Reactions to Digital Nation: Henry Jenkins

Douglas, you asked for my initial response to the film so I am going to be brutally honest.

I have found the Digital Nation website to be an extraordinary resource which I used repeatedly in my teaching last semester, drawing in many different segments to stimulate discussion, to allow students to hear more directly the point of view and see the personalities of writers we were engaging with through our readings. What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways. Yet, it is hard to argue that the materials on the website did not provoke thought about the set of questions that the filmmakers were posing.

I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated. The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.

I appreciate that the website allows us to see so much of the material which ended up on the cutting room floor and thus to second guess the judgements the producers made in organizing and presenting the materials. In that sense, the two read side by side will make a valuable contribution to fostering critical media literacy skills.

For example, I might use the documentary to talk about the primacy effect -- the degree to which what comes first in a linear media experience sets the horizon of expectations and frames how we understand the material which follows. It strikes me that we go more than 20 minutes into the film before we hear what might be considered an authoritative voice offering a sympathetic comment about the value of digital media and that initial critical framing of media as a social problem gets reasserted multiple times in the course of the documentary. This surely encourages greater skepticism when alternative viewpoints get expressed later.

We might talk about the ways that voice-over narrators carry much greater weight in our response to documentaries than the subjects they are drawing upon -- they are allowed to cast judgements and when they raise doubts, they carry extra weight, which again gets used here mostly to point us back to an interpretation of media use as a social problem.

We might talk about conversion narratives such as the way Rushkoff deploys his own shifts in thinking to add greater credibility to his current position in the classic "once was lost but now am found" tradition of religious witnessing.

We might talk about notions of juxtaposition -- the ways that each positive claim is followed by a critical perspective, while for the most part, people who are more sympathetic to new media practices are not allowed to interject or challenge claims made in the more critical segments.

We can talk about how selections of clips can frame and limit the conversation -- see how we are already focusing on the kid who claims to have read Romeo and Juliet as if he were representative of anything other than his own misguided understanding of how to engage in literature. As someone who taught at MIT for 20 years, I scarcely recognized the place depicted on the documentary -- I certainly would have no trouble creating a documentary which arrived at the exact opposite conclusion about what was going on when those students used their computers in the classroom.

And we can talk about the polarizing effect of traditional broadcasting where every issue has two and only two sides. Witness the ways that the more qualified statements chosen from James Paul Gee or myself are made to look as if we were arguing against digital media, which means that any time you cede a point in an interview, you run the risk of having it used against the case you are trying to make. Critics of new media are allowed to make unqualified statements, while advocates are shown to be more equivocating. The result of such practices over time has served to polarize the conversation -- so we are either for or against digital media, it is either good or bad, rather than allowing a meaningful discussion of its potentials and risks, its benefits and problems, which might allow for us over time to find common ground and act meaningfully in response to a situation none of us fully understand. Every one of us, no matter what their perspective, comes across as a more nuanced speaker and thinker in the web clips than we do in the context of this documentary -- and yes, this is an inevitable consequence of trying to cover too much territory in too short a time.

I wouldn't object to the fact that the documentary had a point of view, if it were not for the fact that the point of view is so predictable a reflection of the culture war that keeps getting framed between the kinds of people who watch public broadcasting and the kinds of people who play video games. I am struck by how consistently the documentary connects new media practices to hot button issues within the demographic which is most apt to watch PBS -- framing digital media in opposition to books, say, or linking it to the military or to corporations. Again, this is part of the story but would digital media come across differently to this audience if it was presented in relation to home schoolers, online book clubs, or say, if we showed how the people protesting the military-entertainment complex had used new media to mobilize their supporters.

You had a chance to do so much more than this -- creating a context where serious thinkers with a range of different perspectives can talk through their differences and try to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of a complex situation. I believe the website did this. I believe an online conversation may do this. I don't think the documentary does. What does this tell us about television as a vehicle for serious reflection? What does this suggest about the value of the kinds of social spaces for open ended inquiry and discussion digital media at its best can provide? For example, what does it suggest about the need of television to compress for time and the potential of the web to offer unlimited material?

Seriously, I don't think we can use one instance of media use or misuse to sum up the medium -- whether television or the web -- and that's part of the point I am making. It is nonsensical to make a judgement about whether the web is good or bad. The web is. How do we use it in a way which maximizes the benefits and lowers the risks? That's more or less where you end the documentary -- but at most steps along the way, it's pretty clear the documentary is more interested in the "dangers" than the "benefits" of digital life.