Tag Archives: digital media

Who Gets to Tell Our Story?

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Frieze of Columbus in the New World, US Capitol
Frieze of Columbus and Indigenous Americans in the New    World, US Capitol Rotunda

 There is truth in the irony that our most cherished possession is not exclusively ours to own.

We think that our most precious possessions are the things we have acquired or the relationships we have.  But for many people the “right” to tell their own story looms just as large.  Narratives of our personal or tribal lives may be the keys to understanding who we are and where we came from.  But in fact they are not exclusively ours to tell.  We don’t have proprietary rights to our own personal histories.

This is both self-evident and enormously consequential.   It’s not just that we can’t easily agree even about the foundational stories about our collective past.  What Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln actually achieved will always involve contentious narratives.  We can also be unpleasantly surprised by accounts of ourselves offered even by friends or relatives.

It’s apparent that anyone can write someone else’s biography.  Even biographers who are out of favor with their subjects or never met them are frequently eager to weigh in with their own versions.  For example, we are presently surrounded by multiple narratives that recreate the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  There’s Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best-selling biography (Steve Jobs, 2011) and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin film based on it.  Both recognize Job’s  vision for turning computing into a necessary life skill.  And both portray a garage innovator with a knack for ingenious design and an inability to acknowledge his co-visionaries.  Then there’s Alex Gibney’s very different documentary (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, 2015) detailing a single-minded marketing genius reluctant to engage with the unpleasant facts surrounding the Chinese factories that produce Apple products.  Amazon currently lists about ten books on Jobs. The point is that we can count on each version to offer a different person to readers.

The same is true for groups that seek power or legitimacy in the larger culture by presenting what are sometimes very different accounts about their pasts and their aspirations.  What’s the story of Scientology? It depends on who you ask. How has the institutional life of Catholicism evolved since revelations of widespread child abuse were widely reported at the beginning of the new century?  Skeptics and admirers routinely compete for attention to relay their stories.  In many ways the fissures that are spread across the culture deepen over time, often expanding into complete fault lines as interested parties vie for media access to “get their story out.”

There’s a whole lexicon of useful terms to represent these divisions.  We talk not only about “narratives,” but also “contested narratives,”  “counter-narratives,” “preferred narratives,” “backstories,” “storylines,” “myths,” “legends,” “lore,” “rumors” and “histories” that are disputed as “more fiction than fact.”  Facebook champions an individual’s own preferred narrative: a kind of carefully constructed window display of one’s life. Most other digital outlets focusing on the culture of celebrity capture readers by taking a very different turn:  favoring counter-narratives and backstories.  Sometimes they are even true.

Novelists who would seem to have the advantage of exclusive use of the products of their imagination are inclined to end up in tangles of their own making when readers find possible connections to the writer’s biography.  Readers can also be unforgiving if a scribe borrows another’s particularly traumatic narrative.  A few years ago the prolific Joyce Carol Oates came under criticism in New Jersey for embellishing on a news story about a college student found dead in a campus garbage container. The short story, Landfill, was published in the New Yorker, to the chagrin of the student’s family and others in the region.

For all of our hope that our stories can be communicated in ways that bring us the credit we seek, the fact is that we can never claim rights to exclusivity.  Ask anyone who has recently been in the news how well their views have been represented or how they were characterized. You are apt to get a response of mild frustration.  What we see in ourselves is probably not what those who retell our stories are going to report.  For individuals or groups without power this is sad to witness. Groups lose something basic when they lack the means to communicate their preferred narratives.  The rest of us battle on, even occasionally discovering a narrative that gives us far more credit than we deserve.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu

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Are we Done Collecting?

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Capture digital sampleOwnership of the thing itself—an urgency that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a fading passion.

I wonder about the future of the personal library: those numerous shelves lined with books and music that still line the walls of many of our homes. Owning a physical copy of the work of a writer or performer was, until recently, a sometimes obsessive pursuit for devoted listeners and readers. For many these displays of neatly organized works are a badge of honor, meant in part to suggest membership in certain aesthetic tribes within the culture.

I’m writing in a room cluttered with stuffed bookcases.  It’s the same in other parts of the house, where CD cases sit on table tops and stand upright on shelves.  We are clearly vestiges of the Edison past. In the early days of recording the idea of capturing sound was completely engrossing. Thomas Edison was as much in awe of the idea as everyone else. Add in the possibility of owning a disk of a performance that could be played at will, and the nation collectively swooned at the chance. Shellac cylinders and flat disks soon became their own fetishized possessions. Every middle class parlor had a record player and a growing collection of relatively expensive 78 r.p.m. records. Jump ahead several generations well into the 1990s and teens were still heirs to this passion of record collecting. British novelist Nick Hornby enshrined three clearly recognizable obsessives in his wonderful 1995 book, (and, later, a film) High Fidelity.  In our own ways we were Jack Black:  voracious readers of album liner-notes, and dead-certain of what to display with pride and what to hide.

Ownership is its own reward: something many of us still feel as we purchase a book we will read and perhaps re-read at a later time.

The personalized library has been memorialized by the wealthy with its own room in turn-of-the-century mansions. The rest of us starting  out as impoverished students usually exercised the less baroque option of bookcases made from bricks and boards. In either case books were considered intellectual and decorating necessities.  Their presence meant that you were a serious collector.  Robert Pirsig on one shelf and Miles Davis on another conferred status.

Now the tide has receded. To more younger consumers in most places (except Japan, with its continuing love of CDs) these music and print libraries seem to be an anachronism, like the player-piano rolls I remember as a child collecting dust in a corner of my grandmother’s lace-curtained living room. Digital “natives” are just as happy essentially leasing access to commercial libraries, such as those offered by Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple and others.  Even the e-book, which is sold as the digital equivalent of a hard copy, is never quite the owner’s in the ways that the paper version is.  It can’t be easily loaned or resold because its storage is usually in a proprietary “cloud.”  Digital “immigrants” used to owning works are not quite convinced that we will have access to the work in perpetuity. A cloud-based purchase of an author’s book or a composer’s symphony seems less permanent.

Communication scholar Joshua Meyrowitz partly explains what has changed in his use of the phrase, “the Association factor.”  When we own a hard copy of another’s work—when it is in our physical possession—we more readily identify ourselves with it.  It’s an artifact tied to our identity, an outward representation of our place on the human map.  So if I am carrying around a copy of a particular novel or have a copy of music cd sitting in the living room, I’m probably prepared to defend its presence in my space.  I’ve “associated” myself with it. By contrast, a person may feel no responsibility to defend a song that presents itself to houseguests on Spotify. The lease of a channel of media content seems less personal than outright ownership, even though custom music sources have the advantage of opening our ears to much larger libraries.

My own adult children are mostly consumers of these digital services, and just as passionate in their own ways about their music and books as earlier generations. But ownership of the thing itself—a fact that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a passing signifier of the avid appreciator. No doubt that for many modern consumers walls of CDs and books look archaic. Why hold “hard” copies if they are all available in digitized files?  Perhaps the only answer is that some books and performances are too precious to not hold in one’s hands.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu