But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

• What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?

• What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?

• And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

What strikes me about this ad is that it seems to un-self-consciously demonstrate mainstream America’s imaginary world of neatly defined identity categories and their associated hierarchies of power and influence.

I have never watched “The Big Bang Theory,” so I don’t know anything about these characters beyond what’s shown here. But when I look at the poster, what I basically see is a central white man surrounded by four other, less central people. The central guy is taller than the others and, in the poster I see most often, he is the only one looking directly out at the viewer.

Then there are the “others.” From left to right: the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s effeminate and/or retro and/or gay (as indicated by tight purple pants); the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s not white; the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s nerdy and/or intellectual and/or Jewish (as indicated by glasses); and the woman. Whether or not these descriptions are true of the characters in the show, they are clearly marked this way in the poster.

If you think I’m being reductive, note that these ads for “The Big Bang Theory” (produced by CBS) are in every case — as far as I’ve seen, on the subway — bundled with ads for “30 Rock” (produced by NBC). I’m not sure if I would have thought to read these ads as such an obvious statement of mainstream television’s understanding of identity politics if the two ads weren’t so bizarrely, strikingly similar to each other.

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

I have actually seen “30 Rock,” so I do know something about the characters. All the same, the line-up in the poster is identical to the one I’ve described above, with a single, possible significant difference: the nerdy / intellectual / Jewish role (the one marked with glasses) is now being played by a woman.

So we have again, from left to right and top to bottom: the guy marked as effeminate, emotional, possibly gay; the racial other; the silly, blond woman; the intellectual (now female); and finally, of course, the white guy. No markings on him!

There’s nothing new about this analysis. We all know that white men and women dominate mainstream television, and that identity politics gets absorbed into pop culture — for better and for worse — through the addition of secondary characters, more or less stereotypical, marked as different kinds of “other” in relation to the central white male.

Even given all that, I am struck by the juxtaposition of these two ads — plastered side by side all over New York City’s public transportation system — and by the fact that whoever put them together either did not notice their eerily parallel composition, or else accepted it as a statement about what counts as “prime time” in today’s world.

However, events at Baruch College last night changed my planned post. A clearer example of the unintelligibility of technological amplification, when compared to human-centric distributed communication, occurred in the lobby of the Baruch College William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus Conference Center on the evening of November 21.

CUNY Police Attack Student Protesters from keith on Vimeo.

As this video shows, the security guard attempts to use a bullhorn within the Vertical Campus lobby. Sound waves are directed only toward part of the group he is addressing. The group above on the balcony or behind him past the turnstiles must rely on sound waves bouncing off walls in order to hear his transmission. Additionally, according to the Baruch website, the lobby consists of two “stacked atria, one rising from the ground floor to the fifth floor, with a glass curtain wall facing Baruch’s Information and Technology Building to the north, across Bernard Baruch Way; another, wider atrium rising above that, from the fifth to the eighth floor,” that provide much vertical space in which sound waves can get lost while reflecting off of the eight floors of glass. Since the security guard’s attempt to use directional technological amplification based on increased volume is insufficient to communicate his message to the students, one of the students must institute a people’s mic in order to ensure that the message is understood (see 00:13 in the above video). Distributed human communication succeeds where top-down technological communication fails.

A second incident from the Board of Trustees hearing that serves as an example of the failure of technological amplification comes from the first people’s mic check within the meeting itself. As this video shows, before the chair of the meeting Valerie Lancaster Beal requests, “Security, please eliminate the young lady,” (at around 1:30) her microphone cannot make her heard above the people’s mic.

Since this is a small room—only able to hold a fraction of the public who wished to attend—the issues of technological amplification are different from the bullhorn in the lobby. In this instance, a distribution of bodies throughout the room ensures that no individual—whether a part of the people’s mic or not—is very far from another person who is repeating the message. Valerie Lancaster Beal’s microphone and amplifying speakers are placed at the front on either side of the room. Therefore, her disembodied voice appears to come from three distinct locations, whereas the people’s mic emanates from a few dozen bodies throughout the whole room. This second approach not only allows listeners to hear words as spoken by human beings—rather than relayed through electrical wires—but gives an indication of how much support there is in the room for any relayed message. Just as in distributed network computing, if one of the people’s mic speakers is “eliminated” (to use Valerie Lancaster Beal’s word choice), in theory the message could be picked up by any other member of the group, thus ensuring instantaneous redundancy backup unavailable to the single-point-of-failure electrical microphone system. If the cable breaks or power is cut to an electrical microphone system, then the ability to continue transmission is interrupted.

The benefits of the human-centric people’s mic over a technological amplification system in these circumstances—whether bullhorn or electrical microphone—seem clear and come down to a division between “many-to-many” communication and “one-at-many” top-down transmission.

With technological amplification there is merely unidirectional speaking at a group with significant opportunities for miscommunication. By contrast, the people’s mic encourages a network of one-to-one communication which allows for instantaneous dialogic communication to clarify any points that were missed.

