*Part of series of writings
Bruner's distinction was highly relevant with today's world cultural climate and environment. The particular knowledge I'm talking about in the last part was referring to 'literacy' or 'prior knowledge' that was somehow tacit and intangible. Now, in this part we'll examine our first idea about visual media, and how these days we can't escape the visual regime, thus forced us to be informed and taught by them. To my generation, our entire life was shaped by them, it was the visual regime who determine the extent to which something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be taken seriously in society.
But where does information acquired from social media could took us? It depends on how we treat the incoming information, how we transfer them to ourselves and what can we make out of it. It's too true that our social surrounding promises, above all, the experience of meaningfulness. Any information gathered from our experience in social engagements, shaped us into who we are, but that doesn't mean they can give you any identity. Yes, identity, as without it, we'll be flushed away in this world of demands and harsh fact. And identity was shaped through the means of information gathering, processing (or make it into knowledge), or to be short: learning.
(Remember, by learning here, I don't assume something like 'education'--I wouldn't need to forced out this point so heavily of how that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction, you can always read my rant in my other posts, hehe...) Learning and meanings, learning and identity, this sort of things were what will we discussed in this and next posts. Learning (that ended up in mastering), more than often--if it's not automatically--gave the practitioner an identity.
I have this one friend of mine who was identified as 'musician' among our friends, she was a pianist, and that social recognition given by the society for her amazing 'tacit knowledge' and ability in music, particularly the piano. The second example would be myself (hahaa) who was often identified among my friends as 'illustrator', 'designer' or anything that are related with visual art. One day, both of us (me and my friend the pianist), talked together. And from those talks, I recognized what Bruner's point in 'engage on activities' means. My friend talked heavily about how she shaped herself into an able pianist.
First, as an information gathering activities, she dived herself to musical theories, she submit herself to listened to many named composer and pianist, such as Rachmaninoff or Debussy, Bubi Chen or Herbie Hancock. These were taken as meaningful experiences for her, how she gather the information about music and musician, just the same as how I first interested in Herge's Tintin, Batman comics, or Disney's animation. I took them as information, I examined particular detail in Batman's shadowing, the dynamic movement in Tintin's comic panel, and/or coloring in Disney's animation. Our exploration, ended up in understanding, for we're not taking the information as something that was taken for granted. We consciously process them, not only remembering them.
The second part was meaning making, engage in the particular activity we loved to do. My friend, she then started to summon an instrument for herself: a piano. Learn to play it, compose a music out of it, practice it. The same as how I grab a pencil, make a doodle in my bedroom wall (and forced my father to repaint again and again the wall, haha, sorry dad!), before I start to moved on to paper. And what does the previous information gained for both of us? What good did music theories for my friend, and what good did shadowing and coloring did for me? It's good for expanding. Soon as my friend start to playing guitar and bass guitar, so do I can expand myself to oil paint and charcoal stick. For us, it's easy to move on from one instrument to another, for we're not taking it as our object of affection. We're not limiting ourselves to the instrument only, we learn the subject, and that's why the mediated tool never a problem for us--well, maybe there'll be a bit 'adaptation problem' at first, but as the proverb says, "these too will pass." Now that my friend can record himself in digital sound, transferred in PC speaker, so I can managed to handle Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Instruments are not the great emphasize, like my first idea how physical product doesn't guarantee instant literacy, it only 'help' us, it doesn't ‘make’ us.
The third was mastering and social recognition. It required us not to became indulgent practitioner, we need to contribute in society. My friend, she commit herself to the church choir, a band and any zeitgeist that supports them, while I bring my illustration in printed shirt for an organization, publication posters or promotional video. This is where we got those recognition. We make some implications to society, give them something out of us. We can meet up the society demand, for we--with our extensive learning--are prepared with the supply. We can transformed the information we gather to something 'real'. It took us beyond theory and concepts (no matter how I loved them), and encourage us, knowing that we were able, to contribute in society.
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