One cannot not communicate

May 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

It seems that so much is going on in the world of communication that it makes my head spin just to think of where to focus, which is perhaps one of the great challenges of communication today. Communication seems to be so much about the technology of communication that we often forget what the basics are and how to measure them. To communicate today seems to be centered around getting information from one point to another, and making sure that it happens effectively, but the deeper issue is to understand what happens when we communicate and what the meaning is. Another question to think about is whether communication is an intentional activity, or whether it is just part of who are regardless of the medium or intention.

Paul Watzlawick was a great researcher on the topic of communication, somewhat forgotten in the digital age but incredibly relevant. Born in Austria in 1939 he studied with Jung, continued his studies in El Salvador before ending up in Palo Alto in 1960 where he worked with Don Jackson and followed the now famous Gregory Bateson. He worked mostly in the field of family therapy, but was interested in a much larger understanding of context in communication, seeing the dynamic as a system involving both parties and framing communication as something we do no matter what. To Watzlawick there was no non-communication, just as there couldn’t be a non-behavior, which meant that everything had to be studied as communication.

Another one of his ideas is that communication involves not only the message delivered, verbal or non-verbal, but the message received as a response, which might seem obvious but isn’t when you think of it. Much of our misunderstandings are in the ways we decipher the response to our ways of communication, which is understandably difficult since it comes from another person who might interpret things quite differently. In the age of rapid electronic messaging, the gap between what is communicated and what is received can be drastic, especially when we cannot measure what is received.

Watzlawick coined another distinction between what he called digital and analog communication, which is not the digital and analog we know. By digital he meant words, whereas analog depicts the non-verbal. Communication had to involve both, i.e. words and the way in which they were being delivered through behavior. The behavior involved the relationship and the context in which words have meaning, meaning also that words alone are not fully communicative without the understanding of their context and without understanding the relationship and behavior of both parties communicating.

This all made me think that we have substantially reduced communication in the age of electronic media in the sense that we have abstracted it to messages delivered without there being a true dialogue involving fully present and communicating individuals, integrating both the digital and the analog. Of course there is no going to back to old school, but perhaps we should think of what or who lies behind the screens that mediate.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Non-verbal Communication Tagged With: , ,

Re-imagining Africa in the Digital Age

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How is Africa imagined in the 21stcentury?  What notions does Africa conjure in the minds of a casual observer? As a continent constantly mired in crisis, the site of humanitarian disasters, prone to conflict or home to starving millions? These notions along with many others are the prism through which western observers view Africa.  For many people around the world, Africa evokes images of war, destitution, extreme poverty.

Source: bryna-ethiopianhunger.blogspot.com

The noted Nigerian novelist and prolific writer, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, has an excellent quip about the dangers of misconceptions across cultures.  As she states,” the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story…. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity…. “ (Also see Binyavana Wainaina’s pieces here and here.

The rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and You tube has invariably connected millions of people across the globe.  In an unprecedented digital age, we no longer live in geographic isolation. Armed with our smartphones and ipads we are walking receptacles of instant information and connectivity.  In a culture where sound bites are king, how does one make sense of current events in African politics when the sum of all phenomenon is viewed through a prism of perpetual conflict, dysfunctional institutions, repressive government and the myths of a “single story.”

More specifically how does one effectively navigate a new information culture that is often replete with attention grabbing details that can obscure the larger context?  To what extent do news stories in general  invite us to delve deeper or inspire further inquiry on our part? Such pursuits are  simply too time consuming and costly. The irony is that globalization has flattened our world, widened and deepened worldwide interconnectedness.  Yet we know so little of Africa, that faraway, exotic place. Somehow in our rapidly evolving technological environment  rising awareness through the power of social media has not managed to produce careful dissemination of knowledge or events in far flung corners of the world. Take the Kony 2012 hullabaloo for example.

