Jay L. Lemke
University of Michigan
A new culture?
Students today, of all ages, are participating in a new attentional culture. They are becoming accustomed to rapidly shifting and cycling their attention among multiple sources of information, multiple interactions, multiple virtual environments. They message each other by cellphone and wireless communicators, they do email on PDAs and laptops, they exchange photos and data, they chat online with real-time video links. They play videogames and computer games that require far more sophisticated and dynamic distributions of attention than anything they encounter in classrooms, including educational software. They integrate multiple media: voice, text, image, music, sound effects, animation, video, and 3D virtual-world interactions. When we ask them to sit and pay attention to a teacher at a chalkboard or a printed page in a textbook, they think we are crazy, and they are right.
Power Users
Some students are well ahead of their peers in developing sophisticated means of making sense of complex, dynamic multiple media. They not only play computer games, they modify and create them. They not only use computer applications, they write their own programs or scripts. They not only surf the web, they create dynamic and interactive websites. They not only make use of new technologies, they transform them for their own purposes. They break through sloppy corporate and government computer security for the sheer pleasure of solving a problem and having a laugh at the expense of older adults whose claims to superior wisdom are demonstrably false.
New activities, new modes of thinking
Does a focus on these new kinds of activities, does the development of a new attentional culture, imply different ways of learning, different ways of thinking? How can it not? The original claims of cognitive science that human modes of thinking were independent of specific forms of action and activity were incorrect. Thinking is just one aspect of action, and it changes in basic ways when we engage in new kinds of activity. What we don’t know is just how and why our thinking changes with various specific features of our activities. We don’t think the same way with text that we do with mathematics or with diagrams, or with combinations of all three. We don’t think the same way with or about animations or video as for still images. We don’t think the same way in one medium as we do when we are free to juggle and combine multiple media. We don’t think the same way when we are interacting with just one source of information as when we are cycling our attention rapidly among several. We do not think or learn the same way when we are being led along as when we ourselves take control.
Youth cultures
An attentional culture is more than just a new set of skills for juggling our attention. It is also a new set of desires and values. It means we get bored in some situations and excited by others. It changes the definition of “attention span” and “concentration”. It changes the kinds of input that we are open to. Mass media advertisers have been quick to learn about these changes. Look at the websites advertising successfully to the youth market today. Computer game developers have also been rapidly adapting to and in some cases leading these changes. The new attentional cultures of youth are still emerging, still developing. They are being created at the intersection of mass culture, popular culture, and youth culture. Their leading edge is made by young people who have the sharpest skills with new information and computer technologies, but who also share many cultural interests with the mass of their peers. They are being sold mass market and niche market cultural products, but they are also re-inventing, re-appropriating, and making from these products and technologies what they themselves want to have and create.
Research Tools
How do we study these new attentional cultures? What analytic and conceptual tools are most useful? Some of the answers are obvious, some are not. We need ethnographic studies of how young people at the cutting edge of these changes use new technologies and re-appropriate cultural products. We need studies in which they participate with the researchers in exploring issues of mutual interest, in the course of which we will learn about each other as well as about our shared focus of interest. We need analyses of the language they use, in context, for which discourse analysis tools are fundamental. We also need analyses that can go beyond language to understand how it is being combined with visual, auditory, and interactive media of many kinds, for which multimedia semiotics provides the most rigorous methods. We need sociological and cultural-anthropological studies that situate new activities and practices, new discourses and ways of using multimedia, in the context of larger economic and social-political factors as part of the relations between youth culture and adult culture. And we need sharp-eyed critics to warn us when we are seeing what we want to see and not what we need to see.
An example
Movies like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, X-men, or The Matrix are advertised with sophisticated multimedia websites. They generate complex computer- and video-games which are more and more seamlessly integrated with movie scenes. They are often based on printed books and graphic novels. They are tied in to merchandise and the fantasy play of fans. They generate discussions in chat rooms and online sites. The websites for the book publisher, the movie studio, and the game developer are linked. What fans know is not just one or the other of these, but a good cross-section of all of them. What these works mean today is a function of how we traverse these multiple sources of information and interaction, how we integrate meaning across multiple attentional spaces, over minutes and over months. In Enter the Matrix (the game), players are encouraged to use their computer skills to “hack” the programming within the game. In many other games, players are able to alter and re-create scenes in the games, and even build whole parallel games using the software sold with the original game. In some cases, these player-built “mods” have become commercially successful, and in many more cases online networks of players create alternate forms of the games collaboratively in the same basic way that the open-source community today creates major new software such as Linux.
What are the right questions?
