Road Blocks on the Path to Fulfilling Ethical Obligations
"Consider
the Source"
In my estimation, the single
best, and the single most complicated of the collaboratively produced remixes
was a project by three students who wish to be pseudonomously identified in
this article as "Giggles," "Susie Carmichael," and "Marla Singer." Remixing an
original documentary called "Shoveling
Water: War on Drugs, War on People," the collaborators created "Consider the Source," which
seeks to localize for Syracuse University students the problems of labor,
displacement, and food shortage in the clash between the US-Columbian cocaine
trade and our government's "War on Drugs." At the same time, they satirize and
critique the "high-class," "sexy," and "money/power/respect" popular cultural
mythos surrounding cocaine in the States that makes its use appealing on a
university campus. Take a look:
This was an excellent
response to the assignment prompt for several reasons. "Consider the Source" is
successful as a remix in that the collaborators include original and sampled
text, video, audio, and images, with significant choices in pacing, visual
design, mood, and arrangement. Aside from technical successes, the students
compellingly argue that cocaine use by wealthy college youth unaware of the
source of their "fun" is, in part, enabled by glorifications in popular media
that obscure the complex political, economic, and human costs of the
Columbian-US cocaine trade. Additionally, Giggles, Susie, and Marla drew from multiple
sources to make new meanings not possible within any of those original sources'
contexts. They have remixed in ways that draw from available resources,
literacies, and strategies to form new ideas for themselves and their potential
audiences. As Jim
Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (2009) describe:
In our day, writing often requires composers to draw upon
multiple modes of meaning-making. Computers and robust networks allow writers
to choreograph audio, video, other visual elements, text, and more. Writers
engage in taking the old and making new. Appropriating words and images. Taking
pieces, splicing ideas, compiling fragments. Transforming existing work. Transformation
occurs when the rhetor delivers a text into a new context; collects the text
with others to make a new compilation; adds additional materials to the text;
and more (Mendelson, 2002; Porter & DeVoss, 2006). Most importantly here,
transformation occurs as and when the composer remixes—[...]
Choreography is an especially
applicable concept in the case of "Consider the Source." Lyrics from Eric
Clapton's "Cocaine," images from Scarface and The Chapelle Show,
images of Lindsay Lohan, and samples from Immortal Technique's "Peruvian
Cocaine" are featured as "hinges" between nearly every juxtaposition of the
local, the national, and the international. Interspersing popular culture among
segments of statistical data, scenes from "Shoveling Water," and images and
personalities (real, remixed, and imagined) from Syracuse University, the remix
traces the entanglement of cocaine-using college students and Columbian cocaine
producers on an oft-overlooked ideological playing-field. Taken together, the
hinges showcase a US culture in which the drug is a symbol of wealth, social
status, freedom, sex, and fun. In carefully choreographing their many lines of
argument, the students build complexity into their critique and (hopefully)
inspire a more intrigued college-aged viewership.
Additionally, through the
inclusion of real and imagined SU students and faculty, "Consider the Source"
establishes cocaine-use as a real concern for the Syracuse University
student body. Giggles, Susie, and Marla largely rely on clips from "Shoveling
Water" and their own research to position their critique of the ways in which
cocaine production threatens the health and well-being of its laborers through
both the production process itself and through the US government's aerial
spraying of herbicides that destroy Columbian food crops. But, their inclusion
of local SU content remixed with popular culture brings together actual student
cocaine users, the social milieu that makes use appealing, the exploitative
nature of its production, the fact that US culture generates demand for its
production in the first place, and the US government's punishment of the people
who produce cocaine to satisfy its own citizens' demand. This highly
complicated argument may not have been possible within the boundaries of print
literacy, nor might the viewership made possible by YouTube, nor might the
sheer amount of fun and struggle the collaborators experienced in the making of
their remix.
In "Consider the Source," the
co-authors effectively used their newly acquired or developed digital
literacies in a way that fulfills the ethical project of informed, critical
participation in shaping discourse surrounding global and local public
problems. Using Photoshop, iMovie, Garageband, Keepvid, and YouTube (among
others) Giggles, Susie, and Marla remixed original and sampled media content
toward their own rhetorical ends. They built a stimulating, well-researched,
and complex argument that has so far enjoyed over 100 viewers (not viral, but
significant enough). The successes of the remix, however, must not overshadow
the ethical problems present within the specific content of their work.