The meteoric attention and rapid attention that the thirty minute video managed to garner was unprecedented.  From blog entries, to Facebook, twitter, and classroom discussion, the sheer fire and debate  it ignited speaks to an enormous transformation of knowledge production and dissemination.  It also highlighted to some extent a surprising shift in consciousness.  This is because far from simply jumping on the bandwagon of the normal pity party that Africa’s conundrums frequently inspire, the you tube video inspired considerable critiques.  It seemed that far less people bought into what many deemed a brilliant advertising or marketing strategy and instead questioned the motives, the messianic overtones and seeming paternalism . Admittedly, Invisible Children’s plea  for assistance in hunting down Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony for his horrific use of child soldiers to carry out a reign of terror is certainly noble for it spurred United Nations action and renewed  US attention. But many in the academic, policymaking and blogging communities questioned the short shrift to complicated circumstances in Uganda, misinformation in the video and the nature of Invisible’s Children’s agenda.  In short, many viewed co-founder Jason Russell’s pleas as symbiotic of a continuing polemic of paternalistic western engagement.

I vividly remember the response of my students to the video which I showed in my Africa in World Affairs class.  Much to my surprise the bulk of my students were not convinced and pointed to misleading facts in varying shape and form.  Others expressed disdain for the seeming “patronizing’ tone, one-sided view and absent voices of Ugandans themselves.  What of the voices of Ugandans they wondered?  Some of my students bristled at the call for charity and how the images presented seemed to reify the “White Man’s Burden.”

How do we re-imagine Africa in the digital age or illuminate the wider historical, post-colonial realities of the continent without resorting to reductionism? Better yet, how do we move beyond stark and troubling stereotypes of Africa as the “dark continent’ waiting for the light of the west, waiting to be saved?  How far have we moved beyond prevailing images of the starving child, jutted bones, and swollen bellies?  Just like those late night infomercials, but perhaps more gripping, the power of YouTube ‘s ability to convey and transform the way we perceive and react to social phenomenon is undeniable.  The most interesting or newsworthy bits are not stories that seriously consider the political historical contexts. Instead broadcast journalism is most concerned with shock worthy sensationalism that is ephemeral at best.  In the 21st century, this is simply unacceptable.  Despite the continent’s quagmires, there is hope and promise.

African initiated efforts to bolster economic growth, technological innovation, increase indigenous capital and investment is evident as are a growing number of emerging economies, reverses in brain drain among a plethora of other developments.  As the Economist notes, “in the past decade, six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies are African.  In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.

Re-imagining the continent requires rebranding-using the very (powerful) instruments of technology and communication to showcase a diverse peoples whose futures will not hinge on the goodwill of the west or its aid.  Indeed, the efforts of Ghanaian software pioneer, Herman Chinery-Hesse, and architect of a technological revolution is noteworthy. The third annual symposium Africa 2.0 is also testament to a new narrative of empowerment, amid efforts to transform the continent’s image.   According to Jessica Ellis of CNN, not only is Chinery-Hesse considered the “Bill Gates of Africa” he is a founder of one of Ghana’s biggest software companies and has been “has been spawning innovations for two decades, helping to break down tech barriers between the continent and the rest of the world.”

Source

However, ordinary Africans must also do their part. By harnessing the power of social media, taking ineffectual and corrupt governments to task and ultimately ushering the much awaited “African Spring” these actions can remake, reshape and reconfigure Africa’s image and upstage prevailing stereotypes of what Africa is and is not. North Africans in Egypt used social media forums to harness support and boost activism against a repressive regime.  The western world, African continent and states elsewhere can smartly, sensitively and effectively use social media in constructive ways that channel the capacity for cross cultural understanding while avoiding the dangers of a “single story”.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Internet, Interpersonal Communication, Language, Technology

The Internet as Infinite Interview

May 8, 2012 By 3 Comments

At a recent brainstorming session at the Schwartz Institute, we discussed how to promote student participation in Blogs@Baruch by pitching the site as a place to develop a more professional online identity than one might express on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Of the proposed slogans for this campaign, one in particular struck me as both incredibly clever and potentially troubling.  It stated (I’m paraphrasing):  ”When you post something online, you’re also filling out a job application.”

