What is Digital Media, as an academic discipline?

The community of educators who say that they are working in digital media is diverse, and strongly overlaps with pre-existing academic disciplines such as art, animation, communications, computer science, film, television, and music. Somewhere close to the center of mass of this group is a shared concern with interaction. So, for purposes of this paper, we decree that Digital Media is an academic discipline concerned with the development of new interactive media, and with the production of content for them.

The archetypal interactive medium is sometimes taken to be the Internet, though its role is perhaps better viewed as being a substrate and generator of new media such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, IP telephony, online role-playing games, etc.

There are also those who would quibble about the word “interactive” since people interact with every medium from oral storytelling through television. For the purposes of this paper, we define an interactive medium as one in which the user’s actions have some immediate and nontrivial effect on the content of the medium. Changing the channel on a TV set is a trivial degree of interaction. Calling into a talk-radio show is substantially interactive. Making a phone call, updating one’s own web site, participating in instant messaging, playing a game are highly interactive activities.

Conviviality

Ivan Illich introduced the concept of convivial tools. “Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.”

We interpret convivial media as denoting those media whose shared contents are produced by the users. The telephone is the classic example. The opposite concept is that of centrist media, wherein a small and remote group of people decide what everyone sees, reads, or hears.

Not all interactive media are convivial; some systems such as single-player computer games may be highly interactive; but the content created by the player is not shared. Digital Media needs principles and meta-principles that are relevant to both convivial and private forms of interactive media.

There are three types of principles . A principle may be an explanation of how something works, as in: “Principles of the internal combustion engine.” Examples include compression, ignition, heat, and power.

A principle may be a moral statement about how an honorable life is lived, as in: “She was a person of principle.” Examples include honesty, compassion, self-discipline, and craftsmanship.

A principle may be a guideline or rule of thumb for successful action. For instance, “Quench the steel when it has cooled to the color of straw.” or “A web site’s purpose is to provide information the user needs.”

A large part of a professional education consists of teaching (by both exposition and example) a substantial collection of such principles, of all three kinds. The principles discussed in this paper each contain aspects of all three types: explanation, moral statement, and guideline.

Precedents

Mature disciplines have large bodies of established principles. For instance:

Alexander’s classic work in urban planning, A Pattern Language articulates a large set of principles for the design of homes and cities such as: “People need green open spaces to go to; when they are close, they will use them. But if the greens are more than three minutes away, the distance overwhelms the need.” Later in this paper, we will examine in some detail the principles of journalism, another mature discipline.

A number of authors, writing in fields as diverse as biology and economics, have suggested principles relevant to the cybernetic age and by extension to digital media. We will cite examples from the works of Bateson, Barlow, Brand, Dawkins, and others.

These principles are embedded in a larger pool of general guidelines for success in academia and the world. For instance, I always teach new Digital Media students about Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, exemplifying them with media-related examples.

Meta-Principles are the higher-level principles available for use by those who are formulating basic principles (concepts, values, and rules of thumb.) For instance, the Constitution of the United States establishes a set of meta-principles that are used to generate the actual principles embedded in our laws.

What are the ‘constitutional issues’ for interactive media? This paper proposes two groups of meta-principles to address this question.The first group is concerned with individuals. In this group there are three meta-principles. Meta-Principle one is Learning. Everyone is learning, all the time. How do I shape media to support learning?

Meta-Principle two is Meta-Learning. Each person should be aware of what they are learning, how they are learning it, and who is trying to teach them or influence their behavior. How do I shape media to support meta-learning?

Meta-Principle three is Teaching and Selling. Each person should be conscious of what they are teaching others, and of what they are trying to convince others to believe or do. As I design media, what do they teach and how do they convince?

The second group of meta-principles is concerned with Communities and Organizations. This group grew out of a statement by environmental pioneer Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Meta-Principle four is Commonality. Communities originate around a common interest shared by the members. How does this medium convene a community? Meta-Principle five is Sustainability. A viable community or organization must be based on appropriate feedback loops. How does this medium sustain its community of users? Meta-Principle six is Diversity. A community benefits from activities that promote diverse, rich, long-term trusting relationships among its members. How does this medium promote participation by people with a broad spectrum of styles, skills, and interests?

Exploring the Meta-Principles

Meta-Principle 1: Learning

Everyone is learning, all the time. How do I shape media to support learning? For instance, a user sits in front of a computer (or uses a cell phone, or any other media system) and does something…and is changed by the experience. That change is learning.

What do we teach our students about learning? Not much. Students need to know at least a few central concepts, such as the following

Information
What is it? Bateson says that information is “differences that make a difference.” But, what kind of difference? Information fundamentally changes the person who receives it. Future responses to inputs are forever altered by each new piece of information learned.

Emotion
Learning is not primarily an intellectual activity; it is an emotional experience, sometimes supported by our intellect. How a user feels during an interaction is crucial to the significance the user imputes to the interaction, and to whether the user will remember the information or repeat the interaction.

Habit
To build a skill, a user must move through and beyond cognitive understanding and form habits. Much is known about how to make systems understandable, and how to provide affordances that create good habits.

The Macintosh example
The Macintosh user interface, which was created by Jeff Raskin and others, inspired by work at Xerox, and emulated by Microsoft Windows, is built on a deep understanding of learning and habit formation. What are we doing to equip our students with the right skills, knowledge, and understanding of learning to invent whatever comes after this 30-year old “desktop metaphor” for user interfaces?

Meta-Principle 2: Meta-Learning

Each person should be aware of what they are learning, how they are learning it, and who is trying to teach them or influence their behavior. How do we shape media to support meta-learning?

This meta-principle has two key outcomes. First, we want our students themselves to be conscious, lifelong learners. This is essential to the avoidance of obsolescence in the fast-moving world of new media. Second, we want our students to have in their “mental tool-kit” the concept of meta-learning. We want them to help their users to understand and control from where their information comes.

The eBay example
Consider the ‘reputation’ feature on eBay. This system allows buyers to post feedback about the seller’s quality of merchandise and service. Now, anyone who buys anything from a merchant, is always forming opinions about the quality of the service and merchandise; but it is seldom made into an explicit process by the supporting medium. The annoying little cardboard feedback forms we often are given at a sales counter are expressly for the benefit of the merchant–not for the benefit of the next customer coming in the door.

eBay’s feedback system makes it totally clear to buyers that they have a reliable source of meta-information. The primary information items in the auction transaction are product identity and quality, cost, payment method, and expected arrival date. The meta-information is about this first information. It tells how trustworthy it is, but the provision of this meta-information also affords the user with an opportunity for meta-learning! It makes explicit the fact that you, the user, have a new way to learn about people who want to sell you something.

eBay has, in effect, raised the bar for e-commerce. They have changed the way a medium works, by providing their users with an opportunity to upgrade their ability to learn useful information. We need to send our students (and ourselves) on a quest to find other blue-ribbon examples of media that support meta-learning. Memes are units of cultural information that are replicated through social interaction. Dawkins proposed the concept by analogy to the gene, as the basic unit of information within a Darwinian evolutionary model of how societies adapt to change. Students studying meta-learning should read Dawkins’ work as well as that of its critics, so as to learn and apply these concepts to their evolving understanding of where their own ideas and beliefs come from.

Meta-Principle 3: Teaching and Selling

Each person should be conscious of what he or she is teaching and trying to convince others to believe or do. As we design media, what do we teach and how do weconvince?

Young people often have two paradoxical attributes. They want to make a mark on the world, and simultaneously believe that they make no difference to the world. The point of this meta-principle is to help our students understand how every encounter with an interactive medium ultimately contributes to some other human’s repertoire of experiences. The individual’s impact on others can be viewed as some combination of (deliberate or accidental) teaching and selling; of informing or of convincing others.

The Journalism example
For inspiration, let us consider a set of principles from the mature discipline of journalism. At the web site journalism.org, we find these principles:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain a distance from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Of these, principle number seven is of most interest for present purposes. It says that a journalist is obliged to “make the significant interesting and relevant.” In other words, journalists should bring the public’s attention to “significant” events, people, and ideas, and they should present them in ways that make them appear “interesting and relevant.” The journalist should work to evoke an active desire on the part of the reader (or television viewer, or radio listener) to learn about this significant event.

Now consider this sequence of actions on the part of an imaginary Digital Media student, as he or she moves through his or her academic career.

