Reclaiming Amy (Curious Films, BBC One, 2021)

    This week is the 15th anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death at the age of 27. It is a difficult loss to process, still. Her talent should have allowed for a career that spanned decades and genres. With one absolute masterpiece to her name by the age of 23 along with a deep knowledge of musical standards and contemporary styles, she would have carried on successfully if not for a number of factors that led to her early death. Amy had whatever it was that makes singers into worldwide celebrities.

    She’s been the subject of many books and films since her death, some of which her family supported and others they have not. Each of her parents has written a memoir about their daughter; mother Janis takes the lead on 2021’s Reclaiming Amy, a BBC-sponsored single-episode documentary about Amy Winehouse from the people who knew her best. These include both of her parents (and their current spouses) and three of her close friends from the time before she became a household name. In this way, it’s not as in-depth a look into Amy’s thoughts and feelings as Amy Winehouse: In Her Words. It’s more of a combination of father Mitch’s memoir (the first to make it to print after her death), Janis’ memoir, and the indispensable Amy Winehouse: Beyond Black, which features accounts of some of the same friends that are featured here. As Mitch states early on in Reclaiming Amy, this text is meant to be a response to 2015’s Amy because he felt it showed him and his daughter in an unflattering light.

    The emphasis is on the reclaiming more than Amy as a subject. Yes, they’re reminiscing on camera because they knew her personally; of course, it’s about Amy Winehouse the person. What they have to offer is context that is unavailable elsewhere. The they in this case also includes “the friends and family who knew Amy best and were with her until the end” because the friends especially have been overlooked in most accounts of Amy’s life. Janis states, too, that the group wants to “celebrate Amy as the complex, incredible woman that she was.” That complexity comes across clearly throughout the documentary due to the closeness those involved had with Amy.

    Most of what her parents have to say about her is similar to what they have written in their respective books. Janis’ current husband claims that “Mitch suffered more than anybody” in the wake of the negative publicity about 2015’s Amy. Janis herself says she was most hurt by that film’s implication that “[Amy] had an unhappy childhood.” If that account of her life is a “caricature,” then Reclaiming Amy is an attempt to put Amy’s life back into human proportions. The complexity of Amy’s life was diminished and then amplified in sickening ways to create a distorted picture of a young woman finding her way in the world.

    Bringing that complexity into proper focus is easier said than done, which might be clear when her proud parents are recounting the night she won five awards at the 2008 Grammys. Amy wasn’t present at the actual awards because she was in rehab and was also unable to obtain a visa in time to travel to the United States. In other segments, Reclaiming Amy does not shy away from her struggles with addiction, mental health, disordered eating, and gender identity so it struck me as odd that they didn’t give a quick aside about why she wasn’t there in person to receive praise and an award from Tony Bennett.

    Apart from that minor quibble, the rest of the brief documentary is compelling. Friends Naomi, Catriona, and Chantelle who “knew another Amy” give a fresh perspective. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to think of the Amy Winehouse as a peer in one’s social group. That’s just what this clique of four women were. They knew her before she was famous and were still a part of her life through the next few years. Catriona shares that she and Amy slept together and that Amy would say, “I’m only a lesbian after I’ve had four sambucas.” To add a bit more clarity, Catriona characterizes her relationship with Amy as “unique and undefined.” These comments open a new avenue for interpretation of Amy’s relationships and friendships. Hearing the testimony of Naomi and Chantelle also gives more context to the idea that Amy was exploring gender boundaries and her own preferences as a woman even though all the tabloids ever focused on was her heterosexual relationships and their volatility. It’s important to know that she stuck with these three friends through all her hard times when she could have easily drawn clear boundaries and kept them at a distance. These friendships are authentic, at least from my outsider’s perspective.

    Her friends’ comments help to make Amy seem more like any other twentysomething living in a big city trying to figure herself out. It follows that the death of her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, would be quite devastating. Her own mother says that “things started to unravel” for Amy at that point. Note that this explanation does not point to Blake or to drugs or alcohol as the beginning of her most tumultuous years. A 23-year-old losing a beloved grandparent and feeling set adrift is as normal an experience as anyone could have had. It just so happens that a few months later that 23-year-old would release a world-class album that demanded more of her as a public figure than she may have been prepared to give.