I find this slogan to be so resonant because it captures some of the stark contradictions of the continued digitization of life on Earth.  On the one hand, it’s more than realistic to assume that your online activities are not only heavily monitored, but will in fact be acted upon by future and/or current employers, various organs of the State, and (gasp!) your parents.  In short, your digital identity is a growing part of your total self, and thus must be consciously cultivated to meet the same social, cultural, ethical, and economic standards that constitute your actual (meaty) self.  This perspective holds that, to be safe, you shouldn’t post anything online that you wouldn’t want your boss (or the Department of Homeland Security) to read.  This recent article describes how U.S. employers are increasingly requesting Facebook passwords from prospective employees, while obliging them to sign “non-disparagement agreements” that promise to never speak negatively about the company on social media, lest they face termination.  At companies like this, Facebook statuses literally function as lines on future job applications.

But is this the direction we want the internet to go?  If our online identities are essentially extensions of our “professional” lives, then we never leave the workspace; our digital ghosts will necessarily conform to the values of our employers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  I think this is a dangerous way of looking at social media and the internet in general, since it robs digital communication of its most potent properties by severely limiting the kinds of conversations that can be created.  While promoting responsible online behavior is important, our students shouldn’t be made to feel, at this ripe moment in their intellectual development, that they need to make sure their ideas meet the standards of corporate America.

As many of us know, a job interview is often the last place where creative thinking takes place.  The room in which a job interview transpires is perhaps the most restrictive rhetorical environment on the planet.  Interviewers ask questions intended to elicit responses that fit within an incredibly narrow range of imaginative possibilities, and nervous job seekers reply in ways that (they hope) will please the interviewers and prove their (the applicant’s) total internal alignment with the goals of the organization.  By invoking the metaphor of the job-acquirement process as a model for online behavior, we (inadvertently or otherwise) export that grey institutional atmosphere to our whole internet lives, and continue the process of boxing the digital frontier into an endless vista of chain stores and HR offices.  In my mind, I’m already sitting in one of those offices, and the words of this blog post are being read back to me aloud by an accusatory management figure.  I’ll try to think of a good response now.

 

 

Filed Under: Education, Internet, Jobs

Economies of Communication

May 7, 2012 By 3 Comments

We just don’t read like we used to. More often than not, I skim through books, I skim through newspaper articles, I even skim through celebrity gossip blog posts that are about 200 words long. As a doctoral student, I have more supposed leisure time than the average American. I also have access to scholarly databases and conference presentations. This means that I am privileged in the form and quantity of media I can consume. Still, I find myself moving more and more quickly through most texts. I even have the ability to record TV shows and fast forward through the commercials. Sometimes I’ve seen a show so many times that I skip through the introductions as well as the transitions that come right before or after the commercials. I wouldn’t call the above behavior a shortening of attention span. No, I think it’s actually a narrowing of focus, a kind of info expertise.

Every form of communication is positioned in an economy of attention–the 30 second elevator speech, the graphic novel, the comic strip, the 30 minute newscast. And I don’t think one can talk about economies of attention without considering the role of privilege as a multidimensional variable encompassing items such as a person’s education, leisure time, and access to various technologies. For instance, I posit that the type of media that people consume on the subway can be largely predicted by their degree of privilege. Unfortunately we do not live in a utopia where the New York Post and the New York Times share the exact same readership.

In response to this tendency that I and other consumers of media have to skim text or to fast forward through TV shows, media has further economized itself. On Reddit, for instance, there is an abbreviation–TL;DR. Fittingly, TL;DR is shorthand for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” Often, at the end of a paragraph-long Reddit post, the poster will put TL;DR and write a line summarizing the post for those who couldn’t be bothered to read it:

There is also a section on Reddit that is called TL;DR. This section is used to summarize an entire day of Reddit posts in one line of text. Somewhere between November 13, 2009, when this section first appeared, and July 15, 2006, which was the opening day of Twitter, I guess the whole internet realized that most everything was just too wordy.

Ironically, though, I still can bury myself in a book, but it has to be a book that is hard to put down. From what I’ve personally heard and read, literary agents are increasingly looking for page-turners, for the truly “immersive” and “accessible” read. No longer can books get away with too much exposition, no longer can they afford to let you walk leisurely down the road with Jude the Obscure, observing his thoughts about earthworms. Now the characters have to grab you, throw you in a car trunk, and drive off with you to Mozambique.