• Selecting a DVD movie to rent.
• Choosing a topic and writing a term paper.
• Voluntarily writing an article and posting it on an Internet forum.
• Carrying out a team project in a Digital Media class.
• Joining a campus environmental activism group.
• Starting a small business with two friends.

In selecting the movie, students are almost entirely receiving the “sell job”; but even here, they are also providing information to the film’s distributors about which topics, actors, genres, and styles interest them. Their actions produce data for others to use.

When selecting topics and writing term papers, the students’ task is to hone their skills at finding something significant to write about, and making it interesting and relevant to the hypothetical reader. Posting an online article represents the next step toward self-motivated creation-of-meaning. Now the student specifically wants to be heard, not just graded.

Working on team projects is perhaps the steepest part of most students’ learning curve, as they move toward a professional level of creative output. The student wants and needs to “sell” their ideas, to teach their colleagues what they know, and to make a significant contribution to the group’s work and product.

When the student joins an advocacy group or undertakes to start a small business, they have fully committed themselves to acquiring and using the twin skill-sets of selling and teaching. Not all go that far (I wish they did!), however, these skills and concepts should be made explicit in the curriculum, and taught to every aspiring media professional.

Information wants to be free. Stewart Brand, the originator of this phrase, proposed novel approaches to intellectual property and value in a digital age. John P. Barlow expanded on these ideas and set forth a theory of how new economic models such as open source software can generate income and support careers.10 A good understanding of both traditional economics and of novel thoughts about the service economy would contribute to our students’ understanding and management of their ‘output’ — i.e., their productive careers in media.

GROUP 2: Communities and Organizations

Meta-Principle 4: Commonality

Communities originate around a common interest shared by the members. How does this medium convene a community?

Some media are built to support an existing community, but many communities emerge specifically because a medium makes it possible. This makes it worthwhile to ask questions, when inventing a new medium, about the corresponding community that you will create. Perhaps you didn’t realize that you were creating a community at all.

To use this meta-principle, ask this question: “What is the principal attribute of the people who will use this media system?” If the answer is clear and simple, your system is more likely to succeed. eBay’s simple community concept was that of a virtual garage sale: many people wanted to sell things but they needed advertising, an effective pricing and payment system, and a way of establishing trust that the merchandise would be delivered. eBay’s solutions all grew out of a clear understanding of who the community was.

The Amazon Example
Amazon.com was part of the first Internet boom, and lost large amounts of money in its early years. However, its owners paid careful attention to the community of book-lovers that gathered. They steadily added features to make it possible for this community to support one another, and to meet their own needs. This constantly growing constellation of community-based features helped make Amazon profitable as it grew beyond books, extending the community-supporting feature-set into a variety of online merchandising categories.

These features include user-contributed book and product reviews, with a five-star evaluation system, a book recommendation system, based on other users’ “clusters” of purchases, user-contributed “So, You’d like to…” guides, a “tell a friend about this item” service, a wedding registry, a “submit a manual” service (you provide a link to a PDF of a product manual), and the Amazon Friend program, where you can contact other reviewers.

Unlike eBay, people don’t come to Amazon with money on their mind. They come for knowledge and entertainment, and they encounter a worldwide community, a well-constructed and always-changing bazaar of the mind.

Meta-Principle 5: Sustainability

A viable community or organization must be based on appropriate feedback loops. How does this medium sustain its community of users? Stability and sustainability are very broad issues. Media play key roles and depend on stable organizations. Consider journalism’s principles five and six:

5. It [journalism] must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.

Organizations must nurture a culture in which the management listens to and learns from employees, customers, and competition–the entire community of practice. Students need to see this behavior modeled in our own professional lives, as we work to build and sustain academic organizations.

A media professional who is working to sustain a business or organization also needs to understand and support more mundane systems and practices such as data backup and plans for disaster recovery, security management, creation and storage of media assets in indexable and reusable fashion, and the careful maintenance of customer relationships, to assure repeat business.

A key aspect of organizational sustainability is the health and well-being of the workers. Steven Covey’s seventh principle from his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. states: “Sharpen the saw.” This statement has two meanings: avoid burnout by balancing work and life; and plan for your own continuous education in new methods and concepts.

The Academic Example
Do we practice what we preach? Do we have systems in place to gather ideas from students, other than the end-of-semester teaching evaluation forms? In what ways do students influence the evolution of our online academic presence; our Departmental web sites, or our web-based courses? Do we have effective backup systems? Do we use any kind of version control and asset management systems in tracking the pieces of projects that we lead? If we’re not operating as sustainable academic organizations, then what are we teaching the students about the distance between words and deeds?

