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Media Education Research Journal Volume 4 • Number 1

Editors Richard Berger & Julian McDougall

Editors Richard Berger The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University Julian McDougall The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University Editorial Board Dan Ashton Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University John Atkinson Publisher, Auteur David Buckingham Professor of Media & Communications, Loughborough University Julie Hughes Principal Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton Andrew Ireland, Dean of Media, University of Central Lancashire Alex Kendall Professor & Associate Dean: Research, Birmingham City University Dan Laughey Senior Lecturer in Media Theory, Leeds Metropolitan University Marcus Leaning, Head of School of Media & Film, University of Winchester Jackie Marsh, Professor of Education, University of Sheffield Caitriona Noonan, Lecturer in Media, Culture & Communication, University of Glamorgan Susan Orr, Professor & Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement, University of the Arts London Cathy Poole, Director of Lifelong Learning, University of Bristol John Potter, Senior Lecturer in Education & New Media, Institute of Education, University of London Mark Readman, Senior Lecturer in Media & Education, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University Rivka Ribak, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Haifa, Israel Dave Trotman, Reader and Head of Education & Professional Studies, Newman University Jon Wardle, Director of Curriculum, The National Film and Television School Neil Washbourne, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University Designed by Tom Cabot at Ketchup MERJ logo design and document typeset by Nikki Hamlett at Cassels Design www.casselsdesign.co.uk MERJ (2040-4530) is published twice a year by Auteur Publishing Auteur Publishing 24 Hartwell Crescent, Leighton Buzzard, LU7 1NP www.auteur.co.uk telephone: 01525 373 896 email: [email protected] Subscription Rates: Individual – £30.00 (two print issues per year) Institutional – £60.00 (two print issues per year plus pdf ). Price includes UK postage. Please add £9.00 for European postage and £12.00 for US/Rest of World. Make cheques payable to Central Books. Send your subscription order to Auteur Publishing at the above address. © 2013 Auteur Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. The views expressed in the articles herein are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Editors or the Publisher.

Contents Editorial: Dial ‘M’ for Media Education

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Richard Berger & Julian McDougall Full Articles Unpacking Critical Theories to Enhance Creative Practice: A PhD in Screenwriting Case Study

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Craig Batty Facebook’s Ugly Sisters: Anonymity and Abuse on Formspring and Ask.fm

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Amy Binns Organising Media as Social Objects: an exploratory assessment of a core media literacy competence

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Jerry Jacques, Pierre Fastrez & Thierry De Smedt Film Studies and Statistical Literacy

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Nick Redfern Book Reviews Children, Adolescence, and the Media, Edited by V.C Starsburger, B.J. Wislon, B. J. and A.B Jordan 74 Marketa Zezulkova To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist by Evgeny Morozov

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Kris Erickson Laughey’s Canon: Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins Pete Fraser

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Call for papers - MERJ 4.2 The Media Education Research Journal invites submissions for issue 04:02 by the deadline of October 18 2013. MERJ offers a forum for the exchange of academic research into media education and pedagogy conducted by academics, practitioners and teachers situated in all sectors and contexts for media education. The journal aims to encourage dialogue between the sectors and between media educators from different countries, with the aim to facilitate the transfer of critical, empirical, action and discursive research into the complexity of media education as social practice. We invite papers and reports that present the outcomes of media education research related to any aspect of this discussion. See submission guidance on the MERJ website, www.merj.info

New! MERJ website www.merj.info features information about the current issue of the MERJ, including abstracts for every article, which will then build into an online archive. Every editorial will also be available to read online, together with exclusive, web-only content. Visit www.merj. info for contributor guidelines, deadlines for submissions and advance information about future issues.

Editorial

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Editorial Dial ‘M’ for Media Education Richard Berger and Julian McDougall, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University

When the idea for establishing this journal was first conceived – at a Media Education Association event in 2008 where David Buckingham gave his obligatory keynote – the world had yet to hear the words ‘Leveson’ or ‘Hacked Off’. Looking back at MERJ editorials since then, our position has remained constant: that we must move ‘subject media’ (McDougall, 2006) on from medium specificity, towards what we have called a ‘flattened hierarchy’ of texts, with attendant shifts to a more ‘inexpert’ pedagogy. The Leveson inquiry and subsequent debates reveal much about how policy makers and scholars still view ‘the media’, and this has significant implications for media education practitioners. Marshall McLuhan, arguably more fashionable than ever in our current ‘transmediascape’, called for education to facilitate understanding of the ‘grammar’ of media technologies and communication (1964). After decades of failed promises from ‘subject media’, five years ago we could be forgiven for thinking we could finally get started on this (incomplete) project. 2008 was a time of optimism, as it looked as if the new 14–19 curriculum could offer the type of media education that those such as David Buckingham (keynote speaker at our own forthcoming 2013 Media Education Summit) had been proposing for many years, and McLuhan had foreseen, among with so many other things, perhaps. It is now easy to forget that in 2005 there were 145 consortia, covering 95 local authorities. The pilots began in 2008, and a further 197 were approved in the following 12 months. In 2010, UCAS reported that 100 universities supported the new Diploma qualification. At the same time, OFCOM were funding and supporting media literacy education, albeit with a regulatory premise. The perennial (internal) dissensus amongst the community of practice over the falsely polarised academic and vocational modalities aside, these were good times for media education. But the Diploma was doomed from the start; the then Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly stated that the GCSE/A-Level axis was here to stay, and the Diploma was confined to just 14 subject areas. The exam board EdExcel was also very critical, but 11,500 students did sign up, growing to 40,000 in 2010. The Creative and Media Diploma was by far the

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most popular choice. However, the incoming Conservative-led coalition government scrapped it completely in 2010 as part of £13bn of funding cuts and the Creative and Media Diploma’s relatively quick death, like the failure to act on Tomlinson’s broader recommendations before, marks a massive missed opportunity. This current administration, unlike the previous one, does not shy away from large-scale reform of GCSEs and A-Levels either, but in order to reestablish canons and hierarchies, not challenge them for a more progressive and inclusive alternative as Tomlinson had proposed. We are not alone. Many respected historians have voiced concerns about the new proposed History curriculum designed in part by Niall Ferguson, who recently made some controversial remarks about John Maynard Keynes’s sexuality. These moves will only serve to narrow the field of textual inquiry in schools across the UK, to the great detriment of young people. As Buckingham (2012) puts it, we are living and working in hard times, delivering ‘the new nineteenth century curriculum’. The birth and demise of the Diploma book-ended Guardian journalist Nick Davies’ 3-year investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World. The events are well known to media educators. The Leveson Report, published on 29th November 2012, carefully avoided recommending full-scale statutory regulation of the UK’s press, but instead proposed a new regulatory body which would have the power to impose fines and direct corrections and apologies. The pressure group, Hacked Off, fronted by the actor Hugh Grant, lobbied hard for the Leveson proposals to be implemented in full. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, however, was reluctant to do so, preferring to ask newspaper editors to come up with their own proposals. The film producer, and now Labour-peer, David Puttnam even attempted to table an amendment to the deformation bill, to force the setting up of a statutory regulatory body to oversee the UK’s press. The fall-out from Leveson has divided media academics, especially those with previous or current ‘form’ as journalists. Whereas Stephen Jukes holds the ground for a free press on the basis that it is not responsible for the actions of some notable ‘Hacked Off’ campaigners who enter the disputed arena of public interest by their own volition, James Curran cites the unique status of Leveson as a response to public indignation and then tilts the focus to the ‘elephant in the room’ – concentration of media ownership and a culture of impunity (Jukes and Curran, 2013). It is clear from the post-Leveson policy decisions and manoeuvrings that the focus on one medium as a constituent part of a wider ‘media-sphere’ still persists. This is despite the fact that ‘the press’ now exists in a variety of forms, on a variety of platforms, augmented by the chatter of social media; a newspaper is no longer a fairly stable text, but it is part of

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a bigger conversation, which ranges across all media, largely unrestricted. If the ‘Wikileaks’ affair (which we discussed in a MERJ editorial for issue 1 (2) – see Berger and McDougall, 2010) has taught us anything, it is that the Fourth Estate is now akin to a system of commuter towns, all belted together by numerous information highways. Antonio Lopez asks ‘Can convergence and the participatory culture arising with new media practices challenge hegemony?’ and offers ectononal ‘boundary spaces’ as potential contexts for an environmental media education to offer resistance to neoliberal capitalism (2012: 48). What’s clear from the Leveson fall-out is the scale of the chasm between the hegemonic ‘centre ground’ and such counter-cultural ideas. Media education oscillates between both. Many media scholars were quick to fill in any gaps in the ‘post-Leveson’ conversation: in a collection edited by John Mair, entitled After Leveson? (2013), former Director of the BBC’s World Service – and now journalism professor at Cardiff University – Richard Sambrook, along with Deirdre O’Neill, argues that better training is now needed for journalists; Bob Calver calls for more ‘ethics’ teaching in journalism schools and Phil Harding suggests that mid-career and seasoned journalists were the ones who needed to be taught new skills. So, the medium specific view persists, even in post-Leveson postmortems. In their rather self-aggrandising memoir of the phone-hacking scandal Tom Watson and Paul Hickman state that the events were: …the worst scandal in British public life in decades, touching almost every pillar of British society: the royal family, the government, the civil service, the courts, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and, of course, the media. (2012: 275) All of these institutions will survive, virtually intact. Those that dismiss the Leveson findings outright, such as Private Eye editor Iain Hislop and political blogger Paul Staines, argue that there were laws already in place to deal with this type of wrong-doing. The rich and the powerful have their lawyers and their well funded Hacked Off campaign to protect them, but with the Legal Aid budget being cut, that option is not available for most people. During the inquiry it had been ‘the stories of ordinary people whose lives had been callously ruined that had the greatest impact in the packed courtroom’ (Dean, 2013: 432). For the ‘ordinary’ victim, things would never be the same again. While many make great claims about the benefits of a media education, we would not suggest here that a more informed – or ‘media literate’ – British public would have necessarily been any better off. And what role media literacy should – or could – play in this is at the heart of long-standing discursive tensions between critical / protective and

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creative / employable discourses about our relationship to ‘the media’. This balancing act of freedom and constraint is well captured by Dehli (2009) as ‘whether and how the self-positioning of teachers and the positioning of students frame the media education classroom as a particularly fertile site for the production of neo-liberal subjects’ (2009: 5). But certainly the post-Leveson policy making has explicitly displayed how out-of-step our institutions are in dealing with a cross-platform world (see Berger & Woodfall, 2013). The decline, then, of the Creative and Media Diploma was at the very least a missed opportunity to put media education at the heart of the 14-19 curriculum. Media education has always been about a more plural approach to the creative industries and the texts they produce: Children’s media culture increasingly crosses the boundaries between texts and between traditional media forms. (Buckingham, 2003: 28) Similarly, Len Masterman’s words, almost 30-years ago, have probably never been more pertinent in a post-Leveson education context: Media education…is one of the few instruments which teachers and students possess for beginning to challenge the great inequalities in knowledge and power which exist between those who manufacture information in their own interests and those who consume it innocently as news or entertainment. (1985: 11) However the fault lines between the critical/protective and creative/economic versions of media education are drawn, by not allowing children and young people any sort of media education, we are perhaps denying them the tools with which to critique, hold to account and ultimately shape the powerful institutions which lie in wait for them on/ behind social media platforms, at the multiplex, on television and across the web. Training (or re-training) the media practitioners who caused the problem in the first place, as Richard Sambrook and his colleagues suggest, is the wrong solution for a completely different problem; it is education and training which are required. Perhaps it is important to clarify here (although we shouldn’t need to) that we do not consider the diploma to be a form of ‘vocational’ training, set against an ‘academic’ alternative, but in the spirit of Tomlinson, we celebrated its hybrid form and the way it obliged us to change our teaching and to embrace convergence and the aforementioned ‘flattened textuality’. The Leveson inquiry has laid bare the widening fissure between media producers and media audiences; this fissure is not drawn along technological lines, and we certainly

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would not employ the term ‘digital divide’ here, but it certainly is an educational one: Paris Brown, a 17-year old and the UK’s first Youth, Police and Crime commissioner had to resign her post when journalists discovered that her Twitter account still contained tweets from when she was 14-years old. These tweets were (rightly) deemed offensive and derogatory towards some social groups; in India, human rights worker Jaya Vindhyala was jailed for 14-days, for comments she made about two politicians on Facebook; and in the United States, Cameron D’Ambrosio has been charged with terrorism offenses after posting a selfcomposed rap on Facebook which police considered to be a bomb threat. As Andy Ruddock succinctly puts it: The young people who need access to media and media education…are those who have least access to it. (2013: 177) How quickly times change in education. Just four years passed in between Buckingham’s keynote presentation to the new MEA in 2008, at the conference where MERJ was conceived, and his ‘Hard Times’ address at another MEA gathering in 2012. Our sober conclusion is that whichever way you carve up media education – into the formal and ‘academic’ context of ‘Subject Media’ as it stands, with the innovative and more ‘boundary space’ dwelling diploma or across the curriculum – abandoning Creative and Media and then increasing the general side-lining of creative arts and media education in schools can only restrict access, critical understanding and participation in the public media sphere still further and take us even more steps back from McLuhan’s very modest proposition. In this first edition of the fourth volume of MERJ, we address some of these issues more directly, as Jerry Jacques, Pierre Fastrez and Thierry De Smedt explore how the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects fits into a broader vision of media literacy. And we publish three articles which approach our regular themes from new angles. Craig Batty goes to the heart of theory/practice modalities with his account of the key complexities underpinning the practice-based PhD, namely its development and execution in relation to modes of research. Amy Tinns offers empirical evidence of pastoral challenges in secondary education for female students presented by online anonymity. And Neil Redfern provides a case for statistical literacy as a priority for film education. In the review section, Pete Fraser helms ‘Laughey’s Canon’, this time re-appraising Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers. Marketa Zezulokova reviews the third edition of Children, Adolescence, and the Media, edited by Starsburger, Wislon and Jordan, and Kris Erickson has some problems with Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist.

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Finally, we hope to see you at this year’s Media Education Summit in September. This year the Summit is hosted by Sheffield Hallam University. David Buckingham, Natalie Fenton, Susan Orr and Warp Films’ Barry Ryan provide our keynotes. This will be our sixth conference, and as usual, there will be a MERJ pre-conference event, featuring Sarah Pink, plus the usual ‘MERJ Conversations’ strand running throughout the two days. You can find out more here: http://www.cemp.ac.uk/summit/2013/

References Berger, R. & Woodfall, A., 2012. The Digital Utterance: a cross-media approach to media education. In: Ibrus, I & Scolari, C. A., eds. Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, Education. Oxford: Peter Lang, 111-126. Berger, R & McDougall, J., 2010. ‘Doing Wikileaks: New Paradigms and (or?) Ecologies for Media Education’. Media Education Research Journal 1(2): 7-12. Buckingham, D., 2003. Media Education: literacy, learning and contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity. Buckingham, D., 2012. Hard Times: Media Education and the New Nineteenth Century Curriculum. London: Keynote Presentation to Media Education Association Conference, 1.12.12 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fLEQm9CP1o&list=UL [accessed 4.6.13] Dean, M., 2013. Democracy Under Attack: how the media distort policy and politics. Bristol: The Policy Press. Dehli, K., 2009. Media literacy and neo-liberal government: pedagogies of freedom and constraint. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 17:1, 57-73. Jukes, S. & Curran, J., 2012. Media Reform Post Leveson. Bournemouth: conference presentations, 8.2.13. Lopez, A., 2012. The Media Ecosystem. Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions. Mair, J., ed., 2013. After Leveson? The Future for British Journalism. Bury St Edmonds: Arima Publishing. Masterman, L., 1985. Teaching the Media. London: Routledge. McDougall, J., 2004. Subject Media: A Study in the Socio-Cultural Framing of Discourse. Birmingham: University of Birmingham PHD Thesis - http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/556/1/ McDougall05PhD_A1a.pdf [accessed 4.6.13] McLuhan, M., 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet Books. Ruddock, A., 2013. Youth and Media. London: Sage. Watson, T. & Hickman, M., 2012. Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain. London: Penguin.



Full Articles

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Unpacking Critical Theories to Enhance Creative Practice: A PhD in Screenwriting Case Study Craig Batty, RMIT University, Australia

Keywords: Screenwriting; screenplay; PhD; supervision; narrative structure; media practice

Abstract Drawing from my own experiences of the practice-based research degree, this article outlines some of the key principles I consider to be necessary for negotiating a PhD in the specific area of screenwriting, for both the candidate and the supervisor. Referencing my own and others’ ideas of the practice-based PhD, the article places the screenwriter at the centre of its investigation, celebrating their role in the interplay between the creative and the critical; between practice and theory; between doing and thinking. It argues that just like the protagonist of a screenplay, the screenwriting PhD should take its candidate on a journey: one that improves not only craft skills, but also an understanding of what it means to write for the screen.

Undertaking a PhD is daunting for any candidate. With expectations like being able to demonstrate ‘a systematic acquisition and understanding of a substantial body of knowledge which is at the forefront of an academic discipline or area of professional practice’ (Bournemouth University, 2009: 71), resulting in work ‘of a quality to satisfy peer review, extend the forefront of the discipline, and merit publication’ (ibid.) and that is ‘an independent and original contribution to knowledge’ (ibid.: 12), the PhD journey is far from easy. Whether the candidature is full-time for a solid three to four years, or part-time for up to six or seven years, there will be times when candidates question and probably doubt what they are doing. If this was not testing enough, we could suggest that there are further challenges and complexities for candidates undertaking practice-based PhDs; those in Creative Writing, for example, which according to Krauth, ‘worry university administrations, attract scorn from some older writers and academics, and bring in more

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candidates that we can handle’ (2007: 10). As Brien and Williamson argue, ‘many [concerns] are magnified when dealing with newer academic discipline areas such as the creative arts [… where] emergent research practice seeks to legitimise alternative forms of knowledge production that do not always sit comfortably alongside accepted norms of research’ (2009: 1-3). This very fact, of ‘newer academic discipline areas’, is indeed the cause of such complexities for the practice-based PhD: if the territory is relatively new, how can we be sure of what is acceptable? If there is a shorter history of completions in such discipline areas, where do we turn to for models of best practice? These are fundamental questions for any candidate undertaking a practicebased PhD, and for their supervisors alike; and, although they are actively being explored in current scholarship, they still have a fair way to go in being answered. In the area of Creative Writing, recent PhD graduate Sarah Dobbs writes: ‘What actually constitutes research? It is the practice of writing, yes, but does this mean any writing, or does this mean informed writing, whereby the author has employed traditional research methods, data gathering for example?’ (2011: 67). A basic question perhaps, but an important one that addresses specific concerns about how a PhD candidate working with practice can be measured alongside one working with traditional methods of research. As outlined, there are many complexities and many unanswered questions relating to the practice-based PhD, whether it be in Creative Writing, Media Practice, Visual Arts, and so on. In this way, questions like the one posed by Dobbs are, I would argue, fundamental in developing models of best practice that can be drawn upon by current and future candidates and supervisors. It is the intention of this article, therefore, to explore how a practice-based PhD might be considered and constructed, and, by association, supervised. The discipline area of Creative Writing will be used to facilitate this exploration, not only because of the literature available and the international developments that have taken place, but because it also allows me to draw from my own experiences of undertaking a PhD in this area. However, because my own PhD was in the sub-discipline area of Screenwriting, it is my hope that the discussions will also speak to those in the areas of Media and Screen Practice. As Williamson, Brien and Webb articulate, many supervisors believe that ‘as long as you have been supervised at some point, you are considered capable of supervising’; furthermore, that ‘in the beginning [as a new supervisor], most supervisors rely on a mixture of trial and error, and applying techniques that were applied to them – whether or not those techniques were successful’ (2008: 2). Therefore, as a relatively new supervisor myself, I feel that it is extremely useful to draw on my own practice-based PhD experiences in that it will allow me to reflect on what worked and where I got stuck; and, perhaps more

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crucially, will enable me to understand how I was successful in integrating theory with practice in order to warrant a satisfactory completion, attaining the required standard of a more ‘traditional’ PhD.

The Creative Writing Research Landscape Graeme Harper is seen by many as a leading figure in the development of Creative Writing research, having written and edited numerous books and articles on the topic, many of which specifically in relation to the PhD. He was also my PhD supervisor, which I feel is important to mention because of the effect this had on how I developed and executed my work, specifically the complex integration of theory and practice. In one of his articles, Harper articulates clearly his views on the fabric of Creative Writing research. Considering that new practice-based PhD candidates do not necessarily understand exactly how and where their research will take them, and how theory and practice will be pieced together in the final ‘package’, I believe that Harper’s views are a very useful starting point: Some of this [Creative Writing research] is concerned with the pragmatics of putting words on a page, the actual physical act of creative writing. But a great deal more is concerned with linking the individual (i.e. the understanding and approach of the individual writer) with the holistic (i.e. understanding of genre, form, convention, the market, the audience). There are similarities here between the post-event analysis of literature, film, theatre and other art forms, but the difference is plain enough: the critical understanding employed is used to assist the creative writer in the construction of a work at hand, and/or of their future work. (2007: 19) Quite simply, a practice-based PhD should be about practice; the PhD in Creative Writing should be about creative writing, where students research and understand factors that are relevant to the act of writing. In contrast to an English Literature PhD, for example, a practice-based PhD does not speculate on the intentions of the writer, nor does it look back at a creative artefact from an outsider’s perspective. Rather, it is the intentions of the writer, and looks into the artefact from a creator’s perspective. As O’Mahony reflects, ‘the unique quality of the PhD in Creative Writing is that it gives writers the opportunity not only to write, but also to find ways of elucidating the process of writing by referring not only to their own work but to the work of other writers who have gone before them’ (2007: 46). Harper continues that ‘it is entirely possible to celebrate Creative Writing as a human activity without valuing it solely, or even primarily, for the material outcomes it produces’

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(2009: 64). This once again gives a candidate ammunition to consider their creative artefact in a personal and responsive way, for example questioning why they want to write it in the first place: business, pleasure, otherwise. Harper’s assertions also encourage us to understand that Creative Writing might function as a research methodology to uncover a deeper critical understanding of writers and their writing. In this way, understanding that Creative Writing is an activity that does not necessarily have a material (commercial) outcome allows candidates and supervisors to consider that creative practice can in fact be a research methodology, not merely an end product to complement any traditional research that may have been conducted. This idea is shared by Dobbs, who writes: ‘It sounds almost strange to say that the purpose of a PhD is not to get published. Publication can and does happen, but these novels/collections/works should still make “an original contribution to knowledge”’ (2011: 69). The creative artefact of a practice-based PhD does not necessarily have to be a material artefact; in fact, perhaps the creative element should not be a material artefact, and rather a creative artefact that embodies a set of research questions and presents the results in a non-traditional way. Krauth offers a useful example here from Newcastle University in the UK, whose online literature promoting its Creative Writing PhD states: ‘instead of the thesis being derived from the creative component, a poem or story or chapter or scene may arise directly from research and may indeed drive the academic writing on, so that an intertwined structure is created, observing the same proportions, but exploring the established relationship between text and criticism in a new and dynamic manner’ (2007: 12). This is a somewhat inspirational statement of how such a PhD will be developed and executed, though according to O’Mahoney is a rarity. She cites the struggle she had in finding an appropriate institution to undertake her PhD, noting that many of them saw creative and critical components as entirely different entities, sometimes supervised by staff from entirely different departments. In this way, she suggests that candidates ‘may feel they have to develop dual personalities in order to satisfy the conflicting demands of creativity and criticism’ (2007: 40). Things may have moved on since then, with the number of completions increasing, supervisory capacity building, and universities adapting to developments in the discipline, but it is important to note that these practices still can exist, and where they do, they have the potential to compromise the candidate and their work. If this is the case, the practice-based PhD candidate should try and better understand how theory and practice can combine, leading to a project that is both more manageable and more imaginative. As Krauth recalls, the more fulfilling PhDs for him as a supervisor and examiner are ‘audacious, revolutionary and convincing because they [take] on not just their specific projects, but also the project of freedom to create exceptionally in the

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academic context’ (Krauth, 2007: 18). Thus, rather than writing theoretical and creative components individually, one blind to the other, candidates should embrace the idea that the ‘oscillatory and interrogative exploration between creative and critical [may be] what brings about the required original contribution to knowledge’ (Dobbs, 2011: 68-69). This approach is, I would argue, particularly useful for the supervisor who has little experience of working with practice-based candidates, and who may indeed be struggling to understand the philosophical difficulties a candidate is experiencing. As a result of such discussions on the practice-based PhD, in 2008 the Higher Education Committee of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), the UK’s Subject Association for Creative Writing, developed a benchmark statement for research in Creative Writing. Supported by leading Creative Writing academics from a range of UK universities, the statement ‘offers a reference point for those who assess research proposals and research outputs in Creative Writing, and it provides a guide for those developing research degrees in Creative Writing’ (2008: 11). Many UK universities have used it in the development of research projects and research degree programmes, and with the accompanying benchmark statement on Creative Writing pedagogy, it is under review for official endorsement by the Quality Assurance Agency. Needless to say, the statement holds weight and is an excellent resource for candidates and supervisors of the PhD in Creative Writing. One of the first articulations of the statement is: Practice-led research in Creative Writing uses creative practice to explore, articulate and investigate. The range of explorations and articulations is as broad as the range of possible subjects, emotions and ideals prevalent in the world. However, the simple definition is: that the creative writer will undertake this research through the act of creating; that they will invest knowledge and understanding into this practice, and that they will develop their knowledge and understanding through their practice. The results of this practice-led research will demonstrate this knowledge and understanding (ibid.). As highlighted by Dobbs’ thoughts above, the creative component of such a PhD should embody the research question and in some way present the results. A candidate should therefore be encouraged to understand that they can actively produce a creative work drawn from a specific research agenda, and that their response to all of this should speak to other practitioners. They are not analysing creative work from the perspective of a literary analyst. Furthermore:

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...that the creative writer will undertake this research through the act of creating; that they will invest knowledge and understanding into this practice, and that they will develop their knowledge and understanding through their practice … Practice-led research is not research without critical understanding. Rather, it is research in which the act of practice is central and in which critical or theoretical understanding is contained within, and/or stimulated by, that practice … Knowledge in Creative Writing may be thought of as incorporating a practical skill and critical or theoretical knowledge that underpins and supports that Creative Writing practice. (ibid.) Once more, this reminds us that practice-based PhDs should unquestionably combine practice and theory as one; that doing and thinking, creating and understanding, should fuse and be directed to explore one another. The resulting ‘new knowledge’ can thus be seen to grow from creative-critical experimentations, insightful reflections and subsequent practice-based applications that take place. In other words, theory and practice collide, and as the candidate considers what each means for the other, they are bestowed with knowledge that can then produce new creative work.

Defining Research Questions Here I would like to draw more openly from my own experiences of being a practice-based candidate, completing a PhD in Creative Writing from Bangor University in the UK in July 2009. As already highlighted, my PhD focused specifically on the subject of Screenwriting, and in order to drill down more productively into the specifics of development and execution, I would like to draw from particular examples that appeared in the final text. As well as illuminating some of the ideas being explored, the purpose of this is to provide raw material that may be useful for other candidates and supervisors. As Harper tells us: As creative writers […] we spend most of our lives in the event of Creative Writing: that is, in the doing. We spend most of our lives working as individuals, or because of individual motivations, feelings, ideals, dispositions. So the question of what finished artefacts we produce and the value of these in an aggregated cultural situation is, already, only a small part of our daily lives, if it is a part at all. (2009: 65) Therefore, when we write, we have a purpose, and that purpose is something of intrinsic value to us. It could be a feeling; it could be an impulse; it could be a challenge.

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The PhD began for me with an interest in the idea that film protagonists undergo an emotional transformation (the character arc) as a result of undertaking a physical journey (the plot). This was drawn not only from teaching screenwriting, but also from experiences of receiving feedback on my own screenplays from industry personnel. What I struggled with, I reflected, was telling stories that had a heart; screenplays that explored themes, not just used clever plotting. The notion of two narrative threads working for one whole is outlined in many screenwriting books, but as I became aware, nobody had presented a clear model for how the two develop: symbiotically, one changing as a result of the each other, and so on. Not only that, from some initial research I found that the terminology used in such books was different, nobody ever referencing another’s work as one would expect in scholarly works. Using this as my basis, I felt there was enough of a gap in the knowledge being presented on the subject that if researched thoroughly, could be presented to add to the canon of screenwriting literature. Importantly, I also felt this was something that would help me with my own practice, allowing me to apply the results of research back into the act of screenwriting. It was here that the PhD began to take shape and feel like it had the potential to offer something that worked both practically and philosophically. We can draw upon Harper’s notion of ‘capability’ and ‘knowledgeability’ (2007: 20) in Creative Writing research to understand what was happening here. In essence, this is the idea that research into a subject enables a better practice of that subject (capability), at the same time developing a greater awareness of what we know about the subject (knowledgeability). This produces a ‘responsive critical understanding’ (Harper, 2007: 21): a process of moving beyond mere reflection and instead towards application. Or, rather than reflecting on the practice of the subject, understanding it and then just leaving it there, knowledge gleaned is then applied back in practice. This, one would hope, results in a better, more enhanced ability of practice. Understanding thus becomes responsive because of how it is used, not just acknowledged: …if reflection was all we encountered in Creative Writing, we would never see another piece of Creative Writing produced – creative writers would be too busy ‘reflecting’ on their first works! Most importantly, the creative writer’s response is meant to improve that writer’s ability to develop their own Creative Writing. That is its purpose: it is not reflective, but responsive: its purpose is to initiate action. (ibid.) Once I had understood this sufficiently, I felt the need to make it apparent in the final text. This was because as well as being important to state my intentions with the PhD, I felt

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it necessary to signpost clearly my approach to the PhD. After all, there was no guarantee that the eventual external examiner would have experience of working with practicebased PhDs. To give a sense of how this signposting, here is a direct quotation from the Introduction to my thesis: As will be explored, what lies at the centre of this research is a deeper understanding of the relationship between ‘what a character wants’ and ‘what a character needs’. This will be argued to form the basis of a dual narrative journey for the mainstream feature film protagonist: the physical journey and the emotional journey. Understanding these two journeys will help to map the movement of a protagonist across a screenplay narrative, both physically and emotionally. The results of this, addressing both my own and an audience’s desire to understand how ‘want’ and ‘need’ function in a complete narrative, will appear in a two-fold way: more traditionally, as a piece of critical research presented in a scholarly way; and, more innovatively, as a piece of creative work, a screenplay, which both responds to and feeds into the critical discussions presented. Creative and critical artefacts thus work together in symbiosis, just like ‘want’ and ‘need’ in a screenplay, offering a complete PhD narrative experience. It was important to signpost the PhD’s intention to work as a ‘package’, and that the approach taken in producing it would facilitate this. This is something I now always make clear to my own PhD students, especially at application stage: that the two artefacts may be physically separate, but should be philosophically connected. To go back to the notion of responsive critical understanding, knowledge gleaned through research should enhance one’s creative practice, not stand alone as a piece of critical theory. Needless to say, this very much guided me. Sarah Salway articulates the notion of responsive critical understanding when writing about the transition between an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing. She states: The two strands – theoretical and creative – feed into each other continuously. I often put down textbooks to jot down notes for the novel […] So I am confident that analysing my creative process has stimulated rather than inhibited my writing. (2003: 36) For her, then, the relationship between creative and critical work functions on a practical as well as a philosophical level: as she thinks, she writes; and presumably, as she

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writes, she thinks. To refer back to Dobbs, she too highlights how throughout the PhD journey she was able to come to a better understanding of her practice by undertaking theoretical research. She notes: The question ‘What is your work about?’ at PhD level comes with a whole field of other questions, such as ‘Where are you in this text?’ and ‘What was the reasoning behind constructing the narrative in this way?’ I was asking and answering these questions during the writing and rewriting of the PhD novel and by the third year I had a stronger sense of knowing their answers and their evolution. And it was only when writing and rewriting the critical part of the thesis that I felt better able to articulate the conclusions I was coming to. (2011: 68) Harper spells this out quite simply: ‘This practice, investigation, formal or informal theorizing or modelling, and re-practice and re-investigation, is how knowledge is created, and it is how critical understanding evolves’ (2007: 19). Creative and critical endeavours thus work in symbiosis, and for those working towards or supervising a practice-based PhD, I suggest that this is something that should be constantly reminded. To quote from my own thesis again: The role of the screenwriter is thus at the centre of this investigation: a negotiation between creative and critical, practice and theory, doing and thinking. Although creative and critical artefacts are separated in presentation, they combine to produce a singular understanding of the research question: what is the relationship between the physical and the emotional journey undertaken by a mainstream feature film protagonist, and how can this be mapped out onto narrative structure? Like a screenplay itself, the overall PhD research suggests a synthesis of two narrative threads: the transformational journey of the screenplay protagonist, and that of the screenwriter himself, my journey. As Nelmes argues, ‘[t]he ideas explored and the characters created [in a screenplay] have, to some extent, to be an extension of the writer and the writer can often make the most of this when pursuing a story’ (2007: 111). In Offside [the screenplay component of the PhD], the ‘extension of the writer’ is the critically inquiring mind, seeking to explore and express in a creative medium the question of a protagonist undertaking physical and emotional journeys within one contained narrative.

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Clearly Stating Intentions As already highlighted, practice-based PhDs in the arts are still relatively new territory, which can cause issues of parity and legitimacy for the candidate, the supervisor and even the external examiner, when compared to more traditional PhDs. With this in mind, I believe it is important for candidates and supervisors to fully understand why they are undertaking this type of PhD (approach, methodology, and so on), and why they wish to present it the way they intend (artefact, performance, exhibition, and so on). This will ensure that the candidate can speak with authority about their project, and will be fully equipped to deal with any prejudices that may emerge. From personal experience, this is something I had to contend with. I was aware that using more ‘acceptable’ forms of research material would position me on safer ground, yet because my whole PhD was about the practice of screenwriting and its subsequent connection to industry expectations, I was keen to use materials such as trade magazines and how-to books that were appropriate for the subject in question. Therefore, having purposely used more traditional film and television theories about character and audience emotion in the Introduction to my final thesis, providing the reader with a more familiar approach, it was important to then give a clear rationale for using practice- and industry-based sources for some of the thesis. Although any PhD will require the candidate to regularly signpost their reasons for doing what they do, in an under-examined area like Screenwriting, it could not be emphasised enough. As I wrote: These theoretical insights provide a strong starting point for the creative and critical scope of this PhD. However, it is not enough to merely understand the academics of how narrative threads of film work. Instead, they must be practiced; drafted in numerous forms and experimented with. Films must be watched and screenplays read in order to ‘feel’ the narrative in action, sensing what works and what does not. The views, methods and ‘realities’ of screenwriters and industry professionals must also be read, in order to immerse the screenwriter in a culture of writing where the creative endeavours of film are explored. I then followed this up by offering a deeper discussion that as well as setting the context for my practice-based work reinforced the overall approach that I had decided to take. Once again, I would like to suggest that even if such arguments are not presented in the final thesis, they are explored and understood in an early stage of the development of the PhD so that its eventual execution will feel relevant, authentic and innovative.

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The eclectic range of texts used in the critical commentary is deliberate. Not only are there few screenwriting texts specifically relevant to the research, screenwriting itself draws inspiration from a variety of sources. The newest form in the lineage of creative writing, when compared to prose, poetry, stage and radio scriptwriting, screenwriting is still a young academic discipline. Few screenwriting texts exist in the ‘academic canon’ because they are either somewhat recent, or adopt a simple ‘how to’ approach. Therefore, some of the works drawn upon are from mythology and more general dramatic writing, as well as articles from screenwriting publications aimed specifically at industry professionals. However, because ‘the literary critic does not draw upon the vast sites of knowledge that the creative writer draws upon’ (Harper, 2006b: 162), this range of sources is entirely appropriate for a discipline that is both process-based (the act of screenwriting) and productbased (the screenplay itself ). (ibid.) As Harper suggests, creative writing should seek to create its own ‘site of knowledge’ (2006a: 3) which has its concerns in process and practice, not ‘post event’ speculation. This critical commentary, therefore, is enriched by a wide range of sources, appropriate for such a creative-critical investigation. This is not a Film Studies PhD which offers a historical exploration of screenwriting, nor is it an English PhD which deconstructs the work of a specific screenwriter; it is a Creative Writing PhD which seeks to advance knowledge about a structural model of screenwriting, and apply it to practice. ‘[C]reative writing research deals with human agency, human intention, behaviour, reasons and meanings’ (2006b: 162), therefore research which intends to help the screenwriter with his intentions, and to enhance his writing processes, is absolute. Subsequently, the research undertaken will seek to advance a body of ‘creative theory’ (Melrose, 2007: 110) which will help screenwriting, ‘a form which is complex, has a language of its own yet is driven by the demands of the medium of film’ (Nelmes, 2007: 113), in pursuit of its own site of knowledge. Analysing the screenplay and the process of its writing, Nelmes shares the view that ‘creative theory’ needs to be developed in an appropriate way. She writes that ‘the screenplay is a form worthy of study rather than being viewed as merely the precursor to the completed feature length film’ (ibid.: 107). Similarly, Spicer’s (2007) work on ‘Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History’ argues that the role of the screenwriter should be acknowledged in the filmmaking process, not one that is absolved once a director has been taken on board and the screenplay put into production. Therefore, although the screenplay is the blueprint to the film production process, ‘the first cog in a very large wheel’ (Nelmes, 2007: 107), it should not be denigrated; critically, it should be celebrated. Screenwriter

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Rupert Walters’ view about the screenplay as ‘artefact’ goes some way in justifying Nelmes’ desire to create further, more distinct knowledge about the screenplay and its formulation: Everyone talks about the script being a blueprint – and it is, in the sense that it gets turned into something else – but it also has to be a piece of writing which stands up on its own, because the producer who’s deciding whether to pay for it and the actor who’s deciding whether to be in it want to be transported by the experience of reading it (cited by Owen, 2003: 9). The screenplay is thus a text in itself: an artefact with its own agenda, be that commercial or artistic, with its own form and function. Nelmes rightly argues that ‘screenwriting is an almost invisible process and whilst the script may be the blueprint for the film, it is rarely admired in itself’ (2007: 108). Therefore, this critical commentary addresses the ‘lack’ of attention paid to the screenplay and its creation. As already suggested, the process of writing a screenplay can be closely linked to the critical knowledge required to write a screenplay, connecting screenwriting and screenplay, writer and artefact. The ‘rarely admired’ screenplay will thus be brought into the limelight in the research that follows, considering both its creation and its form. The purpose of the research, in relation to the screenplay, is ‘to assist the writer in the construction of further new creative work […] as well as assisting the writer in comparing and contrasting their work with that of other writers, post the act of writing’ (Harper, 2006b: 162). This appears ‘in process’ (ibid.), before, during and after writing the screenplay, and can thus be understood as ‘responsive critical understanding’: applied knowledge ‘that can be outlined either separately to the creative work of a writer, or incorporated into the modes and methods of creative practice’ (ibid.: 165). Therefore, both purpose and product of creative writing research are found embodied in what follows, combining to add originality to screenwriting as a developing site of knowledge: ‘to find the subject approached as if it is not a site of knowledge in its own right creates a situation in which the chances of achieving a ‘justified true belief’ are considerably diminished’ (Harper, 2006a: 3). “Justified true belief” in this sense can only come from recognition of screenwriting as practice; or, as Joseph Campbell posits, the need to work with a text in whatever form is appropriate to the way in which it is intended: Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky […] the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved (1993: 249).

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Conclusion I have attempted in this article to outline some of the key complexities underpinning the practice-based PhD, namely its development and execution in relation to modes of research. By looking specifically at the PhD in Creative Writing, and with reference to my own PhD experience, I have attempted to outline some of the key principles that might aid both candidature and supervision. The discussion is by no means exhaustive, but does touch upon key areas to be considered by candidates and supervisors: the legitimacy of Creative Writing as a method of research; oscillations between creative practice and critical investigation; modelling a thesis that reflects its intentions; and claiming validity for the type of research undertaken. Although a number of principles have been outlined, it should be noted that they are always under scrutiny and ‘in flux’, adaptable from one PhD to another. Nevertheless, I hope that they are useful for both candidates and supervisors involved in practice-based PhDs of any kind. As a final point, it is worth noting the variables that can affect how a PhD is both undertaken and completed. Williamson, Brien and Webb outline these variables as institutional, personal and industrial (2008: 6–9). The first two of these can be applied to any PhD student and project: the University’s structure, its research strategy, the candidate’s anxiety over their thesis, the specific fabric of their work, and so on. It is the third, however, that is of special interest for the practice-based PhD. According to Williamson, Brien and Webb, PhDs in Creative Writing are subject to changing and highly subjective industrial contexts, whether for the publishing industry (novel writing), the production sector (screenwriting) or even the world of performance (playwriting, poetry). In this way, it is argued that supervisors move beyond a purely academic role into one more commensurate with those in the said industries: editor, agent, script producer, and so on (ibid.: 9). Not only can this create further complexities for the candidate, who might struggle with how they should conceive their project (commercially, academically, both?), it can also complicate expectations around the role of the supervisor. For example, should they only comment on how the candidate’s screenplay explores the research question, or should they apply a professional script editor’s eye to elements such as scene structure, dialogue and visual grammar? This opens up a whole discussion that is not possible to explore further here, though it seems fitting to end on a quotation by Jeri Kroll from Australia. Writing about how practice-based supervisors might get their candidates past the finishing line, she writes: They function as manager, coach and trainer all in one [… and] can transform at will into whatever she needs to be: academic, artist, mentor, disciplinarian,

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cheerleader. And of course, as a creative scholar who embodies all of these bodies from diverse traditions, she obviously understands cross-disciplinarity, (2009: 1–3) Although tongue-in-cheek, this observation might not be altogether far from the truth. For the practice-based PhD supervisor, there is unquestionably a need to know about and be comfortable operating within a variety of scenarios with their candidates: philosophically, methodologically, creatively, pragmatically, commercially and pastorally.

References Batty, C., 2011. Movies That Move Us: Screenwriting and the Power of the Protagonist’s Journey, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Batty, C., 2010. ‘The Physical and Emotional Threads of the Archetypal Hero’s Journey: Proposing Common Terminology and Re-Examining the Narrative Model’ in Journal of Screenwriting, 1(2), 291–308. Batty, C., 2009. When What You Want is Not What You Need: An Exploration of the Physical and Emotional Journeys Undertaken by a Protagonist in a Mainstream Feature Film, PhD Thesis, Bangor University. Bournemouth University, 2009. Code of Practice for Research Degrees, Poole: Bournemouth University. Brien, D. L. and Williamson, R., 2009. ‘Supervising the Creative Arts Research Higher Degree: Towards Best Practice’ in Text (Special Issue: 6). Retrieved August 19, 2011, from http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue6/content.htm Campbell, J., 1993. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, London: Fontana. Dobbs, S., 2011. ‘Should There Be a Fully Creative PhD?’ in Writing in Education (53), pp. 66–70. Harper, G., 2009. ‘Valuing Creative Writing’ in Writing in Education (49), pp. 19–22. Harper, G., 2007. ‘Creative Writing Research Today’ in Writing in Education (43), p. 64–66. Harper, G., 2006a. ‘Introduction’ in Graeme Harper (ed.) Teaching Creative Writing, London: Continuum, pp. 1–7. Harper, G., 2006b. ‘Research in Creative Writing’ in Graeme Harper (ed.) Teaching Creative Writing, London: Continuum, pp. 158–171. Krauth, N., 2007. ‘The Novel and the Academic Novel’ in Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll (eds.) Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 10–20.

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Kroll, J., 2009. ‘The Supervisor as Practice-led Coach and Trainer: Getting Creative Writing Doctoral Candidates Across the Finish Line’ in Text (Special Issue: 6). Retrieved August 19, 2011, from http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue6/content.htm Melrose, A., 2007. ‘Reading and Righting: Carrying on the ‘Creative Writing Theory’ Debate’ in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 109–117. National Association of Writers in Education Creative Writing Research Benchmark Statement, 2008. Retrieved August 20, 2011, from http://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-ineducation/writing-at-university/research.html Nelmes, J., 2007. ‘Some Thoughts on Analysing the Screenplay, the Process of Screenplay Writing and the Balance Between Craft and Creativity’ in The Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 107–113. O’Mahony, N., 2007. ‘That Was the Answer: Now What Was the Question? The PhD in Creative and Critical Writing: A Case Study’ in Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll (eds.) Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 36–47. Owen, A. (ed.), 2003. Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters, London: Bloomsbury. Salway, S., 2003. ‘Changing Habits’ in Writing in Education (Special Issue: Studying Creative Writing in Higher Education), pp. 35–36. Spicer, A., 2007. ‘The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History’ in James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds) The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 89–103. Williamson, R., Brien, D. L. and Webb, J., 2008. ‘Modelling Best Practice in Supervision of Research Higher Degrees in Writing,’ proceedings from the 13th AAWP conference. Retrieved August 19, 2011, from http://www.aawp.org.au/creativity-and-uncertaintypapers.

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Facebook’s Ugly Sisters: Anonymity and Abuse on Formspring and Ask.fm Amy Binns, University of Central Lancashire

Keywords: Formspring, Ask.fm, anonymity, abuse

Abstract New question and answer websites Ask.fm and Formspring have brought highly specific and personal abuse to a new level amongst young people by providing easy anonymity to users within a circle of offline friendship groups culled from Facebook. Relatively unknown due to their unattractiveness to adults, these sites are growing rapidly and have already been associated with at least eight suicides amongst teenagers. Media educators at school level encouraging self-awareness of social media use need to be aware of this new trend. At higher levels, these sites provide a fascinating current case study of online dis-inhibition, and fit into ethical and legal debates on the responsibilities of platform providers, and of individuals as media producers. This paper is based on an anonymous online survey of 302 13 to 16 year-olds at a British state girls’ school. Results showed abuse levels were significantly higher than on Facebook or Twitter. The girls felt using the Q&A sites with their real names felt more real than when asking questions anonymously, but receiving anonymous abuse felt significantly more real than either. Opinions as to the acceptability of ‘sending hate’ were mixed, with some users feeling victims had no right to complain if they had entered the forum.

Overview Social media has been used to good effect as a learning tool by many educationalists at higher levels (Selwyn, 2007), and in schools (Jenkins, 2009; Berger and McDougall, 2011), but beyond the classroom the picture is mixed. Researchers have found complicated relationships between network sites, self-esteem, wellbeing and friendships (Valkenburg et al, 2006; Lee, 2013), with some recognising significant problems of abuse at school age (Ybarra et al, 2007; Juvonen and Gross, 2008). Traditionally, social media used by educationalists such as Facebook, Twitter, and even the group facilities of Blackboard and Escenic are, by their nature, not anonymous,

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though anonymity is not binary. Researchers have examined discursive anonymity online, and differing levels of personal disclosure (Gross and Acquisti, 2005; Schwammlein and Wodzicki, 2012). Some research has compared disclosure levels across different sites (Schrammel et al, 2009). Many researchers are particularly concerned about young people’s levels of disclosure (Waters and Ackerman, 2011). It is widely accepted that behaviour changes according to levels of anonymity online, exhibiting an online dis-inhibition effect (Suler, 2004). Much has been written about anonymous cyber-bullying amongst young people who can ‘hide behind a screen’ to ‘give hate’, (Qing, 2007), with girls seeming particularly likely to suffer in this way (Simmons, 2011). These issues are heightened by the advent of question and answer sites that can be simultaneously anonymous and linked to public, offline identity profiles such as on Facebook, producing very different patterns of behaviour to traditional social networking sites, with extreme personal abuse becoming common. This research examines this phenomenon and compares it with other sites popularly used by teenage girls: Facebook, which explicitly insists on offline identities, and Twitter, where users generally provide a recognisable picture, name or nickname. It works within the paradigm that, when degrees of anonymity are present, de-individuation to some level is likely. It attempts to examine not just how the girls behave on semi-anonymous sites but how much weight they give to their own and others’ behaviour.

On/Off Anonymity: Formspring.me and Ask.fm Most popular platforms only offer the user the chance to define their anonymity in a single profile. Users may choose how much information they wish to disclose and even change their minds (for example, deleting a photograph or phone number), but they cannot easily switch between different levels of privacy on one site. This changed with the launch of question and answer site Formspring in the US in 2009, ‘cloned’ (the owner’s description) by Ask.fm in Latvia in 2010. Although the chat facilities are slightly different, for the purposes of this research, the two sites are treated as identical. These sites, which can be linked to profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc., have both been very popular across the world, with Ask.fm claiming 37 million unique visitors per month across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, against Formspring’s 19-20 million (O’Hear, 2012). In some schools, social circles have migrated to them en masse (Lewin, 2010). They have a dual nature in that users create ‘real world’ social profiles similar to Facebook, or simply log in with their Facebook/Twitter etc profiles, but can then send questions openly or anonymously to each other. If the recipient chooses to answer the question, then both question and answer appear on the recipient’s wall.

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This clear invitation to de-individuation and dis-inhibition while interacting with members of your own offline peer group has been particularly identified by teachers and anti-bullying campaigners as encouraging abusive behaviour, and being particularly tempting for teenage girls desperate to ascertain their social worth. Simmons said: For girls who define success as being liked by everyone, Formspring lets hope spring eternal: you can open an account and maybe, just maybe, you won’t get a mean comment. Or perhaps others will rally to your defense. You’ll be that girl who everyone really loves!... It is a toxic, self-reinforcing cycle. (Simmons, 2011: 133) Online commentator Foster Kamer, of Gawker, who tried Formspring, described it as ‘evil, fun and addictive’. He said: You can just endlessly bomb someone’s Formspring with hate mail, or affection, or subversive questions and you know they’ll read it all, because they’re using Formspring. …they’re trying to get to the good stuff: the questions they want to answer... The high is crack-like. ...At first, it’s fun. And then you want more. You need more. You feel lonely without the questions. Why isn’t anybody asking you any more? Formspring has been associated with at least three teen suicides (Yaniv, 2010; Daily Mail, 2011; James, 2011), and Ask.fm with at least five (Irish Examiner, 2012; Kelly 2013, Robson and Warren, 2012). In the wake of bad publicity, Formspring has attempted to reinvent itself as ‘interest-based’, but Latvian founder of Ask.fm Mark Terebin reportedly shrugged off criticism, saying: ‘We only have this situation in Ireland and the UK most of all. It seems that children are more cruel in these countries.’ (Beckford, 2013) However, as suicide statistics are notoriously unreliable and hard to compare, this may be incorrect.

Research Design I hypothesise that this combination of identity and anonymity is a new online feature, likely to result in increased levels of abuse compared to platforms without this combination. RQ1: Is abuse more common on Formspring/Ask than on other platforms popular with this age group: Facebook/Twitter? A puzzling feature of behaviour on these sites is that girls can delete offensive

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questions without answering, but sometimes choose to answer them, thus publicising insults against themselves. RQ2: How do girls deal with this abuse, and why do they sometimes make abuse public? Although anonymous abuse has always taken place in schools, for example by leaving notes in lockers or writing on toilet walls, I posit that the easy, risk-free nature of these platforms is likely to tempt a larger number of people to misbehave, because their own behaviour feels less ‘real’. I hypothesise that increased abuse is not the result of the same small number of people widening their abuse, but that people who would not abuse offline will do so on this platform. I also wish to know whether or not abuse on this platform is taken to heart, or shrugged off as a ‘known issue’. Thus: RQ3: Does it feel more or less real to use the platform while anonymous, or use it while identified, or to receive anonymous abuse?

Research Methods A survey about anonymity in social networks was drawn up following a focus group at a British state girls’ school to ensure clear language was used and appropriate issues covered. To prevent contamination of the conclusions by students’ becoming aware of the researcher’s ideas, the survey was conducted at a different British state girls’ school in Years nine, ten and eleven (ages 13 to 16). A girls’ school was chosen because cyber-bullying is a particular issue amongst teenage girls (Simmons, 2011). Making an online survey available to girls only at a mixed school posed technical and administrative problems. A state school was chosen to provide the widest possible relevance, though I would caution that the results would not be mirrored uniformly across schools, as a site that is very popular at one may be unused at another. A mixed methods approach (Wimmer and Dominick, 2011: 121), allowed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the girls’ experiences of and reactions to Formspring, Ask and the comparative platforms of Facebook and Twitter using multiple-choice questions with randomised answers. Skip logic was used if respondents did not use a particular platform. To allow the subjects’ voices to be heard, some open questions were included for discourse analysis (Fairbrother, 2007: 60). The school was promised a report on their pupils’ online habits, with identifiers redacted, and a Powerpoint based on students’ answers for use in classes or assembly as a tool for encouraging media awareness and self-awareness. Only two parents refused permission. The remaining children were given access to the survey, hosted on surveymonkey, via the school’s intranet site. They were also given information sheets including anti-bullying helpline numbers and websites.

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It was important ethically that the survey was not compulsory or done in class time so girls didn’t feel their peers or teachers were observing them. However, Year Leaders repeatedly encouraged girls to take part, resulting in a response rate of more than 90 per cent. The open questions also had high response rates, it seemed these students wanted to share their feelings and experiences. All quotes are uncorrected.

Results Of 302 respondents, 130 students had used Formspring or Ask, 164 had used Twitter and 245 Facebook. Anecdotally, Formspring had been popular a year earlier but had been largely abandoned, replaced by Ask.fm.

Feelings about Formspring/Ask: Girls were asked a series of questions about their experiences of Formspring in a multiplechoice format. Results are given below. They were also given an opportunity to write further about how it felt to ask questions anonymously on Formspring or Ask.fm, with 77 out of 130 Formspring/Ask users choosing to respond, which were subject to discourse analysis. Most were brief replies such as ‘fun’. A small number said they used the anonymous option positively as an extension of offline jokes, with coded references for friends. One said: ‘I just write to my friends funny things, but they know its me.’ Others use it as a more tentative way of making contact: ‘well, if you’re on anon then you can ask someone how they’re doing if they’re upset without sounding too personal ... which is easier than asking in real life where it could be awkward.’ Another wrote: ‘it can … help clear up disagreements without the people having to come face to face.’ One-third of responses made comments that could be classified as references to disinhibition or deindividuation: ‘when you’re on anon you could be ANYONE’; ‘you feel like you have power and you can hide behind a screen’; ‘you feel like you can say anything you want’; ‘It’s quite exciting to be able to say something but without your name on it as there’s no consequences for you’; ‘I think then people answer the questions honestly and don’t change it because of who asked the question’; ‘It kind of gives you more confidence, like you can ask people that you don’t know well things.’ The respondents were not directly asked if they ‘gave hate’. However, some responded with comments that made clear they had, such as: ‘It feels better to ask a question anonymously because you don’t have [to] hold back on what you want to say and at the same time it’s bad ’cause you can say whatever you want to anyone, so you can be as mean as you want which can hurt the people you’re saying it to.’

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Receiving and dealing with abuse Of 130 girls who had used Formspring/Ask, 50, or 38 per cent, reported receiving anonymous hurtful, embarrassing or frightening messages (figure 1). These girls were asked about the questions and their responses, which were subject to discourse analysis, though it should be noted that it is the reported questions and answers under analysis. Questions usually focussed on sexual behaviour, looks and projected image, with a few insults around ‘cockiness’. They included (and are recorded as written): ‘your ugly’ ‘you’re wierd’ ‘you’re such a freak’ ‘you should die’ ‘you’re an attention seeking whore’ ‘Everyone in 8c hates you’ ‘what is ur bra size, it looks titch’ ‘your friendship group – bitchiest group in y8’ ‘why do you still hang round with beccy she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore’ ‘how far did you go with dominic’ ‘why do you bum off everyone you see?’ It is noteworthy that these questions clearly come from personal knowledge of the recipient, some being finely targeted. Though not conclusive, this is highly suggestive of having greater power to wound than general abuse on most online forums. They also make clear to the recipient that the abuse is not coming from a stranger who they will probably never meet offline, but from people they probably see regularly. Most replies were sarcastic or dismissive, such as: ‘thanks’, ‘okay...’, ‘haah your great’ or similar. Some tried to be more straightforward. One listed the following: ‘Why are you such a slutty little cunt’ – ‘I dont think i am to be honest’ ‘you look like a fat pumpkin, why did he even have sex with you’ – ‘i don’t know you would have to ask him’ ‘i heard you fingered yourself you little hoe, your a fucking hoe with no self steem’ – ‘umm dont know where you heard that’

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One girl responded to ‘no one likes you’ with ‘i like me’. Another replied to ‘kill yourself love, everybody would be better off without you’, with ‘i couldn’t agree more, however telling someone to kill themselves is disgusting’, and rather brilliantly responded to ‘your a slut’ with the one word putdown: ‘you’re*.’ Of 33 girls who listed abusive questions they had received, only seven (21 per cent) reported that they did not reply. Replying meant that the insults were visible on their profile, which they wouldn’t be if they ignored them. If the profile was linked to Facebook, they would also be visible to all the receiver’s Facebook friends. Their willingness to give publicity to their tormentors in this way is one of the puzzling features of young people’s behaviour on Formspring and Ask. Many other commentators have noted that withholding of personal information seems incompatible with the motivations to join a social networking site (Debatin et al, 2009) and that disclosure fosters liking (Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield, 2007). However, these studies have usually focussed on biographical information (names, location, profile pictures) or on routine news (uploading pictures after a night out). This extreme form of self-disclosure, in which girls reveal the opinions of their enemies, seems new. It is hard to see any benefit to them. Some studies have shown that positive comments by others on Facebook profile pictures are very important to whether or not others view them as attractive (Hong et al, 2012). It seems likely that a girl who allows this kind of abuse to be displayed on her profile will be judged as less socially attractive as a result. The reasons why a girl may choose to reply, thus publicising the insults, were explored in the focus group, resulting in the following question: ‘Sometimes people decide to answer questions even if they are hurtful or embarrassing. Why do you think that is? You can tick as many as you want.’ The spread of answers may show multiple motivations, or may show that young people themselves are unclear about why they react the way they do (see Table 1 overleaf ). The extreme, personal nature of the abuse reported may mean receivers react without clearly thinking of the consequences. It may also be that young people feel obliged to respond because their fellows’ opinions of those who ‘give hate’ vary wildly. A discourse analysis of general comments about how it felt to use the platform showed some were highly critical of anyone using it to bully: ‘i wouldnt ever give hate on ask.fm as its just cowardly and pathetic’, ‘most people used the anonymous thing to send people abuse/harsh comments or took the mick out of them etc… i have never done that, i believe its completely wrong and unfair on the person recieving it.’

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Ask/Formspring (n=103) You have to look like you don’t care

61%

They are angry or upset and want to say

47%

that it’s not true They want other people to comment and be

47%

on their side If you don’t they’ll know that they’ve got to

46%

you They want people to talk about them, it

41%

makes them more interesting It’s better than no-one asking you questions

18%

at all Table 1: Reasons for replying However, others showed a streak of victim-blaming that was reminiscent of reactionary remarks made about rape survivors. Comments included: ‘I think it’s unfair when people choose to get a certain website, like ask.fm, and then act all surprised when its not all lovely questions!’ and ‘if some don’t like the questions they’ve been asked then why don’t they delete their account?! some people just try and be attention seeking.’ One girl wrote: If you choose to have formspring or ASK then you know your going to get abuse, it is almost guaranteed and everyone knows that. I have no sympathy with those who claim they are being ‘bullied’ on it because they know that when they sign up and if they are that sensitive then they wouldn’t have got it. It is pure attention seeking and not only that but I have heard of people posting ‘rumours’ about themselves to get attention. Another ignored the fact that it is almost impossible to have a social life as a teenager without being online in some way, saying: I understand that people can feel vulnerable online but if it really [is] that much of a problem then they shouldn’t be online. Being online is a perfectly safe and fun experience as long as you use you head and don’t put yourself into positions where you could be taken advantage of.

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The final phrase here echoes down the ages from the days of Tess of the D’Urbevilles. To continue the analogy, these remarks are similar to the once-common legal defence against an accusation of rape that consent, once given, is given for all sexual activities and for all time, sometimes even to other men, and cannot be withdrawn (Dripps, 1992). This idea is still current, as in George Galloway’s comments on Julian Assange (Booth, 2012). It may be that having ‘consented’ to receive questions by opening an account, the girls may feel they cannot refuse to answer any question, however vile. While there is no consensus amongst users on what the platform is for or what rules apply, young people may feel that, having opened an account, they are obliged to play the game to the end. This is an area that could be explored by media teachers in seminars on self-awareness in social media use.

Comparisons with Facebook and Twitter Similar questions were asked for Facebook and Twitter, where ‘anonymous’ was replaced with ‘without knowing who it is from’, to reflect that people may create fake profiles in order to stalk or send abuse, but offline identities are the norm. Of course people who answered ‘I’ve never received a message like that’ may have received abuse from named people, but this research was not concerned with cyber-bullying generally, as much as with differences between platforms where achieving anonymity was easy, against those where achieving anonymity takes the conscious intent of creating a new profile.

Figure 1: hurtful, embarrassing or frightening anonymous messages receiving on different platforms by percentage

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One heartening feature is the relatively large numbers who have not received anonymous abuse. Working in media education, it is possible to acquire a jaundiced view of social networks and forums, even without having a pastoral role. Correcting this distortion makes it easier to understand the great pull of these networks. Looking at the reports of anonymous abuse, this clearly answers RQ1: far more respondents received abuse on Ask or Formspring than Facebook or Twitter. As one respondent commented: ‘Ask is made for bullying.’ The lower statistics for abuse on Twitter than Facebook is harder to explain, as the Twitterverse is renowned for mass directing of wrath at individuals (Patterson, 2013; Celebrity Fix, 2013). However, these cases normally involve prominent people. These girls are likely to be too low profile to attract such venom, and are more likely to be cultivating online-only friendships which expose them to fewer and less personal attacks than the bullying which spills from offline friendships onto Facebook and Formspring/Ask.

Is it real? Do they care? Does all this abuse matter? A small number of suicides have, rightly, gained much attention, but it is difficult to attribute exact causes to them. Some researchers believe extreme bullying has moved online but is old wine in new bottles (Qing Li, 2007). The fact that teenagers seem so anxious to remain online suggests the good vastly outweighs the bad. Mishna et al (2009) and Tokunaga (2010) reported some young people stayed silent about serious, frightening threats because they didn’t want parents to remove internet privileges. The insults above seem harsh to adult eyes, but some research (Cass and Agiesta, 2011) suggests racist and sexist slurs are ‘no big deal’ for young people. Is it possible this is a cultural norm barely more important than toddlers exchanging toilet humour, and leaves as little trace? To find out, the survey included questions on whether or not sending or receiving anonymous messages felt ‘real or virtual (not as important)’, in comparison with other sites (figure 2). Here the differences in feeling when using Ask/Formspring in different ways are clear. When asked: ‘When you ASK questions with your real name, or a username that your friends will recognise, does it feel “virtual” (not so important) or “real” or something in between?’, there was a spread of responses, with 25 per cent answering ‘not sure’. When asked about asking questions anonymously, the number that was unsure reduced, while the rest shifted towards virtual, with only seven per cent saying it felt real. As expected according to principles of de-individuation, acting anonymously immediately feels more like a game. This reversed when asked how it felt to receive anonymous abuse. Now only

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Figure 2: the extent to which sending or receiving anonymous messages felt ‘real’ or ‘virtual’, as percentages six per cent were unsure, with 46 per cent agreeing it felt real, the rest split between virtual or something in between. This reversal when sending or receiving anonymous questions is significant. Though girls may use the anonymous feature without feeling the full consequences of what they are doing, they still do not easily shrug off anonymous abuse. Although only a small minority may actively complain of bullying, they commonly experience abuse as hurtful. Their dismissive or sarcastic replies should not be taken at face value, as they may well be a shield that conceals deep feeling. One girl encapsulated the problem of the dual public/ anonymous nature of the site, as she described how she could no longer trust her friends: i have lost self confidence because of my ask.fm not knowing whos saying stuff to you makes me paranoid i get upset at the hate i get because it feels like people have been fake to me in real like and not told me the truth i feel like i know some of the hate question were asked by people i know and are quiet close to i think things like ask.fm should only be used by people who dont mind getting it, i come across like i dont care and sometimes i dont its all a joke if its online. Sometimes i get upset about it all. Another simply put: ‘When you get loads of hate, it makes you die inside.’

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A Role for Media Educators? Students quoted above dismissing bullying complaints have a point: victims do have power in their hands, and often do not take it. They could refuse to reply, set their profiles to block anonymous messages, or delete profiles on sites that cause them problems. Survey respondents generally did not delete or deactivate profiles, even when they had caused distress. Of respondents who had used Ask or Formspring, 77 per cent had considered deleting their profiles but only 20 per cent had actually done so, 12 per cent had thought about it but hadn’t done it, and 45 per cent hadn’t deleted them but just didn’t use them anymore. These ghost profiles will continue to haunt the web, popping up on searches and, unless settings are changed, sending alerts and messages to the profile owner that may tempt them back. How can staff working in media education encourage young people to be proactive instead of reactive in their social media use? One solution comes from the US group Critical Issues for Youth, which helped the Mary Louis Academy organise a student-led Delete Day. The school had had issues with Formspring but the initiative took a wider look at social media, encouraging students to delete anything that didn’t reflect their true image, thus appealing to their drive for better self-presentation, including sexual material, Facebook ‘likes’ and pictures and posts that included some friends but excluded others. Teacher Alison Trachtman Hill was surprised to see entire Facebook account deletions (Resmovits, 2011). Journalism and Communications Professor Julie Dodd commented that the fact that the initiative was voluntary and student-led was vital for its success (Dodd, 2011). Social networks with a supportive ethos may help: British group Beat Bullying works through peer-to-peer involvement, running regular cyber-mentor training events across the country for young people aged 11 to 25, who then support others through a secure social network (www.beatbullying.org, 2013). On an ethical level, Ask.fm, which has no privacy settings, can also be used as a live case study of personal responsibility in a world where we are all media producers. At a higher level, the site raises ethical and legal issues of the ultimate responsibilities of platform providers, a crucial issue in media education. Unsurprisingly, platform owners have resisted being held responsible for users’ behaviour, Mumsnet’s legal battles with childcare guru Gina Ford being a significant example (Rhodes, 2010). In the US, constitutionally-entrenched ideals of freedom of speech have traditionally trumped social responsibility in all but the most extreme cases, as recent comments from Facebook on a widely shared beheading video showed (Kelion, 2013). However, if the design of the platform can be shown to significantly alter behaviour, as this research appears to

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show, should web designers and platform providers be required to shoulder more of the blame? As more of the biggest media companies rely on user-generated content to pull in visitors and generate profits, I believe this research should be part of the debate on their responsibilities.

Conclusion Levels of abuse on Formspring and Ask.fm are much higher than on other social networking sites. The abuse is not only vulgar and sexual, but also personally targeted, thus more wounding than the flaming commonly traded on anonymous forums. This personal abuse also causes distress and distrust in offline social circles. Young people commonly experience these sites as a game, or as being relatively unimportant until they receive abuse. Then, they experience it as real. However, lack of agreement about what the site is for can translate to lack of support or perceived lack of support from peers towards those receiving abuse. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which have received widespread attention and are used by many adults, these question and answer sites seem to still be under the radar for most parents and teachers. As a consequence, young people are being left to make their own judgements as to how they should be used at an individual level. It seems unlikely that these sites are going to go away, but media educators at school level can help promote informed, critical use and use them as a learning tool on personal and social responsibilities, encouraging young people’s use of social media to be conscious, not reactive. For media education in the online age, these sites are an important case study in the debates over corporate versus personal responsibility in a media landscape increasingly dominated by user-generated content.

References Agiesta, J. and Cass, C., 2011. AP-MTV Poll: Young people jaded by slurs online, http://surveys. ap.org/data/KnowledgeNetworks/AP_DigitalAbuseSurvey_ToplineTREND_1st%20story. pdf, access date 20 May 2013. Beat Bullying, 2012. Become a Mentor, http://www.beatbullying.org/contact/become-amentor/, access date 20 May 2013. Beckford, M., 13 January 2013. ‘Pupils and Parents warned over social networking website’, Daily Mail. Berger, R. and McDougall, J., 2011. ‘Apologies for cross posting: a keynote exchange’. The

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Media Education Research Journal, 2 (1), 5-28. Booth, R., 20 August 2012. ‘George Galloway wades into Julian Assange row’, The Guardian. Celebrity Fix, July 2013. Harry Styles’ cougar ex forced off twitter, http://celebrities.ninemsn.co m/?blogentryid=1022476&showcomments=true access date 20 May 2013’ Daily Mail, 22 July 2011. ‘Teenager in rail suicide.’ Dodd, J., 7 May 2011. What Delete Day demonstrates about school initiatives, http:// thoughtsonteaching.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/delete-day-successful-school-initiatives/ access date 20 May 2013 Dripps, D., 1992. ‘Beyond Rape’, Columbia Law Review, 92 (7). Fairbrother, G.P., 2007. ‘Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Education’. In: Mark Bray, Bob Adamson and Mark Mason, eds Comparative Education Research. Springer, 39-62. Gross, R., and Acquisti, A. 2005. ‘Information revelation and privacy in online social networks’, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society. Alexandria VA. Seoyeon Hong, E. T. Jr., Eunjin A. K., Bokyung Kim and Wise, K., 2012. ‘The Real You? The Role of visual Cues and Comment Congruence in Perceptions of Social Attractiveness from Facebook Profiles’ Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 15(7): 339-344. Irish Examiner, 29 October 2012, ‘Third suicide in weeks linked to cyberbullying.’ James, S.D., 22 September 2011, ‘NY Police open criminal investigation’, http://abcnews. go.com/Health/jamey-rodemeyer-suicide-ny-police-open-criminal-investigation/ story?id=14580832#.UXfKtrU3uSo Access date 25 May 2013. Jenkins, H., 2009. ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century’ Massachusetts: MIT Press. Juvonen, J. and Gross, E. F., 2008. ‘Extending the School Grounds?—Bullying Experiences in Cyberspace’. Journal of School Health, 78: 496–505. Kamer, F., 3 January 2010, Formspring.me: The sociopathic crack cocaine of oversharing, Gawker. com. Kelion, L., 1 May 2013, ‘Facebook U-turn after charities criticise decapitation videos’, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22368287. Access date 25 May 2013. Kelly, J., 10 April 2013, ‘Joshua Unsworth: Bullied teenager made anti-suicide video’ Daily Mirror. Lewin, T., 5 May 2010, ‘Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls’, New York Times. Lee, K., Noh, M-J., and Koo, DM. April 2013. ‘Lonely People are No Longer Lonely on Social Networking Sites’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, doi:10.1089/ cyber.2012.0553

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Li, Q., 2007. ‘New bottle but old wine’, Computers in Human Behaviour 23, Elsevier. Mishna, F., et al, 2009. ‘Ongoing and online’, Children and Youth Services Review 31, Elsevier. O’Hear, S., 27 June 2012. ‘Ask.fm claims it’s overtaken formspring’, Techcrunch.com, http:// techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/ask-fm-claims-its-overtaken-qa-giant-formspring-whatsgoing-on-here/ Patterson, C., 15 March 2013, ‘Mary Beard interview’, The Independent. Resmovits, J., 5 June 2011, ‘Erasing Cyberbullying, One Keystroke At A Time’, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/06/cyberbullying-students-erase_n_858832. html Rhodes, P., 2010. ‘Defamation on the Internet’, Loughborough University Institutional Repository, https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/6369 Robson, S. and Warren, L., 12 December 2012. ‘Can you kill yourself already?’, Daily Mail. Schrammle, J., Koffel, C. and Tscheligi, M., 2009. ‘How much do you tell?’ Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, New York. Schwammlein, E. and Wodzicki, K., 2012. ‘What to tell about me? Self-presentation in Online Communities’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17. Selwyn, N., 2007. ‘Screw Blackboard…do it on Facebook!: an investigation into students’ educational use of Facebook’ Paper Presented to the Poke 1.0–Facebook Social Research Symposium, November 15, at University of London (2007). University of London. Simmons, R., 2011. Odd Girl Out, second edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p133. Tokunaga, R., 2011. ‘Following you home from school’, Computers in Human Behaviour 26, Elsevier. Valkenburg, P.M., Peter, J. and Schoute, A.P., October 2006. ‘Friend Networking Sites and their Relationship to Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social Self-Esteem’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9:5. Waters, S., and Ackerman, J., 2011. ‘Exploring Privacy Management on Facebook’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17. Wimmer, R.D. and Dominick, J.R., 2011. Mass Media Research’ Wadsworth, 119-122. Yaniv, O., 25 March 2010. ‘Long Island Teen’s Suicide’, New York Daily News. Ybarra, M.L.. Diener-West, M., Leaf, P.J., 2007. ‘Examining the Overlap in Internet Harassment and School Bullying: Implications for School Intervention’, Journal of Adolescent Health 41:6, p S42-S50.

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Organising Media as Social Objects: an exploratory assessment of a core media literacy competence Jerry Jacques, Pierre Fastrez & Thierry De Smedt, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Keywords: media literacy, competences, assessment, social media

Abstract Digital media offer individuals a growing number of opportunities to interact with others and to develop varied forms of sociability. Such novel social experiences call for competences related to the organisation of mediated social relationships, as part of the contemporary individual’s media literacy. In this paper, we address the issues of the definition and the assessment of these competences. Firstly, we introduce a matrix definition of media literacy that includes the ability to organise media objects from a social perspective as a specific set of competences. Secondly, we present the development of an assessment method for these competences. Our data collection method relies on card sorting tasks, requiring subjects to group cards representing features from Facebook pages into piles, based on their similarity, according to criteria of their choice. In a pilot experiment, ten Facebook users were asked to sort four decks of cards repeatedly, using a single criterion at a time, until they ran out of criteria. The card sort method allowed us to observe the relative richness and fineness of our subjects’ understanding of mediated social interactions, by eliciting their ability to categorise traces of such interactions with respect to different social criteria. Results show that different subject profiles can be identified and ranked in terms of competence level. Finally, we explore how the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects should fit into the larger vision of media literacy, in a context where sociability is increasingly developed and maintained through digital media.

Introduction With the advent of computer-mediated communication, digital media have offered individuals a growing number of opportunities to interact with others and to experience varied forms of sociability, all practices that once were developed in off-line socialised

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spaces. Such novel social experiences call for competences related to the organisation of mediated social relationships, as part of the contemporary individual’s media literacy. Historically, media education expressed interest in fostering social competences related to media practices mainly when it sought to develop people’s ability to recognise the social quality of a media author, or to distinguish between separate groups within media audiences. More recently, the development of social media enabled users to produce increasingly numerous media messages, which they need to adapt to the recipients with whom they choose to interact. It seems that whereas social competences gained more importance in this context, they have not yet received the attention they deserved from media educators. In order to become more visible, such competences need to be defined, measured, and integrated into an educational vision. In this paper, we address these three issues in turn. Firstly, we introduce a matrix definition of media literacy that includes the ability to organise media objects from a social perspective as a specific set of competences. Secondly, we present a pilot experiment aimed at developing an assessment method for these competences. Finally, we explore how the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects fit into the larger vision of media literacy.

1.Defining media literacy, and the organisation of media as social objects in particular Media literacy has been defined in a number of ways, most of the time either as a set of themes or key concepts to be mastered by individuals, or as a set of competences to be developed by them. The first approach has the longest history, as it follows Len Masterman’s (1985) seminal work in media education. For example, in the nineties, the Council for Media Education of the French-speaking Community of Belgium adopted the six following concepts as a basis for media education: languages, technologies, representations, typologies, audiences, and productions (Wangermée, 1995). Buckingham (2003) worked with a subset of the same concepts: production, language, representation, and audiences. As part of their work on critical media literacy, Kellner and Share (2005) proposed to work with the following concepts: non-transparency of media, codes and conventions, audience decoding, content and message, and motivation. The key concepts vary from author to author, but they share the property of being transversal concepts, that can be applied across a wide range of media. In the second, competence-based approach, common definitions include the following components: the ability to ‘access’, ‘analyze and evaluate’, and either ‘communicate’

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(Aufderheide, 1993) or ‘create’ (Livingstone, 2003; Buckingham, 2005) media messages in a variety of contexts. Renee Hobbs (2010) introduced a definition based on the same three components, with two additional terms: ‘reflect’ (applying social responsibility and ethical principles to one’s own conduct) and ‘act’ (working individually and collaboratively to share knowledge and solve problems). In an attempt to extend and further specify these definitions, we defined (Fastrez, 2010; Fastrez & De Smedt, 2012) media literacy as the competences required to perform four types of tasks (reading, writing, navigating and organising media) on three types of media objects (media as informational, technical and social objects). To define the concept of competence, we use the definition proposed by Rey et al.: ‘a personal ability to adapt oneself to novel situations in new and non-stereotypical ways’ (2012: 13). In our model, ‘reading’ and ‘navigating’ correspond to reception activities that include the traditional ‘analyse and evaluate’ component; ‘writing’ and ‘organising’ correspond to production activities that include the ‘create’ component. ‘Reading’ and ‘writing’ share a focus on individual media objects, while ‘navigating’ and ‘organising’ focus on collections of media objects. We chose to exclude the ‘access’ component from our definition due its inherent ambiguity, as it can be interpreted as the media supply individuals have access to in their environment, given their situation, status, financial resources, etc. Owning a smart TV and hence having access to digital HD television channels is by no means a component of media literacy. In some cases, more access to the mass media is in fact associated to a lower level of media literacy (Quin & McMahon, 1993). In our model, ‘accessing media’ is replaced by ‘navigating media’. Additionally, we consider ‘reflecting’ to be part of the social dimension of evaluation, focused on one’s own media practices, and ‘acting’ to be a larger context for ‘writing’ and ‘organising’ practices. The next two sections will detail the three types of objects and the four types of tasks that compose our matricial definition of media literacy.

1.1 Media as informational, technical and social objects Media (messages and devices) can be, in turn, regarded as informational, technical, and social objects. They are informational objects in that they are designed to represent things, real or fictitious, different from themselves, through the use of different sign systems. As representational systems attaching a signifier to a signified, they possess formal properties, referential objects and specific modes of signification. Users of a given media can turn their attention to these three classes of properties alternatively. On the one hand, all media have formal properties. A movie has a duration, a drawing has colors, a theatre stage has

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a size, a photograph has a grain, a software window has an aspect ratio. On the other hand, any media refers to something other than itself. A documentary recounts historical events, a video game immerses its players into a magical world, a poem expresses a feeling. The form of media (its signifier) points to its referent (its signified) in a certain way. The whole conceptual apparatus of semiotics can be used here to characterise these modes of signification, which depend both on the types of signs they use (e.g. text, still or animated images, sound) and the types and genres of media that combine and arrange them in many different culturally entrenched configurations. Adopting a similar standpoint, Lebrun-Brossard and Lacelle (2011) define multimodal media literacy as including a general semiotic competence, specific textual competences for each semiotic system (text, image, sound, hypertext…), and a multimodal competence (for the joint use of different semiotic systems). Media also result from technical processes (e.g. a newspaper, a movie, a website are all produced using different technical apparatus and infrastructure), or are themselves designed to produce or disseminate other media objects (e.g. a Blu-ray player, a search engine, a cell phone are all objects requiring technical interaction to make them function). Finally, media are social objects. They point to the individual and institutional agents who produce and diffuse them, thereby transforming ‘the spatial and temporal organisation of social life’ (Thompson, 1995: 4). They can also be examined with respect to their pragmatics: the intentions of these agents, the positions they attribute to them and to their recipients, the effects they produce on these recipients (Meunier & Peraya, 2004). They also carry, support, oppose or modify cultural models (Holland & Quinn, 1987; Carey, 1989). Finally, media users develop uses and practices through which they domesticate them (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1994; Brotcorne et al. 2010). This list of social aspects of media is of course open, and by no means exhaustive.

1.2 Four types of media tasks Among the tasks related to the exercise of media literacy, we distinguish between those of reading and writing (centered respectively on the reception and production of a single media object), and those of navigation and organisation (centered respectively on the reception and the generation of a collection of related media objects). In a mediated environment, the competent reader is able to decode, understand and evaluate a variety of media objects: a novel, a fiction film, an editorial, a blog, but also the interface of a search engine, or the instruction guide of a drug. Potential ways of reading and interpreting can be focused on what these media represent, the semiotic systems they use, or their format (informational reading), on the technical process underlying

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their production (technical reading), on the institutional context of their production, the intentions of their authors, the cultural stereotypes they reinforce (social reading), etc. As far as navigation is concerned, we distinguish between searching and exploring collections of media objects. The former involves searching for and finding media meeting specific search criteria. The latter involves identifying and locating the formats, genres, technologies, actors, etc. specific to a given media environment. As for reading, the search criteria and the milestones of exploration can either be informational, technical or social. Media writing competences are those required for the creation and distribution of media productions, whether individual or collective. They involve the appropriation of languages and genres that these productions make use of (informational writing), the mastery of the technical operations they call for (technical writing), and the activation of various interpersonal and institutional relationships (social writing). As for organisation competences, they include both the ability to conceptually categorise a set of media with ad hoc taxonomies (depending, for example, on the genre(s) they belong to, the audience(s) they target, or the technical standard(s) they meet), and the ability to implement tools that reify these forms of organisation into personal spaces of information (Jones, 2008): a personal video library, internet favorites, file or email folder hierarchies, etc. The organisation of media as informational objects implies, for example, the competence to keep, organise, annotate, and archive documents (e.g. emails, photos, movies, music tracks) found, produced, or shared throughout one’s media practices. The organisation of media as technical objects (e.g. equipment, software, network services) includes the ability to situate alternatives in terms of available media technologies, and to categorise them according to their potential interoperability. The organisation of media as social objects corresponds to the ability to organise mediated relationships, both as a receiver (e.g. to position oneself with respect to different ways of reading a given media) and as an interactant (e.g. to organise contacts and interactions that one creates and maintains through digital media, such as social networking sites). The articulation of the four types of media tasks with the three dimensions of media objects generates a twelve-cell matrix defining media literacy as the set of competences required to read, write, navigate and organise media as informational, technical and social objects (cf. Figure 1).

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Informational

Technical

Social

Reading Writing Navigating Organizing Figure 1: a matrix of media literacy competences Although this model contributes to mapping the competences that compose media literacy and how they relate to one another, it does not advance the assessment of these competences. The remainder of this paper will focus on the lower right cell of this matrix, the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects, and more specifically on how to recognize them and measure them.

2. Assessing the competences of organising media as social objects: an exploratory study This section presents a pilot experiment that was designed and conducted as a first attempt at exploring the assessment of the competences of organising media as social objects, as a part of media literacy. The experimental method was chosen over other alternative methods (e.g. survey questionnaires, interviews, statistics of media access and use) as it allows to evaluate competences based on their expression through actual performances, instead of relying on less reliable data, such as inventories of the technological equipment one has access to, self-reporting of one’s media practices, or self-confidence judgments on one’s abilities with media. The goal of our pilot experiment was to develop and test a method for assessing the individual’s ability to conceptually organise media objects in multiple ways with respect to their social dimension. Facebook was chosen as the domain of media experience on which the experiment would focus, due to its prevalence in the Belgian media landscape. The chosen method is based on a series of card sorting tasks, in which Facebook users are asked to organise decks of cards representing items from Facebook pages into piles, according to criteria that make sense to them. Card sorting tasks have the advantage of converting conceptual categories into observable constructs (the card sorts and their components) that can be recorded and analysed (Fastrez, et al., 2009; Spencer, 2009). We further defined the competence we sought to assess as the ability to generate and conceptually manipulate multiple organisation schemes related to mediated relationships

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and interactions, and to apply them to collections of information items viewed as social objects. The notion of an information item was defined by Jones (2008) as follows: An information item is a packaging of information. (...) Items encapsulate information in a persistent form that can be created, modified, stored, retrieved, given a name, tags, and other properties, moved, copied, distributed, deleted and otherwise manipulated. (Jones, 2008: 37) In our experiment, each card corresponded to an information item from Facebook. The card-sorting task required subjects to categorise information items using various organisation schemes. An organisation scheme may refer to diverse properties of the information items, including their social properties (e.g. their authors, their intended audience, their cultural references). Hence, we define a social scheme as an organisation scheme related to the social dimension of the information items contained in the collection. Based on the card sorting tasks, we sought to observe the variety and the complexity of the social schemes used by the subjects to make sense of Facebook as a media experience, and the various ways in which they were able to discriminate and aggregate the information items according to their social dimension. In this perspective, individuals who were able to use more varied and/or more complex social schemes were deemed more competent.

2.1 Method: participants, material and procedure A convenience sample of ten Facebook users was selected among the first author’s acquaintances. Although it did not provide us with a representative sample, this recruitment process facilitated the access to personal information required to develop some of the experimental material (cf. infra). Furthermore, as the experiment’s goal was to develop and test an assessment method rather than to produce ecologically valid results regarding the competence it sought to measure, a convenience sample was deemed acceptable. Four decks of cards were created, with each card corresponding to an information item. Information items were snippets extracted from various Facebook pages (e.g. group names, number of friends, likes). The design of three of the decks was based on Georges’ (2010) model of virtual identities in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In this model, multiple representations of self are articulated to representations of others through multiple interfaces. Accordingly, three decks of cards corresponded to:

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• Representations of self in digital media, created by the individual through a process of selection and reduction of their ‘self-in-thought’ (Georges, 2010), as a part of their virtual identity. A ‘representation of self ’ deck (RSD) was created depicting personal information published by the subject on Facebook. Hence, each participant in the experiment had their own personal RSD, featuring idiosyncratic information. • Representations of others in digital media, created through the same process by other people. A ‘representation of others’ deck (ROD) was created with information extracted from three different Facebook profiles: one belonging to a public figure, one to a person all participants knew personally, and one to someone none of the participants knew. • Interface components of digital media (i.e. software, games and online platforms supporting CMC). The ‘interface components’ deck (ICD) was created with information items related to Facebook functionalities. A fourth deck, the ‘communities’ deck (CD), was added to include larger scale relationships emerging from the repeated interaction of groups of people through the same interface (Rheingold, 1993; Preece et al. 2003). Each deck featured 30 cards, a number that has been described in the literature as manageable for a typical card-sorting task (Fastrez, et al., 2009; Spencer, 2009). For each deck, participants were asked to sort the cards using a single criterion at a time, and to group similar cards (according to their criterion of choice) into piles. The sorts they produced were open card sorts: participants were free to choose the sort criterion, the number of piles and the position of each card within the piles. Subjects had the possibility to create a ‘catch-all’ pile (e.g. ‘I don’t know’, or ‘does not apply’). The sorts had to have only one level of hierarchy: piles could not be divided into sub-piles. Participants were invited to name the criterion they used, as well as each pile they created. These labels, as well as the contents of each pile, were recorded by the experimenter. Once they were done sorting the cards, participants were instructed to repeat the sorting process with a different criterion, until they ran out of criteria. Participants sorted the four decks over a total period of two hours (on average), divided into two sessions. After they had completed the sorting tasks, participants filled a three-part questionnaire, including questions on (1) socio-demographic variables (age, gender, education level), (2) access to technology (e.g. number of internet access venues, number of connected devices, frequency of internet use), and (3) level of engagement with digital

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technology (e.g. search engine use, publication of personal productions with digital media, participation to online communities, creation of a fictional virtual identity). These three types of variables were identified as potential factors impacting the level of competence.