I wonder, though, how such pressures to economize the delivery of information might affect academia. Academic discourse has always been a discourse of privilege…even, I suppose, when some of the recipients of Phds are living on food stamps. Now that forms of communication are potentially economizing themselves, does academic discourse appear even more distant, more unrealistic? Is academic discourse guilty of alienating larger and larger swaths of the population? What might be the consequences of such alienation?

Recent years have already witnessed an increased diversity in the forms, or, one might say, the economies of academic writing. These diverse forms include summarizing one’s thesis in a single tweet, academic blog posts, the traditional academic article, word visualizations of conference speeches, and everything in between. In this negotiation of form one might wonder whether a real balance can be achieved between efficiency and the maintenance of academic rigor and integrity. Are there some cases in which an academic  argument can only be introduced in 30 pages or more?

TL;DR: Communication is economizing itself. How will academic discourse adapt?

Filed Under: cac, Literacy, Media, Scholarship, Technology, To Ponder

Knowledge Politics #2: What Universities Do

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is my second post in a series on the politics of knowledge. My goal with these posts is to consider a basic question of critical university studies: How do universities differ from other kinds of social organization such as government agencies, corporations, and cause-oriented nonprofits? What is the importance of higher education? What kind of constituency does it present? What does it mean to build a social institution around the transmission and discovery of knowledge? What is “knowledge” in this context and what are its politics? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Administration, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Education, Higher Education, Jobs, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Pedagogy, Peer Review, Politics, Scholarship

The Irony of Healthy Food

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For the past few posts, I’ve been writing about the importance of healthy lifestyles, and particularly, healthy eating. Importantly, however, the definition of healthy isn’t always clear, and that this confusion often leads to negative effects. Nevertheless, with the advent of better access to media and communication sources,the public is becoming more and more educated, and (presumably) able to make better choices with regards to food.

In addition, there have been many efforts made by organizations like the government in helping push the healthy eating agenda. For example, across various cities and states in the U.S., a tax policy on items like soda has been proposed in large part to curb health issues like childhood obesity. In New York City, a new regulation, started in 2008, limits restaurants to using trans fat-free ingredients, and fines those who do not comply. And while such tax proposals on “bad” foods are becoming more and more commonplace in recent time, some legislatures have even gone as far as suggesting a “Fat Tax,” or in other words, a tax for simply being obese.

Beyond the political side of things, companies themselves appear to be taking on an initiative towards providing consumers with healthier food options. For example, fast food chains like Subway position themselves almost entirely as being a healthier option than the typical burger joints. Even restaurants like Dunkin Donuts, the epitome of unhealthy eating, have joined in on the fight and changed their recipes towards healthier alternatives. Moreover, a huge trend in the past few years has been the addition of altogether healthy menu options. One of the pioneering retailers to do this was McDonald’s, whose salads, fruit side dish, and even whole wheat bun options have led others to follow suit.

While the addition of healthier options (theoretically) represent the good intentions of fast food restaurants, there is uncertainty with whether these efforts are truly benefitting society. In fact, recent work in the academic literature suggests the opposite. In one recent paper by Wilcox, Vallen, Block, and Fitzsimons (2009), the researchers examined consumers’ choices when presented with either menus that contained unhealthy and healthy options (i.e., french fries, salad) or menus that only included unhealthy options (i.e., french fries, cheeseburgers). Quite surprisingly, findings suggest that when menu included healthy options, consumers were more likely to choose the most unhealthy option than when the menu included only unhealthy options. Further examination of this effect provided support for a vicarious goal fulfillment explanation–that is, when consumers saw the healthy options on the menu, they felt like they vicariously fulfilled their health goals, and thus were licensed to indulge by choosing the most fattening, unhealthy option instead.

In a similar vein, other research has found that consumers often perceive of all food items at so-called healthier restaurants as having fewer calories than those  found at restaurants that are not primarily positioned as being healthy. In work by Chandon and Wansink (2007), consumers were found to underestimate the total number of calories in foods from restaurants positioned as being healthy. Additionally, this health halo generalized onto the side dishes they chose: the healthier the restaurant was perceived to be (due to the availability of healthier menu options and a little bit of marketing), the more unhealthy side dish options consumers chose.

