History of Communication Blog

Ownership Anxiety in the YouTube Generation

2010-05-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

“I found a bunch of videos on the Internet of bodies falling. They were on a Portuguese site, where there was all sorts of stuff they weren’t showing here, even though it happened here. Whenever I want to try to learn about how Dad died, I have to go to a translator program and find out how to say things in different languages, like ‘September’, which is ‘Wrzesien’ or ‘people jumping from burning buildings’, which is ‘Mensche, die aus brennenden Gebauden springen.’ Then I Google those words. It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?”—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, (p. 256)- Jonathan Saefran Foer

The September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centers were events that sent a shockwave through the international community. No event in contemporary history has elicited such a strong response on a global scale. There has been a universal embrace and ownership of the event that, regardless of political affiliation or cultural identity, has assured that every person has an opinion. They may not agree, but they are not indifferent. What is it about the September 11th attacks that provokes such a universal desire to own the events? Why do people who did not know anyone who died in the attacks, even peripherally, feel compelled to place their own stamp of opinion and identification on it? I would argue that it is, in part, because communication technologies have evolved so much within the last decade that the paradigm for sharing and relating to information has shifted. Modern communication technology facilitates an instantaneous transfer of information, a flourishing of analysis and a surfeit of opinion. It is a very simple process to locate a clip online, put it under your own name and add any commentary you want, and then redistribute it to an almost limitless audience. These personalized digital derivatives are likely identical in quality to their initial form and are endlessly reusable. We may all be working with the same set of images, but our capacity to recontextualize and redistribute them to serve our purposes is unprecedented.

Information has become commodified now in a way it never was before. While it has always been a commodity, whether the case of someone paying for a newspaper to receive the news of the day (at a cost that factored in the labor involved in retrieving, collating and distributing information) or paying some industrial spy for insider tips that would affect a business transaction, it is now that there are so many different competing channels of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ information brokers that people can see how transparent the packaging of information has become. Where there is commodification, there is ownership, for a thing cannot be a commodity unless someone is there to make it a possession with value. Further, that commodification inherently implies that one person possesses it and another does not. So if we start to consider Veblen’s commentary on the notions of ownership evolving from an ownership of persons to an ownership of objects, it is fairly simple to move from an ownership of physical objects to an ownership of ephemeral objects and subsequently an ownership of ideas (e.g. evolution of patents), and then finally, now, an ownership of experience.

What does ownership even mean in this context? How does someone own an experience or their interpretation of an event experienced by millions? First we must examine more traditional demonstrations of ownership. In order to own something in a way that has any social meaning, you must demonstrate that you own it. A Ferrari in your garage that you never drive or discuss with others means nothing. The joy of ownership, for most people, is in demonstration of ownership.

In the case of modern communications and multimedia, the demonstration of ownership is two-fold: the physical possession of media and the redistribution of said media, with some form of assertion of ownership (commentary, etc.). This is a display of goods, even if the goods themselves are only somewhat physical. Well before the advent of modern technology, Veblen recognized this tendency, “The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation.” So while this may have once just meant display of conspicuous consumption of goods, the evolution of the same social tendency in the wake of modern technology extends to asserting ownership by means of opinion and sense of possession.

However, there is a dichotomic tension generated by this modern technology and our instincts to ownership. It has never been easier to possess physical ownership of a piece of information or media, in the form of, say a YouTube clip or a DVD, because effective mass distribution have driven costs down so far, but it is a veritable impossibility to retain a sense of sole ownership since that same mass distribution that makes it available to you makes it available to everybody. This tension is a source of deep-rooted anxiety in a society accustomed to demonstrations of ownership and has led to the evolution of the commentary culture to create a new stamp of ownership and authority. This media may be ours but this experience of it is mine, and you can’t take that from me.

Ownership gets demonstrated through commentary, reposting, presentation of opinion, context of reposting, repurposing of content and an imposition of experience on the part of the owner. Video is inherently problematic because it presents a myth of objectivity. The camera supposedly shows the viewer the truth of what is there and people are inclined to accept it with less critical considerations. However, film is one of the most easily manipulatible art forms, precisely because people expect a certain level of objectivity. While Benjamin acknowledged the power of film to increase our capacity for critical analysis, he did acknowledge the perils of its apparent objectivity. “As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation.” (p. 236, ‘The Work of Analysis in Mechanical Reproduction). All film is inherently subjective, based on the context and the choice of the filmmaker in what to show and what not to show. While footage stripped of all commentary and editing may be the purest form of record, few people view film without a filter of context and commentary. However, people rarely acknowledge that filter consciously and this context gets added to their own experience of an event.

When people engage in the act of reposting media or sharing it with others, they are placing a stamp of ownership on that content. Even if the content has been viewed by millions of other people, the act of sharing allows a person to offer commentary that will be manifested to others as a form of ownership. Is it a conscious action? Probably not. But it does assuage the vague sense of threat and inadequacy brought about by the inability to reconcile manifestations of physical ownership and unlimited distribution of content, as well as a way of placing a stamp of identity and demonstrate one’s goods to an unknown public.

Assertions of ownership over content and experience elicit powerful emotions from people. These emotions range the gamut of the more simple and understandable (jealousy, feelings of inadequacy) to the newly complex emotions brought about by the ownership of ideas. Anger is one of the most common responses, and is the one that Oskar demonstrates when he articulates his frustration in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It is extremely difficult to reconcile a personal sense of ownership with the idea that other people have the same power to own things you want to just be yours. Everyone has the same agency to own an experience and to assert that ownership through a layer of personal interpretation, and we cannot stop that without restricting access to the information, something that is a veritable impossibility with modern technology.

This creates an even more complex set of emotions when people take the same content and apply radically different values to it. Consider the use of the footage of the Towers falling in the September 11th attacks. An American news station might present that as a tragedy, an inconceivable assault on American values or a call to arms. Al-Qaeda has used that same footage as a source of triumph, an inspirational way of recruiting new members. People who may be generally opposed to Al-Qaeda’s actions have a much more visceral feeling of anger and violation when they realize that that footage is being used for that purpose. If you asked them why, they might not be able to explain exactly what it is that bothers them about that, but the answers, involving a lack of respect for the dead, a corruption of the ‘intent’ of the footage, all fundamentally come down to someone else asserting ownership over content in a way that is anathema to your own.

Another aspect of idea ownership is the concept of performative processing—something that has become much more common in the post-YouTube era. Performative processing, as defined here, is the act of processing one’s own feelings about an experience (whether or not you reach a conclusion) in a public forum. Our capacity to do this has grown exponentially due to the advent of modern communication technologies.

The making of ‘Project Rebirth’ itself is an example of performative processing, and placing ownership, on an extremely large scale. The ownership is asserted at a number of levels in the film’s process—the individual participants choose what to disclose of their experiences, Whitaker chooses what to include in his final version, and finally the audience asserts ownership through identification, opinion and a comparison of feelings. The desire to make the film itself is an exercise in performative processing and a recognition that modern communication technology has made a project like this both possible and familiar to a generation that is becoming comfortable with this level of personal exposure and this need to assert ownership.

So once again, we return to Veblen’s comments on displays of goods in a public setting and consider that in this era of commodified experience and mass distribution channels, we resolve the tension of unlimited access to physical media through performative processing and ownership of experience. Experience is easily reducible to commodity so long as it can be packaged and distributed. As an example of technologies that facilitate this ownership of experience and the act of performative processing, I point you to YouTube and to VITAL. Both encourage the redistribution of media with an added layer of personal meaning and metadata—an assertion of ownership and commentary. While commentary (with intent of asserting ownership or otherwise) is valuable and provides context and common ground for discussion and increased shared understanding, there is a peril of conflating commentary and content.

Now that we are quite accustomed to the relentless presence of multiple media sources, unlimited potential for distribution and almost instantaneous access to information, we have to consider how this access to information affects our own personal capacity to own and process events. What does it mean to be a child of the information age and be denied access to information, especially critical information? Does it create a sense of jealousy because someone owns something that you don’t? Is it a completely foreign concept now? Is this an anxiety that people haven’t really experienced in the past because we take access for granted now? This ownership of ideas and experience is not going to go away. It is only going to grow more sophisticated, and our agitations will run deeper without a satisfactory understanding of why we are so frustrated, because the need to own runs so deeply within us. As Veblen stated, “Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development.”

Here we come to fully explore the source of Oskar’s deep-rooted anger and frustration. Even though he had a direct connection to the September 11th attacks and had the resources available to him to grant him access to multiple sources of information, he was denied that access. To deny him that access while granting it to people who did not have a direct connection to the attacks, but still claimed ownership of it by the act of posting and commenting and providing access to others, means his ownership of the experience has been denied. That is tantamount to telling him he has no right to his feelings, but now that concern has become enmeshed with a peculiar form of consumption anxiety. Modern media has redefined ownership and consumption anxiety, as people are compelled to create and perform their own interpretations and experiences as commodities. In doing so, however, they reinforce their anxiety that these things, now commodities, can somehow be taken away from them, something that is surely a profoundly modern anxiety.

This book gave me heavy boots

2010-04-24T14:14:00.001-07:00

In Foer’s exploration of 9/11, young Oskar Schell seeks some closure on his father’s death by going on a quest throughout New York City to trace a person named Black who may have some knowledge of his father. In the meantime, different narratives trace the complicated relationship between Oskar’s grandparents. His grandfather, Thomas, does not speak, communicating solely through writing and his grandmother feigns poor eyesight to try to elicit communication and attention from him. He leaves her when she reveals that she is pregnant because he does not love her enough, but he returns when he realizes he has had no sort of life without her anyway. Oskar desperately seeks connection with his dead father while neglecting the living mother he has behind.