2.2 Results and interpretation Participants produced a total of 272 card sorts. For each deck of cards, three quantitative metrics were computed: the number of sorts produced by each subject, the average number of categories per sort for each subject, and the Normalized Minimum Spanning Tree (NMST) for the sorts produced by each subject. The NMST (Fossum & Haller, 2005) was used as a measure of the degree of orthogonality between the sorts of a given subject, i.e. the degree to which the different sorts of a given subject show discrimination. ‘Since experts can be characterised in part by their ability to aggregate and discriminate in multiple ways, experts can be expected to have larger NMST values than non-experts’ (Fossum & Haller, 2005: 140). Hence, NMST was interpreted as an indication of our subjects’ expertise in media organisation. Subject

Average no. sorts

1

8.50

Average no.

Average NMST

categories 2.18

6.24

2

9.25

3.49

9.27

3

4.00

4.38

5.26

4

4.00

3.00

8.94

5

6.25

2.32

7.38

6

7,50

3.33

9.67

7

6.00

3.38

10.04

8

8.00

2.97

8.36

9

8.50

2.88

8.27

10

6.00

2.58

7.56

Table 1: general card sort metrics per subject Table 1 shows the average (for all four decks of cards) number of sorts, the average number of categories per sort, and the average NMST for the sorts produced by each subject for each deck.

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2.2.1 Quantitative analyses Two quantitative analyses were undertaken. First, Kendall’s tau-b non-parametric correlation coefficients were computed for each pair of variables among the three metrics presented above (Nsorts, Ncategories, NMST), for each deck of card taken separately, and for their averages on all four decks taken together. A minority of these correlations were statistically significant. The analysis did not reveal a clear relationship between the three variables. All in all, subjects who generated more sorts did not generate more categories per sort (nor less categories); neither did they demonstrate a greater degree of discrimination through their different sorts. Second, several cluster analyses were undertaken using different combinations of the socio-demographic and internet use variables from our questionnaire. Our intent was to identify groups of subjects based on these variables, for which we could then compare the distribution of the three metrics presented above. Due to the small size of our sample, none of our attempts allowed us to identify separate groups. Hence, this analysis could not be completed.

2.2.2 Qualitative analysis The qualitative analysis of our data focused on sort coherence. Card sorts were examined using the following indicators: existence of a name for the sort criterion and for each pile, non-ambiguity of criterion and pile names, logical relationship between the categories and the criterion (i.e. are all categories a possible value for the chosen criterion?), exclusivity of the categories within a sort, and correspondence of all categories of a sort to a single criterion. The criteria used to sort the cards were separated between social (e.g. ‘who appears in the picture’) and non-social (e.g. ‘size of picture’) criteria. Social sorts were coded according to two coding schemes. The first scheme is a list of eight categories that our research team has been using to detail the social dimensions of media objects, including: (1) their institutional context of production, (2) the intentions underlying their design, (3) the enunciative position taken by their author or designer, (4) the (potential) effects on their recipients, (5) their cultural references, (6) their ethical implications, (7) the uses and practices they are associated with, and (8) the knowledge, expectations, intentions and interests of their recipients. The variety of social schemes used by the subject to sort the cards was measured by the number of different categories in the list to which their sorts could be attached. The second coding scheme corresponds to the dichotomy between egocentric and allocentric sorts. Some sorts were centered on the subject’s own point of view (egocentric,

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e.g. ‘what I like’, ‘what is interesting for me’), others adopted an alternative viewpoint (allocentric, e.g. ‘information used by Facebook to make money’). The analysis of this coding allowed us to identify three groups in our sample, each corresponding to a different level of competence. The first group (n=4) corresponded to the highest level of competence. This group included subjects that spontaneously produced sorts based on social schemes (e.g. ‘who is the information shared with?’, ‘who published that information?’). The variety of the social schemes they produced was high (five to seven different social dimensions), and the criteria and piles were all named without ambiguity. The piles within a given sort were all exclusive and related to the sort criterion. The use of binary sorts (i.e. sorts with two piles) and catch-all categories remained marginal. Finally, the members of this group showed a great ability to generate allocentric sorts. At the other end of the scope, three subjects demonstrated poor competences for organising media as social objects. A substantial number of their sorts were not based on social schemes, and their sorts were mostly egocentric, focusing on the subject’s own experience or thinking (e.g. ‘the boxes in my head’). The social schemes they used showed little variety (two to four different social dimensions), and they were partly unable to name the criteria and piles they generated. Some of their sorts were defined ambiguously or illogically, or mixed different criteria (e.g. ‘related to my private life / what I want to say’), and others were highly similar. These subjects relied heavily on binary sorts and ‘catch-all’ categories (e.g. ‘what I like and wish to share’ vs. ‘the rest’). A third group included three participants with an intermediary level of competence. These subjects produced a lot of binary sorts focused on a superficial aspect of the information items (e.g. the presence of a picture with people on it, or the presence of a name). The number of non-social sorts was inferior to that of the low-competence group, but subjects mostly produced egocentric sorts (e.g. ‘me alone’ vs. ‘me and my family’ vs. ‘me and my friends’). The use of ‘catch-all’ categories was still frequent, but there were no logic or ambiguity problems in the sorts. The sorts were coherent and the subjects were able to name all their criteria and piles. Finally, the three groups defined by our qualitative analysis were compared with respect to the questionnaire variables. The competence level (as defined by the three groups) was not associated with any of the subjects’ socio-demographic variables, nor with the subjects’ quality of access to digital media, nor to their level of engagement with social media. The only variable associated with our qualitative grouping was the number of social networks used by the subjects. As we defined the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects partly in terms of the variety of the social schemes an individual could apply to collections of information items, the variety in the online interaction forms

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they experience appears as a good candidate for fostering such a competence.

3. Being able to organise media as social objects as a key component of contemporary media literacy As media literacy assessment research is still in its infancy, it needs systematic and coordinated efforts to make it a coherent endeavor, yielding standardised performancebased assessment methods and indicators. Developing such methodological tools helps reach two goals: the assessment of the media literacy level of individuals, and the evaluation of the efficiency of media education programs. The experiment presented in this paper is a first exploratory step in the development of an assessment method for competences that we claim are growing in importance, and have so far been largely overlooked. The method needs refinement and simplification. In its current incarnation, it is time-consuming and its practicality is limited (e.g. it requires the design of personalised material, tailored to each participant), which limited the number of participants in our sample, and in turn constrained the quantitative analyses we undertook. Nevertheless, participants found the card sorting tasks entertaining, and those tasks did seem to generate the actualisation of their competences in the organisation of media as social objects. Tapping into their everyday experience of mediated social interactions through Facebook, the card sorting technique allowed us to elicit our subjects’ ability to categorise and organise traces of such interactions conceptually with respect to different social criteria, showcasing the relative richness and fineness of their understanding of this domain of experience. We believe the ability to construct formalised representations of one’s social environment has become a key competence for media users. Digital media, and social media in particular, offer their users potential access to billions of other users, including public and private institutions, as well as partly or fully automated agents. Moreover, the development of digital media takes place in a context of social change towards increased social diversity, described by the New London Group as the rise of productive diversity in the workplace, the advent of civic pluralism in the public sphere, and multiplication of membership to multilayered lifeworlds in the private lives of individuals (Cazden et al., 1996). This abundance and variety of potential social interaction inevitably poses the question of how to correctly and efficiently categorise the interaction spaces as well as the individual and collective, human and automated partners who inhabit them. The ability to build a conceptual map of the network of one’s relationships with different groups of actual or potential partners in their media environment is one of the two dimensions of what we defined as the competence of organising media as

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social objects. This competence presupposes another competence from our matrix (see Figure 1), namely, the competence of reading media as social objects, which includes the ability for users to grasp the expectations and intentions of their interlocutors, and the pragmatics of their exchange (Watzlawick, et al., 1967). Yet, the clues needed to develop this representation of the interlocutor are hardly available in online media. This is particularly true in the case of so-called social messages. On the one hand, the ability to gather these clues, to complement them and to articulate them enables media users to undertake the exploration of various mediated social spaces (‘navigating media as social objects’), to map and organise their own mediated social territory and to manage their differentiated involvement in multiple mediated social spaces (‘organizing media as social objects’), and to adapt their conduct and production to the space they occupy (‘writing media as social objects’). In brief, it enables them to practice what Jenkins and colleagues (2006) refer to as negotiation: ‘to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.’ On the other hand, individuals may develop this ability to ‘read media as social objects’ through ‘social navigation’, i.e. through the encounter of multiple social contexts, both online and offline. The most basic learning of that kind probably takes place outside of mediated communication. It involves the gradual socialisation process of each young individual. It consists in learning, through everyday encounters and situations of interaction or comradeship, the proper social position to hold, with its associated social rites, in different institutional contexts: family (close or extended), classroom (Gonnet, 1997), neighborhood, playground, youth organisation, shops, public transportation, etc. The second dimension of the competence of organising media as social objects corresponds to its technical side. In addition to being able to organise their mediated social interactions conceptually, users must be able to explore the affordances provided by the different technological tools and platforms of mediated communication they use, and discover those that allow them to configure their access in terms of reading, writing, searching and sharing with other users. Additionally, they need to be able to fine-tune these technical access settings to adjust the boundaries between social territories to which their current and potential partners belong. In time, they should be able to keep these settings up to date, throughout the changes in their social relationships. Although media literacy cannot be reduced to operational and practical technical skills (Buckingham, 2009), such skills appear as a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition to convert comprehension into action. Through the fine articulation of the two (conceptual and technical) dimensions of the organisation competence, media users can achieve this

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conversion. On the one hand, they can develop a complex understanding of society as a socially and culturally diverse reality, of the social dimension of the media environment, and of their own involvement in multiple social spaces through the media. On the other hand, they can take social action (Hobbs, 2010) through media practices that involve the informed use of technological tools and reify this understanding, thereby increasing civic participation and democratization (Kellner & Share, 2005).

References Brotcorne P., Damhuis L., Laurent V., Valenduc G., Vendramin P., 2010. Diversité et vulnérabilité dans les usages d’internet, Gent/Bruxelles: Academia Press. Buckingham, D., 2003. Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (1st ed.). London: Polity. Buckingham, D., 2009. The future of media literacy in the digital age: some challenges for policy and practice. In: Verniers, P., ed., Proceedings of Euromeduc: Media literacy in Europe: controversies, challenges and perspectives (Bellaria, Italy). Brussels: MediaAnimation, 13–24. Carey, J., 1989. A Cultural Approach to Communication. In: Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J. Kalantzis, M., Kress, G., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S., Nakata, M., 1996. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. In: Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Fastrez, P., 2010. ‘Quelles compétences le concept de littératie médiatique englobe-t-il? Une proposition de définition matricielle’. In: Recherches en Communication, 33, 35-52. Fastrez, P., Campion, B., & Collard, A.-S., 2009. ‘Le tri de cartes. Une méthode d’investigation des catégories mentales au service de l’architecture de l’information’. In: Document Numérique, 12 (2), 23-45. Fastrez, P., & De Smedt, T., 2012. ‘Une description matricielle des compétences en littératie médiatique’. In: Monique Lebrun-Brossard, Nathalie Lacelle and Jean-François Boutin, eds, La littératie médiatique multimodale. De nouvelles approches en lecture-écriture à l’école et hors de l’école. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 45-60. Fossum, T., & Haller, S., 2005. ‘Measuring card sort orthogonality’. In: Expert Systems, 22, 139-146. Georges, F., 2010. Identités virtuelles. Les profils utilisateur du web 2.0. Paris: Questions Théoriques. Gonnet, J., 1995. De l’actualité à l’école. Paris: Armand Collin.

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Hobbs, R., 2010. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. Washington D.C.: The Aspen Institute. Holland, D., & Quinn, N. (eds), 1987. Cultural Models in Thought and Language. Cambridge (MA): Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. J., 2006. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Jones, W., 2008. Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Kellner, D., & Share, J., 2005. Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organisations, and policy. In: Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 26(3), 369–386. Lebrun-Brossard, M., & Lacelle, N., 2011. Des compétences en littératie médiatique à développer via l’analyse de stéréotypes dans les médias. In : Actes du colloque ACFAS 2010: La lecture sous toutes ses formes : pluralité des supports, des processus et des approches. Ottawa, CA: Revue pour la Recherche en Éducation, 55–71. Livingstone, S., 2003. The changing nature and uses of media literacy. Media@LSE electronic working papers, 4. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Masterman, L., 1985. Teaching the Media. London: Comedia Publishing Group. Meunier, J.-P., & Peraya, D., 2004. Introduction aux Théories de la Communication (Second Ed.). Bruxelles: De Boeck Université. Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D., & Abras, C., 2003. History and emergence of online communities. In: Wellman, B., (ed.) Encyclopedia of Community, Berkshire Publishing Group, Sage. Quin, R., & McMahon, B., 1993. Evaluating Standards in Media Education. In: Canadian Journal of Educational Communication, 22(1), 15–25. Rey, B., Carette, V., Defrance, A., & Kahn, S., 2012. Les compétences à l’école: Apprentissage et évaluation. Rheingold, H., 1993. The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman, Incorporated. Silverstone, R., & Hirsch, E. (eds), 1994. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (New Edition). London: Routledge. Spencer, D., 2009. Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media, LLC. Thompson, J. B., 1995. The Media and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Film Studies and Statistical Literacy

Wangermée, R., 1995. L’éducation à l’audiovisuel et aux médias. Rapport du Conseil de l’Education aux Médias. Bruxelles: Communauté française de Belgique: Conseil de l’Education aux Médias. Watzlawick, P., Helmick Beavin, J., & Jackson, D. D., 1967. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Film Studies and Statistical Literacy Nick Redfern, independent researcher Keywords: statistical literacy, Film Studies, higher education, employability

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to establish the relevance of statistical literacy to Film Studies in higher education. In this paper I argue statistical literacy comprises a set of skills and attitudes necessary for all film scholars and that it is a significant failing of film education in the UK that these skills and attitudes do not form a part of the curriculum for film students with negative consequences for their understanding of research on the cinema and their employability post-graduation.

Introduction In October 2012 the British Academy published Society Counts: Quantitative Skills in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, a position statement expressing concern over the lack of quantitative skills affecting students, teachers, and researchers in these subject areas and the impact on UK’s status as a world leader in research and higher education, on the employability of graduates, and on the competitiveness of the UK’s economy. There is a skills deficit. In higher education, almost all disciplines require quantitative capacity, but students are often ill-equipped to cope with those demands. They then leave university with skills inadequate to the needs of the workplace – be it in business, public sector or academia. Students are graduating with little confidence in using what skills they do have, having had little practice in applying them. ... There is a dearth of candidates with good quantitative skills to go forward to doctoral training, and an inadequate supply of graduates with the numerical skills that are in demand in the workplace. (2012: 2) The British Academy (2012: 2-4) notes that ‘many students enter higher education with poor numerical skills, little confidence in their mathematical abilities or an appreciation of their relevance,’ the ‘long-standing lack of emphasis on quantitative methods in many courses and programmes of study,’ ‘the dearth of academic staff able to teach quantitative

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methods in ways that are relevant and exciting to students,’ and students’ lack of awareness of the value of quantitative skills for future employment as factors behind the failure to develop quantitative skills in the social sciences and humanities. As a part of the humanities, Film Studies is not immune from these problems, and at present no Film Studies degree programme in the UK provides any instruction in statistical literacy to under- or post-graduate students. There is no requirement for film students to develop their numeracy, their statistical literacy or their ability to use quantitative methods, despite the value employers attach to such skills (see Tariq, et al., 2010: 7-9). Though there have been long-standing concerns regarding the quantitative skills of arts graduates (Green et al., 1983), research on statistics and its relationship to Film Studies and/or any of its cognate disciplines is almost non-existent. In fact, I have been able to find just a single conference paper discussing statistical literacy in relation to any of these subjects: Zandpour and Rimmer (2006) noted that in the US statistics instruction for students with majors in media, communications, and journalism was rare, while students taking such courses failed to perceive any relationship between statistical literacy and their degree subject. Along with many other disciplines in the humanities, Film Studies has simply failed to grasp the importance of statistical literacy to everyday life, to students’ employability, and to the specific demands of the discipline. This paper seeks to take the first step in making progress in this area by establishing the relevance of statistical literacy to Film Studies in higher education. Specifically, I argue that statistical literacy comprises a set of skills and attitudes necessary for all film scholars and that it is a significant failing of film education in the UK that these skills and attitudes do not form a part of the curriculum for film students, with negative consequences for students’ understanding of research on the cinema and their employability post-graduation. In the next section I set out some definitions of statistical literacy and related concepts. In light of these definitions I argue the importance of statistical literacy in Film Studies in three areas: understanding research in Film Studies; bridging the gap between the humanities and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects; and developing the employability of graduates.