    By focusing on her friendships and and connection with her grandmother, Reclaiming Amy succeeds in doing the task its title implies. She is more complex than a brief reading of the tabloid headlines would suggest. (“Oh the girl who sang about not wanting to go rehab eventually drank herself to death? Shocking.”) That said, those same friends and family knew she had a wild streak, even as a kid. In explaining her attitude and personality, even during the most trying times of her attempts at sobriety, Mitch said “nobody controlled Amy; Amy was the guvnor.” Her willfulness as a person definitely contributed to her success as a musician. It’s hard to hold back someone who believes so strongly in their ideas. Chantelle offers that Amy “was vulnerable, but she wasn’t fragile,” meaning that she recognized in her friend a susceptibility to addiction in various forms. At the same time, Chantelle also knew that Amy wasn’t a delicate flower. She was tough, but no level of toughness is enough to prevent addiction from taking root. For her part, Naomi contends that Amy’s alcohol issues were a means of masking her mental health struggles. As with Chantelle’s and Catriona’s comments, Naomi sees a different side of Amy than the general public and is able to help us understand her friend even better than the top-down analysis from news and music media that is all we usually get to know. It’s a good good thing that we have the perspectives of those friends to help reclaim Amy by sharing experiences that are grounded in friendship.

    What would Amy have said about these attempts to control the narrative about her life? One gets the sense that she’d think all parties have it wrong and that there is more to her than anyone else could ever know, let alone claim for their own. We’ll have to continue wondering what could have been.

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Freebody, P., & Luke, A. (1990). ‘Literacies’ programs: Debates and demands in cultural context

    There are plenty of people online who get mad at other people online for not having robust reading comprehension abilities. What reading comprehension means has itself become a contested term recently to boot. My background as a scholar is in reading and literacy in early and middle childhood, so I have a number of responses ready to go when such disagreements occur; however, these disagreements are not about fine-grained differences between theoretical models and processes of reading. They’re usually about people who have read different sources talking past each other, which is not something reading theories attempt to explain. Nevertheless, the affordances of Freebody & Luke (1990)’s literacies in context as a means of explaining the purposes of reading has been on my mind when I’ve seen disagreements on my timeline or in the news.

    Their brief article describes four roles readers can take on while reading: code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst. These levels are not sequential or developmental, but depend on the reader, text, and context. Reading is a socially mediated activity, which is why any given reader may move between the four roles with different texts and contexts.

    Each role has an associated question: “code breaker ('how do I crack this?'), text participant ('what does this mean?'), text user ('what do I do with this, here and now?'), and text analyst ('what does this do to me?'). If you’re thinking the recent focus on the Science of Reading has emphasized the “code breaker” stage above all else, you would be correct. We’ve known for decades that systematic, explicit phonics instruction is necessary for literacy. It is not sufficient, though. That is why these other three roles (among many other theories of reading) need to be part of any discussion of what reading and literacy mean. Given that this article is written for teachers and scholars who may be working with adult learners of English, it is also important to note that simply teaching phonics to adults (or to students above primary grades) is not enough to achieve literacy.

    For text participants, the goal is to bring to light what might be called the hidden curriculum of reading. Meaning that, there are aspects, such as “narration and exposition” that readers use to make sense of a text (p. 9). Knowing the meaning and pronunciation of each word is obviously necessary, but knowing how writers use those words in different ways or for different purposes will allow a reader to understand the ideas the author is attempting to represent with words in their writing. Freebody and Luke cite an earlier study (Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirey, and Anderson, 1981) that clarifies the difference between knowing the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of each word in the text and understanding what the text means as a whole. In the Reynolds et al. study, Black students from a city and white suburbanites read a passage about playing the dozens. The Black kids comprehended it correctly; the white kids thought the passage was "about physical aggression, importing notions of a race riot and a large-scale fight." Reynolds et al. go on to explain how one of the Black students reacted to that finding. "Upon being told that white children understood the letter to be about a fight instead of about sounding, he looked surprised and said, 'What's the matter? Can't they read?'" This exchange is an excellent example of how each reader’s interpretation of a context is a necessary part of explaining an interpretation of a text that goes far beyond knowing all of its individual words. I’ll give you one guess as to which race’s interpretation is usually given more relevance.

