The Next Wave of Format

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The "Meaning and Media" story

My own understanding of formats owes a great deal to a university course I taught in Fall 1999 — one of the most frustrating courses, for both me and the students, that I have ever experienced. But it was also one of the most interesting courses I have ever been involved with, and it changed my thinking about the value, and the pitfalls, of complex new media like the web.

The program where I taught the course, the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, made its reputation by blending theory and practice for technology users; instead of learning to invent the future as they do up at the MIT Media Lab, these students learn how to innovate it — to use new products or services to develop new industries, new ways of life, and new vehicles for longstanding creation. I planned the course as a hands-on production course to explore the question: "What would it take to develop a piece of meaningful content?" Working together, the students would investigate a complex arena, gather information about the human aspects of that arena (through interviews), make sense of the results together, and then create more-or-less meaningful web modules that expressed the heart and soul of what we had observed. I was naïve enough to think that the organization of the site would more or less take care of itself; and I assumed that students would have enough technological skills that we wouldn’t need to deal with software or production issues at all. In short, I was so focused on the idea of meaningful content that I forgot about the extent to which we would depend on meaningful formats.

I came to the course with a research methodology that I thought would make all the difference. For several years, I had been a key member of a group of "learning historians" — people charged with creating oral histories of organizational change, in a way that inspired people to learn from their organization’s own experiences. We had developed methods of interviewing people, synthesizing that knowledge, and editing the results, aimed at telling a complex, emotionally gripping story with multiple perspectives intact, without drowning readers or listeners in insignificant detail. I thought our process could help students avoid the triviality and smug self-centeredness that imbued so much creative work on the web.

But what story might engage us? A friend, David Ferguson, had been active for several years in a protest movement against a new filtration plant for New York City’s water system. The plant, if built, would lead to devastatingly high water bills in New York (David had gotten into this as a housing activist in Manhattan’s Chelsea district), but if it wasn’t built, it could conceivably lead to a public health hazard. And the only alternative was stringent new protection for the watersheds in New York’s northern suburbs, which comprised, not coincidentally, one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. An airport that was fairly chafing to grow, Westchester County Airport, sat right on top of one of New York’s key reservoirs.

What a great topic! There were no clear heroes and villains. Even environmentalists were divided about whether or not to support the plant. Some people who seemed at first glance like they were acting out of pure, spiteful, undemocratic self-interest — like suburban land developers who wanted to build golf courses near the reservoir — were also reacting to hundreds of years of heavy-handed dealings between New York City and its less powerful neighbors to the north. They saw themselves as underdogs. Others, who seemed at first glance to be dispassionate public health scientists, were actually trying to find a safe place for themselves in a highly politicized, multiple-level government bureaucracy. There were unions fighting to see the plant built (more jobs); Hudson River activists, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., fighting to keep the watershed protected (and ambivalent about the plant itself); and neighborhood groups who seemed fervent against the plant — until it was no longer slated for their backyard. I thought it would be a wonderful experience, with a wonderfully meaningful product, to create a website where a reader could explore this complex, highly important current events conundrum as a historian might — looking at all the points of view, seeking to understand why different people came to their points of view, and recognizing how our villains are always, at least in part, ourselves.

We didn't have the story coherently in mind when we began, however. Working with a couple of key informants — David and his fellow activist Frank Eadie – we mapped out a chronology. We started it in the 1800s, when New York City's water interests flooded major parts of the Hudson Valley to create its reservoirs. (New York, it turned out, had its own "Chinatown" story, a century before the Los Angeles version.) The action picked up in 1974, when the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act was passed; then came two decades of intensive housing development and airport construction in the reservoir watershed (including at least two Donald Trump golf courses), and then an ultimatum from the EPA to New York City in 1997: If the Giuliani administration didn't find a way to protect the water from pollution at the source (by buying land and brokering against more development), the water would have to be filtered. Everyone agreed these events had taken place, but few agreed on what they meant. At stake was not just the water supply for about ten million people living in and around New York, but the environmental-political soul of one of the most populated and influential regions of the world.

