This
paper is opportunistic. Since last year I’ve been the research assistant for LA
Freewaves’ Out the Window, the very
excellent and equally improbable video takeover of LA Metro bus Transit TVs. One
of ten winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s third HASTAC (Humanities, Arts,
Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Digital Media + Learning
Competition, Out the Window shows
animations, documentaries, narratives, and experimental videos about, by, and
in Los Angeles. By sharing unique perspectives from throughout the city, the
project offers a kaleidoscope of the legion social, cultural, economic, and
creative dimensions within the incredibly complex postmodern Los Angeles.
Out the Window is multi-phase; this
paper is concerned with the first. Starting in the fall of 2010, Echo Park,
Historic Filipinotown and East Los Angeles youth participated in a
collaborative learning project wherein they acquired digital media
communication and technical media skills, honing their critical thinking in the
process. They wrote and produced short, two- to six-minute videos exploring
various dimensions of their lives and L.A. Narratives and aesthetics range
considerably, but common is the theme of immigration in all its variegations.
Their
video production is just the first half of the project. Teens’ works were
keyworded and edited according to content and/or location to curate mini-shows
for screening on the 2,196 Metro bus’ 4,366 Transit TV televisions. Following
each curated piece, student-authored, location-based questions written for and
to the riders appeared alongside an SMS number, inviting rider response. Using
out-the-window.org as a platform, students could access these questions and
keep the conversation going.
The
project’s formation and concomitant processes underscore Out the Window’s abiding and equal emphasis on both the youth and
ridership. Of the estimated seven million people riding Metro buses weekly (Metro
2011), a full 38.7% live in households making under $25,000 per year.
Considering that 69.5% of these seven million live in households of three or
more people, this figure is significant (Scarborough 2010). The average rider
spends over an hour and half of the bus in a single day, generally split into
two 45-minute commutes (Williams 2006). The Out
the Window collaborators believe these individuals, for whom the Internet
and new media are less readily accessible, should be no less served by these
innovations. If their youth are to transcend in today’s society, they must have
networking and communication skills to navigate creatively the digital
landscape and do so on their own terms and in their own social structures.
Out the
Window’s methodology likewise reflects an awareness of the prevailing
public art dialectic and its peculiar Los Angeles landscape. For one, LA is
notoriously park poor across the city, but this dearth is asymmetrically
exaggerated according to wealth. Low-income and concentrated poverty areas and
neighborhoods inhabited by majority Latino, African-American, and Asian-Pacific
Islander populations have extremely limited access to parks and open space
(Wolch et al. 2005). And while the bus is not public space in the strictest
sense (you still do have to pay for entry), it is the closest thing that much
of the Metro ridership has. The Bus Riders Union movement registers this
commitment to the riders’ rightful if informal ownership of the buses and the consequent
rights to authority (Soja 2010).
What did we learn from phase one? The youth films screened from
June 12-19, before and after which we conducted surveys of 461 riders to better
understand who they are, what they think of Transit TV, what programming they
would like to see, their bus riding habits, their access to mobile and web
technology, as well as their own feelings about art. The results confirm our
transit accessibility and digital divide hypotheses. To wit, 76.5% of Spanish
speakers self-identified as Latino; of those Spanish speakers, 47.8% ride the
bus every day, compared with just 38.3% of English speakers. In addition, 43.9%
of Spanish speakers never use the
Internet, whereas 51.5% of English speakers usually
use it. This relationship exists even when controlling for age. We also
learned, despite nonprofit One Economy Corp. producers’ and American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act policymakers’ assumption that the Latino riders will watch
the Transit TV telenovela exclusive, “Los Americans,” a meager 6.1% of Spanish
speakers professed interest in the genre. 77.4%, meanwhile, would like to see more news.
Again, this paper is opportunistic. Over the break I will compose
a planning and policy piece, wherein I’ll address such things as institutional
inertia, the importance of leadership, and how something that should never have
happened did, still does, and the promise presented by that unlikely process.
To write all that, however, I need first to explore the potency of
media art in this particular milieu. What else can happen here? What can’t?
What does this research tell us about systemic problems and how can we use
digital media to attenuate them? Digital culture’s power here, I submit, is
paradoxical. On the one hand, we see the great democratization of information
afforded us by the communications revolution. The development of media art now
costs virtually nothing and can go anywhere. YouTube announced on May 25 of
this year that over 48 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. On
the other, the “we” in the information age are specific. Access to the digital
public sphere is constrained by one’s socioeconomic status and even the most benign
agencies persist in making disconcertingly revealing conclusions about ethnicities’ media preferences. My aim with this paper is to establish a working
knowledge of the digital media literature as it intersects with immigration and
media literacy, and apply these findings to this public art experiment in using
the television to show people what is out the window.
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