    A text user is someone who knows why they are being asked to read or at least what to do when the social practice of reading is engaged. To Freebody and Luke, being a text user means “reading for school, work, leisure, or civil purposes” (10). There are many contexts a reader can find themselves in and only one of them is school, where standardized testing would be a part of the student’s reading experience. I’ve never met someone who gives themselves multiple-choice quizzes or short answer responses when finishing a book and then asks another person to evaluate their understanding of the text with a letter grade based on those answers! The bulk of this section of the article is given to an explanation of how learning how to “do school” (in terms of discussing a text with students) is where many readers learn how to use a text at school. They find evidence, they respond to teacher questions, they build on others’ answers, they think about the characters’ motivations, etc. These skills and abilities are important, but they do not comprise all of the possible ways readers can use texts socially. It’s also worth noting that students can do many of these tasks without being able to decode a text or interpret its meaning independently. Again, these roles are not sequential or hierarchical.

    A text analyst is a reader who brings to bear the understanding that “all texts are crafted objects, written by persons with particular dispositions or orientations to the information, regardless of how factual or neutral the products may attempt to be” (13). If this sounds like critical literacy to you, then you are quite the text analyst yourself! They go on to explain how a history text from a secondary school has the hallmarks of “neutrality” when such a position does not actually exist. In fact, a student who decodes the text; brings their background knowledge to bear on it; and makes sense of its structure, format, and terminology could be said to comprehend the text. However, this interpretation does not take into account the “covert ideological position” embedded in the text (14). So, an additional aspect of what it means to be literate is for readers to consider how the text is operating on them as a reader.

    What do these roles mean for misunderstandings on the internet? It’s maybe a tenable assumption that most people online can decode text accurately. (After all, social media users have to be at least 13 years old, right?) There may be some confusion in text participant roles because people are coming from all kinds of backgrounds imaginable, with all kinds of background knowledge imaginable, so that could provide an explanation. Think again of the misinterpretation of playing the dozens and how that might be misunderstood online even though its meaning is completely clear to the person posting it. Text users online are also a possible source of interpersonal confusion. Just as students need to learn how to “do school” as readers, so do users need to learn how to “do social media” as readers (and posters and lurkers and reply guys [gender inclusive]). There are variations in netiquette that can lead to consternation. The role of text analyst can also be a source of confusion. Think of the problems inherent in debunking misinformation or correcting disinformation. A user needs to be aware of the rhetorical impact of letting information pollution fester and the effects of giving it a wider audience by calling attention to it (even to debunk it). Three of four roles that Freebody and Luke described in 1990 have explanatory power in helping us understand why attacking someone’s lack of reading comprehension on the internet may not be as simple as it seems. Consider which role that person may be struggling with and you might just be able to understand their confusion a little bit more clearly.

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Star Fox (Velan Studios / Nintendo, 2026)

    Last week, my dad was in the hospital for a few days because he had stents placed in each of his carotid arteries. Between helping my mom around the house and prepping for a friend to visit from out of town, I spent my downtime playing Velan Studios’ revision of Nintendo’s Star Fox. Silly me, forgetting that this game is all about making your dad proud of you for carrying on his legacy after his death. Maybe I should have played a game with less baggage.

    This version of Star Fox is the fifth version of the 1993 Super NES game that Nintendo has published. Even with the different title of Star Fox 64, that 1997 Nintendo 64 game functioned as a remake of the original. The souped up version of the 1997 game for the 3DS (Star Fox 64 3D) that came out in 2011 was a remake of a remake, and the Wii U’s Star Fox Zero from 2016 was also a remake of the 1997 edition of the game. (I haven’t played the 3DS or Wii U versions.) You’d think they’d include a new character, like Word Girl’s Lady Redundant Woman, to let us know they have some self awareness about the absurdity of remaking a game five times.

