July 26, 2016
Media grandparents
I just got my copy of Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative, edited by Renee Hobbs. The subtitle could be “How I met my grandparents,” where the grandparents are crucial figures in the history of media studies.
The essays take a fruitful approach. In each of the chapters, someone in the field recounts how s/he first encountered a figure who became important to her/him and why that person mattered. That entails explaining the figure’s ideas and place in the history of media studies — although almost none of the figures would have characterized their work as being within that relatively newly-minted field.
I write about how Heidegger’s ideas about language pulled me out of an adolescent “identity crisis” [draft]. Lance Strate explains his struggle to understand McLuhan (I feel his pain!) and how the struggle paid off for him. Cynthia Lewis connects her interest in Mikhail Bakhtin to her precocious recognition that “the presence of other interpreters always already exists” in the words one hears and uses. Michael Robbgrieco explains how Foucault became a crucial thinker for him about media and education, even though Foucault doesn’t talk about the former and views the latter primarily as a system of oppression, which was far from Michael’s experience as a teacher. Henry Jenkins talks about how Raymond Williams’ work spoke to him as a son of a construction company owner in Georgia, and how that led Jenkins to John Fiske who had been tutored by Williams.
These are just a few of the seventeen essays.
The personal approach enables the authors to walks us through their intellectual grandparents’ ideas the way they first did — and the paths these authors took clearly worked for them. It simultaneously makes clear why those grandparents, with their often quite difficult ideas, mattered so personally to the authors. Overall it works splendidly. All credit to Renee.
Errata: For the imaginary record, I want to note that an error was introduced into my chapter on Heidegger. Somehow John William Miller’s ‘ “mid world” mutated into “mind world” and I did not catch it in the copy-edit phase. Also “a preacher of narcissism” became “a preacher or narcissist.” I should have caught these attempts to make my text better. Ack.
