media-1

Transcriber:	Meng-Fen Lin (gracelin_tx @ msn.com)
Brief Bio:	Doctorale candidate, Instructional Technology, University of Houston MS in Computer Science, University of Houston BS in MIS, National Sun Yat San University
Date finished:	September 16, 2004
Proofreader:	Wen-Huei Chou (cris@ocit.edu.tw)
Brief Bio:	交通大學應用藝術研究所碩士 Professional Doctorate of design, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
Date finished:	July 13, 2005

My name is Shigeru Miyagawa. I teach at MIT. In this brief presentation, I would like to make some observations about media. I am particularly interested in forms of media that have been emerged, that have interactivity built into the design. CD-Rom, the Internet and other forms of digital media deliver systems make it possible for users not only to consume media but also to create it. This is what Bob Metcalf in his on-line lecture calls “community media.” I am going to call it “personal media” to contrast it with “mass media”.
Let me begin with something that happened at home last week. I have a young daughter who isn’t speaking quite yet, but she has acquired many tools for communication. One such tool that she uses often, is the “following”. Whenever I do something that she likes, such as singing one of her favorite songs, and she wants me to repeat it, she will do this, “Ah Ah Ah”. She learned this from my wife and I when we say "One more time". She learned to amplify the message by using both hands. Recently my daughter has been allowed to watch some TV. Last week she was watching Sesame Street and at one point, Big Bird sang a song and then a dance that goes along with the song. My daughter liked that and at the end of the song and dance, she turned to the Big Bird on the screen and went “Ah Ah Ah”. Of course Big Bird didn’t respond but instead went on to whatever was next on the script. My daughter turned to me with a puzzled look like “what happened?" What happened was that my daughter discovered mass media. In mass media, there is a clear line of demarcation between those who produced the media and those who created it.  My daughter didn’t realize this and she wanted to have a hand at producing Sesame Street. She didn’t know the whole point of mass media is you sit back and consume it. This is because up until that time, our whole world around her was a personal world where she could manipulate things and people.

Compare this illustration of mass media with another form of media that has spread throughout the youth culture of this world – video games. In video games, the whole idea is that you can control the actions in the games. In fact, the more you can control, the better you are. You get more points and you get bumped up to a more challenging level. Video games are an example of personal media.

The point that I want to convey is this:  Personal media, in a variety of forms, will increasingly encroach upon mass media. We find examples of this today. In the US, young people of today are watching much less TV than young people of ten years ago. As much as an100-hours per year less. Don Tapscott who mentions this in his book Growing Up Digital, tells us that young people who are interviewed for the survey said they are watching much less TV and they are using the computers more to play the video games and to use the internet. In Japan, the use of cell phones, particularly iMode, is growing at an explosive rate. iMode is the use of the internet with your cell phone. People in the industry tell me that young people in Japan are spending anywhere from $50 to as much as $200 a month on iMode. And this has lead to a decline in the revenue from mass media products such as comic books. Comic books are an enormous industry in Japan but with young people using more and more of this disposable income on iMode and other forms of personal media, we can expect that the revenue will continue to decline from mass media products.

I now want to turn to my own work with media. I created a multimedia program called StartFestival with a team of media and curriculum specialists from MIT and from other institutions in the Boston area. StartFestival is very much a personal media. It is about my own story of a Japanese who grow up most of the time in the United States. What I want to tell you are some concrete examples of what I saw happened in the StartFestival classrooms. I can tell you that just about everything that I saw was a surprise. And often it was exactly the opposite of what I expected.

StartFestival is a multimedia program. It has video, graphics, sound tracks, texts and 300 original photographs from my family collection. These photographs are for the most part black and white and these photographs gave me the first clue that the kids were using StartFestival in a way that is completely unexpected. I observed StartFestival classrooms in Boston and in other areas. One day I was in a kindergarten class in Boston and the teacher was using StartFestival. After a while, the teacher told the kids going to play with StartFestival. The kids clicked around the program randomly for a while, as if they were playing video games. But then there arose a spontaneously consensus that they should look for a certain kind of photographs.  These photographs they decided to look for are photographs of me when I was their age. There are several photographs like that in StartFestival of when I was a kindergartener. When the kids were satisfied that they found all the photographs of me when I was their age, then they went on to explore the rest of the multimedia space, but with those photographs as the starting point.

Now I thought that was neat. But I didn’t rally understand the significance of it at the time. Later, I was visiting the same school in the same building and I was in the fifth grade class. And to my surprise, the same thing was happening. The fifth-grade kids were going through the program, looking for my photographs of when I was a fifth grader around age ten. Once they looked for and found all of the photographs of me when I was their age, then that became the beginning, the starting point by which to explore the rest of StartFestival.
What does this mean? You could probably think of many ways to understand this. For me, what it signified is something fundamental to any form of media: The notion of point of view. Point of view. From whose perspective is the media being presented? The kids in Boston, the kindergartener and the fifth graders found their own point of view in StartFestival. The kindergarteners by finding my photographs of when I was a kindergartener and the same with fifth graders.