Before moving on to a discussion of some
categories of ethical complications that arose from the video, I wish to
acknowledge that the problems to come are difficult in how they may speak to
images of SU, its student body, and myself as an ethical teacher and scholar.
First, that "Consider the Source" addresses student cocaine use on my
university's campus is worrisome in how it may confirm stereotypes of private
university students as white, wealthy, impulsive, and entitled. This is
especially contentious, as several of my mentors remarked upon reading this
manuscript, in a particularly difficult moment for Syracuse University. For
instance, in Robin Wilson's (2011) article "Syracuse's Slide" in The Chronicle of Higher
Education this past October, the author connected Chancellor Nancy Cantor's
Scholarship in Action campaign, efforts to improve relations with the community
through services, investment and collaboration, and 10% increase in incoming
"minority students" and students receiving Pell Grants with our fall in ranking
in the US News and World Report and our resignation from the Association
of American Universities. For Wilson (2011), SU's commitment to social justice initiatives "represents
a lack of commitment to significant scholarly work." Conversely, SU's recent
circulation in news media coverage of the sexual abuse
allegations against the men's basketball team's assistant coach, Bernie Fine, has shed negative light of a different kind on our university's
image. All in all, this is a sensitive time for any work to further speculation
about Syracuse University.
I do not want to brush the risks I take in this
article under the proverbial rug. Rather, I feel that it is my ethical
responsibility as a teacher and scholar to address these concerns head on.
While I am aware that my students' discussion of cocaine may reify our students
as privileged, I want to be clear that cocaine use can be found on university
campuses across the nation–private and public, wealthy and underserved,
Research I and community colleges. The same is true of the sexual abuse scandal
we currently face (see coverage of Penn State's Jerry Sandusky), and the crises
of mission in the contemporary university (public interest or maintenance of
traditional cultural values). I am not excusing our university's
particular wrongs, but rather wish to point out that the issues I raise in the
specific space of SU are socially distributed. These challenges are not SU's
alone, but are born out of forces found culture-wide. I care deeply about my
university, and I believe in the power of public awareness as a force for demanding
accountability on the part of the administration, the faculty, and the
students. Facing our struggles publicly carries an exigence for change and
self-improvement that may be less amplified when kept private. Recognizing our
individual struggles and placing them in cultural context out of which they
emerge, through the use of public discourse, is exactly the academic success I
praise in "Consider the Source." But these feats are only so meaningful because
of the risks they take. I will reflect further on these concerns as I
point to ethical complications in the areas of identity, humor, and fair use in
my students' remix below.
Identity
Many of the difficulties in
"Consider the Source" concern risks of identity–those of the
collaborators, their interviewees, Syracuse University, and the SU student
body. Giggles, Susie, and Marla include two interviews in their remix. Around
two minutes into the video, the collaborators introduce a video interview with
a Syracuse University student who describes her experiences with cocaine. The
interviewee makes comments that are helpful for the project of the remix, but
which could be potentially threatening to herself and others in the SU
community, including the following:
What's that you take when you wanna stay up all night at
the library? Adderall. It just felt like Adderall times 10 to me.
A good friend of mine was into coke, and so, like, there
was a couple nights when I was, I don't know–probably 19, like, I was a
sophomore or so in college, that I started doing coke.
More than anything the places that i would see coke at was,
like, the frat formals.
When people get away and they think they're, like,
...they're in Canada, and, like, they're in these shitty hotel or motels, and
they wanna, like, pretend they're in Vegas. And they bring tons of coke. And
everybody's doing coke all over all the tables [...] And it's so funny because
you walk in and like, all these girls, who like, think they're like, you know,
they're wearing dresses like they're in Miami or something, but we're actually
in Canada, and we're in shitty hotels, with shitty people, and we're doing
shitty coke. [...] I would usually be doing coke after I had done, like,
ecstasy.
These comments and others in
the interview are contextually and rhetorically appropriate for the
remix–they establish that cocaine use happens within the student body and
recognized student organizations, they speak to the social climate that
perpetuates cocaine as a symbol of wealth and power, they grant the student
ethos in admitting to her own experience with drug use, and her lack of
knowledge about the source of cocaine (explored in a later interview segment
with the same student) supports Giggles, Susie, and Marla in their
problem-posing. However, if an unanticipated entity were to identify this
student, she could face any number of difficult consequences, such as peer
harassment, school or job termination, legal repercussions, or familial
reaction, to name a few. In the original draft of their remix, peer reviewers
and I noticed that the student's identity was in no way shielded from viewers.
