earthx.org blog

Let’s just start with the axiom that the most compelling popular culture narrative America sells itself is the narrative of individual destruction and redemption. I won’t list the dozens of celebrities that are exemplars of this. We find ourselves fascinated with famous and talented people being degraded and abased through their own weaknesses of character: the powerful and tragic magnifications of our own lapses and less-than-proud moments.

Enter into this system Robert Downey Jr., circa late 90s-early 2000s. Incorrigible, so gone that we kind of gave up on following his story until it was all over (think Whitney Houston about 20 months ago). What’s left, when the glory of being a celebrity is ruined by the shame of being human and subject to human problems? (Think Britney Spears, now). Middle America (and I’m not objectifying this: at the time, I definitely shared the perspective of middle America) wanted Downey to osmotically learn the lessons we understood as common sense, and we were mighty vexed when he didn’t, at least not immediately.

And didn’t at all, not in ways that we found traditionally comforting. He took his issues past a point where we understood them within a revival or “bad boy with a heart of gold” narrative: he got bothersome, and let us give up. He didn’t publicly apologize in the mode we’re accustomed to now. He didn’t get Christian: he just hit rock bottom. We figured he’d be in jail until we forgot about him.

But he then lived. What’s more, he understood himself as the man lost and found again, the prodigal, and performed it. His performance in Elton John’s “I Want Love” is perhaps the most succinct distillation of this. “A man like me is dead in places.” Watch the subtlety with which he, in spaces of moments, mobilizes regret, craving, sadness, defiance, and invites us to sympathize with him. He understands these feelings as theater: not only his own drama, but the drama we were living through him. Downey persisted through the facile shows of glowing life and tragic fall to which we assign the famous, and remained able to look us in the eye and perform himself, and to understand the framework with which we appropriated him, and to own and perform that as well.

Whether it’s in Wonder Boys or Zodiac or his public existence: Downey not only lived through the horrors of addiction but has proven able to mobilize his own story of addiction and tenuous survival, to synthesize it with his art and present it to us in a way we find resonant. Maybe it helps that middle America has seen a lot more Oxycontin and meth and is a little more able to acknowledge the addictions that live within its own culture. Or maybe it’s just because he’s a brilliant actor.

Regardless, he’s free now of our pernicious stories: he’s been through our wringer, so rather than continue to subject him to our narratives of fidelity, sobriety and domesticity, we respect him for the shaman he is, and we let him work. In Iron Man he plays an arms dealer, an emblem of Blackwater or Halliburton, who seeks redemption, and perhaps only he could sell that to an American audience at this point. By acknowledging that he is “dead in places,” Downey takes up our sins and invites us to wrestle with our own degradations and abasements. In some ways, he’s one of the few convincing superheroes we can still plausibly have, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s about time we saw him fly.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins analyzes the practices and contexts of young people writing Harry Potter fanfic, and makes an argument that fanfic communities provide opportunities for situated learning (an extension of arguments Jim Gee makes in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy). This made me want to find out if anyone is actually implementing fan fiction writing as part of a curriculum.

This article gives a good overview of the practice and its potentials. The scholar cited in the article, Rebecca W. Black, outlines the really cool connections between fanfic practices and best practices in literacy instruction in her own article, although at the end she issues the disclaimer:

In presenting these brief examples, it is not my intent to hold this writing community up as a pedagogical model that we, as teachers, should aspire to. Nor am I suggesting that fanfiction should be incorporated into classrooms as part of the curriculum, in fact, I am certain that importing fanfiction into schools would detract from its appeal for many fans.

This took the wind out of my sails somewhat. I can certainly see the logic in the “in school == toxic lameness” argument; I remember when we had to listen to “relevant rock” during 12th grade literature class, and that pretty much ruined Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” for me. But surely that was more an issue of presentation than of substance? Surely there are ways to allow students to practice fanfic without ruining their fandom?

It’s interesting to think about the Venn diagram that covers popular culture fandom and fan fiction production, the overlaps and gaps. Certainly fan fiction practices tend to coalesce around contemporary popular narratives, but Harry Potter isn’t the only narrative with devoted fans, and I’m always very interested by the more fringe-y fanfic satellites out there. To wit: Catcher in the Rye fanfic, evidence that interventionary engagement with a narrative can happen with old-school assigned reading, just as it can with the shiny fun stuff.

A lot of the descriptions on the Catcher fanfic index state that the given story began as an English assignment and turned into fanfic because the assignment went well. So there you go — maybe you just need to invert the practice a little, and the kids will be all right.

Folks have put together a wiki to talk about John Slatin’s legacy. It is a very good idea and worth promoting.

I avoid talking about loss and personal stuff on the blog, mostly because I think I’m miserable at it. It’s a conscious choice, though probably not healthy. So I’ll just say quickly –

I’ve just started remembering the afternoons talking with him in his office, hearing his triple-speed JAWS output and playing ball with an off-duty Dillon. John was a brilliant teacher, technologist and advocate, and an amazing mentor. He dealt with great adversity with patience and kindness; he always blessed me with patience and kindness. I love and miss him very much.

For years I worked on stuff that was secreted away onto shadowy corporate intranets, so it still doesn’t immediately occur to me that work products can be public and shared. But we’ve been working on lots of cool stuff at Terra Incognita that you can totally go look at.

• Late last year we finished The Monticello Classroom, which gives teachers, students and other visitors to Monticello a rich set of resources to compose lesson plans; an online archive of Monticello collections; and, a set of interactive tools to engage with and share. We built this app in PHP with a port of the Mach-II MVC framework, and I built a cool little house builder in ActionScript 3 – it lets you mess up some architecture and then share it with friends.
• We also released updates to The Genographic Project — this was a mix of ActionScript 2 and 3 and a whole lot of contextual learning about this complex and ambitious project.
• For AARP, we created an interactive timeline for 1968 which turned out very nicely. I can’t claim much on this — Gregg did an amazing job developing this one — but I did get to have some fun at the tail end tweaking and deploying it, and besides it’s just cool.
• Finally, the big project for early 2008 — we’ve delivered an exciting museum redesign that should be going live in the next couple of weeks. I’ll add some details when it goes public — until then, I’ll let you know that I’ll be speaking on it at the Texas Library Association conference later this week, with a focus on bringing archival collections online with tools like Flash and Fedora Commons.