Some terms & phrases that you might consider as you think about analyzing the subjects of your podcast episodes from Jenkins:
Here are what the letters mean, and the kinds of questions you can ask yourself to run the drill as you’re reading. Keep in mind that the APATSARC elements are connected–they often work together.
Who are the authors writing to or for? Who might the authors be thinking of when writing this publication? Sometimes writers will directly address audiences that they’re writing or speaking to, but often their audience is implied by what they say.
Why is the author writing or saying this? What goals might the author have in writing this? This element is often strongly connected to the next element, Argument.
What is the author’s main argument or main point? We often call this a controlling idea or a thesis statement. However, since we are looking at different texts created as a group, there may not be an explicit statement of an overarching argument. By looking at the types of arguments in the individual pieces, can you get a sense of a larger argument, or at least a method of argumentation?
What is the emotional, intellectual, or stylistic tone of this publication? If you had to pick an emotion to describe the publication, what would that be? You might begin by describing the tones of specific pieces and then see if there is a pattern that emerges from that, or you might step back and look at the larger scope of a piece and try to identify the tone that this publication is going for.
What is the structure of this publication? How would you describe the genre of this work? What sorts of media does it contain? How is the website where it lives structured? Does it have pictures or graphs? Is it chronological or does it move around in time? Do users have multiple methods of navigating through the site? Is it topical or are the pieces somewhat disconnected to specific events and time?
What assumptions do the authors make about their readers? What do the authors assume we know or believe? What experiences do the authors assume we share with them? What assumptions do the authors make about how the world works or how culture works?
Most types of non-fiction writing use “rhetoric” (persuasive speech) and there are three sorts of rhetorical styles that most writing falls into: logos (using logic to make an argument, such as data, numbers, and facts), ethos (appealing to your reader’s shared sense of ethics, or including the reader in a shared ethical community), or pathos (using emotion to persuade a reader). While most non-fiction writing has elements of all three rhetorical styles, one style tends to be the primary style. See if you can identify the primary style of the text you’re analyzing.
Does this publication rely on certain kinds of specific contextual connections? Are there similar sites or publications that this one responds to or reacts against? Does this site live inside an ecosystem of publications with some similar methodologies or not?
]]>Mozilla has put together a “framework for entry-level web literacy & 21st Century skills” with an accompanying visualization that you can use to navigate their framework. The core literacies (Write, Read, Participate) play out across a set of fourteen 21st-century skills. Those skills are further classified as focused on problem-solving, communication, creativity, and collaboration.
Read the accompanying white paper for more information about how this map was developed and its implications.
]]>I use the terms “affordances” and “constraints” fairly frequently, and I think they will be very useful terms for you to consider when you’re working on your podcast episodes, so I want to give you at least a basic sense of how these terms work.
The concept of an affordance was introduced in the 70s by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, defining an affordance as “an action possibility available in the environment to an individual, independent of the individual’s ability to perceive this possibility.” In the 80s, the concept was picked up and redefined by the designer Donald Norman and introduced to the Human Computer Interaction community in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things, where it was emphatically accepted and taken up. (Here’s a fuller explanation of how Norman uses the term in a design context, but I resist his narrowing of the term to only apply to perceived affordances.)
I generally find Gibson’s sense of the term to be more useful as a critical category. We might ask questions like “what are the affordances of this technology/method?”or “Are they taking advantages of the affordances available to them?”
Such questions prove to be especially useful, as an example, if we look at the New York Times online and ask whether that publication is really fully utilizing the communication strategies available with an online publication or whether they are really just porting their print journalism over to a digital space. We might ask whether they are using images, video, audio, or data visualization effectively and deeply, and whether the nature of how they do journalism shifts substantively when it’s in a digital space because there are different possibilities available to them to explore.
I might also ask you whether you are taking advantage of the affordances offered because you are publishing your work for this class to the web. If you approach all of the assignments this semester by opening a new document in MS Word and writing traditional 4-page essays and then you just paste them onto a page of your site and hit publish, then what opportunities are you missing to communicate your ideas in this space? How might you approach your writing differently for this class now that your website has different affordances available to it then were available when you typed an essay and printed it out?
Just as every technology or method has certain affordances available to it, they also have the inverse: constraints. Constraints are limitations imposed by that technology, which limit the ways in which you can use that technology. In our context, we’ll probably most often use the term to ask whether a publication manages to creatively work around certain constraints that are imposed by a system, or whether they have mistakenly chosen a method of production or publication that brings with it constraints that undermine key aspects of their project.
For example, we might ask whether George Pullman undermines his primary goals by choosing to publish Writing Online as a print book, losing the ability to search, link, copy and paste, and so on. Pullman devotes a fair amount of space in his introduction to addressing exactly these questions and explains why the affordances available in the print book and the additional publication of the online companion to the text serve to ameliorate such constraints, but they are still fair questions for us to consider.
Moving forward, when you communicate with other people, I hope that you’ll learn to at least implicitly, if not actually explicitly, think critically about whether the methods you choose to do so provide affordances that allow you to do effectively without also bringing along constraints that will undermine your efforts. And once you have thought about the affordances and constraints a technology brings with it, you might find that there are ways to hack the technology such that you can do more with it, and avoid the limitations, in order to be more successful.
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Henry Jenkins and a team of academics produced “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” a white paper for the MacArthur Foundation in 2006. The report focuses on ways to foster a participatory culture, which it describes as a culture “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).”
That report outlines a set of literacies, “core cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in our new media landscape,” which include: