Explorations in Digital Influence
The following post is the outcome of an assignment from a course, Instructional Technologies, taught by Professor Jessica Hochman at the Pratt Institute School of Information in the Spring semester of 2017. The course explored pedagogical approaches in digital literacy, and this assignment asked students to examine ways in which technology had influenced their ways of viewing their realities. The assignment takes a casual tone, referring to family members in familiar, non-academic terms in order to evoke the general feeling that taking part in such an activity can engender. It’s long, but uncovered some interesting tidbits of the pasts of all participants. Please enjoy!
Thanks to my parents, especially my dad who sparked my interest in new gadgets, modern technology has played a very prominent role in my development, and in my life overall. Technology has allowed me to frame my world in empowering ways, or attempt to control whatever elements of it I’ve felt the need to control.
That said, it is hard for me to know what I’m not in control of. I cannot see out of what is a technological bubble that I’ve formed around myself, and has been placed around me. I don’t know how my way of perceiving and interacting with my reality would be different if I had grown up without a television, computer, or internet. McLuhan pointed out decades ago that “The medium is the message.” {archived} I’ve received information from a limited set of media for my entire life. I’ve no way of knowing how I would have interpreted information differently had I received it in other formats. It feels a bit ridiculous to say this, but I can’t know what I don’t know.
To gain insight about how technology might have forged the language that I speak now, I thought I would obtain outside input by starting a discussion with my immediate family, who each experienced the same collection of technology, and intimately took part in each other’s development in the 1970s and 1980s. To start this conversation, I created a Facebook group page for my mother, father, brother, and me, to discuss our experiences with digital technology from the 1970s and 1980s, and how it may have shaped the way we view our world.
My decision to use Facebook was deliberate, as it is a somewhat recent technological tool that my family and our culture have come to use quite frequently. It is, like much of the technology my family used when I was growing up, a tool that has changed our discourse because of how it so efficiently facilitates discussion, and records that discussion for the long-term.
Care to jump directly to the Facebook project page? Click here.
The Facebook group page served as an Affinity Space, or a space “where groups of people are drawn together because of a shared, strong interest or engagement in a common activity,” {archived} in which my family could interact easily. When I introduced the project to my family members, I made sure to mention that the page would eventually be made public. I am concerned that our discussions might have been different if the group was to have remained private, but I wanted to make it viewable to the public after the discussion ended to allow further interaction to see what other insights would be contributed.
From February 13–17, 2017, we talked about the various technologies that emerged in the US, and wound up in our house while I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. I tried to let the discussions grow as organically as they could, however I made sure to ask leading questions to spark discussions related to the project’s focus: How did technology affect the way we perceived our reality, and how did it shape our discourse, amongst our small family unit, and with others?
It was a bit difficult to get my family, including myself, to critically view how technology influenced our individual, and family discourse, rather than just reminisce about what we experienced. Advances in digital technology have been entering our lives very quickly, often seeming fictional, as if new gadgets in our lives are portals into the world of The Jetsons {archived}. It’s hard to avoid being wowed by new technology, and easy to miss the lasting effects it has been having on ourselves and our culture.
This reflective exercise made us focus on how much things have changed from the large amount of technological developments we’ve all experienced. My mom wrote, “I have a hard time wrapping my head around what we already have happening, never mind what the future will bring. This project brought that out into the forefront of my mind.” [Full disclosure — my mom is a teacher and knows what kind of feedback I was looking for, so she was a bit biased.] The discussions we had over the course of the week explored a number of things:
- how my dad’s habit of mixing music in his home music studio, which involved repeating snippets of sound over and over, and his ordering my brother and me to take touch-typing classes, may have guided us towards our professional jobs;
- whether or not the videogames my brother and I played as kids were educational in any way — some were and some weren’t;
- how the technological tools formed our habits, and what disturbed us when those tools changed or glitched in unexpected ways;
- how my mother’s biology teaching methods relate directly to J.P. Gee’s writings {archived} on how good videogames educate;
- how the embarrassingly large amount of television we used to watch may have affected our view of the world and how we communicate;
- how Scott McCloud’s idea {archived} that we transfer our identity to abstract cartoon characters may have affected us as kids with our large intake of Saturday Morning Cartoons; and
- relatedly, how successful Loony Tunes {archived} was in introducing my brother and I to classical music by starring the music in certain episodes, compared to The Smurfs {archived} that generally kept classical music in the background dulling the importance of the music as completely secondary to the characters.
I think it’s rare that people look at how new fangled thingamabobs control the way we perceive our surroundings. They are subconsciously changing and defining our visual, oral, and gestural language or discourse. Change can be scary, but change can be wonderfully empowering; who knows what positive developments technology might bring upon our culture as time goes on. I believe the danger lies in not realizing that technology unpredictably changes our discourse.
Some Context — The Levin Family
To provide context for the project, below are very brief descriptions of the family members who took part, or were mentioned, in the discussion on the Facebook group page.
Me
After a botched attempt at music school, I spent many years working as an administrative assistant. I subsequently obtained my undergraduate degree in fine art, and began working as a freelance visual art curator and marketer. I’m currently very close to obtaining a master’s degree in information and library science [update 2018: degree has been obtained!]. I’m highly interested in digital and visual literacy, which is why I’m doing this project.
Mom
Terre Levin taught biology, and anatomy & physiology to high school students for around 22 years in Connecticut. For about 15 years now, at age 74, she has been teaching anatomy & physiology to college-level students in upstate New York.
Dad
Pete Levin is a 74 year old jazz keyboardist known for his work with synthesizers, and the more analog Hammond organ. He performs mostly with jazz and blues bands, but spent many years writing, arranging, and recording advertisement jingles, television show music. He has performed with all kinds of musicians including Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Simon, and Annie Lenox. He is about to go on tour in South America with his brother Tony Levin [Update 2017: he’s now on tour in Japan and China!].
Brother
Paul Levin has worked for many years in New York City as a freelance sound designer and video editor. He recently took a full time gig working on the Pokemon cartoon, applying translation overdubs in multiple languages. Somehow this is not making him go crazy.
Other People
There are other people mentioned in the conversation on the group page (although I don’t bring them up in this blog post). Briefly, they are:
Tony: My Uncle Tony Levin is my dad’s brother, also a musician.
Lew Soloff: Lew Soloff was a goofy, and very talented trumpet player my dad worked with for over 30 years.
George: My ex-boyfriend, George Lambrakis, is a videogame and cartoon animator, who lived with me for a time.
Todd Cagan: Todd Cagan is the son of Dad’s best friend, Al Cagan. We consider him to be a cousin of sorts.
Observations on Specific Posts on the Facebook Group Page
Below are summaries of the conversations my family had on our Facebook page. Note that links in the headings below lead to related comments in the Facebook group page discussion (I can’t provide archived links, so cross your fingers for me that Facebook doesn’t change too much over the years).
Snippets of Sound Repeating Over and Over and Over…
My brother Paul and I definitely had a unique upbringing where music is concerned. Few kids are raised with a professional music studio in the garage, and lots of talented jazz and blues musicians coming and going all the time. Hearing snippets of sounds repeated over and over again while jingles or jazz songs were being tweaked sounded normal to me, even though it might have sounded odd to someone else. I wonder oftentimes if the repeated sounds influenced my interest in avant-garde sound art.
Dad worked on mixing some versions of the Meow Mix jingle for a short stint. Here’s a more updated version of what I heard in the house over and over and over:
Just as Scott McCloud discusses the signs and symbols of visual language in his book Understanding Comics- The Invisible Art, that we transfer our identity to abstracted characters, I feel that other kinds of signifiers, involving all the senses, could be discussed in similar ways. Because my dad made a lot of noise in his music studio for his work, my brother and I were very likely heavily influenced by it.
About his work editing music, my dad posted in the group page, “When I’m editing a piece, I often have to zero in on a snippet — sometimes just one instrument — and play it 20 or 30 times until it’s right. Must drive Mom nuts.”
