Alex Juhasz responds in Podcast form to "choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive"
choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive
Hi, I’m Alexandra Juhasz and this is Episode 6 of We Need Gentle Truths for Now. The podcast engages in radical digital media literacy by enjoying a bite of education and a bit of poetry, creating humane responses to fake news and social media in the era of Covid-19.
In this episode, we focus on the founding illogics of online response and inaction, distancing and touching, by taking up the internet formats at the heart of what ails us. In 2017, after Trump’s election I pledged to respond to the crisis of fake news by blogging alongside him over the first 100 days of the administration. I shadowed him, inhabited his stomping ground, and reacted to his escalating online malfeasance. This left me feeling dirty, grim, and culpable. On the 55th day of creating this online primmer, I wrote the hardtruth: “choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive.” Here it’s read by Kaycee Genualdo, who is working on this podcast as one of my students at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema:
I am Kaycee Genualdo, reading from Alex’s hardtruth #55:
Every morning I wake up and work on this project. By the end of the process I feel invigorated. This octane-fueled daily writing has given my 100 first days under Trump some shape and purpose. But as the day continues, the underlying morass of truths regarding internet habits, uses, and infrastructures—and linked contradictory feelings—begin to build in me. I am pretty sure only a small number of people actually read all the way through my posts. I feel swindled, and worse still, that I am the biggest swindler of myself: producing more content to a small number of readers. What’s the point?
Yes, having this place for expression, “audience,” interaction, validation, non-validation, the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, feels like something. It’s not nothing. But it certainly is a sorry substitute for the engaged, place-based interactions that truly sustain me and their linked movements that matter to me.
In previous work, I have called our production, spreading, and connecting through well-made digital words and images proto-political. Our digital gestures are an important step toward well-being and world-changing—by naming and sharing our troubles—but are not those things themselves. But here I’ll go farther and name this kind of production as a kind of proto-being: a half-life, albeit one pointing to great possibility. I inhabit this half-life with sadness, doubt, and fear which might propel more.
So, perhaps the real use and value of producing all our internet content is just this: the making of a potentiality that haunts all of our words and images and their reception. Online, alone together, we acknowledge to ourselves that we are here, writing or receiving or sharing, and hence we momentarily if only ever partially heard and seen. And from this desire for more, more might come.
And indeed, I did decide to make more happen, beyond my intense and dense internet declarations. In May 2018, video artist Orr Menirom led one of many Fake News Poetry Workshops. Hers was at a media studies conference held in New York City. There, we activated, with professors and students, a writing method called exquisite corpse, allowing for the collective production of what I have named as one key solution to the crisis of fake news: “Art Answers to Phony Questions.”
Here is Orr explaining her powerful process and its resultant poem, which like the HardTruth is called: “Choose to be digitally productive rather than reactive.”
ORR READS.
Productive reactive
Orr and workshop participants mine art answers from a lineage more than a century old, created in the aftermath of World War One: the beginnings of modernism and the stirrings of the surrealists. (the past is always there) Like us, the surrealists were responding to the phony questions of their time--about war, nationalism, racism, and capitalism. They chose to bank on the qualities of the irrational, unconscious, or random—as well as the collective. We borrowed these tactics, and the poems rendered through them allow us real access to today’s truths. Those truths include the logics of the internet, a highly rational system—one surrealists could never have imagined, and one we still have a hard time seeing. It’s a system that produces the irrational fakes and awful truths that dominate so much of how we now think and live: Oceans are drowning in plastic.
Thank you, Orr and conference participants, for your playful thinking and serious sorrows, as well as your proactive production that show us other possibilities. And thank you for listening to Episode Six of “We Need Gentle Truths for Now: Radical Digital Media Literacy as Podcast.”
I know neither podcasts nor Fake News Poetry Workshops will end or even undo the internet’s current shape or violence, nor the insane logics of our time that litter our oceans with plastic. But they do offer other productive systems from which we can learn and do differently. So, change the internet with us! Engage in art answers to phony questions by volunteering to read a poem, a hardtruth, or your own response. Or stage a digital workshop. Please email us at 100hardtruths@gmail.com. To learn more about the project see the embedded links.
This podcast was produced, written and read by Alexandra Juhasz. It was directed and edited by Matthew Hittle and copy edited by Gavin McCormick. Music by Noah Chevan. Social media assistance by Kaycee Genualdo and Cole Richards. Additional readings are by Kaycee Genualdo and Orr Meniron. Thanks for listening.
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Could the phony question it artfully answers be: how do we make the most of our power online by gathering clicks, likes, and followers?
See this original hardtruth:
hardtruth #55 Choose to be Digitally Productive Rather than ReactiveSee the poetic response to hardtruth #55:
choose to be digitally productive rather than reactiveOrr Menirom reads the poetic response "Choose to be Digitally Productive Rather than Reactive":
Response to Choose to be Digitally Productive Rather than Reactive