Thus, I leave you to ponder what the best plan of action is. If the efforts being made by the push towards healthy eating by the government and companies is backfiring, what is left to be done? Can educating consumers, and thus making them aware of these effects as highlighted above, help? Whatever the answer may be, it is crucial for us to figure out the answer. With  1 in every 3 Americans is now technically considered obese,  figuring it out now may greatly affect our society for generations to come.

 

Filed Under: Culture, Marketing, Uncategorized

Culture Shock

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When I was a sophomore in China, I took a course called “Cross-Cultural Communication.” It was my first time hearing the phrase “culture shock”, which is defined as the personal disorientation occurs when people experience an unfamiliar way of life in a foreign country. The professor wrote this definition on the blackboard. I made notes carefully and memorized them after class, focused on passing the final exam. What the “culture shock” really is and how it feels like were fell out of my mind when the class ended.

Several years later, when I boarded the plane to New York to pursue a Ph.D. in Accounting, the word “culture shock” just popped into my mind. For the following few months, everything was novel to me. I felt that I was experiencing a totally different life from what I had in China. As time passed by, I almost forgot such the feeling of shock I had at that time.

But I could never forget the first time when I went to Chinatown in Manhattan. Yes, the biggest “shock” I had was from Chinatown. It was a new world to me, unlike any of the places I visited in China. If you ask me what the differences are, I have to say that I cannot tell quite exactly. Probably, the feeling came from the traditional-fashioned seafood stores, the Cantonese-style lion dance, the Cantonese opera played by amateurs in Columbus Park, or even from the store-name styles which I only saw in Hong Kong movies. It is not a kind of thing either like the culture in which I grew up or the American culture I learned from English textbooks, TV shows, and my American friends. This might be the charm of multi-cultural environment of New York.

The initial shock of Chinatown has weakened. I go shopping in Chinatown once or twice a month and will never get lost there again. I’m getting to the so-called “mastery phase” of culture shock now. Yet it seems that some of my undergraduate students are suffering the similar “shock” as I ever had, which not only lies in language difficulties. Last semester, I had a meeting with a group of Chinese students to help them with their final presentation on Business Policy. After their presentation rehearsal, one of them told me that he always felt nervous when he spoke in public after he came to the U.S. Because his English is not bad, I was not sure whether his problem was also caused by the “culture shock” and could only help him by relaying my own experiences and was still not sure that I succeeded.

It seems to me that “culture shock” can really create some adverse influence on international students’ preformance, especially for their first semester in a foreign country. As more and more international students come to the City, how can we help them suffer less from the culture differences? Is their any means to reduce this initial confusion and anxiety?

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, teaching

The People’s Research Library

April 19, 2012 By 4 Comments

My post is an appeal to readers, writers, and scholars who use the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street central research library. That is, all people who make use of this amazing, impressive democratic institution. The NYPL’s proposed Central Library Plan (CLP) calls for a fundamental transformation of the 42nd Street space whereby the Mid-Manhattan Circulation Library (across the street at 40th Street) and the Science Industry and Business Library (SIBL, at Madison and 34th) would be incorporated into the 42nd Street location. Up to 3 million books from the central library’s research collection would be sent to an offsite storage facility in New Jersey and the seven floors of stacks that formerly housed these books would be demolished to make room for the circulation library, SIBL’s research collection, a multitude of public-access computers, and an internet café. The CLP will adversely alter the way the public can use the central research library and strike at the very heart of the research library’s egalitarian mission. In his recent article, “Stop Cultural Vandalism,” Scott McLemee rightly declares, “the CLP needs to be stopped” Together we need to decide how we will accomplish this goal.

