A very interesting debate is ping-ponging back and forth between the two blogs Personalize Media and FuturePresent, representing the views of respectively Gary Hayes and Claudia Marques Vieira, which I both met at the Cross Media Storytelling Conference in Mechelen; it is a heated debate with many crucial points and I wanted to throw in my humble personal opinion.

Everything started with a remark from Gary who made a distinction between “forward thinking practitioners, catch-up heritage media representatives and theoretical, reflective academics”.
Soon the argument degenerated into something like: what is more relevant to cultural evolution, industry or academia? Why academics will always be behind in the study of new/cross media (Greg) and why this isn’t true (Claudia)? And, I might add, why such an abyss separating practitioners and academics?

The extremely interesting times we live in are witness to a Digital Renaissance, and as we all know this destroyed, or is destroying, OK, maybe it “will” destroy eventually the separation between theory and practice.

All these new media forms and media languages are still in the making, thus it is (it should be) impossible to write about something without getting your hands dirty somehow (like I believe Claudia has done at various points), and on the other hand it is impossible to participate in the creation of these new forms without some reflection.

That is, for those who haven’t been completely brainwashed by this “theory is different from practice, and practice is dirty and we are pure thinkers” line of thought. Greg is a great example of “renaissance” attitude, and I wish industry put on its agenda new ways to stimulate reflective thoughts in their employees, that would be good for everybody.

Critical theory, the way it has become in the last 30 years, is often a byproduct of (popular?) culture, and even more often a style exercise involving always the same references (to know more about the standard references and authors of (bad) postmodernist theory, check out the “Postmodernist essay generator”, a must to all those interested in academia, theory, or really weird writing); THAT attitude towards theory, I agree, can be pretty useless and even misleading.

BUT there is some other kind of theory, a type of intellectual labor, honest, slow, robust and forceful, perhaps completely out of date, whose methods have been lost somewhere between the seventies and the eighties, some say because of new employment policies in academia that force researchers to focus on the short term and don’t allow broader scopes as before.

Call me deluded, but I sort of believe that THAT theory is just as creative as production-related activities, and should not indeed fall for the seductions of the 6 months deadline Greg at some point hints to, because exactly that is the problem with academia (NOT with Claudia, I repeat): on one side lack of contact with ongoing events but on the other side lack of broader scopes to pursue (and broader time frames to pursue them), and over-specialization that cuts creative thinking at the knees.

Although THAT kind of theory (can we call it Renaissance thought? Although I had in mind the great sociologists and anthropologists of the last century) has been drowned by other approaches, sometimes more unscrupulous, to theory, something that has become the norm in recent years, this doesn’t mean it’s not going to come back now, if we want to believe that Digital Renaissance is going to happen.

Suggested reading for everybody: Michael J Gelb, How to think like Leonardo, with plenty of tutorials about how to become a Renaissance man or woman.

Thanks for bearing my two cents, and my delusions for a better future. Hopefully, this blog is still pretty much unknown, so I can write whatever I want without bothering anyone.

Technorati Tags: educational, personal