During the first six weeks of the course, we organized our information and set up interviews. Each student interviewed two more people, drawing from a list that we compiled together. We tape-recorded all the interviews and then took notes on all the tapes, using transcribing recorders that the department bought for us. We showed up in one marathon session on Hallowe'en day, with all our notes on Post-Its, and arranged them around the room until we thought we had a schema that made sense of the basic themes. Then we wrote "mythic" paragraphs to describe the basic themes, and talked about how the audience might receive them. (This session was based on a "research/mythic/pragmatic" approach that I had helped develop for the learning history work.)

That was the high point of the course. From there, things went downhill. Working in pairs, students chose themes to cover: Upstate/Downstate relations, housing costs, filtration science, the culture of politics, and so on. They were each going to produce a page or two about each site, getting in each case to the "heart of the matter" by bringing out the critical perspectives.

I had assumed, naively, that the overall site design would take care of itself. Almost immediately, however, we foundered on our lack of structure. We had no site map. Would pages look the same? Would they look different? What common elements would they have? How would they connect together? What would users see first? How would all our material be indexed? There were no clear models to follow. At a loss for how to proceed, I ceded the site design to two students, who did a brilliant job of organizing our material — but, in the process, focused our course attention away from producing meaningful content, and onto the formats themselves. Soon we weren't asking ourselves how to make something meaningful. We were asking ourselves, "Is this a journalism course? Or a design course?"

We never did get our website produced. About two weeks before the end of the semester, the students approached me as a group. Did I recognize that there wasn't time enough to create something worthwhile enough to show? Of course I did, and we allowed ourselves a much lower goal — getting through the course with something, anything, that showed that we had learned.

The course left a bitter taste for many of us. Some argued that the complexity of the subject had defeated us; we should have tackled a less gargantuan challenge, with fewer people to interview. That was true, but I had learned that any significant subject is almost infinitely complex. There is always someone else to interview; there is always something else important to discern.

Others, to my surprise, said we should have chosen a more interesting topic than our water supply. "I feel deeply fatalistic about water," said one student at the final session. "It comes from my tap. I don’t really care about it." Personally, I thought the website was never really about water -- it was always about people. But this was a hard message to get across. More precisely, it was hard to get across the idea that what people have to say is always extremely interesting, if you can break through the canned chatter at the surface of their conversation, and learn to listen between the lines.

At first, I had thought the course simply ran out of time. Ideally, we would have had a module on each of the skills involved: Interviewing, writing, editing, graphic design, illustration, archive management, web site architecture, information design, charting and mapping, and project management. And I still think that, if I were to teach it again, I would try to set it up as a two-semester course, or perhaps a team-taught course that would occupy eight credits in a single semester.

But I’m not sure that this would make all the difference. For I could see that every student in the course, despite all the malaise, had had some moment of spark, in which they suddenly hooked in to the power of our theme. A couple of students had terrific interviews with some people; for others, the spark came in the way they made sense of complexity. (Two students developed a map of the filtration plant, based on an interview with one of the biochemists who had designed it, that illuminated many of the difficult choices embodied in this seemingly simple bit of public works. Those two students, incidentally, moved from being passionate opponents of the plant to being passionate proponents for it; others, interviewing other people, had the opposite shift of view.) A couple of students had so much frustration with the course that their irritation, itself, was a kind of epiphany — a signal to me that we were on to something, but we didn't know quite what we were looking for.

And in the end, it was only when the site map was in place that we could figure out, as a group, that we had something to say. In other words, we foundered without formats — not because we needed the formats to communicate, but because we would have needed them to think together. Had we been putting together a magazine issue, the task of organizing the underlying structure would have been just as significant, but we would have had words and concepts -- the well, the columns, the captions, and so on -- to help us do it. Instead of looking for ways of expressing our vague ideas, we could have said to each other, "What would make a good sidebar here?" Or, "How long should the introduction to the issue be?" Or, "What are the primary articles for the well?" And each of us could then have thought back through the interviews we conducted, and instantly been able to imagine ways in which the meaning we had perceived could be communicated.

In our final class session, one student said: "I've only created something meaningful & aesthetically beautiful – where writing and designing and publishing all came together --. twice in my life." But it doesn't have to be so rare; if we have a grammar to work with that can do two things. First, it has to provide some window to better see the world. Second, it has to proclaim, up front and accurately, perhaps in sound-bite fashion, precisely what kind of view is available through the window.

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