C-CS

Private Configurations and Cultural Configurations

ABSTRACT

In this entry, I distinguish between private configurations. public configurations, and cultural configurations. The dissemination of cultural configurations is important because of the media used, e.g., print, video, webcam, etc. Commercials are cultural configurations. It needs to be noted that mediated configurations are mediated by someone usually for their benefit. Configuring, nonetheless, is a process of acculturation

Configurations are expressions that convey mental models of situations that permit you to identify with one of the persons in it.

private configurations

Anyone can configure any interpersonal situation and identify with a person in it thus creating a configuration. Most artists are configurers and their art works are configurations. This is simply because artists typically portray experiences by imagining them from the point of view of someone in the situation. In this sense, we are all artists. The difference is that artists make their configurations available to the public and we don't. At the moment of creation, configurations are "private" matters. (Cf. Tim Portlock's "SuperSpecatular")

I suspect that you, like me, have at some time or another wished you could perform like another person. At that moment, you are probably configuring a situation in which the other person performs better than you can. Most of us have "role models" whose behavior we admire. Many of our role models are private. The following scenario is a common occurrence:

Jill admires the way Susan handles her boyfriend when he argues with her. Susan has a knack for interrupting him to ask for "clarifications." He tends to "paint himself into a corner" in answering her and his argument begins to fall apart. If he gets angry at her interventions or tries to shout her down, she walks away. Jill, however, cannot quite master Susan's ability to formulate questions. She keeps trying. Often she practices interrupting Jack's arguments with a scene-stopping question in her imagination. Susan 's behavior is a "private" configuration that Jill is using to learn a new form of behavior.

Human beings, as Aristotle noted, are highly imitative. As children, much of our learning comes from mimicking others. Children often play at being adults, mimicking what they have observed of adult behavior. They pretend to be adults using their imaginations to look at the world through the eyes of adults. Children configure their world by making it a "story world" peopled by stuffed animals and imaginary friends.

[Private Configurations] [Public Configurations] [Cultural Configurations] [Dissermination of Cultural Configurations] [Commercials as Cultural Configurations] [Mediated Configurations Are Mediated by Someone] [Configuring as a Process of Acculturation]

public configurations

When artists make their work available to the public, they do not automatically become a familiar configuration. However, they are different from private configurations because person's other than their creator can configure them (activate, so to speak). The reason is that configurations have no force (cannot be used for learning) until persons take on the perspective (identify with) one of the characters in it. If you do NOT take on the perspective of a character in the situation that is narrated, the narrative is simply a confirmation of the way you already see the world. You don't learn a different way of behaving because you are NOT taking on another person's perspective which is required for you to be able to "perform" in a way that is guided by their performance.

Imagine Jack and Jill going to see a violent horror film. Jack enjoys it thoroughly (we'll be kind to Jack and say that he identifies with the victims rather than the killer and enjoys the film in the same way he enjoys riding on a roller coaster--having the sensation that he is in danger without actually being in danger. Jill hates the film. She can't identify with the victims because it is too terrifying when they are killed. Next week, they go to see a romantic comedy (Jill's turn to choose). Jill identifies with the woman in the film and consequently enjoys it thoroughly. Jack, however, can't identity with the male lead in the film who is a type of man that Jack despises. Consequently, Jack hates the film is is bored throughout it, making snide remarks to annoy Jill.

It is entirely possible to read a story and watch a film without changing. To persons who are not "moved" by a narrative, it is simply information about something that didn't really happen. It doesn't change your life-story.

CULTURAL CONFIGURATIONS

Aesop’s fables like Uncle Remus’ fables are important aspects of our cultural heritage. And so are the many classic fairy tales and children’s stories, not only “Little Red Riding Hood,” which we examined in an earlier chapter, but also “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Peter Pan,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and countless others.

Bruno Bettleheim was one of the first commentators to study fairy tales as expressions of our cultural heritage. In his The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, he argued that fairy tales are important in the healthy development of children. For Bettleheim, fairy tales, "represent in imaginative form what the process of healthy human development consists of...(and) make great and positive psychological contributions to the child's inner growth" (Bettleheim, 12). As cultural configurations, fables, fairy tales, children stories acquaint children with cultural practices. While growing up, children have yet to experience numerous aspects of the world in which they live. Cultural configurations promote their acculturation by making them aware of various cultural practices. In the terms of this study, children have innumerable null experiences. Through fairy tales, fables, and other narrative forms, they can experience cultural practices in the virtual worlds of their imaginations which prepares them to cope with the world in which they live.