Statistical literacy, mathematics, and the liberal arts The concept of literacy has come to mean the ‘idea of being able to find one’s way around some kind of system, and to “know its language” well enough to make sense of it,’ and foregrounds the notion of being able to ‘make meaning’ as either a producer or consumer within that system (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003: 15). Internationally, education has become focussed on developing a range of literacies as skills that enable individuals the access

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and use knowledge and information (UNESCO, 2006: 150-151), including scientific literacy (Hazen & Trefil, 2009), computer literacy (Robinson, 2009), financial literacy (Mason & Wilson, 2000), media literacy (Potter, 2013), statistical literacy (Gal, 2002), visual literacy (Felten, 2008), and ‘new literacies’ associated with digital technologies (Leu et al., 2004) amongst others. Statistical literacy may be defined as ‘the ability to understand and critically evaluate statistical results that permeate our daily lives – coupled with the ability to appreciate the contributions that statistical thinking can make in public and private, professional and personal decisions’ (Wallman, 1993: 1). Numeracy is the ability to use mathematics effectively in everyday life, but statistical literacy goes beyond this to add the ability to read and communicate using quantitative information: ‘That makes it literate as opposed to just numerate. It adds words in as well, so you need to be able to know what the words mean when you are communicating. It isn’t just about the figures’ (Holmes, 2003: 2). Statistical literacy is directly relevant to the humanities, though it rarely features: the ability to read and interpret summary statistics in the everyday media: in graphs, tables, statements, surveys and studies. Statistical literacy is needed by data consumers – students in non-quantitative majors: majors with no quantitative requirement such as political science, history, English, primary education, communications, music, art, and philosophy. (Schield, 2010: 135) One of the problems with introducing statistics into a humanities curriculum is that most students on humanities courses will have limited mathematical skills and/or low confidence in the skills they do possess. Many students may in fact be put off by the fact that film courses have some statistical content because they view it as mathematics. This problem has been widely recognised in the literature on statistical literacy, and although numeracy is a pre-requisite for statistical literacy advocates of statistical literacy stress that it is not the same as mathematics. Statistical literacy promotes conceptual and contextual understanding over the ability to calculate statistics (Cobb & Moore, 1999); and David S. Moore argues that statistical reasoning is one of the liberal arts because it is a flexible and broadly applicable mode of thinking that prepares students to participate in society. Statistics is a general intellectual method that applies wherever data, variation, and chance appear. It is a fundamental method because data, variation, and chance are omnipresent in modern life. It is an independent discipline with its own core ideas

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rather than, for example, a branch of mathematics. (1998: 1254, original emphasis) From this perspective, the emphasis in early statistical education should be on statistical thinking rather than on statistical methods, prioritising conceptual understanding rather than computational recipes. Though it may seem contrary to the goals of teaching statistics, a first course in statistics does not seek to develop statisticians. Rather it seeks to develop a set of skills and attitudes that allow scholars to be able to engage with the information presented to them: [W]e want our students to be good ‘statistical citizens’, understanding statistics well enough to be able to consume the information that they are inundated with on a daily basis, think critically about it, and make good decisions based on that information. (Rumsey, 2002) A similar approach is proposed by Milo Schield, who argues that statistical thinking is a form of critical thinking: Statistical literacy, critical thinking about statistics as evidence, is an integral component of a liberal education since a key goal of statistical literacy is helping students understand that statistical associations in observational studies are contextual: their numeric value and meaning depends on what is taken into account. The need to deal with context and confounding is ubiquitous to all observational studies whether in business, the physical sciences (e.g. astrophysics), the social sciences, or the humanities. (Schield, 2004: 18) Introducing the topic in this way to students already familiar with critical thinking should make it easier to encourage them to engage with data-based arguments. It is in this context that we understand Schield and Shuman Schield’s (2006) observation that ‘statistical literacy is to statistics what art appreciation is to art’. Another perspective is to view statistical literacy as ‘a bridge between quantitative information and social meaning’ as a part of a quantitative rhetoric which focuses on ‘critical thinking, analysis of argumentation and persuasion, and an ability to interpret statistics in context’ (Schmit, 2010). A list of goals for students in developing statistical literacy is provided by Gal and Garfield (1997: 3-5), and includes:

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understanding the principles and processes of scientific discovery,



understanding the role of statistics in scientific discovery,



understanding the logic of statistical reasoning,



understanding statistical terms,



the ability to interpret results presented in tabular, numerical, and graphical form, and to be aware of possible source of variation and bias,



the ability to communicate using statistical and probabilistic terminology properly,



developing a critical stance towards research that purports to be based on data,



developing the confidence and willingness to engage with quantitative research. The purpose in obtaining these skills is to become a statistical thinker ‘able to critique

and evaluate results of a problem solved or statistical study’ (Ben-Zvi & Garfield, 2004: 7). Statistical literacy is different from statistical competence, in which individuals function as data producers and analysers in producing original empirical research rather than consumers presented with a completed study. Naturally, we want students to develop the necessary skills that will allow them to produce high quality original research, and, as I demonstrate below, research in Film Studies requires the ability to design studies, collect and manage data, perform statistical analyses, and communicate those results. These competencies depend on statistical literacy – just as you cannot write without being able to read, you cannot become competent in statistical methods without first understanding the role of statistics in empirical research, the ability to communicate ideas in tables, numbers, or graphs, or the willingness to engage with quantitative methods. Every film student needs to be statistically literate, but only those who wish to engage in quantitative research requiring the use of statistical methods need to master procedural skills.

Understanding research in Film Studies The study of film is a diverse field comprising four distinct but related areas of inquiry: •

Industrial analysis: the political economy and organisation of film industries; technologies of film production, distribution, and exhibition; practices of film production, distribution, and exhibition; government policies, etc.



Textual analysis: representation and the symbolic meanings of film; film form; film style; narrative/non-narrative structure, etc.



Ethnographic analysis: the composition of audiences; rituals of cinema-going and film experiences; cultural meanings and issues of identity, etc.



Cognitive-psychological analysis: the viewer’s perception of a film; communication and information in the cinema; psychological processes of meaning-making in the cinema; the psychological basis of the viewer’s response to a film, etc.

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Films can be analysed as institutionally produced commercial commodities that function as cultural artefacts inscribed with meanings which are then consumed and interpreted by audiences, whose experience of the cinema is predicated on cognitivepsychological processes of perception and comprehension. Film Studies can be defined as a research programme analysing films in institutional, textual, ethnographic, and cognitive-psychological terms. Statistics is relevant to each of these four areas and students will encounter information presented in the numerical, graphical, and tabular form in whatever aspect of the cinema they choose to study. Statistical summaries feature in many Film Studies texts, in newspaper and magazine articles on the cinema, and in official reports and the statistical yearbooks produced by national film bodies. Film scholars will also encounter more advanced methods in research from disciplines such as neuroscience or economics where scientific and statistical knowledge is commonplace. To illustrate the use of statistics in Film Studies the following provides an example from each of the four areas identified above. To begin with economics, Candace Jones (2001) combines historical and economic research in a study of the emergence of the institutional rules and competitive dynamics in the first decades of the American film industry. Combining archival data with historical analysis she describes the shift from the technology era of 1895 to 1910, in which market dominance was asserted through patent control, to a content-based era (1911 to 1920) inaugurated by the rise of the feature film and of entrepreneurs who would go on to become the studio heads of the classical Hollywood era. This article presents quantitative information in a variety of formats. Line charts are used as a graphical method of showing trends over time of the number of films released, the number of firms operating in the industry, along with other economic and demographic data; and are also used to present survival data on the longevity of firms. Numerical information is provided as frequency data or percentages and in tabular form. Statistical methods used in analysing economic data include paired t-tests with one-tailed p-values, the variance of a sample, and the Herfindal index (which measures the size and power of firms). Turning to audience research, John Sedgwick (2009) describes a quantitative method for analysing film popularity, arguing that ‘economic reasoning and statistical methods have a part to play in presenting knowledge about filmgoing that is not otherwise discoverable and even expressible’ (53); and applies this method to data from the ledgers of the Regent Cinema in Portsmouth revealing differences in preferences among audiences attending films at the Regent and those attending at other cinemas in the city. This approach involves calculating a popularity statistic (POPSTAT) that takes into

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account the gross of a cinema relative to the mean for all cinemas, the duration of a film’s release and its billing status, and weighs this information accordingly. Sedgwick uses ordinary least squares regression to fit the POPSTAT scores to the recorded attendances to determine the extent to which attendances can be used to determine the popularity of films. This information is depicted graphically as a scatterplot of the residuals between the predicted and the observed POPSTAT scores against attendance, while the coefficient of determination is employed as a measure of the explanatory power of the regression model. Other statistical terms used include descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation), ‘expectation’ and ‘expected values’, and ‘statistical significance’ and ‘confidence level’. Sedgwick describes his approach to measuring film popularity as ‘rare’ not only because of the scarcity of historical data on cinema attendances but also because ‘quantitative approaches to analyses are not widely practiced’ (47). As an example of the application of statistical methods to film style, my study of the impact of sound technology on the editing style of Laurel and Hardy shorts compared the shot length distributions of silent and sound films featuring the duo (Redfern, 2012). The results indicated that while there is a significant difference in the editing of these films that occurs with the coming of sound, this difference is smaller than that associated with Hollywood films in general and this may be attributed to the continuity of a mode of production, of creative personnel, and a particular kind of film comedy. The statistics used to describe the shot length distribution of each film include the five-number summary (minimum, maximum, lower and upper quartiles, and the median) along with Qn as a robust estimate of scale; and this information is presented in tabular form. Statistical methods used include the Mann-Whitney U test with two-tailed p-values as a test of the null hypothesis of stochastic equality, the probability of superiority as a measure of effect size, and the Hodges-Lehman median difference with accompanying confidence interval as an estimate of the effect of sound technology. Boxplots display the data graphically. Finally, in a much publicised study of the relationship between film style and cognition, James Cutting, Jordan De Long, and Christine Nothelfer (2010) use a range of methods to understand how editing patterns in Hollywood cinema are related to patterns of attention. They employ a negative exponential function fitted to the partial autocorrelation functions of shot length data to derive a modified autoregressive index as a continuous measure of the local relations between shots. They also examine the statistical relationship between this index and the average shot length using correlation coefficients and confidence intervals, with accompanying t-statistics and p-values, concluding that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length since the 1930s but that this is not an artefact of decreases in the mean shot lengths in films. In order to

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explore the global editing structure of Hollywood films the authors use Fourier analysis of the standardised shot length data to identify the presence of 1/__ noise, and conclude that Hollywood films have increasingly conformed to this structure reflecting the 1/__ noise pattern of mental processes. A range of descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, root mean squared deviation) and graphical methods (including correlograms, scatterplots, box plots, and periodograms) communicate the detailed quantitative information in this article. Clearly understanding research on all the different aspects of the cinema requires a high level of statistical literacy. Film scholars need to develop a set of attitudes towards empirical, data-driven research on the cinema that recognises the role such methods play in research in Film Studies. This includes appreciating how quantifying concepts such ‘popularity’ and the use of numerical indexes to represent attributes of objects of inquiry (firm size, shot clustering, etc.) can help us to analyse the behaviour of audiences, the history of the film industry, changes in film style, and so on; and recognising how statistical methods enables us to analyse large number of films and make general statements about them in a field dominated by interpretative studies of small numbers of texts. Film scholars need to develop a range of skills so that when presented with a piece of research utilising statistical methods they are able to: •

evaluate the experimental design of a study;



comprehend statistical concepts such as ‘distribution,’ ‘model,’ ‘significance,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘robustness,’ ‘residual,’ ‘non-linear,’ ‘function,’ etc.;



appreciate the need to use summary statistics to describe a data set and the ability to interpret information presented in numerical form;



interpret information presented in a wide range of graphical and tabular formats;



describe the relationship between samples and populations, and comprehend the role of statistical inference in making statements about the latter on the basis of the former;



describe the logic of statistical hypothesis tests and interpret the results of such tests; and



evaluate the conclusions of a piece of research derived from statistical analysis. Finally, film scholars need to develop the confidence to express their informed opinion

about the use of statistics in research in Film Studies. In order to achieve these goals it is essential to recognise that statistical literacy should not be relegated to generic ‘research skills’ courses as an adjunct to other topics in Film Studies. It is necessary to combine statistical literacy with subject specific tuition so that statistical thinking develops in relation to real world problems that demonstrate the importance of such knowledge for understanding the cinema and to reduce the cognitive

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burden placed on students by presenting statistical concepts and ideas in a framework they already understand (Yilmaz, 1996). In practical terms, this means writing explicit learning outcomes for statistical literacy into degree specifications and course design, deliberate teaching of statistical literacy contextualised within the broader scope of the study of film, and explicit assessment of students’ statistical literacy in their work.

Science education and the humanities The recent film policy review published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) noted there exists an artificial division between the arts and humanities and the sciences in education in the UK, and that this is unhealthy for the film industry in particular. There is no division between Film Studies and science at the level of content or of the research practices of film scholars since the methods and knowledge derived from the latter are intimately a part of every aspect of research and learning in the former. Understanding the cinema depends on knowledge derived from physics (the properties of light and sound), material science (how an image is produced on film stock), technology and computer science (how cameras function), physiology and neuroscience (how we perceive films), psychology (how we experience films), sociology (human social activity in relation to the cinema) and economics and marketing (the film industry) in addition to humanistic modes of inquiry (historical research, philosophical approaches, narrative inquiry, textual analysis, etc.). A key step in establishing the relevance of statistical literacy in Film Studies lies in overcoming such long-standing hostility to applying ‘scientific’ methods in subjects traditionally viewed as the ‘humanities.’ It is not a question of making Film Studies ‘scientific’ or of abandoning the subject’s roots in the humanities to place it in the service of science. It is a matter of recognising that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is wholly false and that defining Film Studies as an autonomous discipline within the humanities cuts scholars off from potentially useful ways of understanding the cinema. It is necessary to stop thinking of ‘Film Studies’ as a subject with clearly defined norms and cultural values, epistemologies and methodologies that separate it from other subjects and to start thinking of the cinema as a complex object of inquiry (‘the study of film’) that requires scholars to embrace the ontological, epistemological and methodological ecumenism essential to understanding its many dimensions. It is a matter of providing film students with the full range of skills and knowledge they need to understand the cinema flexibly, pragmatically, and collaboratively rather than inculcating them with a narrow epistemological and methodological purism (Onwuegbuzie & Leech, 2005).

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Every film student should learn how a digital camera produces an image because philosophical debates about the ontology of the cinema depend precisely on such knowledge, and any scholar who lacks a basic scientific grounding will only be able to make the most superficial contribution to our understanding of the cinema.

Statistical literacy and employability Yorke (2006: 8) defines employability in higher education as ‘a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’. Numeracy, statistical literacy, and quantitative skills clearly fall within this definition and are highly valued by employers (Durrani & Tariq, 2012) but the British Academy and the Royal Statistical Society (via its ‘Get Stats’ programme) note that there is ‘a generic deficit in quantitative capacity in our country and specifically, in the preparation of many students who study social science and humanities subjects’ (British Academy/Get Stats 2011: 3). Raising students’ awareness of the employability aspects of statistical literacy has a key role to play in attracting students studying film to courses dealing with quantitative information. Research on attitudes to quantitative and qualitative research methods shows many students arrive at university with firmly fixed opinions regarding their research orientation and that many have strongly negative perceptions of quantitative methods (Murtonen, 2005); and that students experience ‘statistics anxiety’ when asked to use statistical concepts, solve problems in statistics, or evaluate information presented in statistical form (Onwuegbuzie et al. 1997; Zeidner 1991). This is especially the case for students in the humanities (Gillespie 1998). Research has shown achievement in statistics education is related to perceptions of the use and value of quantitative methods (see Evans, 2007: 24-25 for a review), but many students are unaware of the career advantages of good quantitative skills (MacInnes, 2009).

Conclusion There are many obstacles to embedding statistical literacy in Film Studies in higher education: attitudes to empirical research in subjects traditionally regarded as the humanities must be transformed; the benchmarking for Film Studies degrees will need to be re-written to require students to obtain quantitative skills; lecturers will require training in statistical methods and in teaching statistical literacy; and students’ awareness of the importance of quantitative skills needs to be developed. None of these problems are insurmountable. This article has taken the first step by demonstrating that statistics are

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to be found in every area of research on the cinema and that statistical literacy comprises a set of skills and attitudes all film scholars ought to possess in order to comprehend and evaluate this research; that there is nothing for Film Studies to fear in looking beyond the humanities; and that by introducing statistical literacy into the curriculum we better prepare students (and lecturers) for work and life.