Public Library

cc photo credit: Paolo Rosa

Implementation of the CLP will impair the ability of writers, readers and scholars to conduct research at the NYPL’s central research library. Patrons organize their library time around heavy, often complicated schedules. We therefore must maximize the time we spend in the library. My requested materials typically arrive together, allowing me to hunker down and get to work. Under the proposed plan, it is impossible to guarantee that all of one’s requested items will arrive together—a significant impediment to maximizing time in the library. What if a few books arrive one day and the rest trickle in over the next couple of days, but a patron cannot be back at the library for another week? And what about the patron who has traveled from outside NYC, and thus has a very limited timeframe in which to conduct research? Or the student who is striving to write a research paper under deadline? Architects of the CLP claim that requested materials would be available within 24 hours. In a piece titled “Improving a Treasured Institution,” NYPL President and CEO Anthony Marx argues that “24-hour turnaround is made possible by major enhancements already in the works, most notably by bar-coding every item.” Upgrading the means by which books are tracked makes sense. Moving the books offsite does not. Current turnaround for most materials is roughly less than an hour and that is because most of the collection is located in the stacks or in storage under Bryant Park. Touting a projected 24-hour turnaround as a benefit underscores a major flaw of the CLP and the myopia of its supporters: researchers should not have to wait 24 hours—and probably more—for their materials. Indeed, due to time constraints and deadlines, they often cannot.

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911)

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911) by leiris202, on Flickr

The CLP also fails to take into account the serendipitous aspect of research. While reading a particular text, I have often been guided to additional sources via footnotes and bibliographical entries. I then request those texts and receive them in an hour or so. Threads of thought have the best chance of coming to fruition when they are unbroken, when one can engage with several texts at the same time. Trying to hold on to a thread—before it even becomes an idea—for days before one can consult a needed text is difficult, if not impossible. A keyboard or a pen and paper are often not enough to keep an idea going. A book is vital to the development of an idea and, if the flow of research is impeded by having to wait longer for materials, then the quality of one’s research will suffer. Given the logistics of peoples’ schedules, many day readers may simply forego by necessity the opportunity to read the books they want to read. Books that people cannot find in circulating collections, books that are out of print, books that are unavailable digitally in their entirety, books that are unaffordable for personal purchase. Circulating and research collections are completely different from one another and one should not be the sacrificial lamb for the other. In response to a query on what will replace the stacks, the NYPL cheerfully declares, “Books!” Does anyone else see the cracks in this veneer?

It is disingenuous to argue that, after the NYPL’s largest circulating library has been folded into the nation’s second-largest public research library, research activities won’t be compromised. They will. Whether one is involved in a years-long research project or has devoted a day to read up on a topic of personal interest, the patron of the research library is there not only because of the collection, but also for the overall environment that the research library provides. The expansive Rose Main Reading Room, whether on a weekday morning or mid-afternoon on a Saturday, provides a conducive place to work. That is because people are there to read and write and this engagement is wonderfully palpable and inspiring. The anticipated spike in traffic from combing three libraries into one is enormous. Lauding this increase, the NYPL boasts, “[t]he number of visitors to the new Schwarzman Building will likely triple, and the percentage of people using the collections will soar.” Try conducting focused research under those conditions! Researchers working on long-term projects may apply to use the Allen Room or the Wertheim Study. There often is a waiting list, though, and access is limited. The CLP calls for the allocation of “dedicated spaces for up to 500 NYPL-affiliated writers and scholars,” however that will still leave the vast majority of research library patrons to try to function as researchers in overcrowded, mixed-use space.

The price of this overhaul is estimated at $300 million. The cost of this overhaul is well beyond dollars. One does not upgrade a world-class public research library by turning it into a glitzy, overcrowded facility. Nor does one upgrade the city’s largest public circulation library by shutting down its current location and reconfiguring it within an existing library. Public access computers can be added without gutting the stacks. Of course money is an issue. It always is. However, if the CLP is the best that the library’s executives can do in light of objectives and budgetary concerns, then they have failed in their stewardship of the NYPL. The library has a page on its website titled “Join the Conversation” through which the public can communicate its concerns. Yet, since comments are not shared through the site, a “conversation” never really materializes and how the comments are handled behind closed doors remains unknown. There is also a Facebook campaign dedicated to stopping the CLP. But we need to do more than “like” it. If we want to assure that the people’s research library continues to operate as such, then we need to collectively, vocally, and tirelessly speak out against the Central Library Plan until it is stopped.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Literacy, New York, Scholarship

Speaking, Acting, and Taking Your Shoes Off

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sydney, 1938 / Sam Hood (State Library of New South Wales collection)

In preparation for an upcoming CLASP (CUNY League of Active Speech Professors) symposium at Hostos Community College, I have been reflecting on this meaty topic: Theatre Practice and Communication Studies–the Intersection of Two Vital Disciplines.

