CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: DiCenzo, R. (1999, May). Conscientizing video downroad: Using Sense-Making to negotiate shared experience - articulation, limits, and potentials. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Rich DiCenzo (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
This project is part of my dissertation focusing on how people use video to acquire cultural power, and also, part of an ongoing project to design and enact a pedagogy of video, centered in ‘participation’ as contrasted with ‘resistance.’ By ‘cultural power’ I mean the capacity of each person to create cultural products which move the culture forward to new places. For my students (mostly undergraduates but adult learners as well), it means expressing themselves and their worlds and struggles in video. The following story illustrates more concretely what I mean. In a field trip in Mexico, I visited “guerilla video” natives of Tamazulapan Mixe who showed us videos they had made to preserve their Mixe culture and language and to train their people how to be political leaders and preserve their heritage in general. I asked them if knowing how to use video in this way gave them cultural power, and they replied that they wouldn’t exactly call it cultural power, but they pointed out the following consequences: the government couldn’t get away with what they had done to the Mixe ‘Indians’ in the past since they had made these videos; indeed, they couldn’t be pushed around or slighted in terms of their own cultural prerogatives, and therefore they got more respect and also, more money from their government. In addition, the videos had won them appreciation from other people in the United States and Europe.

As explained below, this project is not about deconstructing television, revealing truth, or fostering ‘right thinking’, political correctness, media or cultural literacy, raised or advanced consciousness, or forsaking the entire medium as less than print. It is, however, about empowering students to create their worlds and it assumes, in line with critical pedagogy, that part of this process is attending to one’s place in the social order and to the ways in which these worlds both enable and constrain one’s place. Every moment that I’m teaching basic presentational speaking, I’m provoking my students to learn to acquire cultural power by participating in the world, not ‘resisting’ some hegemony. We stress interaction and engagement, not distancing or ‘criticism’ except in some ‘constructive’ or ‘interactive’ way. We’re not victims, not whining nor complaining, but rather we’re making life better, or trying to. I am conducting lengthy Sense-Making interviews of 15-20 people, chosen to constitute a judgmentally selected sample of video users (including producers, consumers, teachers, students, artists, professionals and amateurs), who describe themselves in differing roles. Participants are asked how they use video and what that use “does” for them. I am interested in how we have come to know what is ‘good’ video, be that product or practice, and what we imagine could be better.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
As a researcher and teacher, I am attempting to provoke participation in moving the culture, by using communication technologies (especially video in its myriad and emerging forms) as a means of becoming engaged in processes and procedures of acquiring cultural power. The idea of moving the culture captures what cultural studies literatures have documented - that culture is changed not only by large monied forces but by everyday people as their pursue the human need to express and to engage others in dialogue so they can be understood. I have found that ‘engagement’ allows for conscientization, though often ‘downroad’, but that ‘resistance’ only allows for the reification of the status quo in habit, structure and power relationships. To champion resistance to the exclusion of other means and methods of empowerment, self-realization and actualization, is to imply that, as the Borg say in Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.” Coming to know how to use video, and what is ‘good’ video, is an ongoing group process of consensually negotiating the mutation of an esthetic of appreciation. What I draw from Sense-Making provides a procedural and methodological referent, for paralleling ‘video method’ in my research, my practice, and my design and enactment of a critical video pedagogy.

Throughout all aspects of this project, from interviewing participants through the analysis, presentation, and application of the findings; and, in the design and actualization of a critical video pedagogy, Sense-Making provides a ‘continuity check’ that is reflexive, inclusive, open to possibility, and yet limited to the human scale. In this way, I attempt to overcome abstraction, miscommunication and hubris, acknowledging the limits of my attempts to realize such an ideal. This means avoiding all the vanities that academics, and particularly those engaged in research, carry around with them in terms of thinking they are doing ‘perfect’ or ‘politically correct’ work with no ego involvement, no ‘blind spots’. I believe this attitude is grounded in excessive pride, unfounded/excessive confidence in their methods, methodologies, and political or religious beliefs. I have taken this road because these means and methods would appear to be capable of allowing for the possibility of empowering anyone who has watched TV, thought about that experience, and talked about it, or otherwise shared that experience with another. In this way, Sense-Making is uniquely situated to take advantage of the situation, language and experience that most residents of North America, and many others, ‘grew up’ with (and within), that I would characterize as “growing up on television.” As such, like the beginning ‘voice-over’ of an old cop show on TV: “These are stories of life on television.”

