New Media Classroom

Sometimes teachers think their role, their relevance, is disappearing, especially when it comes to new media.  Students already know how to use new media.  They already post videos on YouTube.  And they probably own and use gadgets their teachers have never heard of.

Yet teachers are still needed.  One key area that students need to be guided in is new media literacy, being taught to consciously think about and critically reflect on how they interact with new media.  Students can then be taught to apply this critical reflection to their own new media writing.

This post will give an example of how an interactive web space (the Star Trek website) can be analyzed using a theoretical, reflective approach to new media (Margaret Mackey’s theories of play) and then used to encourage students in developing their own new media writing.

You don’t have to be a Trekkie to appreciate the Star Trek website and its web 2.0 savvy.  Equipped with an RSS feed, click-to-play soundtrack from the film to accompany your website exploration, a number of clips from the film, and constant interactivity, the Star Trek website invites you to become part of the Star Trek world.

Margaret Mackey provides a useful lens to explore how users interact with new media texts like the Star Trek website.  In her book Literacies Across Media: Playing the Text, Mackey explores various definitions of the term play (in the spirit of Raymond Williams’ Keywords), giving eight categories for how we “play the text.”  Four of these categories are particularly relevant to analyzing the Star Trek website.

1. Playing as pretending or imagining

Margaret Mackey writes, “How do we learn about stepping into a world with an imaginary and still-open future? How do we learn to apply this switch to a new text, or a new format?” (166).

The Star Trek website equips us with all the tools we need to enter the website world. For those without past Star Trek exposure, there is an “About” page with story background and a basic synopsis.

Yet the Star Trek website also invites pretending and imagining from those familiar with the Star Trek world. The “panoramas” and the character and place dossiers are visually attractive and interactive, both inviting and teaching the user to pretend or imagine specifically in the web sphere in addition to the film sphere and TV sphere.

Imagining in the website allows us to explore a “still-open future” an online Star Trek world in which we can determine the possibilities and how we interact with all that is before us.

2. Playing as engaging with the rules of the game

Not only does the Star Trek website invite us to imagine, it quickly teaches the “rules” of online interaction in this space, both what is and is not possible, and what is and is not permissible, just as certain things are possible and permissible when you play a game of baseball.

One of the major “rules of the game” of the Star Trek website is that we are meant to have a dual level of awareness, a dual level of interaction.  Right next to the “dossiers” of major characters and places-presented as if dossiers from the fictional world-are “production notes” which include filmmaker thoughts on casting, filming certain scenes.  We are supposed to engage with the characters on a deepness comparable to engaging with real life stories, and yet we are supposed to know all the time that this is just a movie, and a movie’s website.

3. Playing as performing

When we perform, we are not only pretending in order to interpret the text. We become involved on a very physical and emotional level in our engagement, in our “play” as we act out various roles.

The games page is an obvious example of physical performance; for example, as you play “Race to Destiny” your body has physical reactions—movement, muscle tension, etc.—in response to things encountered on the digital racecourse.

The site offers opportunities to perform Star Trek identities offsite, providing downloadable user icons. By blogging with a picture of James Kirk or Uhura as your icon, you are performing (and creating) a different identity emotionally (for both you and those you interact with) than if you used your own picture.

4. Playing as fooling around

The Star Trek website allows you to “fool around” or in other words, to experiment with possibilities.  By clicking on different ship hallways or using the “Navigate” menu we explore the movie website world at our own pace, in our own order, testing and trying the different functions to see what interests and engages us without being constrained by a set or pre-planned arrangement.  There is no easy beginning-middle-end “reading” method like with a traditional print texts, and being able to explore without these traditional constraints gives our mind new options, new possibilities, helping us think in original ways and make new connections.

Classroom Application:

Applying a complex theory like Margaret Mackey’s to something students already engage with (like the Star Trek website) helps them understand the theories surrounding new media and also to think critically about the online processes they engage with on a daily basis.

As always, the next step is to help students apply it to their own “online writing,” their own writing creations.  In a new media project I might assign a written reflection, worth 25 of the 100 points, in which the students address the following (based off of Mackey’s categories):

• New types of online texts teach you how to actively play and pretend in their worlds. What in your text invites users familiar and unfamiliar with its elements to participate, play, and “pretend”?
• All texts have rules. What are the rules of your text that an audience would have to engage with to have a successful experience with your text? How will they know what these rules are without them being explicitly stated?
• Performance creates an added level of participation on the part of your reader. What opportunities do your readers have to perform, to participate either in different physical or emotional roles, with your text?
• Some of the best online texts allow the viewer to choose how they will explore or “read” the text, allowing them to make decisions and create new meaning. What about the design of your text/project gives choices to your viewers? How might they create new meaning through your text?

Some of these may seem intuitive to your students-if they’ve created a video to upload on youtube, then the rules of the texts will have been acquired by their viewers spending time on youtube watching other videos.  Yet whether the explanations are obvious or not, reflection helps them to think critically, and create better material in the future.

In and of themselves, Margaret Mackey’s theories are unhelpful to students.  Yet if students are shown how the theory works in action, and then are invited to apply it to their own work, they will not only learn a lot about what makes good new media writing, but they will also become critically-thinking new media writers.