Over the last few years, I have had opportunities to think about this from a number of perspectives, but when trying to compose my thoughts in a coherent form for the panel, I needed a jumping off point. I went back and looked at an article about the role of the introductory theatre course in the liberal arts curriculum, which the Institute’s Director, Mikhail Gershovich, co-wrote with theatre scholars (then Fellows) Amy Hughes and Jill Stevenson. A baseline assumption of the article is the reciprocal exchange between actor and spectator that makes theatre studies “an ideal forum in which to explore the means and methods of effective oral and written communication.”[1]  As I read, I discovered one potential source of my writer’s block; the panel topic requires elaboration on a point of intersection that has become intuitive. I have conditioned myself to take these principles for granted in my teaching and my coaching of students, as I time and again return to the basics of theatre collaboration: as the article spells out, in the classroom these basics (ideally) translate into encouraging cooperation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, diverse talents and ways of learning. Speech and theatre arts become just two chummy pals, the cookies and milk of the liberal arts curriculum.

Even though I recognize that disciplinary battles between theatre and speech have a long and sordid history, I’ve often found the opposite to be true—that faculty boldly yell across these divisions, in an effort to get past what are really just departmental (or bureaucratic) boundaries—boundaries which are changing more slowly than our pedagogies. My charmed vantage point might have to do with the fact that I have had “communications people” expect certain strengths from me as a “theatre person,” and vice versa, and rarely confront the kind of “get out of my playground” mentality for which many academic fields are famous.

This can sometimes cause problems, too. Maybe you’ve had the same experience: when considered the “theatre person” in the room full of “communications people”– disciplinary divisions being what they are—it is assumed that you’ll be the one capable of immediately engaging students in a full body warm-up, making inflexible students flexible, convincing shy students to pop from their shell, evoking diaphragmatic breathing from the whisperers, and, at a moment’s notice, reveal a grab bag of tricks and strategies that will free them from their frozen stances. Because of these assumptions, when I began teaching Public Speaking– and before that, English as a Second Language– I occasionally felt like a fraud; I didn’t actually have in-depth training in voice or movement as an actor, beyond an inglorious stint on an improv team in college. (Many of my performance experiences were  in the realm of performance poetry, which privileged the word over any other consideration.) My academic theatre training focused on dramatic structure and playwriting, along with critical reading of texts– theatrical theory and plays– and I believed my strengths in the speech course would stem from there, through structure, research, and analysis. (When forced by curricular fiat to take acting courses, I shrank in fear of being asked to remove my shoes in the presence of other students.)

But I warmed to the challenge of being the “theatre person” among the communications people in part because I realized that their expectations reflected a true need among our students—and a potential gap in public speaking courses. The hope that a “theatre person” could more efficiently tackle these needs inspires me to believe in the best that theatre training can and should offer, within the context of a communications course. It is this inter/disciplinary “hope” that has slowly infused my speech teaching practices with “borrowings” from the theatre discipline: I now rely on my comfort watching and discussing the body and its relationship to breath, or my familiarity with the push and pull between the rehearsal process and the eventual work, and I follow my desire to push the desks aside in order to transform a classroom into a training space.

Additionally, in my experiences at the Institute– where one of my responsibilities last year was to support sections of Introduction to Theatre Arts– I met instructors who wanted to integrate communication goals into their coursework, but felt that approaching the course through dramatic literature tied their hands. They had fallen into a routine of assigning play reviews and response papers, rarely asking their students to move from a written to an oral form of communicating ideas. Usually this was “fixed” easily, since the instructor had already designed the course to encourage active learning and collaboration, allowing for numerous places of oral communication interventions. Taking it a step further, we would brainstorm where public speaking challenges might belong in this model of the theatre arts class—a discussion that frequently boiled down to assignment design.

