on these
topics.
The second video focuses on one of these technologies, Google Docs, but, by
contrast, also brings in images of human users. If the voice of "Us/ing" is
a timeless, bodiless voiceover, in "A Vision," that bodiless commentator
(made of text alone) shares the screen with the faces of some of the 200
other contributors. What's more, because these students are represented
not merely text, we now have something else to contend with: their bodies.
These are the bodies of "Students Today," though perhaps that title should
be qualified to "students in Michael Wesch's KSU class room on the day of
the recording." They are more than just color-coded user-names
collaboratively generating a document. They are human subjects.
As the video proceeds, these students become a (low-affect) medium for the
information from the Google Doc. With nonplussed faces, they hold up
placards that reveal statistics about the state of their computer use and
their other academic habits. The implicit suggestion is that these students
are not what we expect and that they are different from those who came
before them. They Facebook in class. They buy expensive books they never
use. A number of these students have laptops. And they are a wall of
white.
It is their image of their raced bodies that carries so much information and
yet goes uncommented.
Of course, Michael Wesch doesn't have to deal with every topic every time he
makes a video, but I would argue that the homogeneity in the featured
students' appearances communicates something about race, even if that was
not the intention. This isn't to rehash representational politics but to
comment on what happens when Wesch's subjects go from social software to
sample students.
Now it's not that the video isn't representative. Surely, KSU doesn't have
anything to apologize for. It's demographics are not too different from
state demographics with respect to race and ethnicity. It's economic
diversity also shows its openness. (Nor am I suggesting that other
universities get the mix of diversity better.)
But this video isn't about KSU. Part of the problem may be that due to the
success of Wesch's Web 2.0 video, this "Vision" has taken a kind of
hegemonic weight. Again, its title offers the video as an image, albeit ONE
image, of "students today" (in America, presumably) and in the process
ignores its own implicit message about race.
My first reaction is: I'm not surprised. In my experience, white students
do not tend to think about race. As one professor has pointed out to me
elsewhere, students from homogeneous environs don't nec. think about race
with the same frequency that students growing up in more integrated environs
do.
My second reaction is: I'm concerned. How often do our conversations about
"this generation" of internet-using, always-Googling, Facebooking students
drop questions of race, or the questions of access or institutionalized
discrimination that underlie them.
For my mock-up, I attempted to use Wesch's collaborative technological
approach from "Us/ing" to remix and rewrite "A Vision," not as a "gotcha,"
but as my own contribution to that Google Doc and a small reflection for MLK
day.
Marino gives more context and commentary here.
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