Interesting discussion today (for other purposes than what I usually write about here) about comprehension versus analysis. This applies (as discussed today) mostly to children in various developmental stages -- roughly kindergarten through middle school. But it also applies, I think, to us.
The way it applies, though, is somewhat counter-intuitive. When teaching children, it is usually assumed in most forms of education that analysis follows comprehension. Comprehension can loosely be described as being able to piece together given strands of information into a coherent narrative or larger idea. Analysis is in the disassembling -- re-examining those pieces for context, subtext, non-obvious meaning, etc.
We performed an interesting experiment in a higher-level issue that arises when comprehension is taken for granted, though. We listened to side one of an old children's record telling the origin story of the Lone Ranger (available here at Week 26). Afterwards, we discussed various techniques for analyzing the record, gauging it to be generally familiar (genre, characters, tropes) but unfamiliar in other ways (we weren't used to following a radio play). But something interesting happened. We were all so busy analyzing -- discussing Western expansion and ethnocentrism and stereotyping and historical aesthetic context and genre conventions -- that none of us could recall what had actually happened.
Well, I did, anyway, because I actually thought it was pretty neat, and it reminded me of listening to old radio shows with my dad on tape in the car. So I gave the synopsis -- it's the origin of the Lone Ranger, describing how he was separated from the other Texas Rangers after an ambush from the Cavendish gang -- and we relistened. My colleagues' faces lit up...oh! (During discussion, one person thought that my piecing together of the narrative was from prior knowledge of the Lone Ranger. "But they actually said that!") We had a nice discussion about what you might call inverse media literacy, which is itself a kind of media illiteracy -- privileging analysis to the detriment of comprehending the piece itself.
This pretty well articulated for me something I've been kicking around in my brain for quite a while, something I've wanted to call "second-level media illiteracy." Roughly, media literacy is the ability to ask critical questions of media (not in the sense of "criticize," but in the sense of understanding what the various messages of media are, who made it and why, whom the piece is directed to, etc.). We can assume that anyone with eyes can receive an image, but not anyone with eyes can necessarily understand what is being said in the message or how it's being said (conventions, techniques, etc.). Again, this doesn't necessarily extend just to hot-button academic issues -- ethnocentrism, chauvinism, etc. -- but basic issues that blur the line between comprehension and analysis.
Anyway, in what I've been calling second-level media illiteracy, what happens is that you're so busy reading for subtext that you start to miss the text. This is exactly what happened to us listening to the Lone Ranger -- we were obsessed with validating the system of strangeness or wrongness in which the piece was framed, but we couldn't tell you what happened. Our analysis actually destroyed our ability to comprehend the text at the most basic level. And apparently there is some literature that backs this up -- one danger of heavily analytic critical media literacy is that it actively diminishes other kinds of comprehension skills. Following a plot, understanding which character is which, etc. (Can't and won't point to a specific study for this, since I'm just floating ideas here -- let's just say this is anecdotal and base it on my own experience today.)
In many ways, savvy is the enemy of comprehension. One who understands how to access information can't necessarily handle the information themselves -- the recent gushing over the role of Twitter in the Iranian protests is a good example. I would imagine that most Western onlookers have very poor comprehension of Iranian politics -- who the major players are, why they matter, who the factions are, who Iranians are -- and so giving this person an endless stream of firsthand analysis is in many ways counter-productive. Certainly comprehension and analysis can work hand-in-hand, but I don't think this is what happened with the Iranian conflict; though it would be totally unfair to say that those who followed the insta-analysis of Twitter feeds etc. learned nothing about Iran, it's also likely that these people did not truly invest themselves in the complicated history of Iranian politics, trying to piece together political movements from at least the time of the shah. (My only firsthand experience with this kind of comprehension-building was portraying Iran on a Model UN team -- a good way to learn Iranian history, but I won't pretend it makes me even marginally competent enough to have a strong opinion on what exactly is happening there.)
The internet is full of analysis, and it's full of content, but it's not all that well equipped to provide comprehension tools. These would necessarily be instructive in nature, and are extremely difficult to achieve in isolation. Conversations are a good way to build comprehension (and a lot of my music history, for instance, has been shaped by the conversations I've had online), but often conversations are venues primarily for analysis -- you already need to know the material before you join in.
But when everyone is essentially analyzing, it's entirely possible that they are simultaneously weakening their comprehension skills. And the tenor of many internet debates in which I've been a part resemble something like this -- lots of smart people who for one reason or another refuse to truly try to understand what another person is arguing, sticking to their own primary evidence and merely attacking from different rhetorical stances. Pausing, relistening, and recalibrating an original response is not really in the vocabulary of Accepted Internet Argument Techniques. It's as true for someone dismissing Fleet Foxes for being self-evidently mediocre (and hey, I suspect Fleet Foxes are pretty mediocre, but I don't want to do the necessary comprehension building, i.e. listening to them again, to figure out why, so I should be pretty honest about that and not fling poo) as it is for someone dismissing Ashlee Simpson's "La La" for objectifying women without noticing the actual (specific) narrative that's happening in the song (she clarifies what the song's really about in the bridge -- "I feel safe with you / I can be myself tonight / It's alright with you / 'Cuz you hold my secrets tight").
So I'm beginning to wonder if my Big Concern about internet communication has been backwards the whole time -- here I am thinking that the problem is that we're not getting very good analysis, when in fact it's possibly the sheer volume of analysis that's hampering a more basic form of comprehension, of everything from policy (cf. the absurdly overwrought reaction to a justice department memo on the Defense of Marriage Act that claims "Obama" is "comparing gay marriage to incest") to music criticism*. When you de-privilege basic comprehension in favor of snap analysis, you'll inevitability degrade the analysis itself, just as our Lone Ranger conversation was essentially meaningless if we couldn't accurately recall what we had actually listened to. In effect, we had a very thoughtfully- and passionately-argued conversation about nothing. And this starts to get at my fears about the further dispersion of online chatter -- lots of (occasionally very good) analysis, but fewer centralized places in which someone might actually be challenged to listen more than once to make sure they got it right the first time.
