Tactic vs. Strategy: Project Girl

Reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and Alexander Galloway’s Protocol this week was a bit more challenging than I’d anticipated. Both of the excerpts were quite dense; they covered abstract, theoretical concepts (and in de Certeau’s case, without very many tangible examples).

As I started thinking about the differences between tactics and strategies and the power dynamics that play into them, I recalled an experience that I had when I was in seventh and eighth grade.

A very good family friend, Kelly Snider, started an art activist group when I was in middle school. This group was intended to educate girls about the mixed messages that the media gears towards girls and women. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to get involved in the group.

The group is called Project Girl. Through the use of art projects and workshops, we started to ask critical questions about the media and the messages that they were targeting at young women. In light of reading excerpts from de Certeau’s piece, I have begun to make the connection that Project Girl is employing girls with tactics to use in response to mass media strategies.

http://www.kellyparkssnider.com/the_girl.html

In this case, mass media strategies are any devices employed that help companies to make money by perpetuating negative stereotypes and/or gender stereotyping against girls and young women. Here, tactics are devices that help girls think critically about the media. Even simply conversing about the negative effects of advertisements on girls can be considered a tactic to be used against mass media strategies.

Though I was able to make a connection between de Certeau’s ideas about tactics and strategies with Project Girl, I struggled a bit to see where Galloway’s ideas about protocol came into the picture. de Certeau’s ideas were very much rooted in culture; I wasn’t completely sure that Galloway’s argument about protocol had very many explicit connections between protocol and culture, since most of his examples were centered on the Internet and its surrounding technology. However, Galloway made an interesting point about the interpretation of protocol.

A last point… is that protocol is against interpretation. This is to say that protocol does little to transcode the meaning of semantic units of value that pass in and out of its purview. It encodes and decodes these values, yes, but such transformations are simply trivial mathematics and do not affect meaning in the same way that a Hollywood film may affect the meaning of femininity, or a police officer walking the beat may affect the meaning of power in public space. (Galloway 52).

The examples that Galloway gave with this claim struck me as interesting, especially given the previous connections I made with tactics and Project Girl. Galloway argues that protocols are completely separate from the information that they carry; one cannot interpret protocol. This seems to be a trend across many of the readings thus far; the device that carries information is separate from the content being carried.

I’m not sure I am completely convinced by this. Though protocol may not be connected to the information it is carrying/transmitting, I would argue that protocol itself is a product of its environment.