Readings

At a recent public debate about organic food, the proponents of organic farming extolled its virtues by listing its various benefits. It is kinder to the environment, they said, and to animals, and it keeps toxic chemicals out of our bodies. “But does it taste better?” an audience member asked. To my surprise, the experts hesitated. “We can’t reliably measure that effect,” one of them explained. “So it’s not a claim we make.” The exchange reminded me about everything that’s wrong with arts advocacy these days.

• US computer and video game software sales totaled $11.7 billion in 2008.
• Sixty-eight percent of American households play computer or video games.
• Forty percent of all game players are women.
• The average game player is thirty-five years old and has been playing video games for twelve years.
• Twenty-five percent of Americans over the age of fifty play video games.

Source: The Entertainment Software Association¹

From computer-mediated poetry, read on a laptop computer while sitting in a wireless café in Paris, to touring works of performing arts, such as composer Pamela Z’s Baggage Allowance, an installation and performance based on her world travels, new media artworks are becoming an integral part of the global cultural environment.

I’m a film teacher. I’m tech savvy. I show my students a lot of video clips. I know how to rock a DVD remote better than anybody. Yet, at a recent teaching job, there was no DVD player in the classroom. I had to show video clips off my Mac. I know my Mac inside and out, backward and forward, yet I rarely watch DVDs on it. I most certainly do not rock the DVD player application. When showing clips there are moments when I need to scan through a scene, slow shots down, or move frame by frame. With the laptop, I do this quite ineptly.

I first met Carrie Mae Weems in 1976. I was teaching a photography class at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was then located in a large second-floor loft space above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. On the first day of class as a few students straggled in, a seemingly shy woman with big, expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand.

If you ever read information online or download and print materials from the Internet, you are part of the “digital divide.” While most, if not all, members of philanthropic organizations in the United States may take for granted high-quality access to the Internet, many people of color, indigenous people, and people living in rural areas have none or only very limited ability to use computers and gain access to the kinds of information and education that can improve their lives.