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Green, J.M., Shearn, D.C.S., and Bolton, N. 1983. ‘A Numeracy Course for Arts Undergraduates’. In: Studies in Higher Education, 8 (1), 57-65. Hazen, R.M., and Trefil, J.S. 2009. Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy. New York: Anchor Books. Holmes, P. 2003. Statistical Literacy, Numeracy and the Future. Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MI., 31 March 2003. Available online: http://www.statlit.org/ pdf/2003HolmesAugsburg.pdf, accessed 14 May 2013. Jones, C. 2001. ‘Co-evolution of Entrepreneurial Careers, Institutional rules and Competitive Dynamics in American Film, 1895-1920’. In: Organization Studies. 22 (6), 911-944. Konnikova, M. 2012. ‘Humanities Aren’t a Science. Stop Treating Them Like One’. In: Scientific American, 10 August 2012. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literallypsyched/2012/08/10/humanities-arent-a-science-stop-treating-them-like-one/, accessed 25 October 2012. Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. 2003. New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Buckinghamshire: Open University Press. Leu, D.J., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J.L., and Cammack, D.W. 2004. ‘Toward a Theory of New Literacies Emerging from the Internet and Other Information and Communication Technologies’. In: Robert B. Ruddell and Norman Unrau, eds., Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 5th edition. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 15701613. MacInnes, J. 2009. Proposals to Support and Improve the Teaching of Quantitative Research Methods at Undergraduate Level in the UK. Available online: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_ images/undergraduate_quantitative_research_methods_tcm8-2722.pdf, accessed 30 May 2013. Mason, C.L.J., and Wilson, R.M.S. 2000. Conceptualising Financial Literacy. Occasional Paper 2000: 7. Loughborough: Loughborough Business School. Available online: https:// dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/2016, accessed 21 May 2013. Moore, D.S. 1998. ‘Statistics Among the Liberal Arts.’ In: Journal of the American Statistical Association, 93 (444), 1253-1259. Murtonen, M. 2005. ‘University Students’ Research Orientations: Do Negative Attitudes Exist Toward Quantitative Methods?’ In: Scandinavian Journal of Education Research, 49 (3), 263-280. Onwuegbuzie, A.J., DaRos, D., and Ryan, J. 1997. ‘The Components of Statistics Anxiety: A Phenomenological Study’. In: Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics, 19 (4), 11-35. Onwuegbuzie, A.J. and Leech, N.L. 2005. ‘On Becoming a Pragmatic Researcher: The

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Importance of Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Research’. In: International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8 (5), 375-387. Pokorny, M., and Pokorny H. 2005. ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education: Student Quantitative Skills and Independent Learning as Impediments to Progression’. In: International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 36 (5), 445-467. Potter, W.J. 2013. Media Literacy, 6th edition. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. QAA, 2008. Subject Benchmark Statement: Communication, Media, Film, and Cultural Studies. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/CMF08.pdf, accessed 1 November 2012. Redfern, N. 2012. ‘Shot Length Distributions in the Short Films of Laurel and Hardy, 1927 to 1933’. In: Cine Forum, 14, 35-71. Robinson, H.M. 2009. Emergent Computer Literacy: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Routledge. Rumsey, D.J. 2002. ‘Statistical Literacy as Goal for Introductory Statistics Courses’. In: Journal of Statistics Education, 10 (3), http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v10n3/rumsey2. html, accessed 25 June 2012. Schield, M. 2004. ‘Statistical Literacy and Liberal Education at Augsburg College’. In: Peer Review, 6 (4), 16-18. Schield, M. 2010. ‘Assessing Statistical Literacy: Take CARE’. In: Penelope Bidgood, Neville Hunt, and Flavia Joliffe, eds, Assessment Methods in Statistical Education: An International Perspective. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 133-152. Schield, M. and Shuman Schield, C. 2006. Statistical Literacy is to Statistics as Art Appreciation is to Art. International Conference on Teaching Statistics, Salvador, Brazil, 2-7 July 2006. Available online: http://www.statlib.org/pdf/2006SchieldPosterICOTS.pdf, accessed 1 July 2012. Schmit, J. 2010. Teaching Statistical Literacy as a Quantitative Rhetoric Course. American Statistical Association Joint Statistical Meetings, Vancouver, Canada, 31 July-5 August 2010. Available online: http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2010SchmitASA.PDF, accessed 30 May 2013. Sedgwick, J. 2009. ‘Measuring Film Popularity: Principles and Applications’. In: Michael Ross, Manfred Grauer, and Bernd Freisleden, eds, Digital Tools in Media Studies: Analysis and Research – An Overview. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 43-54. Slingerland, E. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tariq, V.N., Durrani, N., Lloyd-Jones, R., Nicholls, D., Timmins, J.G., and Worthington, C.H. 2010. Every Student Counts: Promoting Numeracy and Enhancing Employability. Preston:

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Book Reviews

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Children, Adolescence, and the Media, 3rd Edition [date], London: Sage Publications Starsburger, V. C., Wislon, B. J., and Jordan A. B., Eds. After the well-received second edition (Strasburger and Wilson, 2002), Sage Publications brings us another edition of this cross-disciplinary and research-orientated book which draws upon a media-effects tradition. The core question of this 3rd edition is how media impact cognitive, social and emotional development of children and adolescence, and vice versa; how developmental differences influence the ways in which they process and make sense of media. Even though the discourse is predominantly centred around cause-andeffect studies of TV from the 1970s and social and media statistics from the 1990s and the early 21st century, the actuality and relevance of the literature is demonstrated through the real world examples of current media narratives and children’s and youth media practices. The authors build on the idea that media are good or bad depending on ‘the type and frequency of their use’ (p. 438), which sets the nature of one’s reading. Among the negative effects of entertainment media, the focus is on violence, sexualisation, drug use, gender and racial stereotypes, materialism, unhealthy lifestyles, emotional distractions, and antisocial behaviour. In contrast, prosocial and educational media are discussed as a pleasurable and effective learning environment and a stimulus for active citizenship and prosocial behaviour. While being US-focused, international differences and similarities are occasionally explored in order to widen the target audience. This review highlights summaries, novel or interesting ideas from each chapter with the aim of exploring the potential value for a variety of readers. To begin with, the first chapter tasks the reader to acknowledge that children and adolescents are different from adults and from each other when they use and interact with media. However, they do share an eagerness to learn and a lack of real world experience, which makes them more vulnerable than adults to media messages. This vulnerability, which marketers can potentially take advantage of, is further discussed in the second chapter on advertising. The ‘Educational and Prosocial Media’ section is inspired by Joan Cooney’s (Sesame Street) statement, ‘it is not whether children learn from television, it is what they learn’ (p. 104). The writers state the possible effects of a TV viewing peak at the age of seven and subsequent rapid fall (Mares and Woodard, 2005, 2012), and suggest that digital media and Web 2.0 have a great potential to become a platform for personal and social change among older children and adolescents. The following emphasis is on the relationship between media violence and aggression as a learnt behaviour, which

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‘can be acquired, reinforced, and primed by media messages’ (p. 179). One particularly valuable and interesting recommendation says, ‘if a parent is concerned about a child learning aggressive behaviours from the media, then programs that feature heroes or good characters engaging in justified violence that is not punished and results in minimal consequences should be avoided… [whereas] portrayals that feature less attractive perpetrators who are punished in the plot and whose violence results in serious negative consequences can actually teach youth that aggression is not necessarily a good way to solve problems’ (p. 157). ‘Sex, Sexuality and the Media’ provides a number of compelling examples from a number of media genres (e.g. push-up bra advertising for 7 year olds), which represents increasingly suggestive and explicit sexual content. In contrast, the amount of responsible sexual narratives, recognised for their positive influence on attitudes toward intimacy and adolescents’ sexual behaviour, is considerably lower. ‘Drugs and the Media’ shows the associations between exposure to alcohol consumption and smoking in media and the subsequent use of these two drugs among adolescents (e.g. Smith and Foxcroft, 2009; Anderson et al., 2009). ‘Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media’ warns people about the real dangers of obesity and eating disorders instead of ‘showing them impossibly thin role models seems an ideal solution’, but claim this approach is ‘impractical in today’s society’ (p. 369). With a balanced focus on TV, chapters 8 to 10 are written by guest contributors who discuss ‘new media’. Firstly, the aim of Edward Donnestrein’s input, titled simply ‘The Internet’, is to decrease parents’ fear of knowing less about this medium than their kids. Secondly, Jeanne Brockmyer talks about video games as natural teachers, because according to her ‘the gaming environment is a powerful combination of carefully graded challenges and immediate feedback and reward, [which makes it an] ideal learning environment’ about behavioural patterns (p. 474). Lastly, Megan Moreno and Rajitha Kota ascribe the uniqueness of social networks users’ vulnerability to peer relationships, influences and pressures, because it is where adolescents are provided with overly glamorised videos, pictures and comments portraying their peers’ irresponsible behaviours stripped of the consequences. Although each chapter includes sections for parents and policy makers, Chapter 11 is specifically devoted to ‘The Family and Media’ and Chapter 13 to ‘Children’s Media Policy’. For parents, the key is a higher awareness of media effects, increased control and interest in their children’s media habits, and empowerment of their role as monitors, supervisors and participators in children’s media consumption. Government bodies’ future steps should be to develop consistency in ratings, enforce existing rules, and provide greater funding for beneficial media and for parent education.

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From the media education point of view, a number of chapters propose increased media literacy among children and adolescents as one of the key solutions to the issues previously highlighted. For instance, decoding and analysing media images could support dealing with eating disorders and the increasing self-esteem. Likewise, the authors advise incorporating media education principles into schools’ sex education and drug prevention programmes and to teach advertising literacy toward critical and responsible consumerism. This makes the negative core of the twelfth chapter, ‘Media Literacy/Media Education’, surprising and in some way disappointing. The guest author Robert McCannon’s main emphasis is on the underdeveloped measurement of media literacy’s impact on changing students’ behaviours. According to him this makes it difficult to prove the value of media education. Probably the only uncritical acknowledgment McCannon gives are to his own media education practice and to Austin and his colleagues’ (1993 – 2006) media literacy research and theories. Trying to cover an extensive number of topics, the analysis becomes inconsistent, difficult to follow, and the recommendations inadequately grounded in the literature. Yet the chapter might have a certain value for those interested in measurement systems, or for already experienced media literacy schoolteachers, who will be able to make an informed judgement of his practical advice. In general, it is a comprehensive textbook for university students and lecturers exploring different methodologies, especially correlational research and literature and projects on media effects, as well as for the theories embedded at the end of the chapters’ exercises. Another well-established topic is children’s media policy in the USA, which is contextually strong and therefore understandable to an international audience. The media industry can be inspired to enforce self-regulation and ‘rather than being part of the problem, [to] become part of the solution’ (p. 374). Non-profit organisations might find the proposed prosocial and educational cross-platform campaigns that were evaluated effective and useful not only for the target audience of children and youth, but also for those nurturing them. The literature can be stimulating and reflective for both teachers and parents, although the practical parts may be challenging to apply in different cultural, social, political and educational environments. Without doubt though, the reading experience can significantly increase teachers’ and parents’ awareness, knowledge and understanding of ‘growing up with media’ issues, as long as they keep a cool head and do not start blaming entertainment media for all children’s and adolescences’ personal, social, physical, mental and emotional problems. As the writers claim, rather than causing these problems, media have a certain power to contribute to them and this book’s ultimate goal is to encourage diverse agents to weaken the negative and strengthen the positive effects. Reviewer – Marketa Zezulkova – PhD student at CEMP, Bournemouth University

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To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, solutionism and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist by Evgeny Morozov (2013, London: Allen Lane) Recently on Kickstarter a user named FAKEGRIMLOCK raised £45,000 of capital to selfpublish a volume of inspirational management screeds illustrated in his own idiosyncratic, DIY style. FAKEGRIMLOCK is the anonymous face of a certain kind of Internet guru that has gained a reputation by rejecting received wisdom while offering slightly register-shifted advice of his own. His advice has the familiar ring of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur: ‘Startup you!’ he exclaims, ‘No one can have vision staring at someone’s back!’ His message is seductively self-evident and devoid of self-doubt, but these are precisely the aspects of Silicon Valley culture that make it so ripe for critique. Both the manner in which FAKEGRIMLOCK has reached an audience, and the voracity of the appetite for ‘grimlockian’ solutions are the subject of Evgeny Morozov’s recent book. The central argument, one that Morozov makes repeatedly throughout 350 pages, is that our society has become carried away with notion that ‘Internet values’ can be applied to problems outside of computer networks. Examples include iPhone Apps that use motion sensors to track and quantify our sleep patterns, GPS units that track our driving and report back to the insurance company, digital cameras that take pictures of the trash we throw away and rate us based on our recycling habits. These ‘innovations’ are catching on, Morozov contends, but the results might have unintended consequences. By reifying the Internet as a powerful and autonomous agent with its own logics and desires, we run the risk of abdicating human moral responsibility for political and social life. The more intractable the problem, the more seductive the technological solutions and the more caution is needed. It is a broadly pessimistic account, since moderation is in short supply in many of the domains that he scrutinises: politics, media, urban governance, crime control and education. These arguments will be immediately familiar to any scholar working in technology studies since the 1990s. This is an odd book – a popular critique of technological culture that might be new to a mass audience but is well-worn terrain for academics. Even though Morozov is somewhat late to the party, his ideas remain politically salient. In the 17 years since Barbrook and Cameron published their incisive critique of the ‘Californian ideology’, Silicon Valley has become a movable feast – although Morozov doesn’t explicitly state it, the admixture of neoliberal economic reform and consumer technology has found enthusiastic political adherents here in Europe and around the world. When David Cameron seeks to

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‘reward UK innovation’ by offering tax cuts, or when Ian Livingstone calls to overhaul the IT curriculum to respond to the global labour market, we observe the continuing strength of the Californian ideology. But unlike other scholarly accounts, Morozov spends less time discussing neoliberalism and more time describing various widgets, gadgets and the companies that make them. The book lacks a clear structure, with Morozov opting to meander through a series of domains of social life where the effects of his argument are most acutely observed. Of interest to readers of this journal will be the brief accounts he gives of the effect of technological solutionism on education. The lessons to be gleaned by media educators are twofold: First, Morozov makes the indirect but compelling case that media literacy has never been more important than at present. Much of the risk in technological solutionism arises because Internet services are far from transparent. The public may not realise, for example, that Google preferentially ranks search results based on an algorithm that predicts one’s political beliefs, or that one’s geographical coordinates are sold by mobile phone companies to local police. We need a new kind of digital literacy for an algorithmic, ‘smart’ world. Secondly, and related to the first point, educators should resist in the strongest possible terms the ideological influence of technocrats and free market supporters in the provision of education. Learning is not like buying a new hairdryer on Amazon, with star ratings and customer reviews – learning is hard work. If we reduce our education system to an online store front, we could structure learning in a way that promotes popular ideas at the expense of unpopular ones – the antithesis of principles that inform democratic citizenship. The book’s usefulness to media literacy scholarship will be limited by the sporadic attention given to education and its lack of engagement with academic literature. It makes overuse of buzzwords like ‘datasexual’, ‘double-click’ and ‘RyanAir-ation’. The most puzzling choice is Morozov’s use of the term ‘solutionism’. There is no widespread acceptance of the term’s meaning in political science or technology studies, the two main disciplines that Morozov evidently hopes to engage. He takes the term to mean the tendency to offer simple, technological solutions to complex problems. But the looseness of the idea is frustrating, and it is unclear why he didn’t select more precise language with clearer academic parentage. It could be because calling it a ‘technocratic impulse’ or a form of ‘cybernetic totalism’ or even good old-fashioned ‘scientific positivism’ would have alienated Morozov’s imagined audience. However as a consequence of these and other stylistic choices, the book vacillates between serious academic critique and populist manifesto. For the airport departure lounge reader, the book is somewhat too sprawling and lacks the soundbite quality of other successes (such as Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur

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or Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?). For the critical academic audience, the book frustrates in its unwillingness to locate itself in any of the intellectual trajectories that underpin other, better work. Readers seeking more robust theoretical discussions of the tensions between technological innovation and governance are advised to read Armand Mattelart’s excellent The information Society, Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy, or Rob Shields’ The Virtual, all of which deliver more nuanced and portable analytics for understanding other cases. Bonus: Shields engages with Proust far more meaningfully that Morozov does here. A writer of considerable insight, it is probably not lost on Morozov that his book occupies an uneasy perch between technological mass consumption and academic critique. While he admonishes his techno-utopian contemporaries for engaging in ‘soundbitefriendly futurism’, he might likewise be accused of offering only a more critical version of his own. Reviewer – Kris Erickson – Research Fellow in Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy, University of Glasgow

Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins 1992 Laughey’s Canon Editor’s note: This review is part of our series in which a current media teacher re-examines a ‘classic’ text in honour of MERJ editorial board member Dan Laughey and his provocative ‘Back to Basics’ article in MERJ 2:2.

At about the same time as Henry Jenkins was researching and writing Textual Poachers, Tim Berners-Lee was busy inventing the World Wide Web. This was, of course, coincidence; but there is a connection, since the web was the medium that brought the fan fiction Jenkins describes to a much wider audience. Often people talk as if fan production began with YouTube in 2006, but Jenkins showed in this book just how much was going on decades before that, even if its distribution was much more haphazard than that available via social media today. Jenkins has, of course, developed the ideas from Textual Poachers into a whole theory in his 2006 book, Convergence Culture and written extensively on the topic in his blog

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‘Confessions of an Aca fan’, but essentially the position he outlined in 1992 stands up well more than 20 years on, in spite of the very different media ecology we have today. As a fan himself, Jenkins recognises the mocking tone of much previous work on fans and the mainstream media convention of representing the fan as fanatic (i.e. mad). More significantly, he recognises the right of the reader to become a writer of meaning, appropriating from mainstream texts to re-purpose them. Though the texts he references have in many cases declined in significance (The Professionals, Blake’s 7, Beauty and the Beast, arguably even Star Trek), the activities he describes (drawing, story-writing, music making, video production) still exist and indeed have been extended due to the possibilities of cheaper media technology and web distribution. His categories are interesting – ‘filking’ (fan music making), ‘slash’ (fan stories which posit homo-erotic relationships between central characters from fictions) and ‘poaching’ (taking elements of mainstream media and re-working them). All undoubtedly still exist and have grown in an online environment, with a younger audience increasingly involved in their production (e.g. Harry Potter fiction). Indeed, such work is taken even further than Jenkins might have envisaged, with the use of Photoshop allowing the highly sophisticated manipulation of existing texts both for clever political statements but also for the production of huge quantities of pornographic celebrity ‘fakes’, where celebrity faces are added to the bodies of porn actors. Video is the area which has exploded the most since Textual Poachers was written, with a whole slew of sub-categories of animation such as Machinima, and Lego frame-by-frame re-makes of title sequences, adverts, video games and film sequences, live action copies of dance routines from music videos and endless mash-ups from anime to TV series where fans either pay homage to their favourite media or offer up new juxtapositions of meaning. On one level, this material in itself may do no more than justify a view of the fan as a ‘sad’ figure, working for free on unoriginal material for an audience of ‘sad’ peers; but on another level it acts, just as Jenkins argues in Textual Poachers, as a starting point for a sense of community to begin to be enacted as part of a ‘Participatory Culture’. So Textual Poachers deserves its place in Laughey’s Canon – a groundbreaking book, prescient of a fan culture to come. Reviewer – Pete Fraser – Chair of the Media Education Association and PhD student at CEMP, Bournemouth University