Dr. Penley’s Permission to think Seriously about the Unserious

Ethan Tussey

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One of the great gifts Constance Penley gave me while I studied with her was the permission to consider ordinary media through a critical lens. Her ability to celebrate and contextualize the oft-overlooked is expertly captured in her essay “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn.” In that essay, Penley reflects on her upbringing and how it informed her research agenda: “I cannot imagine any better preparation for grasping the intricacies of contemporary theory and cultural studies than negotiating a Florida cracker childhood and adolescence.”[1] Our field can be intimidating. The ambitions, knowledge, and skill of our peers can make us question the vitality of our own research interests, but through this sentiment, and her teaching, Connie taught me that so many of the things that brought me to film and media studies were worthy topics for exploring and relevant to the literature in the field.

As cineplex audiences dwindle, cable subscriptions are cut, and broadcast television ratings decline, it may be more important than ever to follow Dr. Penley’s prescription and turn our critical eyes toward ordinary media. As a teacher in the field, it is increasingly difficult to find content that is recognizable to most of my students. This can make teaching more difficult, as students are faced with unfamiliar ways of thinking and unfamiliar illustrative texts. As I have written elsewhere,[2] much of our exposure to media content happens within the routines of our everyday life. It is increasingly important to examine these everyday interactions as they may be some of the few remaining media interactions we share with our neighbors. Jacob Gaboury’s work on “screen shots” as an historic practice and archive of digital behavior is a good example of this kind of work.[3] Additionally, studies of everyday encounters with media and visual culture, such as search bars, weather apps, Spotify “wrapped,” group text threads, “memories” on photo apps, New York Times games, social media holidays, and emoji keyboards are all media interactions broadly experienced by the majority of our students.

Consider the Google Doodle. Google’s front page provides a dominant pathway to the internet. The search engine and its algorithm attempt to anticipate (often problematically[4]) our search targets. But even before one begins to type in the object of their search in the search bar, Google offers a near daily “Doodle” decorating its corporate name. These doodles often highlight the birthday of a notable figure, a significant day on the calendar, a cause, a civic celebration, a global event and many other topics. There have been over 5000 Google Doodles to date with the first one appearing as a kind of away message by the company’s founders announcing they would be at Burning Man.

Google Doodles are often regionally specific, reflecting the culture, people, sports events, public health emergencies (COVID doodles), elections, and social activity. Bob Britten refers to Google Doodles and the search bar generally as one of the few iconic images of the internet age and a vector for collective memory.[5] Google Doodle hosts a yearly children’s contest for submitting new Doodles and routinely selects subjects for these doodles from public requests. This public-facing effort to integrate Google into education and childhood creativity helps to embed the search engine as a dominant feature of public life. Google advertises the feature as “spontaneous celebrations of local places, seasonal celebrations, heroes, events, culture, places.” The histories, people, and culture surfaced in the majority of Google Doodles have been dedicated to expanding the heroes of the collective historical canon and raising awareness of the overlooked contributions from those in minority populations.

At times, the subjects of the Google Doodle have sparked controversy and been a battleground in the culture wars. On March 31st, 2013, the Google Doodle celebrated the life of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez. The Easter holiday also happened to land on the same date. Some professional political pundits and merchants of outrage felt that Google’s decision to feature Chavez and not Easter theming on the Google Doodle implied anti-religious sentiment.[6] More recently, the Google Calendar and by extension the Google Doodle became the site of controversy when in the wake of recent threats from the Trump administration, Google removed Black History Month, Pride, and Women’s History month from its services.[7] While these blips in the news cycle can be dismissed as merely fodder for online flame wars, they also indicate that the Google Doodle is culturally relevant enough to be a site for political debate. While it may be easy to dismiss a seemingly ginned up controversy, Connie, no stranger to the culture wars, reminds us of the impact a shrewd academic can make by providing context, critical consideration, and expert testimony on behalf of those caught up in the latest reactionary crusade.