*The Singles Jukebox is in many ways an experiment in how comprehension and analysis can go completely out of whack in a productive way, i.e. when the comment threads find a middle ground by taking in a variety of perspectives, some of which have a better idea of what's "really happening" in a given song. I think a lot of people, myself included, were a bit off on what Regina Spektor was doing in "Laughing With," but the conversation was revelatory. I note that the most recent comment has some eloquent, thoughtful analysis that once again doesn't seem to totally connect back to what the Spektor is literally saying, but there's at the very least a process to negotiate his interpretation within a group understanding of what's going on when content itself is up for debate along with a particular line of analysis.
Don't think I see the difference between comprehension and analysis. In comprehension you perceive a flow of stuff and you put it together into a story. But it's not comprehension unless you put it into the right story, or at least a plausibly right story. (Most stories will at least have parts that are open to interpretation, there may be many stories going on at once, not to mention holes in plots, etc., and many "real-life" stories and some fictions aren't even constructed with the intention of creating total coherence or a closed, final reading.) And no story contains everything within it necessary for its comprehension. You have to make assumptions about the meaning of words, what people in the world of that kind of story do, etc. ("The King died, the Queen died of grief," makes instant sense if you're brought up with fairy tales, notions of kings and queens, etc. Whereas, Michael Jackson dies, reading comprehension dies of grief" obviously would need elaboration or at least interpretation. Whereas in the king-queen story, the interpretation is built into our expectations.)
ReplyDeleteSo what I'm not getting is the difference between misunderstandings based on putting story elements together in the wrong way (which will almost always involve the overlooking or ignoring or discounting of anomalies) and misuderstandings based on analyzing in the wrong way (which will almost always involve the the overlooking or ignoring or discounting of anomalies). But also, good readings will involve the overlooking, ignoring, discounting of stuff that's e.g. typos or stuff that's just there, mistakes, tangents, incoherencies, etc. If you had to include everything in your comprehension, you'd never get around to comprehending. You make judgments about what's major and minor, what's relevant or irrelevant etc.
The problem isn't that misreading occurs but that people are piss poor at testing their ideas, that rereading doesn't occur, that actual stated counterarguments are ignored or not noticed, that basic logical inference is a skill that most people never apply to movies or music (as opposed to, say, balancing the checkbook). But as I said, I'm unclear on the difference between misreading because you've misconstrued the story, and misreading because you've analyzed the story poorly. They each seem to be the same operation.
Quote mark needed before "Michael Jackson."
ReplyDeleteHa! Speaking of my own failure to reread:
ReplyDeletebasic issues that blur the line between comprehension and analysis
Don't mean to draw a hard line between comprehension and analysis -- but to maybe put it more concisely, what I'm talking about is certain kinds of analysis that can adversely affect (weaker phrase for "start to fuck up" maybe) certain kinds of basic comprehension. And you could make the argument that comprehension is and of itself a form of analysis, but it's usually seen as a lower level of analysis than what I'm actually calling analysis here -- the difference between a capsule plot summary and a capsule critique, say. And though those lines can blur, and sometimes (as in your Buffy summaries) what we expect to be a "plot summary" actually tells us a lot about the humor of the show and the writer, I still think there's a basic form of "first-level" comprehension that, though it happens simultaneously with more complex analysis, is still generally distinct from that "second-level" analysis.
ReplyDeletethe difference between misreading because you've misconstrued the story, and misreading because you've analyzed the story poorly. They each seem to be the same operation.
Yes, this is exactly it (they are essentially the same operation), but I suppose what I'm feeling out or trying to argue here is that we very often take for granted the first sort of mistake -- we'll call it "poor comprehension" -- and focus more on the second sort of mistake, "bad analysis." But the first mistake can be the direct result of the intensity of "second-level" analysis
("analysis") at the expense of "first-level" analysis ("comprehension") -- the process of incorporating social context, developing a social critique, etc. in effect distract us from following along (I have a line about this in one of my old columns: "I was so 'clever' I missed how funny [Aly and AJ] were, so 'deep' already I didn't bother to dig." Here, my "second-level" critique -- say, holding Aly and AJ's evangelical background in my mind as I listened -- completely distorts the story happening at the "first-level" (I thought "Not This Year" had something to do with contrived Christmas cheer undercutting the sanctity of the holiday, when in fact it's Aly/AJ's own words that are contrived, and Christmas itself has little to do with it).
I don't mean to hierarchize the first- and second-level here myself, though this is routinely hierarchized in e.g. elementary through college education (by college it is assumed you understand the basic mechanics of reading comprehension -- though interestingly, basic reading and viewing comprehension issues are the biggest ones I face when I teach undergraduates; it's often a real struggle to get them to make an argument/construct a thesis at all), so you can in some ways consider it "first-" and "second-" like in Type 1 versus Type 2 diabetes.
Well, when AJ sings, "Haven't meant a word I've written here," both the "meant" and the "I've" are muffled, and I had to go to one of the lyric sites to learn them. If they'd been sung or recorded clearer you wouldn't have made your mistake.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell if Martin Kavka's Type 2 ridiculousness causes him to make Type 1 mistakes in, e.g., his bizarre interpretations of "Fairytale" and "Blame It," but it's not as if he misquotes the songs, just wildly reads things into them. Ditto with "Laughing With," though his readings helped to open up ours. And it's damn near impossible to come up with a Type 1 reading for that song anyway.