Tales are not the only narratives that can be identified as cultural narratives. Many stories are deeply ingrained in our cultural practices and retold countless times through various media and tailored to fit the times. The stories associated with Ishtar, Osiris, Odysseus, Oedipus, Aeneus, Perceval, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes, and even Indiana Jones are all cultural configurations. The very mention of their names evokes their stories—rebirth, quest, idealism, revenge, bargain with the devil, miserliness, deduction and heroism. Their re-incarnations are numerous owing to the applicability of their mythos. Each teaches a lesson about a cultural practice.

In this section I want to show the ways in which cultural configurations show us ways of being in our world. Every cultural configuration presumes a null experience of a typical situation. It instructs its audience in ways to behave in unfamiliar situations. Configuring situations is not a “once and done” event. As in the case of any skill, it has to be cultivated over time. One falls into bad habits and have to return to “basic” instructions to reinforce the learning. We tend to think of living as a spontaneous phenomenon that simply happens. However persons who do not practice cultural skills find themselves adrift, subject to whims and fancies, tricks and troubles. To cope with the world in which we live, we have to practice how we behave. In unfamiliar situations we submit to instructions.

The dissemination of Cultural Configurations

In print cultures configurations were disseminated large through publications of fairy tales, legends, myths, and canonical classics. Growing up prior to the electronic revolution, I had fairy tales read over and over to me as a child. When I began to read, tales of heroic figures who were legendary were readily available to me. I was particularly fond of The Lone Ranger. In school I read about American heroes—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Bunyan. The stories of these figures were repeated over and over again.

Then the movies supplied me with countless stories of heroism—cowboys, soldiers, frontiersmen, policemen, explorers. When I was in high school, a television station opened up in a nearby city and I was now able to watch stories on it. Not all the films and TV shows presented me with cultural configurations but many did. Not only had figures like the Lone Ranger migrated from radio to TV but so had other familiar heroes. Family shows configured family life. War films configured battles. Growing up during WWII innumerable war films came to the movie theaters and later to TV. Like my friends, I identified with the heroes presented to me and often pretended that I was them in the various backyards, fields, and streets of the neighborhood.

Years later, thanks to the development of new media, we are bombarded by potential cultural configurations. Advertisers pioneered the techniques of dissemination of these potential configurations for politicians, religious leaders, and producers. Consider the changing depiction of our cultural enemies in various configurations associated with movie making. Producers know that providing a villain who we believe is threatening to us almost guarantees our identification with the hero proposed to save us from them. Growing up, German and Japanese soldiers took the place of the big bad wolf and Captain ? as threatening figures from whom I needed to be saved. Later, after the Atom bomb, I needed to be saved from scientists who were more interested in their research projects than human life. Still later, law enforcers tried to save me from the drugged out hippies and their spaced out ladies without success since by that time I was in Graduate School and was well acquainted with persons who chose a counter culture and protested the Viet Nam war. I feel certain, however, that others felt saved from them while watching the many TV shows that featured them as villains. During the cold war, Russians provided villainy. After it, Arabs did and continue to do so. I admit to enjoying John Grisham novels and films where in the villains are ruthless and invisible businessmen whose lackeys fail to get me in their clutches.

In our current cultural climate, we can assemble the configurations that reinforce our beliefs and simply disregard the others that don’t. When I was growing up during WWII I thought that I belonged to one culture without realizing how many cultural spheres impinged on my life. Even though I participated in numerous cultural spheres of belief, it seemed that there was an over-arching set of cultural beliefs that I shared with almost everyone—American culture. A half century later, the numerous cultural spheres and the configurations that reinforce their requisite beliefs no longer seem enclosed in some more general and wide-spread sphere that is shared.

American culture seems to be migrating into a global culture of a hybrid character yet to be identified. We no longer seem to be in a period in which the cultural configurations are dominated by a widely shared belief system such as Catholicism and later Christianity. As Lyotard argues in the PostModern Condition, “Grand Narratives” no longer possess the impact they once did.
Whereas in the past configurations were disseminated through fairy tales, legends, and myths, in the 21st century they are disseminated through the media. We misrecognize them. Accustomed as adults to identifying fairy tales, legends, and myths as fictitious narratives which children or less sophisticated societies believed, many configurations are not recognized as such. In the next section, I compare the cultural impact of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood with the cultural impact of the Nike superstar Michael Jordan.