It probably does drive Mom nuts, but hearing that repetition of sound as a kid probably influenced my love for minimalist classical music, such as that by Steve Reich {archived}. My brother Paul, reflected upon how Dad’s repeating snippets of sound likely influenced his work as a sound editor: “One of the things I do at work that other mixers don’t is I’ll play a short snippet of dialog (1–2 seconds) over and over until ai [sic] don’t perceive it as words anymore, just frequencies. I usually do this when I’m cleaning bg [background] noise out of dialog.”
Also interesting is that Paul uses various forms of visual language to see sound. He posted a screen shot of a spectrograph he uses in his day job:
“The X axis is time, Y axis is frequency, brightness is loudness. This [image above shows] a woman speaking in Spanish. the bright wormy things are vowels, the square-ish blocks on the top are sibilants (s, ch, sh)….[The] software is for audio clean-up/restoration. It’s like photoshop for audio.”
Muscle Memory
I posted an old picture from 1981 of our home office on the group page. Reactions to it lead to a conversation that explored, in part, how muscle memory {archived} and the new technology we used back then intertwined, affecting our lives in positive and negative, simple and complex ways.
Muscle memory: “When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort.”
In this post, I brought up how I had (and still have) a habit of hitting ctrl-S on my computer keyboard every few minutes to save whatever I’m working on to avoid losing hours worth of work. This habit formed while using glitchy older software, like WordPerfect in DOS, that would either crash deleting all my work, or inexplicably clear after hitting seemingly random keys on the keyboard (a vexing thing that has also happened to my mother).
Funny thing now — when I’m doing something non-digital, like painting, and I make a mistake, I feel the urge to click ctrl-Z on an invisible keyboard to undo. Paul mentioned the problems he had with one particular crashy piece of software that had assigned “ctrl-Q” for saving. When he replaced that software with another, he had trouble adjusting: “…for the first month or so on [the new software] I’d hit quit whenever I wanted to hit save…” and he would lose his work.
While these stories are funny in hindsight, they speak of our tendencies to create habits to simplify the complexities of our daily tasks. None of us noticed our reliance on clicking ctrl-# until the keyboard shortcuts no longer worked. What other tools have we been relying upon in the same manner, such as the design of a website UI, the size and shape of a monitor screen, the shape of a mouse, the sounds our digital tools make, etc. that have this kind of influence on our lives? These are human-designed tools that change as a designer or inventor attempts to register new patents, not natural ones which last for a millennia in the physical world. Which of these tools might cause us harm if they were to become unstandardized, or discontinued? Which of our senses are being deprived of input as we spend more and more time interacting with digital tools?
The Smurfs vs Bugs Bunny
It should be noted that Dad played opera and other music in the house all the time, so music was a prominent and important element in our lives that we paid attention to.
One day in 1992, while attending my music history class at Hofstra University, the entire class realized that we all knew Franz Schubert’s Symphony №8, “Unfinished,” Allegro moderato {archived} as the Gargamel {archived} theme song from the cartoon, The Smurfs. I think the intention of The Smurfs was to introduce classical music to kids (other classical greats were used as themes for other characters in the show), but my fellow music students all sardonically joked at the time that the plan had backfired: even now, I still think of Gargamel, and forget Schubert, when I hear this music.
In response to my concern for The Smurf’s dulling of classical music, replacing it with vapid cartoon characters, Paul posted three Youtube videos of old cartoons that used classical music, including the famous Bugs Bunny cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?
Both Paul and I agreed that the way the music was presented in the Loony Tunes {archived} and Tom & Jerry {archived}(LT and T&J) cartoons was much more successful at introducing us to classical music than the Smurfs had been, even though the titles of the works and their composers were not cited until the end credits. I believe that the reason for this is that LT and T&J featured the music in their cartoons, rather than using it as representational background motifs for major characters as the Smurfs had.
Wrote Scott McCloud about the cartoon character, “The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled…we don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it.” The characters in LT and T&J participated in the music, rather than simply being dramatized by it, so, if McCloud is on to something, whatever connection I may have had to the characters in cartoons would have defined my connection to the music. Paul seemed to relate to this, and Dad mentioned that the soundtrack from The Smurfs consisted of what was likely lazily-sourced royalty-free recordings. Did LT and T&J allow for more of a kind of participatory learning compared to The Smurfs?