We cannot just ask how “power users” of new technologies are coming to learn differently and think differently without also asking what they are learning and thinking about. We can’t understand new attentional cultures apart from the activities in which attention is deployed, or apart from the interests and motivations that guide the focus of attention. We can’t take new ways of thinking out of the social and cultural contexts that are giving rise to them and in which they are being developed and transformed. We can’t separate meaning-making from meanings-made.
What do we know how to do?
In terms of research tools and their application, we know how to analyze the explicit and implicit values in written texts and their extensions that include images, animations, and video or film. We know how to analyze their content themes and organizational structures. We can analyze hypertext and interactive websites. We can analyze interview data and transcripts of online chat or text in much the same ways. We are just learning how to analyze users’ and players’ actions and communications as they engage with programs, programming, or digital games in real time. We can connect what people do and say to key aspects of the personal social relationships being built or changed by their actions. We can connect the patterns of what people typically do or say to some of the larger-scale cultural, economic and political contexts in which they live, including issues of gender and generational cultural differences.
My end of the elephant
Most of what we’d really like to know about the emerging new attentional cultures of power users of technology cannot be learned by individual projects. We will each see part of the elephant. Only by integrating our different partial views will we understand what the elephant is. Personally, right now I am mainly interested in how young people as gamers make meaning and experience feelings in the course of interactive, multimedia, immersive-world gameplay. I want to compare that with how they respond to the best current educational software. I want to understand what I can of their new attentional culture and interests within the context of digital games and constellations of closely linked media (such as movies, websites, guidebooks, merchandise etc.).
A top research student
My most advanced research student at this point (Caspar van Helden), who is well-trained in methods of discourse and multimedia analysis, is mainly interested in issues of changing adolescent identities at the intersection of popular culture and youth culture, including uses of new technologies. He has experience with interviewing and interview analysis, online text analysis, print media analysis (e.g. youth magazines), and film/video analysis. His background prepares him not only to do discourse and multimedia analysis but also to help design studies, conduct interviews, and interpret findings in relation to larger social and cultural contexts.
My background -- See PROFILE: Jay L. Lemke
Some of the kinds of analyses I have done include: NASA websites, political cartoons, newspaper editorials, journalistic essays, secondary school classroom discourse, educational curriculum materials, nonverbal communication in science classrooms, computer games and associated websites. I am co-editor of the new journal Critical Discourse Studies, immediate past co-editor of Linguistics and Education, on the editorial boards of a half-dozen major academic journals (including Visual Communication and Functions of Language), and regular reviewer for another half-dozen or so (including Journal of the Learning Sciences and Cognition and Instruction). I have frequently reviewed funding proposals for the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), the Economics and Social Research Council (U.K.), the Australian Research Grants Council, and other foundations and national agencies.
Some of my publications of particular relevance to these issues include: [For hyperlinks to Full-Text]
“Travels in Hypermodality.” Visual Communication 1(3): 299-325. 2002.
“Language development and identity: multiple timescales in the social ecology of learning.” In C. Kramsch, Ed. Language Acquisition and Language Socialization. London: Continuum. pp. 68 – 87. 2002.
“Discursive technologies and the social organization of meaning.” Folia Linguistica 35 (1-2): 79 -96. 2002.
“Multimedia genres for science education and scientific literacy.” In M. Schleppegrell & M.C. Colombi, Eds. Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. pp. 21-44. 2002.
“Becoming the Village: Education across Lives” In G. Wells and G. Claxton, Eds. Learning for Life in the 2ist Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on The Future of Education. London: Blackwell. 2002.
"Analysing Verbal Data: Principles, Methods, and Problems" in K. Tobin & B. Fraser, (Eds). International Handbook of Science Education. Kluwer Academic. (pp. 1175-1189). 1998.
"Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings And Media" In D. Reinking, L. Labbo, M. McKenna, & R. Kiefer (Eds.), Literacy for the 21st Century: Technological Transformation in a post-typographic world. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. pp.283-301. 1998.
"Resources for Attitudinal Meaning: Evaluative Orientations in Text Semantics." Functions of Language 5(1): 33-56, 1998.
"Discourse and Organizational Dynamics: Website Communication and Institutional Change" Discourse and Society 10(1): 21-48, 1999.
"Cognition, Context, and Learning: A Social Semiotic Perspective" in D. Kirshner and A. Whitson, Eds., Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic, and Psychological Perspectives. (pp. 37-55). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 1997.
"Hypermedia and Higher Education" in T.M. Harrison and T.D. Stephen, Eds. Computer Networking and Scholarship in the 21st Century University. Albany: SUNY Press. 1995. pp.215-232.
Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. London: Taylor & Francis. 1995.