COMMERCIALS AS CULTURAL CONFIGURATIONS

When Phil Jackson was the coach of the Chicago Bulls, he had his players close their eyes and meditate. Many of them did not participate in the spirit of the event and would open their eyes to see if the other players had theirs closed. In Sacred Hoops, Jackson explains why this did not bother him:

. . . the experience of sitting silently together in a group tends to bring about a subtle shift in consciousness that strengthens the team bond. Sometimes we extend mindfulness to the court and conduct whole practices in silence. The deep level of concentration and nonverbal communication that arises when we do this never fails to astonish me.

One of the ironies of NBA history is that the Jackson coached Bulls won four championships playing the triangle offense which is a team-oriented strategy in which all the players are involved. Because of his ability, Michael Jordan stood out statistically and artistically. As a result, the “Air Jordan” shoe commercials from Nike inspired a generation of kids to play like Mike, that is, to play as individuals since they did not show a team but only “the jumpman” Jordan. The “jumpman” image of Jordan flying from the foul line toward the hoop, the ball poised in his right hand, his left hand behind him as if maintaining his balance, his legs set in a forward leaping motion is as easily recognizable as the NBA logo. The jumpman logo is probably even more familiar to today’s basketball players. These commercials were configurations of contemporary basketball that superseded the image of Gerry West on the NBA logo. Like other configurations, they led to imitation. Not only did millions of kids wear these shoes believing with Mars Blackmon (played by Spike Lee in a well-known series of Jordan commercials) that "It's Gotta Be The Shoes!" because they’re Jordan’s but countless others like the protagonists in the film by the name dreamed “hoop dreams” in which they were Michael Jordan.

As I write, Nike has just introduced a line of “Air Jordan XXI” shoes. As Darren Rovell describes the new commercial in his “The Jumpan in us All” feature on ESPN’s website (March 2, 2006). This year's advertising, dubbed "2nd Generation," is a glorified version of "Be Like Mike." But instead of the kids trying to "Be Like Mike" and failing, these kids literally imitate the Jordan signature moves. . . . Although all the spots were filmed in Los Angeles, the goal was to show kids imitating Jordan in all parts of the world. Jordan's defensive stance is portrayed by a kid dressed in a jersey that is African inspired. Another scene is set on another continent, where an Asian boy famously palms the basketball like Jordan. [Another] young player imitates Jordan's most famous dunk.

It’s amazing to watch the ad on the ESPN website which I did before I read the article about it. Rovell describes its effect quite accurately from my point of view:
What makes the spot so unbelievable is the way in which the commercial evolves. At the beginning of the ad, moments are less specific so viewers aren't quite sure what they are watching.

It starts with the shoes. The dribbling of the ball. The tongue wagging. The gum chewing. Then a moment of discovery happens. By the time it comes to the dunks the viewer starts to realize what is happening. The next few seconds are filled with anticipation as the viewer wonders what will happen next. Each moment is perfectly choreographed, leaving no chance . . . to question a certain moment.

From the perspective of this study, the most astonishing aspect of this commercial is that the kids were NOT shown the specific Jordan moves before they performed them. The producers of the commercial maintain that the kids “did what they remembered” and that Jesse Coulter, the art director, only “fine-tuned to make sure the moves were as technically accurate as possible.”
Although the Jordan commercials are inducements to behave “like Mike” whereas “Little Red Riding Hood” is a prohibition against behaving like the featured figure, in both configurations the self-figure teaches its audience how to behave in a cultural context.

What are the conditions that underlie switching perspectives? As Bruno Bettelheim suggested in his classic study of fairy tales, children relate to such stories because of “needs” they have. If we looks at advertisements as cultural configurations—explicit or implied narratives repeated over and over until they become an aspect of the current culture however fleetingly—we can see infer many of the needs successful advertisements play upon.

Advertisements are without doubt the most salient instance of narrative impacts in our culture. Ads, which very frequently feature stories, often become configurations for certain situations in everyday life. The impact of ads is due, in large part, to the ability of the ad storytellers to tap into our needs and motives. For example, ads that sell medical remedies usually tap into our fears about our vulnerability to illness.

I will use David C. McClelland’s conception of our “motivational systems” to link configurations to the four main motivational systems he delineates: achievement, power, affiliation, and avoidance.

Ads for medical remedies tap into our avoidance motives in the domain of illness.
Cholesterol ads
Ads for beer often tap into our affiliation motives in the domain of friendships.
It doesn't’t get any better than this. Miller high life. [the scudsy ads]
Ads for cars often tap into our power motives in the domain of control.
Ads that whoosh over the roads … giving the driver control over his lifestyle.
Ads for electronic devices often tap into our achievement motives in the domain of career success. For example, the Energizer bunny commercials to take a less obvious example.