The important thing is they found this point of view on their won. It wasn’t presented to them. By taking this point of view that they discovered, they were able to go inside the program and begin with that point of view that they established. They were able to explore StartFestival from that point of view that they selected on their own.

This is fundamentally different from mass media. In mass media, you are watching something, the point of view of which was chosen by somebody else. So you are never inside the program but you are always outside of it. As a result, you are not able to manipulate the media from your own point of view. Personal media is a kind of media when a user is able to select his or her own point of view. Often it is the user’s point of view was someone like the user.

The second point I want to make about personal media is the idea of appropriation. To create personal media, you need material, stuff to build it with. In personal media, you take whatever you need to create the best possible media. With more and more things become digital, this idea of appropriation becomes easier and easier. Now this is completely different from mass media. In mass media, content is sacrosanct. It is even vigorously protected from appropriation from others. It is called copyright. Recently we saw an example of what happens when a sacrosanct content in mass media suddenly becomes available for personal use. Napster allowed people to download music for their own personal music library. Setting aside legal issues, and there are many, what Napster showed us is the power of personal media. When people are able to appropriate things for their own personal use, they will do it. And with more and more tools in digital media becoming available, this will become more and more common. The difference between what originated with you the user and what didn’t will become blurred.

Let me tell you something that I saw in a StartFestival classroom that illustrates this notion of appropriation. I was observing a seventh-grade art class which was using StartFestival. The students were assigned to do an art project and the artistic model that the teacher gave the students was a Japanese Kokeshi. A Japanese Kokeshi is a wooden doll with a cylinder body and a round head. A traditional Japanese Kokeshi reflects the image of the Japanese. The skin is light and often it is white to symbolize the traditional cosmetic taste of Japanese women. But the Kokeshi I saw produced in the seventh-grade class was completely different. There were Kokeshi of every color. There was even a Kokeshi, a married couple Kokeshi that was interracial, black and white. This represented the producer of the Kokeshi, a girl, who had interracial parents. What this girl did was to appropriate the model of Kokeshi but made it into her own image, her parents.

Now these dolls were physical objects but the students could have done this just as well in digital form as personal media. The point we see in personal media with this example is this: People who are producing personal media are not simply going to accept a consumer media. But they are going to appropriate things, bits and pieces, from sources their own and others, to build their own media. The third and final point I would like to make about personal media as StartFestival is an old point. We all like to tell our own story. I’d like to show you a clip from StartFestival that has triggered many many stories from young people.

This is a site from StartFestival about my mother and her experiences in World War II. There is an introduction to StartFestival which we place on the same web site in which you are watching now. The site that you just saw about my mother has triggered many stories from young people about their grandparents, and ancestors suffering under the Japanese occupation, the German occupation and stories about slavery. Some of the stories came from kids of Chinese and Korean ethnicity who talked about their grandparents suffering under the Japanese occupation. These stories were moving and painful and deeply ironic. In telling the stories of their grandparents, they had appropriated the young kids had appropriated bits and pieces from my mother’s site, which was a site of a Japanese who suffered during World War II.

To sum up, I talked about the increasing spread of personal media. I noted three features of personal media that I saw in StartFestival: the ability to control point of view, the ability to appropriate things, and story telling. I would like to finish this presentation by looking at some of the consequences of what I said for education and also for mass media.

First, education. The two points I like to make. The first point is that it is important that we institute media literacy into the core curriculum. This is a point that my colleague at MIT Henry Janking has been pushing for sometime. Young people are going to distend more and more of their time creating personal media of different forms and not just for entertainment but for education as well. They will have at this disposal an increasing array of tools for creating personal media but they wouldn’t necessarily have the knowledge for creating sophisticated media. They need to be taught the know-how to create such media. Students will be very interested and highly motivated in being educated on media literacy.

The second point about education is how we teach the kids. We can think of the traditional classroom as one that reflects the world of mass media. The teacher is the broadcaster of information and knowledge and the kids are the consumers of this knowledge. But as the young people’s attitude toward acquiring information and knowledge shifts from completely a mass media world to pn that incorporates the personal media perspective, the education system will have to accommodate this shift.

Young people are going to be learning some, maybe most of what they learn in schools, through creating and recreating their knowledge through forms of personal media. And education will have to accommodate this form of learning, which is very different from the traditional classroom. For mass media, the question is "Will mass media survive in the fact of increasing encroachment from personal media?" The answer is yes, but mass media products will have to become consistently better. The young people of today are much more media-savvy than the previous generations. They are not just going to be looking at things like how the plot unfoldes and how the characters are developed. They are also going to be focused on much more technical aspects of media production. A friend of mind told me about an experience she had with her 10-years-old son. In viewing a movie with him, she was surprised that while she was looking at things like plot and characters, he was focused on technical aspects such as how the camera angles were being employed to push the story along.

That’s it. I thank you for listening. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me.