What the Foucault Are You Talking About?

After reading, what seemed to me, two labyrinthine pieces by Michel Foucault, I’m not as impressed as I expected to be. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect his opinion and the effort and courage it took to speak his own mind in a coherent way – I do. However, in both of the essays that we read, Foucault is responding to or developing another person’s work, especially in the case of “What is an author?” It seems easier to me to rebut another’s argument and counter it, as he does with Barthes, than to create an argument without any provocation. I just find it hard to understand how he came to be so influential in the academic world. So what I want to know is, what makes Michel Foucault so damn special?

Now, I’m going to copy Foucault a little bit and leave my own question unanswered. I understand that I probably have not read enough of his work to cast any judgments, but it’s hard not to when he’s been put on such a tall pedestal. I made the mistake of searching for Foucault on YouTube, and found a lot of interviews and even an excerpt (and later an entire transcript) from a debate he had with Noam Chomsky. Foucault clearly was considered significant if he had a formal debate with Chomsky, who is also considered as one of the most influential thinkers of our time, but that still doesn’t answer my question as to why he is thought of in this manner. After I realized that I did not have enough patience to make sense of the debate, I started to do what his contemporaries hated, and found out more about Foucault’s life. What I did find especially noteworthy and significant about his life is that Foucault died of AIDS a little while before the disease became well-known.

I then found a quote from one of his interviews that I thought was particularly fitting: “I don’t feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”  In this sense, Foucault was successful. He authored works that others have found very influential and thus has been transformed (somewhat posthumously) into what may be a "founder of discursivity." However, did he inspire a revolution? Did he reform an institution? Without concrete effects of his writing, I just don't get why Foucault is valued so highly, although I would love to find out. 

Remediation and 21st Century Activism

We now live in a world where the only place we feel truly safe to speak our minds is behind a computer screen. It’s understandable that people become braver when they know they will not have to face any repercussions for their comments. It’s easier for most people to make inflammatory and controversial remarks when they don’t have a pair of eyes staring back at them. What I wonder is what has remediation done to our generation and how will we be remembered?

Our preceding generations had countercultures that weren’t afraid to challenge the pre-existing political and social norms of their time. They expressed their personal feelings in ways that were hard to ignore, and they most certainly faced repercussions. Most countercultures were literally and metaphorically “in your face” and that’s how they made their movements and causes more popular. Even now, we remember what they wore, sang, and did.

Now, posting things on the Internet is the easiest way to disseminate information about any cause. Our generation no longer relies on print, music, or television to spread awareness. How will our generation’s activists be represented in history? Most of us have stories about our parents and how they were part of physical, organized protests. Will our parents’ Vietnam War protests be equated with Invisible Children's KONY 2012 campaign, whose video has over 96 million views on Youtube?

           Although the Internet and social media sites provide a much broader audience, I think it will be harder for our generation to advocate change in a meaningful way. No matter how moving a Facebook campaign is, will it ever be as memorable or influential as the photographs of the Kent State Shooting were/are to millions of Americans? Personally, I think the things we see in the digital world are hard to connect to on a personal level because they exist in an ever-changing environment. What kind of mark will a generation from the Information Age be able to leave?

Why Can't We Just Get Along?

           After these first two weeks of class, I have started to re-evaluate my feelings towards the Internet and its rapid eclipse of newspapers and other print media. Having written my Common App essay about my passionate disdain for e-readers (which begs the question, “how did she get into college?”), I came into this class with a lot of preconceived notions about the virtual world. I thought that the Internet and all the information it provides were making a direct attack on a medium that I had grown to love. It seemed to me that most people in my age group would rather carry around a fashionable Kindle in a leather pouch than a few books from the library, and that drove me crazy.

            Yet as we go through more of our assigned readings, I see that these two media can coexist. It’s not as if one medium is trying to eliminate the other; both media have their own pragmatic purposes in our fast-paced worlds. I think each medium’s existence and influence depends on the humans who are making use of them. Bolter propounds the same idea that “communities of readers help to define the properties of the writing space by the demands they place on the text and the technology.”

It was harder for me to accept the legitimacy of virtual media because the people that I knew to be the most technologically savvy were under the age of thirty. I also had the notion that the bigger a book was, the wiser and older the readership. Now, both of these generalizations are being disproven. 

The traditionalist in me likes to think that newspapers will survive my lifetime, but the pragmatist in me knows that’s impossible. If I had been born a decade later I would be using e-readers and virtual media for anything and everything because it’s so easy and efficient. Obviously, I no longer harbor the animosity towards virtual media that will forever stain every single one of my college applications. However, I still prefer reading books and I’m not sure if that will ever change. Does it have to?