Meta-Principle 6: Diversity

A community benefits from activities that promote diverse, rich, long-term trusting relationships among its members.

This meta-principle is strongly influenced by Leopold’s ecological ethos; in his writing, he frequently equates diversity and beauty. A diverse ecosystem has hundreds or thousands of species. When a threat damages some part of the habitat, the species-mix will shift to take advantage of the new circumstances. A monoculture (like a field of wheat) is critically vulnerable to a single disease.

The media questions to ask are “In what ways might your media system generate a monoculture?” and “What opportunities might you miss, if your users are all of the same xxx?”. In the previous sentence, replace xxx with age, gender, economic status, nationality, language group, political party, operating system preference, or any other cluster of customs and beliefs.

The Computer Game Example
During its first twenty years, the computer game industry was overwhelmingly oriented toward young male game players. A few hit products like Pac-Man were popular with girls, but most games sold over 90% to boys.

The Sims, the largest selling computer game franchise to date, was referred to during development as “Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator.” It was sometimes called the ‘dollhouse game’. It took seven years for Will Wright to convince skeptics that a game with no weapons, cars, levels, or a defined objective would sell. Apparently, due in part to these very attributes, women and girls represent a large share of the purchasers and players of The Sims family of games.

The next blind spot
What other kinds of monocultures are being generated by our media tools? Well, one set of “cultural blinders” to which Americans are particularly prone is the idea that everything worthwhile on the Internet is available in English. There are automatic translation systems that can, for instance, render a Japanese or Chinese web site into very broken English; but have you ever used one?

More importantly, the search engines are by and large partitioned by language. So there exist few ways for a good idea in, say, the Hindi-language online community, to make its way into the mind of an American or British teenager–except when a young Indian entrepreneur decides to put it there.

It is not likely that American students will rush out to learn the world’s languages (though many Digital Media students are making earnest attempts at Chinese and Japanese). It is far more feasible to steer these students toward the creation of, and participation in, social experiences on-line with people from around the world, who are learning or already fluent in English.

The key point is that our students need to be equipped with a willingness (and experience) at identifying the advantages of working heterogeneous groups; and of mastering media tools such as language translation systems that bridge gaps of understanding.

The key message
It’s not specifically about gender, age, race, or language–it’s about diversity. Who do you know who is not like you? How do they factor into your plans for learning, working, and living? You’re running blind if you aren’t asking these questions.

Summary

This paper has set forth six meta-principles for the organization of Digital Media curricula. These ideas may be informally summarized as follows:

Learning: What effect does a person’s input (from media) have on them?

Meta-Learning: Who is selecting, shaping, and controlling a person’s input?

Teaching and Selling: What effect does a person’s output (via media) have on others?

Commonality: What does a media system do to form its group of users?

Sustainability: What does a media system do to keep its group of users?

Diversity: What can a media system do to make its user group (and thus its business model) robust in an ever-changing environment?

Footnotes

1. Ivan Illich. Tools for Conviviality. (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 22.
2. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 342.
3. Steven R Covey. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
4. Aldo Leopold. “The Land Ethic”. In A Sand County Almanac. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 240.
5. Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. (New York: Dutton.). 1979. 99.
6. Steven Levy. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. (New York: Penguin, 1994).
7. Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) (30th Anniversary edition).
8. journalism.org. Project for Excellence in Journalism: Understanding News in the Information Age.
9. Stewart Brand. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, (New York: Viking Penguin), 1987, 202
10. John P. Barlow. “The Economy of Ideas.” Wired Magazine, 2.03 - Mar. 1994.

Works Cited

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton. 1979.

Brand, Stewart. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

Barlow, John P.. “The Economy of Ideas.” Wired Magazine, 2 no. 03 (Mar. 1994).

Covey, Steven R. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 (30th Anniversary edition).

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York; Harper and Row, 1973.

Journalism.org. Project for Excellence in Journalism: Understanding News in the Information Age. http://www.journalism.org. (February 3, 2007)

Leopold, Aldo. “The Land Ethic” In A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Levy, Steven. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. New York: Penguin, 1994.