While the student had approved the inclusion of the unaltered video, the
collaborators recognized concern for her privacy and used visual effects to
render her less identifiable in the final version. In a time of hyper-presence
in social media, we understand how common it is for individuals to have loose
concerns for privacy for themselves and others; culturally, we are still
negotiating expectations and consequences of virtual identity, as this anecdote
reflects.
Throughout the remix, we find
images of Syracuse University manipulated to establish its campus and student
body as a site of cocaine use. One particularly stirring image grafts Dave
Chappelle's "Tyrone
Biggums" (a
crack-addicted African American male who recurs in Chappelle's sketch comedy)
onto a picture of the Syracuse Orange men's basketball team. I will further
analyze this in the "Humor" section below, but at the moment I wish to draw
attention to its negative implications and potential harm to the team's image.
The most dangerous image depicts our school's mascot using a glass pipe to
smoke crack or cocaine. This image is clearly meant to be satirical,
but due to a recent harrassment investigation concerning an SU law student's satirical blog,
I have edited the image to protect my students from a similar fate.
While Giggles, Susie, and
Marla were kind enough to allow the feature of their video in this article, all
three preferred that their real names not appear in its text. Additionally, I
have edited the original remix to obscure Marla's real first name and a
derivative of Susie's last name, which they had included as captions over
slides that feature their faces Photoshopped onto the bodies of the original
actors in a Scarface poster. That they wish to remain anonymous reveals
their sensitivity to the dangers of what Ridolfo
and DeVoss term rhetorical
velocity, or, "a conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed,
and time, pertaining specifically to theorizing instances of strategic
appropriation by a third party." The students recognize that "recomposers are
perhaps unknown to the initial composer or creator of video and text," which in
this case yields fear of potential threat to the composers' ability to
establish, maintain, and protect a particular identity or livelihood.
This article, then, served as
a prompt for the students to consider the ways in which their privacy and
identity could be endangered through the "Righteous Remix" they had composed
and made public nearly a year prior. Though the entire class participated in
several discussions about managing identity, security, and privacy in digital
public spaces, my pedagogical approach was ultimately to allow students to make
their own, informed decisions about individually acceptable levels of risk.
While I remain confident that I am ethically obligated to help students develop
digital literacies, this specific application of them yielded for me these
questions: what is our ethical obligation to students in assisting the
protection of their identities, privacy, and security in the age of rhetorical
velocity? In what ways might we be bound to protect potentially damaging
critiques of the university as our employer?
Fair Use
Writing teachers have long
taken up the charge of helping students develop responsible research practices
that align with scholarly conventions of citation and respect for others'
intellectual property. These conventions, however, are less clear when it comes
to multimedia projects. I am just recently coming to consider the difficult
realities of fair use and multimedia composition myself, largely thanks to
having taught this particular class. As I mentioned above, I asked students to
develop in their remixes a visually consistent system of attribution for music,
images, and videos that were not their own, and I encouraged the use of end
credits as a space for documentation.
Giggles, Susie, and Marla
made important strides toward this goal, but were not wholly successful. They
chose not to identify the artists and track titles for the soundtrack they
sampled, for instance. Additionally, the compression of the video in tandem
with their font choices leave the end credits illegible. In one location, the
timing of their attribution was inaccurately placed such that Cookie the
Cokehead was labelled as being sampled from "Shoveling Water." Finally, some of
their statistics and textual research were uncredited altogether. The
collaborators made a good effort overall, but were not necessarily consistent
with the fair use guidelines we had discussed. I believe, however, that their
missteps were the result of technical difficulty,
time constraint, the newness of the genre and its convention (both for the
students and culturally).
In a recent article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Patricia
Aufderheide (2011)
argues that "it is time for scholars to reclaim fair use." Addressing the
confusion that many teachers, scholars, and students face in understanding the
differences between fair use and the educational exemption to copyright law, Aufderheide clarifies that:
Teachers and scholars have significant rights within
copyright law, but they are limited to mostly traditional educational settings.
As both students' and professors' work moves outside the classroom, whether in
a video posted on YouTube or a slide presentation on SlideShare, they'll need
to employ their fair-use rights to participate in 21st-century education.