The entire book is really a story of people communicating at cross-purposes or not communicating at all. They don’t tell each other the words they need to hear (I love you, I need you, I understand your pain, I’m scared, I can’t do this, I need help) and in the process systematically lose their ability to communicate. Take grandfather Thomas. His inability to say what he needs to say, to explore his own grief over losing Anna, ends up shutting down his entire capacity to communicate verbally.

Written communication runs as a theme throughout the book (understandable for a novel), and while it has elements of an epistolary novel, it retains far too much of Oskar’s narrative to be purely epistolary—though that would have been a logical direction for Foer to take, given his intense focus on documentation-as-substitute-for-direct-interaction in the story. Thomas writes thousands of letters to the son he never meets and writes page after page in his daybooks to communicate with people. Oskar keeps a collection of “Stuff That Happened To Me”—documents and images that define his self-conception (and that fill the book itself). He writes letters to strangers that he admires constantly, in a relentless search for approval and connection. In the end, his grandmother can’t say the things she wants to say to his face—she writes him a letter. Oskar only has the key that he finds in his father’s things, the impetus for his quest, because a man cannot open a letter from his dead father in time. Oskar is haunted by the things his father didn’t say in his final phone messages. He is incapacitated when the phone rings and loses the opportunity to speak to him a final time and hear what he really needs to hear—that his father loves him, something that it seems no one in this book (except Oskar’s mother) can say in a timely fashion.

The lesson learned is both bittersweet and clear: seize the opportunity to SAY what you need to say—make your needs clear, don’t be afraid to ask for help and above all, tell the important people in your life exactly what they mean to you every chance you get because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

2010-04-19T20:20:00.001-07:00

The Veblen breaks down some very complex concepts that form the root of our capitalist society in a deft and thorough manner. By beginning to identify the root of class consciousness, class formation and cultural concepts of inherent value judgments accorded to labor, Veblen causes us to question our assumptions and values related to employment and economic structure. Every time Veblen articulates a point, I just felt like leaping in the air and saying “Of course!”, which isn’t something I’ve really felt (to the same extent) with other theorists we’ve studied. While the others have all presented views that are legitimate, well-researched and understandable, this one really resonated as truly accurate.

Where to begin? The fundamental separation of women’s work and men’s work and how that helps push us towards distinctions in class and employment? The absolutely delicious correlative drawn tracing the role of exploit in men’s work through the taking of trophies through the evolution of consumerism? The most academic dissection of the concept (and futility of) of keeping up with the Joneses ? WHY we have to keep up with the Joneses in the first place? The implications of manners and the deeper understanding of good breeding? Deconstructing the differences between practical labor and status-based vicarious leisure? The status-based perceptions of drunkenness (though doubtless a shift in perception of that in modern times would be expected.) It’s really awesome, isn’t it?

This is what presents the problem. I really enjoyed the entire reading and so am finding it really difficult to pick any single passage to focus on, but I’m going to try to apply some of Veblen’s more individually minded observations to a general societal problem.

The self-evident comparisons between Veblen’s cautionary observations and America’s modern credit crisis are overwhelming and not particularly interesting to comment on, except that we clearly haven’t learned anything in a century (a common theme of its own in this class). However, a few points that he makes point to a general societal problem that is only growing more pervasive. So I give you several quotations in a row and address them all together…
“Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or last pretence of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual need.”

“The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation.”

“It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life, and it may in this way become as indispensible as any other item of the consumer’s habitual expenditure.”

So what do we do with all of these together? Well, the mass psychosis of modern over-consumption and debt can be found here. First, people will buy long after it ceases to be prudent or advisable, because the act of gratifying one’s wants is far more pleasurable than the process of responsible self-denial, particularly in a world that makes want gratification so easy!
What makes them want so many things? Part of it is the relentless inundation of marketing, but the other part of it is the constant exposure to other people’s gains. A century ago, who did we have to compare ourselves with? Family, neighbors, and public figures. Now, it’s everyone on the internet, so really, it’s everyone. For a culture already overly comfortable with relentless consumption comparison, potentially comparing yourself to everyone on the Internet is staggering and is exercising transformative impact over definitions of ‘good breeding’ and the display of goods.

In terms of breeding, there has been a bit of a reactionary revolt against standards we had held before. Language has deteriorated thanks to “lol-speak” and texting grammar. A basic decorum and reservation of manner has been replaced by relentless over-sharing and a celebration of gauche crudity (hello reality television) because people want to identify more with the people on their televisions, so instead of aspiring to greater successes, they drag their celebrities down to their level.
However, despite bringing the aspirational figures down to a more manageable level, society still covets and produces and consumes at an ever-increasing pace. Technology has reduced product cycles and attitudes towards innovative products have shifted from ‘evaluate carefully and then plan a purchase’ to ‘buy the latest, greatest amazing thing because it will TOTALLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE’.

Easy access to credit has made that possible in a way Veblen could have never anticipated. No longer do you even have to struggle to maintain an aura of conspicuous consumption, banks will enable you to have whatever you want, whenever you want, so long as you pay for it for the rest of your life. People value goods less because they have to work less (on the front end) to receive them. Society as a whole does not fundamentally appreciate that at some point, things bought on credit must be paid for. As a result of this, while people continue to spend and spend to match up to their ‘peers’ and maintain their sense of self-worth, they are in fact destroying their own capacity for financial self-determination and potential for ascending the class ladder by indebting themselves beyond repair. If it weren’t so sad, it would be almost funny.

V for Very Obvious Emotional Manipulation

2010-04-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

Barthes was, for me, a bit of hit and miss. While I did not respond to ‘The Face of Garbo’ with the same enthusiasm as some of my colleagues, I found two essays to be very resonant: ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘The Blue Blood Cruise’. It seemed that the world of French wrestling is very similar to modern American professional wrestling—pageantry and artificial drama over any semblance of pugilistic skill—and I do confess being one of the people who disdains wrestling as a sport and assumes that most of the people who are enthusiasts are idiots who don’t realize it’s staged. I hang my head in shame at the Barthes. Whether all spectators are cognizant of the moral drama being played out in front of them is still something I question, but realizing that wrestling has more in common with a morality play than a sporting event completely changes the nature of the beast and I begin to see its purpose in modern society. Really, the summary of the idea can be found on page 18: “In both [wrestling and theatre], what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.” So what does this mean? By viewing a wrestling match, we as audience engage with the wrestlers, asking them to project their internal struggles for us to witness, for they are also our internal struggles, and in enacting them before us, purge us through acts of catharsis. Do we yearn for a world where good and evil are so clearly defined as to be determined by the color of someone’s cape? Definitely. Do we truly feel that there is some sort of justice in the world when watching it be pantomimed in the ring? Possibly. Are we so purged of emotion by the end of the match and full of the false sense of righteousness that comes with watching justice be meted out that we accept the true injustices of the world because our complacency has been purchased through spectacle? Sadly so. “What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” Life is so much simpler under these circumstances!

Amy and I went to see ‘V for Vendetta’ in theaters. I thought it was pretty awesome and under the auspices of the Bush administration, it felt very relevant and satisfying. I felt righteous, happy and emotionally… voided afterwards. I asked her what she thought of it and she was troubled. She said that the catharsis engendered in the audience watching it is extremely detrimental for the development and mobilization of legitimate social change and people would walk out of that theater feeling that their righteousness and sympathetic emotion from watching the film was somehow equivalent to actually taking action. As usual, she was right and reading this essay on ‘The World of Wrestling’ called that particular exchange to mind in a way I never would have expected.

I saw "Fight Club". Which duvet best defines me as a person?

2010-03-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

In reading the Marcuse, I became forcibly and repeatedly reminded of the time period it was written in, moreso than almost any of our other readings, mostly because the author is discussing different economic systems and focusing on the Soviets and the Americans. Since capitalism has pretty much won this round (even in China, really), it becomes very strange to read this now.

To focus on one passage that particularly leapt out at me, “The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of affluent society. Here the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.” (p. 7)

In essence, yes, I agree with Marcuse that so much of what we do in modern society as workers, once one moves beyond the needs for shelter and sustenance, is work to attain material possessions and experiential purchases (vacations, etc.) that perhaps allow for those modes of relaxation previously mentioned, but also arguably expand the mind and allow for alternate perspectives on the human condition (but that depends where you go and what you do). However, it becomes extremely difficult to conceive outside the paradigm of which he speaks, not for a lack of imagination, but because this is the functional paradigm of modern affluent capitalist society and one cannot live outside the discourse.

Another argument is that people now are not so much recognizing themselves in their commodities (p. 9), but are striving instead to make connections with other people through their purchasing decisions, whether it be spending money on a laptop or a smart phone or a trip to Europe or expensive dinner. Sure, one could point out that generations before us connected fine without all these newfangled gadgets, but that argument is near petulant and willfully obtuse in the face of inexorable technological movements. These tools are here… now what do we do with them?

Perhaps at some point in the near future, we will be able to move from the illusory choices of brand and ‘leisure’ and start taking steps towards asking meaningful questions about freedom and true liberation. However, until we have made sure that people everywhere, and not just in affluent societies, are free from starvation and poverty, we aren’t really in a position to engage those other questions, I don’t think.

