A/V in the digital era of the university
“mongrel” america, the annual University of Texas American Studies graduate student conference went off without a hitch, and I’m now back to staring down my dissertation. Our keynote speaker was Dick Hebdige (UC - Riverside), who gave a talk about race, rockabilly, and the west. He played a bunch of music clips, and showed scraps of video, and talked about everything from lynching to June Carter to snake handling as described in Salvation on Sand Mountain, a book I’ve always had a particular affinity for due to its ability to tell a lurid tale without making the people involved seem like cartoons or freaks.
In any case, while the talk itself was interesting, I was particularly interested in the format — the incorporation of videotaped images and slides (real slides, not digital ones), and music clips played from cassettes. As much as I love incorporating multi-media into my own presentations, I rarely invest in that portion of the process as much as I should or would like to. It’s too easy to fall back on PowerPoint slides filled with snappy bullet points, and frequently, I feel that I live down to the relatively low expectations for academic presentations. In part, I’ve avoided cultivating more media-rich presentations because because I just haven’t taken the time, but it’s more because I’m terrified of technological failure. There’s something profoundly embarrassing about failing to master the bells and whistles of a presentation, but fear of embarrassment probably shouldn’t be a guiding force when it comes to scholarship — mine or anyone else’s.
Hebdige’s devil-may-care approach to technological failure was refreshing, though I wonder if some of the willingness to go with it has to do with the particular technologies involved. We all expect VHS tapes and hard copies of slides to fail a bit — they’re obsolete, after all. Increasingly, the fact that anyone can do anything at all with these a/v holdovers is kind of impressive on its own. Newer, more digital technologies are “powerful tools,” though, things to be mastered, things that we’re led to believe will practically do the work for us. In the digital age, I’ve been promised perfection, and when I can’t arrange for it, I feel that I’ve failed the technologies, and not the other way around. That said, I don’t think the audience had any sort of crisis of attention span when the wrong tape got queued up or the audio track on the VHS went dead for a few seconds during the keynote. And, perhaps assuming that audience members are automatically dismissing me when I can’t get everything just right isn’t giving them, or myself, enough credit.
Photo by Russell Lee from the National Archives and Records Administration. Lee worked for the Farm Security Administration as a photographer, later taking public relations photographs for Standard Oil before becoming the first photography instructor at the University of Texas.