Educational Video Games Have Been Around For Awhile
I asked my parents whether or not they thought any of the videogames Paul and I played as kids were educational in any way. I don’t think they were educational for me, but then again, with the exception of Atari’s Adventure (see .gif above), I didn’t take that strong an interest in them.
Dad thought they were mainly good for entertainment and distraction, but didn’t recall any educational value, so I brought up the game he installed on our Apple IIe called Robot Odyssey {archived}. Paul promptly found an old game emulator online and, “…got stuck at the exact same spot i got stuck as a kid :/ “
This all connects directly to the post about a picture that was on the wall of the office:
The Pumpkin & The Cabbage
Dad had placed this image on the wall of the office to remind Paul and me not to use the computer solely for playing videogames. Ironically, the image had been cropped off of an advertisement published in Enter Magazine {archived} that promoted educational videogames. While the image didn’t really curb the use of videogames, both my brother and I learned to code in Basic, and wrote our papers for school on the computer.
It’s important to note that our use of the computer did not rival our time with the boob tube:
The Idiot Box
For shiggles, before I had thought to set up the Facebook group page and involve my family at all, I googled ‘television series 1970s 1980s,’ to try to recall all the shows I watched regularly when I was a kid. So far, I’ve come up with a list of 147 sitcoms, cartoons, action adventure, and scifi shows that I watched from pilot to season finale. Can you believe there were so many?! I’m thoroughly embarrassed. It’s two decades worth, so I guess that makes the high number somewhat understandable, but it’s still a lot! It’s very likely the TV turned my head into a pumpkin or cabbage more so than any videogame.
Television tends to be very objective, for me at least. I used to let these shows completely entertain me. I didn’t try to interpret anything, or figure out why aspects of each show were presented (designed, written, etc.) until a short-lived television show called the Idiot Box {archived} began airing on Mtv {archived}. The show’s title gave me a bit of a wakeup call. I recall wondering if these shows were defining my sense of reality in a skewed way, but didn’t know how to explore that suspicion. When I got to music school at Hofstra, I refused to watch any new TV shows with my roommates because I felt oversaturated and dumbed down.
(I haven’t put them in any order, but the whole list of TV shows are further down in this post.)
It’s too bad that I didn’t look behind the curtain of all my favorite TV shows and movies; I certainly missed a lot of juicy, intelligent stuff that was trying to reach my hypnotized brain. For example, sometime around the early aughts, while rewatching the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory {archived} with Gene Wilder, I realized that the ditty Wonka plays in his musical lock is not from a Rachmaninoff composition as the character, Mrs. Teevee, so arrogantly states. It’s from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This was not an error made by the movie’s writers. The scene, and many others in the movie, is a character-building one that establishes an adult stereotype that Mrs. Teevee represents. The child characters in the movie are meant to guide the child viewers against misbehaving…but the adult characters in the movie are also there to guide the adults. Looking at the scene now, it seems to me that the movie itself takes an arrogant stance, evinced by the fact that Willy Wonka does not correct Mrs. Teevee’s mistake, thus not correcting any viewer confusion. The viewer is left on their own to figure out who to follow in this moment.
Screen grabs of the scene are below, but you can see the segment of the movie on YouTube here. Because it’s copyrighted content, I can’t embed the snippet on this blog post. Which is just fine with me.
In reflection to my post about this, my mom wrote that the television definitely controls conversation in general. When she and my dad go out for dinner, they are more easily able to talk about things. My dad compared his experience with television from his own childhood to now, “[My brother] Tony and I were allowed almost no TV when growing up in the ’50s, and the habit became ingrained. Tony rarely watches TV now. I got attracted to some of the series you listed [in the 1970s and 80s]. Eventually I lost interest completely, judging the level of writing and acting to be vastly inferior. I felt that the industry was creating fodder for the masses, and the public was soaking it up because that’s all there was. In the ’90s, I actually worked weekly on music for a sitcom starring Michael J. Fox — a huge hit. In the studio, we watched every episode. I don’t remember laughing at a single joke. Now, it’s only feature films and documentaries via Netflix. TV — I either want to see a good performance or I want to learn something. Otherwise, I’m not interested. I used to be a news junkie. These days, I can barely stand to watch it.”