2010-03-23T20:13:00.000-07:00

I had never really stopped to consider before this reading how intensely reassuring the concept of shadow conspiracies can be.

Seriously. A vague belief that the world is controlled by a small elite of intensely competent (though morally subjective) individuals organized to execute specific goals helps to reaffirm the concept of historical narrative that Mills explores and eventually dismisses on page 22. It permits people who have no feeling of agency to either be reassured by a sense of historical destiny or to bestow the blind faith/anger that one holds for a higher power on a group of people (whether you agree with the direction or not). It also becomes very convenient for people in power themselves to have this distraction available. “Internationally, the image of the omnipotent elite tends to prevail. All good events and pleasing happenings are quickly imputed by the opinion-makers to the leaders of their own nation; all bad events and unpleasant experiences are imputed to the enemy abroad. In both cases, the omnipotence of evil rulers or of virtuous leaders is assumed. Within the nation, the use of such rhetoric is rather more complicated; when men speak of the power of their own party or circle; they and their leaders are, of course, impotent; only ‘the people’ are omnipotent. But when they speak of the power of their opponent’s party or circle, they impute to them omnipotence; ‘the people’ are now powerlessly taken in.” (p. 17)

This public abdication of authority to appease a mass of people and put on an air of public service and humility serves many purposes. People become more trusting of leaders who are 'just like them' and don't appear to want power overtly. It also allows blame for unpopular decisions to be quickly shifted off the individual in power and preferably onto a political opponent while the people with economic and military authority continue to comfortably make policy choices that affect the lives of millions without ever having been elected. This isn't to say that issues of decision making and election are paramount here (again, something Mills covers quite handily on pg. 21), but merely to continue to highlight the distinctions between appearances of authority and accountability and actual exertion of authority without accountability.

This was, of course, a very detailed and quite fascinating reading that I would like to pick apart more. One wonders what Mills might say now that the links between the political, the military and the economic elite have grown even more complicated. One thing I did find particularly problematic (and this could just be the fact that I only have a post-military-industrial complex framework to work from) is the concept that the blurring of the political, private economic and military establishments is a relatively recent idea. How are these things not inherently related? "The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and greviously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways with military institutions and decisions.” (p. 7-8)

When were these three things ever separate? Most definitely now when working with an international stage, super-powers and mega-corporations, the stakes are higher, but look at ancient Rome, as just one example. One cannot meaningfully separate decisions made for political expediency or gain, military supremacy or economic power (simply consider the First Triumvirate) if one is acting in the interests of a state. And if it is true that what is good for General Motors is good for the United States, and vice-versa, it logically follows that corporate influence is an inevitable outgrowth of the economic considerations of a state. Again, this is not a modern invention. The East India Company exerted enormous influence over English politics (particularly, obviously, in India, where it effectively ruled the country for a century). So what is Mills saying is the new development here? Breadth of control and involvement?

Why Your Car Runs On Gas And Can't Fly

2010-03-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

The market demands I compete,

Apparently fair, no mean feat,

I'll absorb my opponent

(A 'free' market component)

There's no innovation! That's sweet!

One topic that seems to pervade our readings is the constant tension between ideal economic circumstances and practical economic circumstances. So much of economic theory seems defined by the former and is reluctant to engage in legitimate policy proposals based on the latter. The limited readings we did of Schumpeter illustrate this point quite handily, as he attempts to disengage from speculative conjecture on economic policy and push more aggressively to dealing with realistic policy issues. I am not entirely certain if he is successful in this endeavor—I’d have to read a lot more of his work and study a great deal more economic theory—but I do appreciate the need to engage the reality of a marketplace.

While this topic is explored in his touching on issues of socialism and unemployment, the most particular moment for me exists on page 80. “In the general case of oligopoly there is in fact no determinate equilibrium at all, and the possibility presents itself that there may be an endless sequence of moves and countermoves, an indefinite state of warfare between firms. It is true that there are many special cases in which a state of equilibrium theoretically exists. In the second place, even in these cases not only is it much harder to attain than the equilibrium in perfect competition, and still harder to preserve, but the ‘beneficial’ competition of the classic type seems likely to be replaced by ‘predatory’ or ‘cutthroat’ competition or simply by struggles for control in the financial sphere. These things are so many sources of social waste, and there are many others such as the costs of advertising campaigns, the suppression of new methods of production (buying up of patents in order not to use them) and so on. And most important of all: under the conditions envisaged, equilibrium, even if eventually attained by an extremely costly method, no longer guarantees either full employment or maximum output in the sense of the theory of perfect competition. It may exist without full employment, it is bound to exist, so it seems, at a level of output below that maximum mark, because profit-conserving strategy, impossible in the conditions of perfect competition, now not only becomes possible but imposes itself… Is it not quite true after all that there is little parallelism between producing for profit and producing for the consumer and that private enterprise is little more than a device to curtail production in order to extort profits which then are correctly described as tolls and ransoms?” (p. 79-80)

So essentially it seems that if perfect competition actually existed (it doesn’t), then the larger macroeconomic goals of the market would be perfectly in line (equilibrium) with the consumer and all would prosper. However, as Schumpeter attests here, actual competition involves undercutting competition and squashing innovation in order to preserve pre-existing profits, minimize workforce while increasing prices, prevent sustainable opposition and encourage government involvement that reinforces corporate interests while remaining resistant to leveling playing fields. How is that compatible with the overall economic progress and innovation necessary for a large economic entity (whether multinational corporation or state) to function within a global marketplace, particularly one with socialized or semi-socialized businesses? Simply put, in the long run, it isn’t, and this methodology stunts the potential growth of the industry and participants while continuing to marginalize the average consumer/wage laborer.

What bewilders me, and always has, is how corporations seem to prefer squashing innovation rather than co-opting it. If Ford and Exxon had teamed up to offer electric cars that ran on clean sustainable energy sources right now, they would dominate the global market, guaranteeing profits the likes of which they’d never seen, and creating a sustainable business model to take them into the next hundred years. Instead we see the death of the electric car and the beginning tentative industrial explorations of renewable energy sources by organizations that lack the capital to do the R&D necessary to innovate effectively.

I digress too far from the text now, but not the spirit, I think. Schumpeter also says, “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.” (p. 67) In that vein, entrenched industries would only seem to stand to gain from embracing innovation, but perhaps this is the same idealistic trap that many economists fall prey to when studying theory rather than practice.

One should never listen to the French about anything but cheese and wine...

2010-03-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

The policies of laissez-faire

With which we've had a torrid affair

To resist regulation

Seems quite a temptation

You say "Yes!", we say "Au contraire!"

I love economic readings. I really can't help it. The politics of money are absolutely fascinating and Polanyi's approach is refreshing and very clear. This is why it was so difficult for me to pick solitary points of this reading to focus on. It is with great difficulty that I am going to select one passage to comment on and refrain from expounding at the length I would like to.

“Theoretically, laissez-faire or freedom of contract implied the freedom of workers to withhold their labor either individually or jointly, if they so decided; it implied also the freedom of businessmen to concert on selling prices irrespective of the wishes of the consumers. But in practice, such freedom conflicted with the institution of a self-regulating market, and in such a conflict, the self-regulating market was invariably accorded precedence. In other words, if the needs of a self-regulating market proved incompatible with the demands of laissez-faire, the economic liberal turned against laissez-faire and preferred—as any antiliberal would have done—the so-called collectivist method of regulation and restriction. Trade union law as well as anti-trust legislation sprang from this attitude. No more conclusive proof could be offered of the inevitability of anti-liberal or ‘collectivist’ methods under the conditions of modern industrial society than the fact that even economic liberals themselves regularly used such methods in decisively important fields of industrial organization,” (p. 155)

It is very difficult in modern America to consider the concept of true laissez-faire market policies seriously. Sure, at its most basic level, a market has a self-regulating aspect... supply and demand, cost determination, wage determination, etc, but the moment that one starts concentrating wealth in the hands of the few, the actual self-regulation becomes somewhat difficult. One need only look at early attempts at union movements and collective organizing on the part of workers to see how difficult it is for workers to demand higher wages in concert without the backing of some sort of government authority. Laissez-faire is a fantastic idea... if you already have control of wealth and the means of production. It is for this reason that listening to modern neo-conservative millionaires espouse laissez-faire policies that systematically strip government oversight from large corporations while increasing taxation on small businesses that it is difficult to see the theory as anything other than a cynical means of power consolidation.

But that's viewed through the lens of a modern, heavily regulated economy, where regulations for the sake of societal good [attempts at equal wage regardless of sex or race; elimination of child labor; control of unsafe work conditions] are taken as a matter of course. Naturally the government would regulate these things... where is the incentive for private companies to do it on their own? It reduces their profit margin and surely not every employee is so skilled (nor every company so altruistic) that the companies would voluntarily take on greater cost to incentivize and attract top talent.

So the real question here for me (and the one that Polanyi didn't engage because he was busy refusing laissez-faire theory) is: On what basis did proponents of laissez-faire theory believe that for-profit organizations would self-regulate for a common good? Would markets as a whole try to resolve themselves for the greatest possible good? Yes, I can see how that might work... at a certain point companies have to raise wages or lower costs to make their products/services appealing and competitive to the greatest possible audience and so self-regulation occurs, but independent entities, especially ones at the megacorporation level don't have to consider safe working conditions, for example, when there is little reason (gov't regulation) to make them think about it, even if safe workplaces are in the best interest of society at large.

A related thought:

Perhaps the closest thing to a modern functional self-regulating market is eBay. Prices are determined through a fairly transparent process of auction, mutual agreement between willingness to sell and willingness to buy and the ability to compare values is transparent and instantaneous. People who do not adhere to the community-determined rules (timely payment, authentic representation of goods, etc.) are reported, penalized and eventually banned, and providing feedback is a mandatory part of market exchange. However, even that community has standards, fraud prevention, restricted payment methods and oversight, both of a private corporation (eBay itself) and the global economies that it is a part of.

By adhering to laissez-faire policies in their illogical but literal extreme, you overvalue independent action to such an extent that you remove our strongest supports-- each other-- and in the end, there is no market, self-regulating or otherwise, without people.

Ooooh, shiny! (Seems to be a theme this semester)

2010-02-15T17:22:00.000-08:00

"Argue film is art? Yes I can."

"Better than paint?" you demand.

"The forms, they quite differ,

(Your back, it grows stiffer)

The problem? Your attention span."

Benjamin’s assertions about the inherently commodified nature of film, as well as its tacit inferiority to painting as an art form are a little frustrating to this film professional. I believe in his dismissal of film as an absorbing but ultimately passive experience for the viewer, he does not consider the capacity of someone to view film with a critical, engaged eye any more seriously than he considers that someone could view paintings passively, glance at them and not become engaged. “Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes the circumstances as follows: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’ The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change.” I would contend that this is a flaw of consumer as well as product. When viewing a painting, one is still beholden to the image the artist presents. One can engage with that, make associations and analyze as they see fit. One can do the same with a film, but perhaps just at a more rapid pace. The filmmaker is asking the viewer to engage with a much more rapid set of images than the painter, but both artists must contend with their audience’s choice to engage. Perhaps it is a function of generation gap. I know that my brother (age 6) can process visual information at a speed that I cannot, but he has a corresponding difficulty in paying attention to one thing at a time. Conversely, my mother offers things a great deal of attention and focus one thing at a time.

It is when Benjamin begins looking at the roles of reception and criticism that he hits a stride that the modern thinker can really appreciate. He says “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies, this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” (p.240-241). One wonders what he might say if viewing the habitual multitasking of today, or the lack of engagement necessary to be a critic of anything in the modern blogosphere. If everyone’s opinions and distribution channels are equal, how can we learn to value discernment and respect for an educated, considered viewpoint? Likewise, what can artists do to engage their audience’s full attention?

L'etat c'est moi... et vous...

2010-02-08T20:15:00.001-08:00

The State's an ephemeral thing
Yet 'praise unto thee' we all sing,
Did you once stop to think
This thing's not so unique
What a volatile sich ist das Ding.

It's hard to believe that Dewey wrote this in 1927, because (emphasis on the role of the telegraph aside), it feels like it could have been written today. It is very challenging to come up with a specific part of the reading to talk about because there were so many different points that came out as compelling. The transformation of religion from a public to private sphere; where modern states get to involve themselves in private transactions; loyalties to family versus state; and above all that most difficult of questions... what IS a state?

While I would love to spend time exploring so much of what Dewey had to say about the evolution of democracy and the dangers of holding modern governmental forms as sacrosanct and the logical evolution of human society (and did in previous drafts of this post...), the crux of where Dewey is relevant to our studies is fairly clear, as he spends a great deal of time talking about the role of communication technology in democratic discourse and evolution. On page 144, it says "The transition from family and dynastic government supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular government was the outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs by which men had been bound together." While he does allow that technology has been key for the advancement of democracy, he also deplores the availability of distractions and misinformation that allow people to abdicate from their own participation in democracy so easily.

Lanier would doubtless agree when Dewey says (p. 162), "Of course, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by mankind, but it does not equal, probably, the increase in the amount of errors and half-truths which have got into circulation. In social and human matters, especially, the development of a critical sense and methods of discriminating judgment has not kept pace with the growth of careless reports and of motives for positive misrepresentation." This has been a problem for humanity for the last hundred years, at least. The pace of technology has far outstripped our ability to cope with it and develop a capacity to distinguish between what is useful and what is not. Still, this brings us back to last week's reading and explorations of how we might start sorting through our huge collections of data and making some sense of it. Are we still just gathering information? Have we done ourselves a massive disservice by devoting so many resources to increasing our ability to gather information without increasing our ability to analyze and interpret it effectively?

Ultimately, the most resonant part of the Dewey, that brought me back to Pachauri's lecture and Jeffrey Sachs', was this: "Humanity is not, as was once thought, the end for which all things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is the center of interest and the measure of importance." (p. 176) While it is important to try to step out of the relentless narcissism that seems to afflict our species, it is precisely that narcissism that might get us out of the mess we've created. This course so far has brought forth many dystopian and utopian looks at the future, and definitely highlighted several challenges we have to face, but I am not as of yet convinced that we're doomed. Granted, it's only February, so we'll see where the reading takes us from here.

Vroom Vroom! Information Superhighways!

2010-02-01T18:38:00.000-08:00

The problem with data creation

Is it lacks any standardization

My X and my Y

Are different to that guy

And prevents sharing interpretation

All three readings this week made me incredibly happy... for entirely different reasons.

I like economic theories. I do. Comes presumably from having a mother that is an economist. While Benkler is not solely focused on economic concerns, his theories are strongly driven by economic factors. While I read it from the viewpoint of someone who is a firm believer in capitalism, I do definitely see the merit of the open source movement and the value of incorporating non-market production into market economies.

I had several concerns with some of Benkler's speculations, most notably on page 13, where he spoke about the changes in media distribution. While I do think that this is possibly the best description of Internet information distribution I have ever read, he fails to acknowledge that access and distribution are not at all remotely neutral yet between the solitary information provider and the megacorporation. Despite the ability of solitary entities to gain some followers, their presence in the grand scheme of the information being shared is ephemeral because of their lack of capital backing. Are we in a period of transition? Undoubtedly. But media distribution conglomerates are not losing relevance-- they're merging with each other and forming larger corporations. As popular as Winston the Cat is, he will never have the same influence of a single one of hulu.com's advertisers because he lacks the capital backing. It's okay, I'll wait for you to finish the video before I continue. He's a weird looking cat, isn't he?

Where Benkler's ideas really DO start to be thought-provoking though, are in parts like page 14, where he says "More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a combined effort of public, nonprofit and open-source-like efforts being developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security throughout the poorer regions of the world.” Without analyzing at length, because it merits an extensive post (or paper) of its own, perhaps it is more productive to uncouple the analysis of communication collaborations for educational/research purposes and ones for entertainment purposes.

When just looking at educational/research purposes, the power of a network of that size becomes awe-inspiring, but also begins to create some of the problems outlined in "The Fourth Paradigm". What do you do with so much data and so many collaborators without standardizing your information delivery? How do you handle peer review? How can you assure quality and authenticity of data?

When I was coming up with the discussion questions for this week's class, I kept coming back to a few ideas, mostly ones of information sorting and information retrieval. In my line of work, I do have a lot of concerns with both of these things-- I work with digital video. Issues of archival metadata, file compatibility and data integrity are huge. Even as we continue to create terabyte after terabyte of information, we do so without adequate answers to these questions. I'd gotten so used to looking at it through such a narrow lens, I hadn't even considered the similar (and far more pressing) problems facing scientific fields or the catastrophic consequences that not answering these questions would have for a large sector of the economy and our long-term collective knowledge.

One last thought... Gray says, "And note, parenthetically, that the Internet is really turning into an object-oriented system where people fetch objects." It was a side note in a much greater question, but it really resonated. I have been trying to think of all the things I use the internet for-- academic research, social interaction, shopping, casual research, playing stupid games... he's not wrong. These are all objects. I'm striving to think of what else it could be used for and when framed in such general terms, it is difficult to imagine.

Theories of Communcation, post 1

2010-01-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

This blog will take a slightly different direction now as we move into the spring semester's class: Theories of Communication. Similar ideas, a slightly more modern bent. In the first week's collection of readings, we have looked at an article on the quest for the perfect stove (Burger Bilkhard's "Hearth Surgery"), Arjun Appadurai's fascinating look at the creation of minority and majority identities and how that is playing out in new ways on a global stage, "The Fear of Small Numbers", and received a brief introduction to the problems of world poverty, unsustainable development practices and the impending doom of humanity in "The Bottom Billion" and two lectures by R.K. Pachauri and Jeffrey Sachs. That last description wasn't meant to sound flippant so much as to express the breadth and complications of challenges facing global society in 2010. It is very easy to get caught up in the minutiae of one's own life and hear phrases like "globalization", "climate change", "Kyoto protocols", etc. and have them bounce off your ears. You recycle, you attend a liberal institution, you oppose the war in Iraq, you donated to the Red Cross in Haiti, you use public transportation, you consider yourself moderately well-informed. Then you read things like this and realize that you know absolutely nothing.

As a way of organizing our thoughts, we have been asked in this blog to... "Identify one concept per reading that you find especially useful for helping to understand trends you see at work around you or in a wider global context. Explain the idea in your own words and briefly reflect on the insights the concept provides or the dilemmas it helps to explain and/or resolve," and "list ideas you find personally useful here, whether as tools for understanding your own experiences or for analyzing contemporary issues that you find particularly interesting." Alright then.

Reading "Hearth Surgery" opened up my eyes to an aspect of climate change and global emissions that I had never even considered before. When the article began, it broke down the carbon emissions generated by Third World cooking fires as being commensurate in carbon dioxide emission to a car, as well as producing substantially more black carbon. When I read the sentence, "Given that cooking fires each release one or two thousand grams of soot in a year, and that three billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet”, I think my jaw dropped, both from the sheer lack of information available on this topic in the mainstream and the lack of funding this work seems to be getting. So often climate change is framed as a problem solely the product of industry in developed nations, a byproduct of economic privilege that the entire world must now sacrifice to correct even though most have not reaped the economic benefits it provides. While it is undeniably true that the onus of cleaning up our environmental irresponsibility should fall on wealthy nations, why aren't suburban Americans loathe to give up their SUVs being informed that there are research directions that we can take that don't (yet) involve them sacrificing any part of their lifestyles to do good things for their environment and their fellow man? A stove! It's a stove. It seems like it would be anathema to environmental workers to cater to the self-interest of the privileged to advance their goals, but perhaps if it was framed more like this, initially, they could get more funding for what they want to do. Reading that article first helped to frame the breadth of subjects we are going to be looking at as well as the unexpected directions we will be taking.

The central message I got from "The Bottom Billion" was "Narrow the target and broaden the instruments". So many of the problems we are facing in the world today seem insurmountable, in part because there are so many goals that seem to be in conflict with each other. However, if we begin to focus on specific issues and expand our arsenal of tools to address them, I think we will achieve successes beyond our wildest dreams.

"Fear of Small Numbers"... So much of my limited graduate work so far at TC has overlapped with work that my partner did in her undergraduate career. I studied film and literature and a bunch of dead European white guys who wore funny outfits... she studied queer theory, modern social movements, political organizing and mobilization. So starting reading like this means a lot of me raising my head from the screen and saying, "Hey, Amy, I have a question for you..." It's good to have someone like that next to you when you're trying to figure this out. That being said, I think that one of the more interesting ideas posited in the article is found on page 43-- "Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people’, minorities are major sites for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. Minorities, in a word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project. And it is this betrayal- actually rooted in the failure of the nation-state to preserve its promise to be the guarantor of national sovereignty- that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or eliminate minorities. And this also explains why state military forces are often involved in intrastate ethnocide.”

Here's where my clearly defined separate paragraphs on each reading/piece we studied will blur, because this feeds directly into things said by both Sachs and Pachauri about the perpetual political destabilization and violence of impoverished regions.

It is very difficult to step out of my own frame as a liberal New Yorker to understand this at a visceral level. Each instance of minority violence, particularly intrastate, that immediately comes to mind, whether in Serbia, Rwanda or of course Nazi Germany, has its own rationalization, but when framed like this, particularly with the overshadowing issues of resource scarcity, anxiety and need for an 'other' to blame your lot on, the similarities all become chillingly clear. It seems that the more that wealthy nations and liberal idealists project a notion of global citizenship and our responsibility as citizens of the planet, the more violent and visceral the need is to cling to smaller, more easily locatable labels-- labels of nation, religion, ethnicity, tribe. So what happens to the state when they can no longer adequately define their 'people' is that they define their minorities and persecute them, thereby defining themselves as separate in the process. With so much of human history being defined as a struggle between 'us' and 'them', I think it is fallacious to pin so much of this hostility on the failures of the national project. It's just easier to organize persecutions of the 'other' when you have a military, a state authority and a sense of legitimacy on your side.

I highly doubt that we will see the collapse of the nation as an organizational identity in our lifetime. Identifying one's self as a global citizen is too big and as a religion, ethnicity or tribal affiliation too small for economic function and viability in a global marketplace. So will we see things moving more towards the mega-state (European Union, etc.), with several smaller countries with less in common in terms of smaller identity groups, banding together for economic competitiveness against countries that have a more... "coherent" sense of self (America, China, India, for the most part)?

Cellular organizations as exemplified both in the direction of terrorist organizations and internet sensibilities do represent a very potent new evolution in structuring conflicts (and other interactions) with the nation-state, but do they have the economic viability to compete in a global market in any way that isn't solely destructive or based on individual transactions? Will Al-Qaeda ever behave as a nation? Can it engage in treaties with countries? Can it trade in scale with nations? Will it ever want to? How will the definitions of legitimate global players change based on these evolutions?

On page 28, Appadurai says, "This double character of global capitalism in the era of the Internet is what allows us to understand better the cellular nature of the new terrorist networks. Connected yet not vertically managed, coordinated yet remarkably independent, capable of replication without central messaging structures, hazy in their central organizational features yet crystal clear in their cellular strategies and effects, these organizations clearly rely on the crucial tools of money transfer, hidden organization, offshore havens, and nonofficial means of training and mobilization, which also characterize the workings of many levels of the capitalist world. Indeed the grayer areas of the world of banking and finance are clearly complicit with the workings of the networks of international terror.” Is this to say that Al-Qaeda should be more properly thought of as a mega-corporation? And if so, has global capitalism (see recent Supreme Court decision re: campaign financing and the legal status of the corporation) reached a point where we are moving more towards corporations over countries? If so, we reach additional troubling considerations with the ideas of minority and majority, as well as self-definitions of identity. Also, we begin to wonder who exactly we should be negotiating with when needing to develop global consensus on global issues.

That was a lot for a first reading. I look forward to the class discussion tomorrow to address some of these ideas and concerns.

Also, probably next week, depending on the size of the reading, I will return to limerick prefaces.

Fall Paper

2009-12-14T17:13:00.001-08:00

Acacia Graddy-Gamel

MSTU4016

Fall 2009 Final Paper

In modern pedagogical practice, the concept of memorization has become somewhat maligned. Technological advances permit students to have almost instantaneous access to facts and thus devalue the virtue of committing them to memory. Advances in technology have made it possible for people to divert their mental resources to critical analysis and making connections instead of pure retention. Pedagogical theories have not quite caught up to these advances in technology and educators must still strike an effective balance between ensuring a core base of knowledge and avoiding coverage of easily accessible data. At the beginning of the semester, I had not given much thought to how pedagogical practices had evolved over time, or the sheer energy and focus on memorization in past educational practice. More than that, I had never considered how a focus on memorization could mitigate a capacity for critical analysis. As the semester went on and we moved through different media, the connection became clear.

As early as mid September, we were reading Havelock and Plato and learning how Plato viewed the role of memorization in education. With memorization being the sole way to pass on a cultural legacy, an oral tradition precluded proper analysis. As Havelock stated about Plato in our reading, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.”

This was a revolutionary concept that we now (typically) take for granted. In our later readings, Havelock presents Plato’s view that the real purpose of education is to equip someone to lead an examined life. To my mind, there has really never been any other relevant purpose to education than to teach problem solving skills and critical reasoning. As progressive educational institutions have steadily moved away from memorization in the classroom, Plato would likely be pleased with the result.

Certain technological advances, particularly print, made it possible to start uncoupling the acts of accessing information and memorization. People began to use their capacities to memorize to instead visualize scenes from the books they were reading and divert more mental capacity onto separating themselves from their texts. A byproduct of this was that they also started to separate from each other. Reading is a deeply solitary act, as many of the readings in this class have discussed, and a million people reading the same text will have a million interpretations of it.

The act of mass-producing media removed control of the content from the individual and on to the institution, whether a private publisher or a church. So while people might have the mental freedom to analyze a text, they still only received the perspective intended by a given institution. A classic example of this can be found in the formations of the biblical canon. There is still disparity between the Protestant Old Testament (39 books) and the Catholic Old Testament (46 books). That is not just a great deal of discrepancy between the two perspectives, but representative of the level of control that media producers and distributors have over material before it gets to the consumer. The Bible is also an excellent example of this movement from memorization to critical analysis because of the gate-keeping function the Catholic Church provided. People were discouraged from reading it on their own; it was material that was intended to be accessed through a priest. The idea of critical interpretation by laypeople was also anathema to the Church and part of what spurred the Reformation. So in this case, access and capacity to analyze were inextricably interlinked and ability to memorize was very much a secondary concern, further reinforcing the notion that physical possession of a text precluded the need to commit it to memory.

In order to access specific pieces of information, though, readers needed to have a deep fluency in a particular text. This is a huge difference from the position that consumers of media find themselves in now, when the command of a few key words online will instantly summon a passage. Unfortunately, they also summon a hundred other unrelated things, which leads to the development of a new skill set that these medieval readers would not have to use nearly as heavily: discriminating amongst a surfeit of seemingly related information to locate precisely the information one is looking for. As Birkerts says in the Gutenberg Elegies, “In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know countless more “bits” of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional. We depend far less on memory; that faculty has all but atrophied from lack of use.” (p. 72)

So the question becomes: what place do these new skills have in an educational environment? Is it the responsibility of educators, as Plato would like, to teach these critical thinking skills over memorization? Is it their responsibility to balance the crucial older skills of literacy and mathematical reasoning with newer skills of analysis, multiplatform research and media literacy? I would say so. Beginning this course, I was already inclined to believe that it was the province of education to teach critical thinking, and after completing this course, I am even more convinced that it is absolutely necessary to cultivate these skills from the earliest possible age, not just to enable people to navigate the rapidly changing technological landscape, but also to help them regain a sense of meaning and footing in a world that is suffering what Birkerts called “a loss of depth” (p. 73).

