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Meetings, Conferences, Workshops

1996 Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop Abstracts

COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION:
© DiCenzo, Rich, 1996. Cite as: DiCenzo, Rich (1996). Sense-Making Creative Process in Video Production Aesthetics. Paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 23. Available at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96dicenzo.html

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
Essentially, I am asking a video production community "what is good video?" How this comes to be, how we know, who told us, what could be better, what is video good for? I hypothesize that this esthetic shifts video language at its root as "style" emerges, as in Vancouver, now. I hope to obtain "other" stories from these didactic storytellers that might provoke a critical video pedagogy.

The reason for this road is "literacy" is an inadequate concept, and s-m can elicit the difficult to articulate and foreground difference by reducing expectations of sameness. This is my best hope for an ethnomethodology that might help others make sense of self and others as we use video to make sense of the world, at least as referent, but also as leads to engagement and participation.

The best so far has been the "stories" of how people do collaborative and creative and purposeful work they can be proud of. Thus far, most of what they ascribe to good video comes from good people in a good time, in a good experience, in the enthusiasm and the trust of the enclave.

Particularly helpful for me has been the "talking cure" as in the therapeutic communication aspect of the way the interview can elicit pre-textual, and pre-language emotions and "felt meanings." I find that people can talk "about" (circling) ideas most difficult to articulate directly. Since I am looking for talking about ideas that aren't already prepared speeches, the s-m method is best for me.

I have struggled a bit with the idea of the producer or the "creator" as a "mother" figure that "enables" others to be creative when they are patronized so. This is not popular terminology in these days of idealized democratic or dialogic communication -- the therapeutic model of communication I believe to be inherent in s-m is much more useful to me than "message in a bottle" ideas of other models (particularly of "literacy"). Also, despite our "given" of time moving "forward" I am not so certain that "who's on first, what's on second" is always illuminating. That is, I'm not sure a time line doesn't over emphasize the primacy of origin as foundational, when talking about experiencing immediacy, currency and style.

What would help now is more work on a protocol for method and the "good" representation that would be required to make the best of an "open" yet reducible interview -- that is, the relationship between a pre-interview schedule of questions and topics, the sense-making interview and the final representation of usable examples and how they might be "worked" in a critical engagement.

ABSTRACT: Stories of Life on Television
Communication scholarship would be remiss without more substantial theorizing of video and new media as sites of interaction and mutual extended experience. Working to provoke a pedagogy of "good" video that is "critical" I am attempting to engage the dynamic esthetic of video appreciation in style emergent in a community of video production. I posit that we are all capable of expanding our repertoire of roles along a continuum of participation in culture from being consumer to producer, from critic to actor, from unconsciously reacting to stimuli to a more responsible purposeful engagement. When privileging the individual's (though a member of a community) talking as theorizing their own experience of appreciation, the talking about (circling) what is good, how this comes to be, how we come to know, and what knowing is good for, can help the making sense of our mutual extended experience we share in stories of life on television. My project is to become a participant observer and ethnographer of video production in the "style" emergent in Vancouver, B.C. I hope to trade "work" as a "go-fer" on site, for time as an interviewee. I will provide an outline of my questions in advance of the interview and encourage sharing among members of the community in some forms of member checks that would include video playback. I hope to involve students and peers and others in "working" the product I collect. I hope to shoot, edit and produce a "good" video engaging the same questions about "circling" what is good video, and how this dynamic esthetic is capable of "moving" the video language, expanding the horizon of what can be appreciated in the ecology of the world constituted by video -- as a milieu, that serves as a cultural referent in making sense of many complex relationships we might now engage in through electronic media of communication. I hypothesize that what many have theorized as mystifying mythology might be appreciated as access to cultural power beyond resistance, for those who would choose to be responsible participants in culture. Those that inhabit the niche on the edges of technological and artistic/creative experience "leak out" some aspect of this niche culture to influence some larger culture, pervasive in its effect, to some extent, everywhere there is electricity and cities -- "telecultural" in the capacity to walk across boundaries political, economic and otherwise, and to talk to a wide diversity of people as if with an inner voice.

If, the television, telephone and computer are becoming one unified appliance, one medium, one esthetic of communication, appropriating text and talk, dance and music, then, this study might be a help in making sense of a changing world, new technologies, new opportunities yet to emerge in what could be good, or better.