Ads, of course, have something to sell and companies that profit thereby. Cultural Configurations are not "neutral" instructions on how to behave. Just as beer ads are designed to dispose us to buy beer, cultural configurations have "backers," persons or institutions who benefit by the recommended behavior.

Mediated Configurations Are Mediated by Someone

In “The Combat Film,” directed by Lawrence Pitkethly for the American Cinema series, directors of combat films (from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), critics, and combat film historians, most of whom fought in the wars about which the films they discussed, reveal the differences between uncensored and censored war films. As the PBS telecast unfolds, the films about WWII stand out in contrast to films about the other wars which were anti-war films. The WWII films, censored during the war by the Office of War Information are tributes to the heroism and bravery of the Americans who fought in the war: Bataan, Guadacanal Diary, Air Force, They Were Expendable, Sands of Iwo Jima, and Battleground.

In sharp contrast, many films of WWI (The Big Parade and All Quiet on the Western Front in particular), the Korean War (The Steel Helmet, Pork Chop Hill), and the Vietnam War (Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now) are fiercely antiwar in their portrayals of the effects of war on the men who fought in them. I am not suggesting that films like Apocalypse Now or Pork Chop Hill are not mediated and that the Office of War Information is the only mediator involved. Rather, these both sets of films reveal their configural character since they are crafted to elicit specific emotional responses from their audiences. The compelling aspect of the military’s enlistment of Hollywood Studios for “propagandistic” purposes is testimony to the cultural impact of the configurations they commissioned.

Both types of films are still used by the military. In a revealing clip shot at a Marine Officer Candidate School. In a class on the subject “Attack On A Fortified Position,” the candidates watch an attack on a fortified bunker starring John Wayne (Sands of Iwo Jima). He runs up to a bunker where a soldier who was carrying explosives to toss in the bunker was just hit. Wayne as Sgt. John M. Stryker strips off his gear and rushes over to the spot to retrieve the explosives and continue rushing the bunker. The teacher says how about that Sgt. Stryker and the class cheers.

Afterward Marine Officer Candidate Audris Zindermainis says to a reporter: “Well, your old movies like ones about Audie Murphy and Sgt York . . . Those are great movies; I mean, they’re great patriotic movies. They’re not what you would call realistic . . . like them movies weren't’t realistic as much but they’re very patriotic. They give you the sense of hey I’m gonna do that.” This echoes director Lindsay Anderson’s remark that “Many of these films were, after all, made according to device. Ok, we gotta make a war picture. We gotta make a picture that will make people want to join the army. And they did. Both of the films that Zindermainis mentions feature the lives of real soldiers—York and Murphy—who killed by themselves an incredible number of enemy soldiers. Audie Murphy kills 240 German soldiers and York personally kills 25 German soldiers, then single-handedly captures 132 prisoners. As a result, York becomes the most decorated hero of WW1, celebrated by no less than General John J. Pershing as "the greatest civilian soldier" of the war. Murphy is the most decorated soldier ever. Both films are inspirational. Mike Cummings notes that To Hell and Back “did remarkably well at the box office, thanks to its battle sequences, the popularity of the likable Murphy, and the public's appetite for shoot-'em-up patriotic flicks (like the films of John Wayne).” Although about WWI, Sgt. York was released in 1941. It has been described by Richard Gilliam as “among the best of war-time propaganda films.” He writes: “It was natural that, as the United States entered World War II, Hollywood would want to make a movie about the life of Alvin York, the most decorated U.S. soldier in World War I.” York agreed to release his autobiographical account of his war exploits to Hollywood on the condition that Gary Cooper play him. Cooper won an Oscar for his performance.

Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, recalls: “I’ve come out of the theater having seen some of these old films Movies like Pork Chop Hill and To Hell and Back with Audie Murphy, Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. I’d come out of these movies having … feeling a peculiar thing. I wana play war and I remember looking at my little buddies on a Saturday afternoon and we’d go out onto the golf course and pretend we were John Wayne.” Pork Chop Hill, an antiwar film directed by Louis Milestone whose—All Quiet on the Western Front, Pork Chop Hill which remains one the most powerful antiwar film ever made—had the opposite effect on O’Brien. Once again, we can note that the configuration only surfaces when activated by configuring it. It is not uncommon that films engender opposite effects on their audiences depending on how they configure them. A young boy configures the scenes of bravery. An adult configures the scenes of unnecessary death—“ While diplomats argue pointlessly over the shape of the negotiation tables at Panmunjon, United Nations troops bleed and die. Lieutenant Gregory Peck leads a 135-man unit on the attack of the Chinese-held Pork Chop Hill. When reinforcements finally arrive, only 25 of Peck's men survive.” Configuring is a selective process. Thus the same film can evoke two contradictory configurations. Film makers are quite aware of this phenomenon and take it into account in their work orchestrating potential configurations for men and quite different ones for women. This departs from the sense one gets in literary studies that the print or film text contains the meaning or that the interpretive community of critics negotiate the meaning of the text.

Paul Fussell (a veteran WWII) notes that the cinema between WWI and WWII was antiwar, which changed when the Hollywood Studio system enlisted in the war effort. He writes:
“It’s easy to understand why these films are all the same film during the war because their manufacture is being supervised by the Office of War Information. It’s harder to understand something interesting which is why these conventions persist when there is no censorship. It’s as if the audience demanded that the films follow these rigid conventions because those conventions produced feelings and emotions which are universally gratifying for the audience.”
These conventions lasted into the 1950s. In some instances into the 60s, for example, The Longest Day (1962) which Nick Sambides, Jr. describes as an “almost jingoistic” film “which trumpeted the Allies' successful D-Day landing.” Some of the classic WWII films that featured the bravery and courage of US soldiers were filmed after the war, Guadacanal Diary and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).

There is little doubt that the Office of War Information and similar government agencies believed that films could enflame their audiences with patriotism as well as hatred of the enemy. These agencies even used the cartoons that preceded feature films in movie theaters to instill in audiences a patriotic spirit. “The U.S. government commissioned several of the cartoons enlisting Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and others in the war effort.”

Configuring as a Process of Acculturation

Configurations play profound roles in learning by providing us with alternative construals of segments of “our” world to which we can compare corresponding segments of the world in which we believe. If we alter our belief system to accommodate the alternative construals, technically, we learn.

This opens the issue of the motives of the teachers. And, of course, it also challenges the notion that learning takes place in school. Most of our learning takes place out of school. Schooling is a species of training.

From this perspective, every simulation of experience is, in potential, an instructional device that has the capacity to dispose us to behave according to the exigencies of the experience. Mediated experiences (TV, film, videos, VR scenarios, etc.) either confirm our beliefs or challenge them as alternatives to what we believe. Though we are not forced to accommodate these mediated experiences in our world views and corresponding belief systems, they can be quite compelling, sometimes more compelling than actual experiences.

The problem is evaluating the difference between beliefs occasioned by mediated experiences. All mediated experiences are designed to be construed in a particular way. Mediated experiences prescribe points of view, mandate foregrounds and backgrounds, ascribe positive and negative traits to the figures in them, and picture the situation graphically. Persons who read the book before they saw the movie based on it, typically construe the situations in the different media differently. Since movies give less play to the imagination than novels, persons who imagined the characters in the novel usually find that the film configures them differently. Media manipulate construal to suit the purposes of its controllers.

I offer VR scenarios as my examples of mediated narrative construal because I have had direct experience in their constructions and know more about the purposes of the controllers than in any other media. In addition, as remediations of prior media, they are comprehensive though still in their developmental infancy. As a researcher in instructional technology, I worked with the Electronic Visualization Lab at UIC on a number of projects and I’m familiar with the development of others. In chapter 7, I will discuss the construction of a mediated narrative construal by analyzing passages from a novel I have written before I began this endeavor. In that case, I have had complete control of the mediated situation and am aware of its motives since they are mine. In this chapter, I review the VR scenarios with which I am familiar as expressions that imply particular cognitive abilities, paying special attention to the circumstance that they are mediated simulations of experiences and therefore require separate delineation from the relatively “un-mediated” expressions of everyday face to face communications.

jjs

Notes:

. Musicians may be exceptions to this statement. ...

. [From his review of the film for www.allmovie.com accessed on March 6, 2006. ] ...

. [ http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:43758 accessed on March 6, 2006.] ...

. [From Hal Erickson’s plot summary of Pork Chop Hill on www.allmovie.com accessed on March 6, 2006.] ...

. [From his review of the film on www.allmovie.com accessed on March 6, 2006.] ...

. [Shull, Michael S. Doing their bit : wartime American animated short films, 1939-1945 / by Michael S. Shull and David E. Wilt. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c1987.] ...