While it would seem easy to paint a rosy picture of technological access sacrificing our capacity for memorization and granting us this hitherto uncultivated capacity to analyze and draw connections, it is an unfortunate byproduct of our technological that our critical abilities are devolving along with our memories. People are overwhelmed by content and do not take the time to evaluate their sources. When we read Lanier at the beginning of the semester, he expressed a concern about the vast repository of unverified information available on the Internet and the common mistake people make of not checking sources or doing any form of due diligence when gathering information online. It is a very real concern and educators have an additionally difficult task of teaching a new form of research and vetting to a generation used to having information at their fingertips but shockingly unused to questioning its validity.

In writing these blogs and doing this reading, I have come back to this same idea of shunting the task of information retention onto external sources and freeing up one’s mental resources to make connections between those sources. That somehow, if we can train ourselves to effectively access and utilize these external repositories, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of insight that we could not reach before. The more that I’ve come to think about it though, the more I worry that that will not happen until we also renew a set of skills that we have been neglecting in this process of aggregating this information: the skills of discernment, depth of study and singular focus. I don’t see that one necessarily has to preclude another. With some training and prioritizing, I believe it will be possible for people to apply the mental discipline necessary to committing an epic poem to memory to formulating thoughtful connections between pieces of information with focus and engagement, even if they have not committed those pieces of information to memory themselves. I have not been turned into a pessimist by this realization, but rather acknowledged that the problem is far more complex than I initially thought.

2009-12-07T19:46:00.001-08:00

One of the things I found most remarkable about this reading was the high esteem with which McLuhan views television. In modern critical study of film and television, film is considered the far more involved medium than television—requiring an active participation on the part of the thoughtful viewer—who considers plot, structure, character behavior, lighting, artistic design, editorial work, camera work, auditory decisions and exploration of themes. While the content is important, the medium is equally important, and does serve (hot medium?) all of the information necessary to the viewer, but leaves a great deal for the viewer to resolve on their own in terms of connecting the information presented to other films and mediums that they are familiar with and being certain that they are accessing all of the data being delivered. Many casual viewers of film are not conscious of all of the data they are receiving (particularly auditory data) and how it affects their interaction with the media.

That being said, free television has quickly become the unwanted stepchild of modern art forms (and in some ways technology). Many shows appeal to the lowest common denominator, require a minimum of involvement or audience participation and demonstrate an acute lack of thoughtfulness and information perceived. The idea that this form involves more participation than film is… bewildering to me. Perhaps it was a response to the relative newness of the form when he wrote this.

Overall though, some comments to touch to another point of McLuhan’s, albeit from a slightly tangential perspective. McLuhan says “The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. lt is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”(p. 443).

The problem with this demonstrated in modern society comes in the popularity of hero tales, particularly in television and film. As a personal note, I’m a huge fan of hero tales, and my girlfriend despises them (for the reasons I’m about to outline). I studied film and literature in college; she studied social movements. People watch films and television about epic protagonists who engage in sweeping dramatic actions and get caught up in the power of the story. They feel, through their identification, that they are participating in the story, and that they are actually effecting societal change by participating in a viewing activity. However, they are not actually changing anything. A sense of personal epic narrative has actually stunted people’s capacity to engage in real change that involves group movements and slow progress. Are people really participating in television? Does it give viewers something to do? Do they fill in information or do they just substitute their own experience of the real world with the experience of characters and thus become more inoculated to a passive relationship with the real world because they cannot have the sweeping narrative of fiction?

Sales are not a bad thing

2009-11-27T15:08:00.000-08:00

The wonders of selling to me

Through the ads on prime time TV

Lose their appeal

And all of their zeal

When you see I get hulu for free

While the Beninger reading brought up a lot of fascinating ideas in terms of social control and technology, one thing I’d like to focus on is the concept of marketing, which has changed drastically as communications technology has advanced. The connection between marketing tools and popular entertainment has become so inextricable as to be unexamined by the consumer. If you watch free television or listen to free radio, the cost to you as a consumer is sitting through the advertisements of the show sponsors, who assess demographic data of the program and try to determine what sales method would deliver their product most effectively to you. As Beninger says, on page 20, “Although advertisers were initially wary of broadcasting because audiences could not be easily identified, by 1930 sponsors were spending $60 million annually on radio in the United States alone”. That problem of audience identification and isolating effectiveness is one that he goes on to elaborate later in the text—exploring mediums from questionnaires to house-to-house interviews and the famed Nielsen ratings system.

While most advertising is appealing in a general sense, it is only with the advent of the Internet that we really get targeted ad content. Google has made a fortune on the business model that by analyzing the things that you, as the individual, are interested in (and then selling that information to marketers), they can sell to you and only you. By having a wide variety of ads available to target people who use certain language in their searches, marketers can appeal specifically to people with a much higher rate of success. It is a ruthlessly efficient advertising system, and what’s more, consumers are in some ways grateful for it, because they are receiving product awareness of things much more likely to appeal to them and likely receiving far less marketing inundation that does not.

If you step away from the clichéd view that all marketing is bad and designed to sell you things you don’t want or need—that marketing creates a sense of false need in the consumer who can get along perfectly fine without a product—you begin to see the true genius and benefit of these targeted marketing models—both to buyers and to sellers. While this data accumulation is without doubt an almost insidious form of social control, it is also a way of respecting and acknowledging everyone’s different interests and needs and permitting more demographic subgroups to flourish. No longer are all women ages 18-25 viewed equally and sold to equally. I prefer to look at it as a positive thing, despite the sinister overtones. I live in a capitalist society. I use products. I like to know about new products that may appeal to me. I know that what appeals to me will likely not appeal to most people. Therefore, I appreciate being marketed to directly and unobtrusively, using the Google and Facebook models. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between media technology and advertising over the next fifty years, particularly as pay models (iTunes, etc.) start to assert their presence. Make no mistake, they’re still collecting demographic data about you and selling it, you’re just not seeing the results as directly.

No need to send a horse. Stop. I've just revolutionized communication. Stop.

2009-11-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

Centralizing communications

The telegraph transformed many nations

I can send such clear orders

To my colonial borders

And boost epic real-time wealth creation

Carey writes about the telegraph changing the news and speaks to how the unlimited distance of the wire service created a need for “objective news”. The word limits of the telegraph required only the barest facts to be conveyed, leaving the majority of the article to be fleshed out in the newsroom by people who were not present for the event. This form of editorial flexibility leads to a curious sense of “objective” journalism. If readers labor under the view that they are getting the absolute facts because the root content is the same from paper to paper, it forces news outlets to bury their biases even deeper.

It made me think of current movements in the blogosphere where people cite news articles or report on events directly and openly acknowledge their biases. Now that we live in a time where people have such free access to generating their own content and opinions about shared ‘news’, readers are more active critical thinkers and conscientious writers have found it expedient to divulge as much of their own bias as possible up front. While on one hand, this is a boon for readers, there is still a substantial schism between this amateur reporting and the professionally vetted news institutions. However, the sheer volume of contributors makes it extremely difficult to isolate the information that one would care about and verify that the source of the material is legitimate. In viewing this commentary through this lens, it becomes almost laughable to think that objective news reporting is even possible, especially through a fifty word telegraph.

My form of self-identiification can beat up your form of self-identification

2009-11-08T18:46:00.001-08:00

A nationalist identity

Helps to create community

Because then me and you,

Whether Christian or Jew,

Have some sense of fraternity

Reading about the evolution of nationalism this weekend struck a particularly strong chord with me because I traveled to Washington DC this weekend. If there was ever a place deliberately designed with the glorification of the concept of a national identity in mind—it is Washington. In visiting the World War II memorial, what struck me (viewed through the lens of this reading) was the multiple levels of identity being explored. All Americans identify with the memorial as Americans. Each state or territory that sent troops into battle is represented individually, allowing for more personal levels of identification. I saw people taking pictures of themselves in front of the names of their states. Was that the intention of the memorial? Probably not, but as an example of nationalist identification, it was clear to see.

“…all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”

This point cannot be gainsayed, but it begins to call to mind the various forms of virtual communities present on the Internet. People start to partition themselves by identity aspects that were never used as defining characteristics in the past—from stamp collectors to fans of particular television shows—because it has never been easier to create a community and feel an immediate sense of fellowship and identification. Only time will tell if the paramount importance of nationalism currently will diminish or increase as the internet becomes more pervasive. Currently it seems to be moving in both directions simultaneously—as people perceive the differences between themselves and their neighbor to be less, they reflexively raise their boundaries higher and cling to identities that clearly demarcate the Self and the Other. Who knows if we will continue to compound identity upon identity as a way of defining the Self and the Other, or we will seek more rigorously to find our commonalities.

2009-11-03T18:44:00.000-08:00

To be connected to one’s fellow man

Means one stays alone for a span

Oh the things schoolboys glean

From lewd magazines

Or reading a Bible that’s banned

Eisenstein posits a great deal of information to digest in a mere fifty pages. While casual students of history take it for granted that the advent of the printing press precipitated things like the Protestant Reformation, there is a great deal of assumed gradualness about the process of disseminating printed documents to the masses. However, not only does Eisenstein dispute these assumptions, she also raises the idea that the act of pushing people away from illuminated manuscripts and towards print began a process of standardizing thinking while it standardized textual presentation. Moreover, the idea of the burgeoning print industry crossing national, religious and linguistic boundaries is an extremely compelling one. The power of print to duplicate and disseminate in a way that far outstripped scribal work completely changed the face of nearly every field- from law to astronomy.