    Five games, five platforms, one story. Rather than a simple cash grab, this revision of the game seems more like an instance of theme and variation. There’s only so many ways to play the blues, yeah? There are five access points to this series that have been available for players over the past 33 years. This isn’t preservation (a topic that took on additional significance last week as publisher Sony announced that it was going to no longer manufacture physical discs for its consoles beginning in 2027), but revision. When you’ve got a really good idea, stick to it.

    Well, I don’t know about that. I first played 1993’s Star Fox for the Super Nintendo because Nintendo Power convinced me that the polygonal graphics were at the cutting edge of technology. Sure they were, but that doesn’t mean the game is good or that it’s pretty to look at. Even if I understand cognitively that using polygons means programmers have more options for how many things can happen on screen in a game, it doesn’t mean that I will enjoy the game they create. I didn’t then and don’t now think the graphics look good. It wasn’t until the N64 version that I really fell in love with the game. The improved graphics, actual voice acting, and decreased difficulty all certainly helped. Those are the kinds of variations on a theme that open up the paths of the game to new players.

    The N64 version is good enough that I bought it three times: soon after release, at some time in college, and around 2018 when I was getting reacquainted with video games. (Previous to that, the last console I bought during its lifespan was a refurbished PlayStation from FuncoLand in 1999.) Because Nintendo can apparently read my mind, they released Star Fox in the summer. Both this Switch 2 version and the N64 version found their way to consumers’ hands in the final week of June of their release years. It’s a summer game through and through. You are recklessly making space junk explode by hitting it with lasers and bombs. In other words, you’re making fireworks and having someone else foot the bill.

    You might be wondering (as I did) how much of my enjoyment of this game is bound up in childhood nostalgia. I don’t know. I am not in touch with the friend group that I enjoyed playing the N64 game with when Nintendo released it in 1997. I don’t have fuzzy feelings about those people. As I mentioned, the game itself was good enough that I bought it multiple times. That also means I sold it that many times, too. I would get to a point of complete satiation with it after running through all of the medals, high scores, and achievements. Just looking at the cart would repulse me. I wasn’t interested in jumping back into it like many other games. Over time, the feeling would wane and I would track it down again (and again). I felt skeptical when I saw the news of this remake a few weeks back. Would I really want to go through that cycle of emotions again? When I saw the updated graphics and added interstitial narrative scenes, I couldn’t help myself. This time I can’t sell it either, so I’m stuck with it until Nintendo decides to pull the plug on “my” digital copy of the game.

    In this latest revision, it took a few times through each level before I felt like I was competent at the game. That feeling of “how did I ever do this?” crossed my mind more than once. After I got the hang of it, I was hooked. The updated controls for the Switch 2 work well. I like having a single button to press for somersaults and U-turns. The graphics are excellent. In levels such as Meteo, Sector Y, and Area 6, you get a real sense of depth with the details in the background. I like the voice acting just fine. After a few times through the game in English, I did get tired of the same dialogue over and over again, so I’ve changed the spoken language for each successive playthrough. I’m on Brazilian Portuguese at the moment, so that’s something like at least 10 times through the game. I do wish the subtitles weren’t only in English so I could pretend like I’m learning new languages while I play.

    One reason I have kept changing the voiceovers is because I want to watch the scenes that occur between each level repeatedly to pick up on the subtle details hiding inside. In the previous games that I’m familiar with, you would get comments from your crew as you entered or exited each level. General Pepper would give maybe a line of dialogue between missions once you’d selected your path. The story itself isn’t very special but it gets the job done. In these new scenes, the relationships are fleshed out more fully with dialogue and actions. You get a third-person view of what it’s like to hang out in the Great Fox between missions. There’s a lot to be read into the body language of your crew. The way they are incorporated into the branching paths of your attack on Venom is interesting, too. A holographic avatar of General Pepper explains the situation to you and the consequences for each choice. Sometimes your crew will go rogue and offer suggestions that conflict with Pepper’s advice, but not in front of him. It’s ultimately up to you (as Fox) to decide which path you’ll take. You do so by looking at a 3D projection of the Lylat System on a holoviewer. The music that plays as you look at this scale model of the system gives a relaxing feeling to the time between missions so that you can decompress with your crew before jumping into action once again. These are also the points where you can resume your game if you don’t end up completing it in one sitting as you would have needed to in the original game.