My dad’s mention of the news reminded me of In The News {archived}, a segment of news created for kids that was aired during ad breaks during the “Saturday Morning Cartoons” time. This little news segment bored me as a kid, but I watched it each time it aired. Eventually, it was discontinued. I clearly recall stumbling upon a recording of one of these segments many years later, pre-internet. I was surprised, angered, and concerned that this In the News segment, geared towards tweens, was far more intelligent and insightful than most of the news programs had become by that time. I have a vague recollection that there was a point in time, either in the 1980s or 1990s, when news programs became more subjected to Nielsen Ratings {archived}. Their quality seems to have gone down after that. I cannot find anything online to support this memory.
A Biology Teacher Comments on J.P. Gee’s Good Video Games & Good Learning
While the responses to this particular post on the Facebook group page were not related to technology, I thought my mom’s responses relevant to include here because she related her work as a biology teacher to J.P. Gee’s writing in Good Video Games and Good Learning. In this essay, Gee describes the way videogames can promote good learning, describing some learning principals he felt good games incorporated. My mom didn’t have time to read the entire paper by Gee, but she provided some interesting insight:
“…what I did read I can see applies to teaching science. In the first area he identified — Identity — how does anyone get students to be involved enough to identify with a field of study when that is not their interest? How does a Biology teacher get students to identify with biology when they are really involved in music or the arts? Yes — you can link music to biology through senses, physical attributes, etc., and the arts through anatomy, DaVinci, but not all students are into these specific fields — but are interested in other fields. It’s difficult to get all students to identify with biology in a classroom of 30.”
“Science is all about interaction. That’s what labs are all about. Hands on experience allows students to see the science in action. I took my advanced biology class on a 4 day environmental camping trip in the summer before classes started. How can you understand the environment if you don’t experience it? I twas a great experience for me — and we bonded (how can you not bond when you’re brushing your teeth together at the spigot?).”
“Production — At the end of this field trip on ecology I had the students work together as a unit to develop one lab report for everyone. this meant they had to include the few students who couldn’t go on the trip as well. they had to identify preserved specimens collected, provide a map of the areas we studied, write up a conclusion. so there was INTERACTION and PRODUCTIVITY in this one experience.”
“Risk taking is what drives science. Ninety-nine percent of all experiments fail. But do they really fail — no! That negative result only leads the scientist on to try other challenges to try to find the answers. The Scientific Method insures that the end result will be logical and factual, not based on opinion or faith.”
Paul played devil’s advocate and added, “I agree with the paper for the most part, although it ignores many of the more negative aspects of gaming, such as addiction, lack of physical fitness, eye strain, social degradation, etc. that having been said, I attribute most of the professional skills I’ve developed to early exposure to music and video games.”
Typing Classes Are Important?
Paul and I had chatted on the phone about the typing classes Dad made us take in high school, which really annoyed both of us at the time. He could see how prevalent personal computers were quickly becoming, and knew the keyboard was going to be one of the primary controllers used to access them. While I did well in typing class, goody-two-shoes that I was, Paul completely rejected all of it and failed.
Subsequently, in my early 20s, I wound up working in law firms as a secretary and word processor, applying my impressive typing and computer software skills in a field I would come to hate. While he eventually did learn to type, Paul’s still not that good at it, but there are many ways of controlling a computer beyond the keyboard. His job as a video editor and sound designer uses many kinds of controllers, many of which require different skill sets.
If I’d rebelled against the typing class as my brother had, would I have embarked on a different job track in my 20s? Who knows…
Bibliography
Hamilton, B. “Maker Spaces, Participatory Learning and Libraries” from The Unquiet Librarian [blog], 6 June 2012.
McCloud, S. (1994). The vocabulary of comics. In Understanding comics: the invisible art (pp. 24–59). New York: HarperPerennial.
Freire, P., Ramos, M. B., & Macedo, D. P. (2014). Chapter 2. In Pedagogy of the oppressed {archived}.
Gee, J. P. (2013). Good video games and good learning: collected essays on video games, learning and literacy.