Above all, the most interesting part of the reading was the exploration of the gradual solipsistic isolation and self-reflection that people found themselves in once literacy had become so pervasive. “Not a desire to withdraw from a worldly society or the city of man but a gregarious curiosity about them could by the eighteenth century be satisfied by silent perusal of journals, gazettes, or newsletters. Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellowmen.” (p. 41) This notion of technology being an agent of simultaneous unification and isolation is one that we will doubtless keep returning to as every technical advance since—the radio, television, computer and mobile devices- continue to advance this seemingly contradictory state.

Visualize a Hunchback

2009-10-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

Some recollect with aplomb

Their visual memory, a balm

The triumph of reading

May be misleading

Nous n'oublions pas Notre-Dame

The reading for this week, on metamemory and memory theory, naturally makes one start to consider how they formulate their own memories. The system of developing memory loci makes a great deal of sense once one considers one’s own relationship with locations and associated memories. When in a location, it is easy to immediately invoke strong memories associated with the place that can be shockingly detailed. Visual memory is one of our most powerful tools (though I would personally argue that scent memory is the most evocative of experience, though far more difficult to imagine and deliberately construct) for structured and deliberate recollection. The implications of this as people moved from an oral tradition to a written tradition are outlined in “The Art of Memory”.

One of the questions related to this, and covered to a degree by Hugo is what happens when print becomes ubiquitous? As communication technology improves, people are able to spend less and less mental energy on the act of memory, and they foist the responsibility of storing data onto external sources. This has its good points (mass accessibility) as well as its bad points (reduced mental discipline, reliance on ephemeral objects) and this discussion continues in earnest with the birth of each new technology.

One thing that struck me about this reading, referenced by the authors only obliquely, is the astonishing capacity of the brain to generate and retain detailed visual imagery. Despite generations of people adapting to the written word, our most potent tools of recollection are visual. When calling to mind a scene in a book, attentive readers do not summon images of the words on the page, but representative images of what is described. Who among us read the Hugo, considering the power of architecture and writing, and did not immediately picture a building of sweeping majesty (and likely personal resonance)? Can architecture be destroyed by writing? Never while people continue to imagine buildings.

The Great National Myth

2009-10-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

A pedagogic component to art

Will help keep your nation quite smart

Make citizens compliant

Just a bit self-reliant

And from your domain they’ll not part

This is the second time I’ve read the Aenied for a class, and so I have a little bit of background in it. While it co-opts the style of Homer’s writing, its agenda is somewhat different. If we suppose that Homer’s purpose (in part) was to use the Iliad and the Odyssey as ways of passing on a cultural encyclopedia to the Greeks, to teach them their own cultural identity—Homer’s ideal of what the Greeks should be, the Aenied is the deliberate act of Virgil to push patron Augustus Caesar’s political agenda for Rome.

In the Aenied, Virgil has created a cultural myth of shared identity, drawing on common stories and shared religious concepts to offer legitimacy to a set of values and a past that all Romans can take pride in. These values are expressed through story in a variety of ways. When Aeneas sees those being punished in the underworld, their crimes are more than just myths—they are warnings for Roman citizens against undesirable behavior. Likewise, in a circular fashion, Virgil increases Augustus Caesar’s legitimacy as a ruler by gifting him with this divine (and seemingly pre-ordained) heritage.

Ultimately, Virgil and Augustus Caesar both saw the dazzling potential of utilizing an epic poem as a means of civic education and they seized upon that opportunity to create the Rome that they wanted to see. In writing this blog, I was discussing these concepts with Amy and trying to articulate what other circumstances where people have created a work of art or narrative piece with the explicit agenda of defining a national identity or unifying a people into a shared identity group. The only things we could think of are religious texts, most particularly the Torah. I would be curious to see what other people think of when they think of these kinds of works.

Absolute Truthiness

2009-10-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

The cave is quite the sensation

For those intent on the provocation,

Your concept of Truth

Might to me be uncouth,

But whose absolute sways the nation?

Plato’s “True World” outside the cave is equivalent to Latour’s concept of Science (the politicization of the sciences through epistemology in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature.) Latour calls out the obvious problem with the cave allegory: the very existence of an inviolable, incontrovertible Truth. “Because, without [the division], there would be no more reservoir of incontrovertible certainties that could be brought in to put an end to the incessant chatter of obscurantism and ignorance. There would no longer be a sure way to distinguish what is true from what is false. One could no longer break free of social determiners to understand what things themselves are…”

Throughout history, people have sought guarantors of absolute truth, something to tell us what is Right and what is Wrong. Perhaps Plato’s saving grace in his exploration of the cave analogy is that he doesn’t offer his thesis there of what is Right, but merely points out that there IS Right and Wrong, Truth and Falsehood.

Educators have to be wary of absolute truth being dangled in front of them. There are few ideas more seductive than those of absolutes. Everyone wants assurances that they are right and that their way is the right way. We all think that we are the enlightened ones, obligated to return to the cave out of a selfless sensibility—but no one knows anything for certain.

2009-10-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

Philosopher Plato sat in his cave,

With flick'ring shadows that would not behave

These false appiritions

Encompassed his vision

And were the reality most crave

With this prompt, I find my two classes intersecting in a beautiful way. Two weeks ago I had to write about my personal philosophy of education. As a graduate of progressive institutions, I had always received an education that focused explicitly on interdisciplinary connections, critical thinking and analytic reasoning. It wasn’t until I got much older that I realized that this was not a normal educational experience. So to comment directly to the discussion prompt: I feel that preparing a person to lead an examined life should be one of the primary educational objectives and that it is very feasible, particularly at a time in technological development where the need for people to have raw information memorized is growing less and less relevant. Of far greater importance is people’s ability to critically reason, draw connections and apply problem-solving and deductive reasoning to a variety of subjects.

These educational developments and directions owe themselves in some part to Plato’s ideas, though they thankfully recognize the relevance of art, poetry and metaphor as “pointing the soul upwards” as well. While Plato’s list of prescribed subjects was extremely limited, it is to be understood that he was proposing a pedagogical revolution and thus had a great deal to consider. Educational practice should function to constantly point the soul upward and allow everyone the opportunity to enrich themselves through learning about themselves and the world around them. Havelock focuses a great deal on explaining exactly how difficult Plato’s task was and how important the development of writing was to permitting that. Right now we face a similar period in educational evolution. With all this information available at our fingertips, “what” teachers should teach becomes significantly less important than “why” and “how” teachers should teach it. Were Plato alive to assess modern education, hopefully he would feel more amenable to the role of art, though he might still wonder why so much emphasis is placed on memorization when students should be taught analytic skills.

Ow, my brain.

2009-09-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

These advances in human cognition

Might have met with Homeric derision

To part body from mind

Might be thought unkind

But it’s worthy of great recognition

As one might expect considering the subject matter, I had a lot of thoughts about this reading... and I really enjoyed it, but I had serious difficulty articulating all the concepts effectively. So I'm going to give it a shot, but I feel very scattered about this one...

For as long as human beings have been able to conceptualize their own mortality and speculate about what happens after death, they have been looking for language to define abstract concepts. However, expanding language to incorporate these concepts led to people changing their thoughts about things that they had previously taken for granted, like the relationship of their limbs to the rest of their bodies.

The crucial cultural invention that accelerated the articulation of abstract concepts was the development of religion. In starting to conceive of an invisible divinity and attribute to it causation of events and concerns beyond their ken, humanity began to need the language for things they could not see and touch. The necessity of imputing supernatural (or as Snell would articulate it, in fact, quite natural) powers to these divine beings started humanity on the path to finding a concept of their own individual spirits, which led to language to distinguish the ‘self’ from the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’.

In observing the transition from Homer to Heraclitus and how this articulation evolved, it was particularly insightful to read the Snell, who forced a re-examination of basic ideas that the reader would take for granted because of the filter of culminated Western thought. As Snell says, “It has long been observed that in comparatively primitive speech abstractions are as yet undeveloped, while immediate sense perceptions furnish it with a wealth of concrete symbols which seem strange to a more sophisticated tongue.” In translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, readers are given a text that has been translated for literary beauty and readability more than literal accuracy, so many of these sense perceptions as articulated by Homer are read with all the implied abstraction of contemporary English rather than the intended meaning of the author for that meaning would be almost indecipherable to the modern reader, so it becomes very difficult to imagine how the abstractions we take for granted were foreign to Homer.

One of the most crucial evolutions in thought between Homer and Heraclitus can be defined here: “[Heraclitus’] rejection of external guardian spirits (F60) has profound consequences: we make our own destinies. In a world of flux and hidden stability, of war and hidden peace, we choose to be one of the sleepers or to wake up.” In moving past externalized guardian spirits and focusing on self-determination and self-awareness, Heraclitus begins to create both accountability and sovereignty and internalize the rich unseen outer world. People are not just reactive in action, but proactive, and it is in proactivity that we push civilization forward.

Wait, you mean the Iliad's NOT a textbook?