    Between that upgrade to the gameplay experience, the vastly improved music, and the gorgeous graphics, this revision is just about the best it can be as far as I’m concerned. It’s slick and it’s smooth, which is just how it should run. There’s also the multiplayer mode that you can engage with even if you are a solo player (local and online matches exist; I played against the computer and had fun). You can also get different avatars and backgrounds for the battle mode by completing levels in the Challenge mode. There’s a lot to do besides the main storyline. I don’t think I’d call the Star Fox series one of my favorites, even though I bought the N64 cart multiple times and have since played through it via the Nintendo Classics service. It’s familiar and filling like any good comfort food should be, but I don’t get a lot of nourishment out of it. There’s no moments of genuine wonder or awe or drama in the game. It simply excels at what it is meant to do. Until Nintendo revises the game again, the Switch 2 version will stand as definitive. These Arwings’ engines are firing cleanly on all cylinders.

    As of Saturday, my dad is out of the hospital and is recovering at home. Turns out his carotid blockage was 50 percent on one side and 80-90 percent on the other. He’s got improved blood flow to his brain as a result of the stents. I imagined he would feel much different with this increased circulation. He said he did not and that the doctor told him he wouldn’t feel different as a result of the surgery. That outcome is counterintuitive to me, but I’m not that kind of doctor. I figured if you opened up a passage more widely and allowed for additional blood flow that you would feel more in tune with your body or feel like it took less energy to do the same tasks. He’d been compensating for so long under inadequate circumstances that it seems reasonable to think that restoring the previous status quo would result in a noticeable change. Once you’re habituated to an experience, a revised version of it might be difficult to discern as different. It’s easy to know in your heart that it is better even if words might escape when you try to provide reasons why.

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Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (Samuel Woolley, Yale University Press, 2023)

    A colleague of mine usually tells me she “lives under a rock” when I’m telling her about whatever it is that has set me off in this news this week. There’s times when I speak with her or other people in my life that I feel like my views are out of synch with theirs. Somewhere, some machine has slipped a gear. There are many possible explanations for why each of us sees the world a little differently, and the nature of those misperceptions are part of what Samuel Woolley explores in Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity. You may have heard the phrase manufactured consent and so you’re thinking this book is a new update on that idea, and you’d be correct. Woolley argues that the nature of what used to be known as mass media has changed significantly in the days since Herman and Chomsky gave a name to the idea of a small number of broadcasters being able to create wide support for certain ideas through one-way messaging. What’s different now is that we have devices with worldwide reach in our pockets and we can use them to remain anonymous while sharing our perspectives with each other directly. More than that, we can hide our perspective behind that of a bot that interacts with other users according to our programming instructions. As a result, Woolley contends that instead of manufacturing consent, we are instead involved in a process of manufacturing consensus; it may seem that the majority of people share the same viewpoints, even when that is not the case.

    The book’s cover communicates this idea beautifully. There are 28 dots on the cover that comprise shades from blue to red. Only the bottom three dots are completely red, and they also have shoulders attached to them that make them appear as generic social media avatars. What it seems to be saying is there is a diversity of voices available, but only the three voices that are fully red are taken as representing the whole group. It’s a biased sample. Our perception may be that three out of every three people agree with a certain perspective, but those three are from a population of 28 and they are in the minority. It’s easy to be confused in a context where those three voices dominate, even if you occasionally have evidence that the other 25 voices exist. You might feel that you live under a rock if one of those 25 voices speak to you, regardless of whether you agree with the perspective espoused by the three red voices.

    Woolley provides an operational definition for propaganda early in the text, writing that it describes “the use of politically biased information in considered attempts to manipulate or influence the opinions and actions of individuals and, more broadly, society” (p. 4). He goes on to state that the purpose of propaganda may not be to effect concrete changes in its targets’ behavior. It can be enough to seed certain emotions (anger, apathy) that result in a target taking no concrete actions or behavioral changes. Think about people who have convinced themselves that not voting is some kind of message. It’s not. Non-voters are telling candidates that their opinions can be safely ignored. Getting enough people to feel cynical about the process of elections or other social participation is the goal of some propaganda. It seems easier than ever to get people to sit home and rot these days, which is just what the propagandists want.