In the context of the proposed Pathways Initiative– which would mean real changes to prioritization of Speech Communications courses within the CUNY curriculum– it is important to go beyond oral communications as something that can be “tacked on” to any discipline with ease, and to ask real questions about the actual needs of students, not disciplinary divisions. (And this post is in no way meant to be reflecting simultaneously on Pathways, although I invite thoughts on how it relates.) The CLASP panel is looking at intersections between theatre practice and speech not because intersections are all the rage, but because it is the divisions that have proven unproductive with time. For the individual instructor, the most important challenge becomes seeing beyond the intimidating gaps separating that “Other” discipline, and rather to see shared goals between the two.

[1] Amy E. Hughes, Jill Stevenson, and Mikhail Gershovich, “Community through Discourse: Reconceptualizing Introduction to Theatre,” Theatre Topics 16, No.1 (March 2006): 86.

 

Filed Under: BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), CUNY, Faculty Development, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,

The prize versus the wage

April 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

David Graeber’s phrase “the alienated right to do good,” captures for me the inequality of opportunity to choose meaningful, socially and ethically engaged work.[1] Two recent talks have made me think about this alienation in a new way. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at MLA  gave a talk at BLSCI on March 29 called “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy.” Given the change in academic publishing—companies accept fewer manuscripts these days, but academic jobs require more publications than before—Fitzpatrick suggests that scholars use the internet to circulate their ideas. Not only do blogging and other forms of web communication help connect a scholarly community, she argues, but they also draw attention to the scholar’s ideas, thus making a book more marketable.

This reminded me of a rueful little joke I told myself when I was on the job market this spring and odds were looking very long. I decided that if I did not find an academic job I’d tell my family that I had decided on a new career and was moving to LA to write screenplays. What I thought was funny about this, if it isn’t obvious, was that a teaching job was not something I expected to have as long odds, and require as many years of no-wage (research) and low-wage (adjunct) labor. And I didn’t think that choosing to work towards a career as a professor meant I had the same kind of ego and tenacity it takes to make it in Hollywood. Now I’m not so sure. Fitzpatrick’s outline of the new career path for academics predicts that this ratio will grow, and her prescription for academics is that we adapt and, I guess in turn, continue to support this work structure. In her speech on “Communicative Capitalism,” political scientist Jodi Dean claims that currently we’re working less for a wage and more for a prize—we work not to be paid but for the opportunity to compete, and the chance to win, pay. While I disagree with many of the points Dean makes in this talk, this particular point seemed to hit the mark.

In a recent conversation with a few colleagues, though, we all agreed to nix high salaries for full professors, decrease top salaries to 70 thousand or so, and pay graduate teachers about 30 grand to start. This would mean much less grad student debt. It has been remarked before that any incentive to change the university labor system dies once one reaches tenure. We’ve got our eyes on the prize. 

Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” seemed worn and wan when I first read it—it was a play that seemed very relevant to my father, though. But, with the current Broadway revival, and Dean’s speech, I saw a new resonance in the line “I am not a dime a dozen. I am Willy Loman!” Has my choice of career with such long odds, that demands unpaid work, been the result of a privileged sense of what my opportunities should be? Am I doing this because I think I’m special, and deserve a special, rare career? In this case, do I “pay” for the privilege of this special job through unpaid labor? Or, is my job choice situated in a context in which the wish to “do good,” to use my labor not only to provide for myself, but also to be part of a collaborative, ethically engaged project alienated?

To put it more simply, it is harder to find this kind of work, and I have come to take that fact as a given. But, I wonder if academics’ sense of the privilege of this kind of work is part of what allows this exploitation to happen. If so, are we right? Are we paying for a privilege? Do long odds come with the nature of the reward? Or are we being exploited?

[1] David Graeber, “An Army of Altruists: on the alienated right to do good,” Harpers Magazine (January 2007): 31-38.

Filed Under: Audience, Internet, Jobs, Marketing, Uncategorized
« Older Posts