(2011)
Finally, she makes an appeal
to the activist impetus for being aware of and implementing our fair use
freedoms, concluding that "when scholars and others do not employ fair use,
they shrink its effectiveness as a right"(Aufderheide, 2011). This is not far from a point Lessig (2008) makes in Remix. Noting the ways
in which culture and copyright law shape each other, clash, and interact, he
reminds us that government is not the only source of creative dampening. He
explains that:
The law is just one part of the problem. A bigger part is
us. Our norms and expectations around the control of culture have been set by a
century that was radically different from the century we're in. We need to
reset these norms to this new century. We need to develop a set of norms to
guide us as we experience the [Read/Write] culture and build hybrid economies.
We need to develop a set of judgements about how to react appropriately to
speech that we happen not to like. We, as a society, need to develop and deploy
these norms. (Lessig, 2008, p. 274).
Taken together, Aufderheide (2011) and Lessig (2008) offer a parallel sort of argument about
fair use to that which I am making about digital literacies. These modes of
cultural production have emerged out of a particular historical place, doing
what Saskia Sassen
(2006) terms "jumping
tracks." Though her project is quite different from my own, her insight
applies. Theorizing the palimpsestual nature of the shifting nation-state in the globalization
period, Sassen argues that "some of the old capabilities are
critical in the constituting of the new order, but that doesn't mean their
valence is the same; the relational systems or organizing logics within which
they then come to function may be radically different" (2006, p. 8). In other
words, the founding principles of copyright law to protect and allow for
creation of new content ought to be retained; but in the digital age, creation must
now be made possible through active and conscious shaping of both
culture and law to account for economic and personal interests, while also
recognizing the place of knowledge-making through remix. We must push
well-informed fair use to its greatest capacity to encourage the digital public
participation in global affairs afforded locally in our classrooms through
projects like "Righteous Remix" so that gains made through these literacy
practices in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street can continue and expand.
When asking our students to
remix others' content, it stands to reason that we are obligated (as we are in
teaching traditional academic research) to be informed ourselves about common
systems of attribution in multimedia work and to prepare our students to make
the best possible compositional choices. But in an age when culture and
law are at odds (Lessig, 2008), what is our obligation for
intervention in student work such that we protect our universities, ourselves,
and our students from legal or private consequence, and work from a coherent
disciplinary, political pedagogical mission?
Humor
Many compositionists have
described the ways in which play can enhance learning. However, humor,
when used in the context of global human rights atrocities, can be ethically
questionable and rhetorically dangerous. I would like to return for a moment to
the example of Giggles, Susie, and Marla's use of the Dave Chappelle "Tyrone
Bigguns" character. In one of their remixed images, the group takes
picture of Hendrick's Chapel (an easily recognizable SU building) and overlay
Tyrone Bigguns. In pink letters, they caption the picture with a quote from the
character: "Chinese riddle for you: How can you sleep when you're high on
crack?" This particular image lasts barely long enough to read the caption, so
I did not notice it until several times through watching the video for this
article. For this reason, I never noticed the racially offensive undertones.
I believe the students
composed this image for the purpose of continuing in their invocation of
popular cultural references like Bigguns, whose character was almost always
featured as added to images of SU's campus. However, I felt compelled during
the drafting stage to appeal to the group, explaining the problem of conflating
cocaine use among white, middle class fraternity and sorority students at a
private university, and crack cocaine use via a caricature of a crack-addicted,
African American male. I described the statistical race and class distinctions
among the drugs' users, and discussed the structural racism in the
now-overturned "100:1" crack to cocaine ratio determining legal sentencing for
possession convictions. But the students chose to retain the images due to
their persuasive power for their intended audience, since Dave Chappelle's work
is both highly popular and highly recognizable amidst a contemporary
college-aged students.
Another complex use of humor
in "Consider the Source" comes in the form of a character invented by the
students themselves. They introduce her as "Cookie the Cokehead" from "The
sisterhood of STD." She is played by Marla, wearing a sparkly pink hat and
sequined black top. She has what appears to be white powder beneath her nose.
In her first interview, she responds to the question "So, why do you like
cocaine?" All sways and bounce, Cookie replies "I like coke because, I just, like,
really love the way it makes my heart race, and then I can just, like, fuckin'
party." What mitigates the drama of this scene, in some ways, is that it
directly follows a line from the "Shoveling Water" in which the narrator says:
"Let me show you a few of the other characters that are involved in this tragic
comedy." Hence, "Cookie" is meant to be read as a caricature whom the audience
should pity and find amusing in her hyperbole. Marla, however, could
potentially be taken more seriously than the collaborators intend. Taken out of
context, the student could be perceived as openly describing her use of the
illegal substance.