    Later in the first chapter, Woolley is explaining how powerful propaganda can be in the world of social media. He uses the case of Martha Coakley’s failed 2010 run for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as an example of how social media users influenced the result of a race. Widely seen as an easy win for Coakley, the race went to her Republican opponent. Woolley explains how a small number of social media accounts were able to successfully pounce on Coakley’s gaffes and missteps, which helped to blunt her momentum and cost her the seat. More generally, Woolley uses a section of this chapter to explore the truism that “if you don’t know what the product is, the product is you” with regard to social media (p. 15). I was a little surprised to not see Shoshana Zuboff’s revision of this statement cited instead. She claims that its not “you,” but “your behavior” that is the product on social media. Her analysis dovetails nicely with Woolley’s because what is important is not just the social media user, but how propagandists can manipulate their behaviors through anonymity and automation that is important. So, what is key is not just the users on social media, but the behavior of the people that a small number of social media users manipulated to prevent Coakley from coasting to victory in her 2010 race.

    Further into the text, Woolley defines more clearly three levels of manufacturing consensus and how they interact. He describes them as “a kind of ouroboros of manipulative information” because of how they rely on each other (p. 55). Each level is based on different types of users. There are political-bot-, sockpuppet-, and partisan nanoinfluencer-based propagandists. Then there are social-media-algorithm-, recommendation-, and trend-based propagandists. Finally, there are news-media-based propagandists. Each level relies on and interacts with the others. The first type (bots and sockpuppets) give the illusion of wide support for marginal ideas. The second type (algorithms and trends) are taken as genuine public opinion polling, even though they can be manipulated or gamed. The third type (news media) gives an institutional sheen to the propaganda created by the other two and broadcasts it to wider audiences as they “reproduce, recreate, and further launder content” (p. 55). One of Woolley’s interview participants grasps these levels of manufacturing consensus with his rhetorical question, “Why would I focus on trying to change someone's mind with a bot barely capable of communication… when I could get the trending algorithm on a site to reprioritize and reshare the content I'm pushing with five thousand bots?” (p. 121). It’s clear that Woolley’s levels are grounded in the reality of social media users. This particular user (among his other interview participants) is able to articulate exactly how to move from the first to the second level of manufacturing consensus, and there is reason to believe that he could easily understand why getting the news media to cover his propaganda campaign would lend it further legitimacy.

    At this point, you yourself may be feeling there is no sense is fighting back against these interlocking systems because there is no way to undo all the damage propagandists have wrought. Woolley tells us later that “there are, sadly, no easy fixes” (p. 84). One that he proposes is based on the work of Joan Donovan and danah boyd, who argue for “strategic silence” from news media (p. 138). The attention the news media give to trends on social media amplifies, launders, and legitimizes propagandists’ campaigns, as Woolley has explained. (He uses 2016’s Pizzagate incident as an illustrative example of how this process unfolds.) So, part of the solution does rest on the shoulders of mass media. How and whether the local or national news covers certain trends has a large influence on whether it is seen as an idea with consensus.

    Woolley doesn’t let us down in the end with a despairing conclusion. One immediate change that would be helpful would be to replace the U.S.’s Section 230 with “legislation that takes account of the massive rise of social media” (p. 176). He also calls for interaction between the Federal Elections Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Communications Commission to “prevent manipulation via digital tools” (p. 176). That he cites a thirty-year-old law and three large governmental bodies that need to work together to solve this problem gives a sense of how immense the problem is. Both of these changes in regulation sound like excellent ideas. 

    Normally, about here is where I’d sign off with a comment like “well Trump won again after this book was published, so there’s no hope.” However, this past weekend’s comically mismanaged Great American State Fair shows just how little actual power these folks have. The consensus they appeared to wield is has been manufactured and their low level of support is undeniable. They’re outnumbered and we will win.

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