We were very lucky to have Clay Shirky provide the morning keynote at our Tenth Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction.
We were very unlucky in that we could not get the live stream to work. But we’re happy to be able to bring Clay’s talk to you now:
My favorite defacement of an ad in a subway station began as an image of the New York skyline in a hazy sunset. I don’t remember what the ad was for, but I don’t think the designers had figured that it was too soon after 9/11 to depict a reddish, smokey skyline without evoking dread and sadness in the commuters who rushed by, barely taking in the image and definitely not noticing the brand. It was great to see how the contributions to this poster added up over a week or so. First, yes, there was a magic marker drawing of an airplane headed towards the top of a building. Then, few days later a cartoon in ballpoint pen of a little alien appeared, hovering in a spaceship over the East River. A smiling Martian, with cute curling antennae. Bit by bit, other drawings started to fill up the sky, drawn with different pens, in different styles. There was a flying alligators, and even a yelling George Bush stick figure. I would pass this poster in its many phases, and feel really happy about my fellow New Yorkers for collectively and creatively remaking what had maybe been a disturbing and insensitive ad agency’s miscalculation. I thought of this graffiti as a great way to respond to the impolite media that was too quick to jump on the event and fictionalize it.
I can tend to read too much into things, but this year I began to feel like the way some subway posters were defaced was asking for attention beyond the usual idle tearing or tagging. An ad for the movie “Leap Year,” suddenly seemed to actually look like the strangling weed the romantic comedy about a desperate single woman actually is. Someone had either tested under the top layer of the poster to see what was underneath, or had remembered the previous ad for a horror movie (“Wolfman”) in the same place. 
Someone sliced pieces of the first layer of the bright green “Leap Year” to show twisted dark vines beneath it. The heroine of the romantic comedy now looked threatened by the clutches of a monster, and it was the encircling grasp of another movie. Was it a feminist cut-up, or a coincidence? And was I over-interpreting? I took a picture, and showed it to a friend. He said, “Hm. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
Later, a sad face appeared inside the poster for the “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” show.
And, soon after that, a knife and the same tangled vines from “Wolfman” appeared between Jennifer Lopez and some actor guy in the ad for “Back Up Plan.”
My favorite one (sadly, I didn’t get a photo) was of two morning talk show hosts. After their hyper-groomed and hugely smiling faces had been up for a week or so, the subway razor artist peeled around their heads to reveal much bigger heads beneath them. Now it looked as if huge monster heads were surging out of the perfectly suited morning show host bodies.
Eventually, I put my question to Google and turned up a video and an article in the Greenpoint Gazette about an artist who goes by Poster Boy.
At the Schwartz Institute Symposium last week, keynote speaker Clay Shirky described how the internet allows people to critique and adapt systems and institutions. What had previously been one-way communication (television, print ads, etc) has become two-way and multiple-way (Amazon, Facebook). Sharkey succinctly and compelling theorized what he calls a revolution in communication behavior that comes from adapting to these new technologies. I’ve been thinking of how Shirky’s explanations of the effects and significance of new technologies could also be useful towards theorizing older technologies and behaviors. I’ve thought of public art that did a kind of political, public critique of being a 90’s phenomenon, but at that time it was associated with singular artists. I like not being able to tell when subway ad defacement is intentional, when it is the work of someone who considers himself an artist, and when it is more random. It makes me look at these images differently.
For other examples of subway art (and better photography) see this article in New York S8#%ty.
I am going to reveal a hope of mine; I have long kept this hope closeted, as it seems very likely to bring me disgrace. I hope that Writing Across the Curriculum and Communication Across the Curriculum programs might one day render Composition obsolete.
The development of a specialized knowledge of writing instruction has been one of the most important achievements of higher education in the last forty years. This specialized knowledge of how to teach students to write will remain important. In fact, the incredible utility of this knowledge means that it cannot be confined to specialists! The birth of WAC, analogous to the invention of the web-link, has the potential to completely transform the way we conceive of the essential material of higher education. No longer can we isolate writing instruction to language classes. Could this be the idea that reverses a hundred-and-twenty year trend of increasing specialization in the curriculum?
Okay. So, once again, I have resorted to polemic (here, in the form of a strange sort-of-Hegelean fantasy). However, my conviction is a serious one. The humanities are ill served by the teaching of writing prior to the more fundamental questions. Why are we here, what do we do, how do we form the bases for our beliefs? These deeper questions, which students ponder on their own, are seldom addressed in their course work in Humanities disciplines, even though these are the questions that motivate humanistic study.
I have, tentatively, shared these ideas with my colleagues. The ideas are not well received. “If you can’t write, you can’t think. How can you work on big ideas if you can hardly sort out your words into sentences or your sentences into paragraphs?”
Further confession: I am either so prescient or so far-fetched in my thinking that I even like to imagine WAC and CAC will lead to curricular solutions to the economic problems of today’s higher education in the humanities. There are too many graduate students. Graduate education takes too long. Professorships become scarce as institutions increasingly rely on adjunct- and other temporary appointments. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to climb, especially at junior and community colleges. A caste system has formed where only “the best” professors can teach original courses, and an underclass of highly educated professionals prepare the masses by running them through a byzantine system of prerequisites for contact with the elite specialists.
Specialization in the sciences is important. In the humanities, specialization is like a derivatives market; it takes something that has a basic function, and, in trying to increase the wealth this thing produces, it fouls the thing’s basic functionality.
Let every graduate teach what he wants, but have him also armed to teach writing. Instead of, “how can you work on big ideas if you can’t write a sentence,” let it be demanded, “how can you build advanced knowledge, if you can’t teach basic writing?” The system of levels and prerequisites will fall away. The humanities will drive, and skills will ride along.
Is this really such a disgraceful idea?
This American Life recently ran an interesting story about a memoir written by millionaire Steve Poizner. The book recounts his volunteer half-year as a social studies teacher at Mount Pleasant High School in East San Jose, California. Poizner’s portrait of a dilapidated, violent, underachieving school in a stinky, blighted low-income neighborhood stirred the indignation of members of the school community and district, who maintain that the school scores about average academically, has a low dropout rate, is not at all dangerous, and is located in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood. In other words, Poizner lied, or to be more generous to him, made mistakes in his perceptions of the school.
photo credit: motionblur
Poizner’s motives for exaggerating Mount Pleasant’s struggles seem clear: he first ran for public office two months after leaving the school, and is currently a candidate for governor of California. An excerpt from his memoir is posted on his campaign site. But the story made me wonder: what biases and motives do we embed in our own representations of what happens in our classrooms? Isn’t even the most humble, self-effacing teacher story from “the trenches” (as Poizner calls the high school classroom) a manipulation of power, since it only reveals the teacher’s angle? When is it fair to turn our experiences in the classroom into a self-aggrandizing anecdote for a job interview, a cautionary tale for a blog post, or a punchline for our friends—and when is it a betrayal of our students’ confidence?
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