And a ton of embedded hyperlinks along with attempts to link to their archived versions — sorry if it’s a bit clumsy.
The Embarrassingly Long List of Television Shows
The following is a list of all the TV shows I watched regularly in the 1970s and 1980s. This is embarrassing…I’ve most definitely missed more than a few. No, I will not organize it according to year, network, or genre — it’s hard enough not getting stuck reminiscing about all these things:
- Mtv (constantly watched this)
- Cheers
- 120 Minutes
- M*A*S*H
- Three’s Company
- Mary Tyler Moore
- Cosby Show
- Different Strokes
- Family Ties
- Growing Pains
- Who’s the Boss
- The Idiot Box
- Alf
- Silver Spoons
- Mr. Belvedere
- Perfect Strangers
- Married…With Children
- Night Court
- WKRP in Cincinnati
- Happy Days
- Bosom Buddies
- Murphy Brown
- Mork & Mindy
- Roseanne
- V
- A-Team
- Knight Rider (there was also a similar show involving a motorcycle…and maybe another with a helicopter)
- Bionic Man
- Bionic Woman
- The Odd Couple
- The Osmonds
- The Magic Garden
- You Can’t Do That on Television
- Wonder Woman
- The Tracy Ullman Show
- Laverne & Shirley
- Max Headroom
- MacGyver
- Star Trek (the original — Live Long and Prosper)
- Star Trek — New Generation
- Star Trek — Deep Space 9
- Golden Girls
- Quantum Leap
- Sliders
- Monty Python’s Flying Circus
- The Young Ones
- Happy Days
- Kids in the Hall
- Roseanne
- Diff’rent Strokes
- Little House on the Prairie
- L.A. Law
- The Facts of Life
- The Muppet Show
- Sesame Street, Electric Company, Mister Rogers, Fraggle Rock
- Bob Ross
- St. Elsewhere
- Magnum, P.I.
- Taxi
- Moonlighting
- Hill Street Blues
- Designing Women
- Punky Brewster
- CHiPs
- Gimme a Break!
- E/R
- It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
- 21 Jump Street
- Living Color
- Saturday Night Live
- Late Night with [fill in the blank]
- [The Nickelodeon show with the mishmash of video shorts including the Fish Heads song.]
- Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel
- Masterpiece Theater: Elizabeth & I, Claudius
- Nickelodeon: The Third Eye
- What Will They Think of Next?
- Double Dare
- 3–2–1 Contact
- Mr. Wizard’s World
- The Carol Burnett Show
- Archie Bunker’s Place
- Partridge Family
- Doogie Howser, M.D.
- Kate & Allie (I vaguely remember this…I think it was one of my mom’s fave shows?)
- Murder She Wrote
- The Monkees
- I Love Lucy
- The Honeymooners
- One Day at a Time
- Sanford and Son
- Lassie
- Flipper
- Brady Bunch
- Square Pegs
- The Wonder Years
- Northern Exposure
- Space 1999
- Just Say Julie
- Remote Control
- Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes
- Club Mtv (there were several teen dance club shows)
- Remote Control
- Totally Pauly
- Liquid Television
- Thundercats
- Voltron
- Robotech
- Tom and Jerry
- Loony Toons: Bugs Bunny et al
- The Woody Woodpecker Show
- The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
- Ducktales
- He Man and the Masters of the Universe
- Animaniacs
- Inspector Gadget
- The Jetsons
- Thundercats
- The Flintstones
- The Smurfs (ruined my recognition of classical music)
- Scooby-Doo
- Muppet Babies
- Schoolhouse Rock
- Super Friends
- The Pink Panther
- DangerMouse
- Mighty Mouse
- Heckle and Jeckle
- Underdog
- Josie and the Pussycats & Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space
- The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy
- Hong Kong Phooey
- Fat Albert
- Popeye the Sailor
- Yogi Bear
- Magilla Gorilla
- Land of the Lost
- Atom Ant
- Battle of the Planets
- Fantastic Four
- Casper the Friendly Ghost
- Count Duckula
- The Bloodhound Gang
- Zoom
- Great Space Coaster
- Romper Room
- Captain Kangaroo
- Mickey Mouse Club