Typically, I am a strong
advocate of fun and laughter in the classroom; I believe that enjoyment helps a
student become receptive to new information and ideas, and encourages
engagement that moves beyond the banking-model, making the transformation of
real learning possible. It does for me. However, libel law and satire are in a
precarious cultural dance, and it has taken the drafting of this article to
realize that I need to be better informed about the consequences of digital
literacy, rhetorical velocity, and humor.
I wish to emphasize that these difficulties are
not products of my students' or my own choices alone; rather, they are prompted
from the still-emerging social norms about the power of design and circulation
in a moment where texts are made and shared more quickly than our understanding
of or agreement about their power and significance. Analyzing these risky uses of humor in "Consider the Source" prompts,
then, the following questions for educators concerned with critical digital
literacy: What is our obligation to helping students shape responsible
public arguments that are sensitive to problems of race, class, gender, etc.?
Where do we draw the line in creative projects between adhering to our own
political commitments, protecting students, and recognizing their right to free
expression? In other words, how do we decide when to use our full teacherly
authority as evaluators and as administrators of virtual class spaces, and when
to respect our students' rights to play and to take informed risks?
Some readers may question my
choice to allow my students to make such a complicated video publicly
accessible. It is appropriate to question the costs of circulation in the
global and digital era. The racial tensions that arise through the use of
Tyrone Bigguns might reveal irresponsibility on the part of myself and my
students, but I understand my students' choice to retain the images and mine to
consent to the video's publication differently. The form of play, humor, and
experimentation present through invocation of Chappelle's Bigguns character
might be read instead as a form of what Cornel West terms "tragicomic hope,"
or, "the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life's joy–to preserve
hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy–as against
falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair" (qtd. in Gilyard, 2008, p.77). Giggles, Susie, and Marla dance
along a precarious tight rope in their efforts to balance attention-holding
techniques, critique of the popular cultural mythos surrounding cocaine in the
US, and enticement of SU students to understand the ways in which their
participation in the cocaine trade and culture affect the material lives of
those who produce it. I believe that Chappelle's Bigguns character, though it
makes light of crack addiction, does so in the the spirit of the tragicomic;
and, the collaborators rely on the character's visibility and comic effect as a
way to draw in viewers and, hence, make it more likely that their hope for
spreading awareness will be fulfilled. In this way, the risk of structural
racist cultural scripts speaking through their remix benefits their larger
anit-racist/colonial cause and actually serves to enhance its efficacy.
Additionally, while, not undervaluing the complicated nature of the students' "play,"
I also have to respect that: 1) I created a space where students were
comfortable enough to take risks in a real way–the students could have
chosen a less complex topic and might have produced less complicated work. In
allowing their work to circulate, I have chosen to value the risk they did
take, complete with its struggles and successes, thereby allowing student to
grapple with consequential rhetorical choices in a real world setting. In part,
this means acknowledging that Giggles, Susie, and Marla took pride in
completing the project, wanted to make it public, and that taking the risk must
also mean following through with the risk. 2) Learning to be a public writer is
an on-going process for writers in the digital age. Even well-established
profesional writers and academics face both successes and failures, taking
risks with every publication in journals or even on Facebook or Twitter. In
producing and publishing their remix to YouTube, the collaborators were forced
to take themselves seriously as textual producers and grapple with the process
in more complicated ways that bring ideological concerns to the fore. They had
to engage in the weighing process that I'm going through with the publication
of this very article.
That said, I recognize the
ethical murkiness on my own part in raising these complicated problems in my
students' work–further circulating and drawing attention to and gaining
scholarly benefit from them in the same breath that I am discussing the
potential moral quandaries involved. The analysis presented here, however, is
intended to demonstrate my firm belief that conversation afforded by
problematic student creations must not be shut down in an attempt to suppress
risk altogether. As teachers, we must take risks with our students in
order to help model processes of deliberation and critical consideration that
they might use in future moments when their digital, public creations are done
on their own time, toward their own goals. In my mind, the greater risk is a
generation of media-creators who are not well-prepared with the rhetorical,
critical, and ethical grounding that positions them as informed, responsible
participants in the shaping of a global public discourse. This is especially
true in our current moment of instability, within which our practices actively
contribute to the establishment of emerging norms. Since the ethical issues of
identity, humor, and fair use are likely to arise in any composition classroom
undertaking public multimodal composition, Giggles, Susie, and Marla's
generosity in allowing me to reflect on their work in this article serves to
open up conversation that might benefit students and teachers working on
similar projects (and facing similar questions) in the future.