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
Sharing, with students and others, in the apprehension of an emerging esthetic of video and other technologies of communication as a means of engaging and moving the culture, if only in some small part or amount, is what I imagine to be the best I have achieved. There is an enthusiasm in praxis, in consensus, in negotiationg our mutual experience of coming to know ‘good’ video, that has motivated all of those who have participated in such projects, to achieve some synergistic potential that has provoked all of us to grow and learn and share in conscientization that is fun, if not addictive. I am also proud of having engaged my peers with the possibilities of using video as a method of research, as a tool of critical pedagogy and as a novel critical methodology.

WHAT HAS BEEN HELPFUL:
Dervin and Clark (1987-4) who found that library patrons used video tapes in ways that had not been imagined by librarians, demonstrated the applicability of Sense-Making methods to elicit the unspoken, unnoticed, and possibly, not-yet-formed articulations of the experience of using video as a means of empowerment. Dervin’s (1992-1) paper “From the mind’s eye of the user: The sense-making qualitative-quantitative methodology” has also helped me theorize experience that could open up to a reflexive negotiating in method. Damarin (1992), in deconstructing ‘malestream’ technologies, allowed for reimagining the relation of culture and technology as well as the relationships between gender class and power. Both works by Tichi (1989, 1991) apply literary and cultural criticism to emerging relationships of our bodies and our identities to technology, and especially to television, and chart a genealogy of the move from an esthetic of structure and feats of power to an appreciation of style and grace. And I would have to add that Mumford’s (1922) The Story of Utopias, as an ancient precursor of contemporary cultural criticism, and as a ‘foundational’ text of utopian criticism (as well as most of his extensive collection of books and essays as art, literature and architectural critic) provide a ‘loose’ metaphoric frame for thinking about the relations of communication, technology and culture, in terms of the organic and mechanistic, spatial and relational, abstract and concrete.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
I have chosen to resist the idea that ‘resistance’ is empowering, and therefore I have attempted to avoid ‘right thinking’ about what is or is not ‘good’ video, or even considering if such a possibility might exist or ‘should’ exist. Those who champion media and/or cultural literacy constitute a ‘camp’ and literature that I want to engage. Howvwever, I seem to be attempting to deconstruct the foundational assumptions extended from configuring reading as political power, to imagining that other media, like video, could be used to acquire cultural power. I am always struggling with interpreting the emergent in terms of the outmoded, i.e. grasping the future while living in the now, anchored in the past. In this way, I am able to capture what has eluded most video research, that in fact, it is the marginalized and the young who have always been best able to “predict” the future of video.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
Suggestions, provocations, challenges, contest, assurance and/or therapy, in terms of analyzing and presenting these stories and theorizings of using video to acquire cultural power, that voice the diversity of those participating in this research, and yet, might eventually coalesce into a critical curriculum, a ‘video method.’

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
Traditionally, pedagogy has focused on the individual as source and object of knowledge and experience. More recently, the curricula of empowerment have been built upon the assumption that socially useful information and knowledge derive from interaction and collaboration. Beyond decoding, deconstructing and ‘resisting’ the oppression of an ‘inevitable’ hegemony ‘revealed’ in classic cultural/media literacy studies, a pedagogy of using video (method) to acquire cultural power can present ‘alternate truths,’ construct opportunities for conscientizing downroad, and create, in a collective praxis, participation in moving the culture - appreciating, making, and using, ‘good’ video. I am attempting to use Sense-Making to negotiate the shared experience of coming to know how to use video to acquire cultural power. Sense-Making Methodology serves to provide a continuity-check for critical reflexivity, from ‘data’ collection to analysis, representation and presentation, to the design and enactment of a pedagogy of video centered in participation rather than ‘resistance.’ The continuity of method and methodology, from research through the design and implementation of a participant pedagogy, allows opportunities ‘downroad’ for conscientization, with Sense-Making providing an ongoing procedural referent. Articulation of shared experience and of knowledge we didn’t realize we had can be elicited through a proceduring of interaction that parallels the video method: Interrogation, Negotiation and Triangulation. After opening up to possibilities in the interrogation phase, attempting to elicit, for instance, all the ways one might use video, we can then limit the field of discussion through dialogue in negotiation; this could involve trying to ‘group’ uses into a small number of ‘types’ or sorts that we might then triangulate; the next step would bring us to consider; gaps, goals and bridges or movements across gaps and toward goals. This process allows us to explore not only ‘what is good video’but also what our use of video does for us. Though this inquiry is so limited, it remains open to the possibility of what could be.

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Damarin, S. (1992). Unthinking technology. Qualitative inquiry, 1 (1), 21-48.

Mumford, L. (1922). The story of utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright.

Tichi, C. (1991). Electronic hearth. New York: Oxford.

Tichi, C. (1989). Shifting gears. New York: Oxford.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistdicenzo.html