2009-09-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

Plato’s against memor’zation

Insisting on deliberation,

For without analysis

You risk pushing fallacies

In teaching to each generation

There is a lot of great stuff going on in the Havelock and in the Homer. By way of context, I’ve read the Iliad in whole or substantial parts at least three times in my academic career—once in high school and twice in college for different courses on literature and philosophy—so I am pretty familiar with the text and decoding it. That said, it was a pleasure to read it again bearing in mind Havelock’s points and the discussion question.

Not being very familiar with the Greek educational system, it was absolutely fascinating to view the Iliad as a means of passing on a cultural history, albeit one meant to be memorized rather than analyzed. On its surface, Plato’s antipathy towards Homer’s lack of absolute expertise seems absolutely bizarre. However, when total memorization and empathic absorption is the only way to effectively incorporate information, deliberation is less important than reaction and rote recitation. Or as Havelock put it, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.” Plato is attempting to completely overthrow the pedagogical norm, and has quite a challenge ahead of him.

Within the context of the Iliad itself, the question of deliberation in action is a fascinating one. Characters don’t actually deliberate or analyze situations—they act. Gods act regardless of consequence and men act in response to situations set up by the gods or their baser impulses. The only time any character demonstrates a moment of deliberation in his action (lines 90-215), it is represented by the appearance of the goddess Athena. Athena is recognized as the goddess of wisdom, to be sure, but the important thing to note is that Achilles did not deliberate on his actions of his own accord—he was swayed from an impulsive decision by divine counsel. Had he even been remotely tempted to act counter to Athena, doubtless he would have learned from the humbling decimation the Greeks had just suffered at the hands of Apollo. So what is Homeric deliberation then? Is it action without critical analysis? Is it a mark of a hero that they act solely based on either instinct or divine decree?

From a pedagogical perspective, the Havelock reading got me thinking a lot about the purpose of rote memorization at all. It has gone in and out of fashion recently, especially in basic mathematics and vocabulary building. It seems that as access to written fact has become the dominant paradigm in the educational environment, it is far less relevant to teach facts than it is to teach how to interpret them and analyze them. In a world dominated by today’s aggressively pervasive technologies, this becomes moreso as the available source materials have increased infinitely. Today’s students have to learn to research, discern and decode the wealth of information at their fingertips and memorization becomes irrelevant in a society with devices that permit portable near instantaneous recollection.

Globalization, Wikitelligence and why the free market isn't so free

2009-09-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

When thinking on globalization,

One cannot lose sight of the nation,

So China's priorities

derail Western authorities

Oh, unsuspecting hegemonic creation

Globalization is a hot topic word in media. Depending on who you ask, globalization will solve all the world's problems or sink us into a morass of economic and social inequality, all while ruining our environment. Still, globalization itself is rarely defined, though authors who bandy about it do so with an agenda. The Steger was particularly useful in distinguishing three different globalism agendas: market globalism, left justice globalism and jihadist globalism, all of which take advantage of globalization and advances in technology to further their own needs, they all "articulate and translate the rising global imaginary - notions of community increasingly tied to the global - into concrete political programmes and agendas."

Moreover, there is a lot of tension in the readings between the ideas of globalism replacing nationalism as a prevailing ideology (a la Friedman) and nationalism experiencing a resurgent power and relevance in defiance against a globalist agenda, particularly one that focuses on Western and Americentric ideas. As Gray says, “Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift.” Therefore, paradoxically, it is nationalist motivations that are fueling a movement towards globalization: taking advantage of economic, technological and social opportunities globally to advance a national (or other unifying group—whether religious, ideological, racial, etc.) agenda.

The uncoupling of capitalism, democracy and globalization was a crucial feature of the Gray article and key to understanding the implications of globalist agendas across the world. While most cursory looks at globalization would seem to promote a leveling of the playing field, in reality, political entities all want to be ‘more equal than others’. It is difficult to imagine who would willingly forsake either an existing position of cultural and economic dominance or a chance to achieve it.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the reading was the framing of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as responses to unchecked capitalism and economic inequality. Having always looked at the rise of National Socialism through the lens of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles as being the direct cause of hyperinflation and unemployment, it is compelling to consider it through the lens of unchecked free market rapaciousness and draw correlations to modern economic inequalities—particularly as those tendencies manifest themselves right now in both secular and religious ways.

In terms of academic and pedagogical implications, the Lanier felt the most directly relevant. In concerns about collectivism and collaborative references like Wikipedia, the tyranny of the majority would necessitate reducing things to the lowest common denominator and thus diminishing the social intelligence. There have already been studies done that show that modern students accept most of what they read on Wikipedia and other internet sources as factual without stopping to consider the credibility of the source—a source that, as Lanier points out, is becoming more difficult to trace as anonymity and collective intelligence are becoming more common on the web. My girlfriend and I had a long conversation about this article and this very point, where she contested that for Wikipedia to have developed any credibility at all, it had to be mostly factually accurate, otherwise people would not use it and its lack of reliability would have rendered it obsolete. When I countered by comparing it to a physical encyclopedia (considered a legitimate source by most instructors, whereas Wikipedia is not), she pointed out that the masses can serve a similar function to the editorial gatekeepers behind a conventional encyclopedia, and we cannot easily (nor is anyone inclined to) trace the individual identities or biases of authors of Encyclopedia Brittanica articles either. Moreover, Wikipedia and internet authorship opens up a more democratic set of views that, if critically vetted by responsible readers, can be far more valuable than a conventionally published text. Or, as she put it, “History is written by the winners, but at least on Wikipedia, sometimes it’s written by losers”. These considerations will have to be factored in by modern educators who have to re-evaluate their own ideas of source legitimacy and train their students in effective critical evaluation.

2009-09-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

Diebert’s introduction to “Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia” posits some difficult questions about humanity’s relationship to communication technology and how it influences our progress as a society. By presenting an examination of history framed through a medium theory lens, he forces the reader to consider their own assumptions about political authority, the influence of communication technology and even how the world is structured.

Of particular interest in examining the problems of modern society and communication is the collapse of boundaries that modern society has created between discrete political entities. Diebert says “We should not presuppose the "modern" distinction maintained between "politics," "economics," and "religion" in the composition of past or future world orders (p. 10)." This framework is a key analysis tool for comprehension of modern international relations, but is becoming rapidly obsolete. Unfortunately, navigation of this post-modern world order is in its infancy as it is a world of “de-territorialized communities, fragmented identities, transnational corporations, and cyberspatial flows of finance. It is a world in which brokers, cultists, and khalifs are as much in prominent relief as Canadians, Poles, and Kuwaitis. It is, paradoxically, a world made up of plural worlds, multiple realities and irrealities, digital artifacts stitched together in a web of spectacles, cineplexes, and not a single "global village;' and even less a system of territorially-distinct nationstates, postmodern world order is, rather, a pastiche of multiple and overlapping authorities - a quasi-feudal, "multicentric" system. (p. ix)”, which brings us to the question: how do we shift our own concepts of power structures and political entities to meaningfully interact in the new world order?

“While it is far too early to provide a clear outline of that emerging world order, the trends unearthed point away from single mass identities, linear political boundaries, and exclusive jurisdictions centered on territorial spaces, and toward multiple identities and nonterritorial communities, overlapping boundaries, and nonexclusive jurisdictions. (p. 15)”. A few examples that came to mind particularly in reading Diebert highlight the turmoil in the Middle East. The last major conflict that the United States engaged in, Vietnam, was a fight against a regime (and a political ideology with global implications, true), but a clearly defined regime. While this is definitely reductionist, the basic idea holds true. In America’s current conflicts, the enemy is far more nebulous, confined by neither country nor region, and the nature of warfare is adapting rapidly. Likewise, in the recent Iranian elections, global attention came down on Iran, shifting views on citizen journalism and protest methodology as well as raising questions about citizenship and democracy. Why are non-Iranians invested in Iranian elections? Where does the sovereign authority of a nation-state have to be accountable to a global sense of democracy? What does a global sense of democracy MEAN in a world still drawn up into nation-states?

While these are all weighty ideas that I look forward to exploring in great detail in this course, the crux of what got me excited and curious relating to my own studies came from the series of emails. In my program and career, I hope to utilize new media technologies to help secondary and post-secondary educators of the humanities improve their teaching and more effectively reach their students using all the tools available to them, so when I see statements like “The problem in reality is not that some schools are failing schools; it is that schooling, as our only educational strategy and system, fails with a significant portion of the population. Like any institutional system, schooling has its functional capacities and its functional limits. Children stumbling through the process with scant benefit and teachers struggling with miserable results does not mean that the children are uneducable nor the teachers incompetent; it means that the system of schooling has been pushed to the limits of its possible effectiveness,” it gets me very excited to think of how educators will be able to move outside conventional methods of education and re-imagine the process of study in ways that will encourage individual learners to reach the height of their potential.

When the author spoke of how e-learning should not be an electronic delivery system for a conventional textbook based education, but rather the springboard for a whole new look at learning, it made me realize how much my frame of understanding was limited by this traditional idea of education, even though I attended extremely progressive schools. In my office right now, we are working on a Global Classroom initiative with Jeffrey Sachs and the Earth Institute. Every day, twelve classrooms across the world connect through a video conferencing system to participate in interdisciplinary lectures on the problems of sustainable development by leading international experts in the field. Not only would this not have been logistically possible without advances in current technology, it would likely not have been conceived. It is not a very conventional approach to education.

I can’t wait to see what other assumptions will be challenged over this course of study and how it will help me think of my own role in education in a different way.