James Yékú and Ayobami Ojebode have written about the more direct political messaging that the Google Doodle provides in Nigeria, writing “there are political meanings attached to doodles, even as these visual narratives are both emblematic of Google’s presence in the country they celebrate and are performative expressions of their solidarity with nations whose historical legacies are visualized and broadcast through the significations of the doodle.”[8] They point out that in places with access to the internet but little control over its hegemonic power structures, Google Doodles can be among the few visual markers of the region’s shared cultural heritage. The claims of the significance of the Google Doodle, and its progressive potential may be easy to dismiss as most of our engagement with the Google home screen is ephemeral and brief.

Yékú and Ojebode counter that the significance of the Doodle is particularly important for places like Nigeria where public engagement with history has been historically difficult to foster. For example, a Google Doodle of Stella Adadevoh, a physician that was crucial to fighting an Ebola crisis and organizing public health systems, inspired a grassroots effort to push back against a state-based apathy and silence that misrecognize and undermine the historical significance of Adadevoh’s expertise and accomplishments. The authors argue that the cultivation of a historical consciousness fostered by the Google Doodle is significant.

Beyond raising awareness, Google Doodles provides an opportunity for playful procrastination to counteract the stale rhythms of the workday. Connie is fond of reminding us of the folklorists Alan Dundes and Gershon Legman who taught that the dirty joke shared at the watercooler breaks up the workday and is an essential part of the “warp and woof of American working life.”[9] The Doodle accomplishes this by periodically offering an interactive component or game. Take for example the one of the most popular Google Doodles, the Pac Man Google Doodle. Launched in 2010, the Pac Man Google Doodle celebrated the 30th anniversary of the beloved video game with an interactive doodle in which Google users could play Pac Man in their browser via the Doodle with the ghost filled arena containing walls and pathways that spelled out “Google.” Another interactive doodle was offered on Valentine’s Day of 2024. Drawing inspiration from Personality quizzes and Myers-Briggs categorization schemas, the doodle asked the user to make a number of selections about personal taste and behavior. After completing the quiz, the user was assigned an element from the periodic table and given information about what personalities they are “attracted” to and could “bond” with. Google even offered a “best of” its interactive doodles as an entertaining enticement to keep people at home during the quarantines of the COVID pandemic.

It is not surprising that the interactive Google Doodles borrow from forms of “snackable media” that one finds across the internet like flash games and Buzz Feed quizzes. These are just some of the many examples of ordinary media that people interact with throughout the normal course of their day. Connie has always encouraged her students to take these ordinary media encounters seriously. We may not be watching the same movies and television shows as often as we used to, but we are still looking to media objects to get us through our daily routines. Whether it is Google Doodle, a viral video, or the NSFW content that Connie has made a career out of studying, we must not dismiss the ordinary. It may be among the final media objects that we are all encountering everyday.

Notes

[1]Penley, Constance. "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn," Porn studies. Duke University Press, 2004: 309-331.

[2]Tussey, Ethan. The Procrastination Economy: The Big Business of Downtime. NYU Press, 2018.

[3]Gaboury, Jacob. "Paper computing and early screenshot cultures." Screen Images–In-Game Photography, Screenshot. Screencast, Berlin (2022): 87-92.

[4]Noble, Safiya Umoja. "Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism." In Algorithms of oppression. NYU Press, 2018.

[5]Britten, Bob. "Google doodles and collective memory-making." In Handbook of Visual Communication, pp. 334-348. Routledge, 2020.

[6]Ngak, Chenda. “Google Doodle gets heat for honoring Cesar Chavez instead of Easter,” CBS News, April 1, 2013.

[7]Grant, Nico, “Google Calendar Deletes Women’s History Month and Other Cultural Events,” New York Times, February 12, 2025.

[8]Yékú, James and Ayobami Ojebode, “From Google Doodles to Facebook: Nostalgia and Visual Reconstructions of the Past in Nigeria,” African Studies Review, Vol 64 (3) September 2021; 498-522.

[9]Penley, p319

Ethan Tussey is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Georgia State University. His book, The Procrastination Economy: The Big Business of Downtime (NYU Press, 2018), details the economic and social value of mobile device use in the context of the workplace, the commute, the waiting room, and the living room. He has contributed book chapters on creative labor, sports television, sports gambling, connected viewing, and crowdfunding to peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.