Technological amplification passively objectifies the recipients of the message—it is unconcerned with whether or not the group agrees with the statement being transmitted. The people’s mic, however, demands active participation by all of its subjects, even if they are in disagreement. While not the ideal way the people’s mic was designed to work, the choice can always be made not to relay a message if the matter becomes too disagreeable to the participants.

The means by which distance is overcome also differs between these two methods. With technological amplification, directed volume is employed. As the message gets further away from the specific direction that speaker is facing, sound waves dissipate and the message is lost. Increasing the volume on the technological device can improve the distance at which the device can be heard, but also increases the distortion, making the message unintelligible even to the listeners close to the device. With the people’s mic, sound radiates from the speaker through the crowd of the listeners’ collected bodies. Distortion is possible, as in the children’s game of telephone. However, since the number of repeating bodies is significantly lager than the single person in the children’s game—a whole group rather than one child whispering to their neighbor—redundancy is built into the system to make distortion very unlikely. There is also a chance to clarify anything unheard or misunderstood through an immediate side conversation.

His Master's Amplified Voice

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

photo credit: Jonas in China

When purchasing tickets, would-be audience members are warned that this production is in “English and Mandarin (with English surtitles),” in much the same way they would be warned of profanity, violent content, or seizure-inducing strobe lights. My first thought was, “Why do we need a warning? Is bilingualism dangerous?” But my second less flippant thought was, “Why no Mandarin surtitles?” If this is supposed to be about the American misunderstanding of Chinese culture, just as much as the other way around, then why do we only read the English words, while hearing both English and Mandarin? Is this exemplifying the exact linguistic bias that Hwang is attempting to undermine in the play?

The purpose of supertitles (or as they are called in the warning listed above, “surtitles,” a term which I just discovered is a Canadian trademark) is ostensibly comprehension. Unlike on the dramatic stages of Broadway, supertitles are common in opera companies. New York City’s own Metropolitan Opera developed seat-back versions (the also-trademarked “Met Titles”) that resemble multi-lingual pager displays, sending lyrics to audience members in calming amber LEDs. The aria may be sung in a language that the audience member does not understand or using diction that is unintelligible to the listener. The words projected above the stage (or on the tiny screen mounted on the seat in front of the audience member) are supposed to make it easier to understand what is happening during the opera.

Supertitles before an opera

  photo credit: testastretta-999

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I use this technology when I attend operas. I tried turning it off once during a performance of Nixon in China (an opera sung in English), but there was the constant gnawing that I was missing something if I didn’t have the glowing amber lights translating the words that I supposedly understood. Does this technology in fact detract from the experience of the performance? I am watching and listening to the performance, but when my eyes flicker to the screen, I am no longer relying on the performer’s interpretation. I merely listen, while reading the text. The physical body of the actor is no longer important to me, and I just listen to the singer’s voice. Does this make me a lazy audience member? Or merely someone who privileges reading a translated meaning over the actor’s interpretation?

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

  photo credit: Mark Runyon

Back to Broadway and Hwang’s Chinglish. In this case, we are talking about a non-musical—something very different from the world of opera up at Lincoln Center—and, therefore, the use of supertitles differs from the operatic trope. Rather than projecting every word, only Mandarin words translated into English are supertitled. When an actor speaks in Mandarin, my eyes immediately go to the words which are projected onto the walls of the set. I am not reading the actor’s body language, only the meaning of the words. However, when actors speaks in English, no translation is provided and my focus remained on the actors—fully taking in their posture, gestures, eye-contact, and facial expressions.

This feeling of always being behind the action is described by an occurrence late in the second act. Next to me in the balcony, was a group of spectators who spoke fluent Chinese. At one point, Jennifer Lim (playing the role of Deputy Minister Xi Yan) was delivering a monologue. Before the words could be translated into English, a single guffaw of recognition came from a woman in the group. This single laugh seemed to encompass the production’s feeling of cross-cultural disconnect more than anything Hwang could have scripted. I knew that something humorous had occurred, and I was about to find out what. But perhaps it would not be laugh-out-loud funny to me in translation. When the English words were finally revealed a second later and I caught up with the meaning of what had been said, the actor had already moved on to the more poignant part of the speech. At this point a more demure English chuckle was all that could be elicited from the non-Chinese speakers in the audience, who were left wondering how the line must have been heard in its original language. That single laugh is something that could not be translated into a supertitle.

We can all stand witness to the ways in which social and news media can spread a movement within and across nations.  I know an Egyptian who claimed that her family and friends knew that the revolution was going to occur in the weeks and days before it actually happened.  How?  Just by the messages on social media and between individuals.  In a similar fashion, social media proposed and flamed the fires of the occupy wall street movement in the weeks before it emerged, grew, and took hold as a real story in mainstream media outlets.

The protest was set to start on the 17th.  At first, there was a kind of silence.  People questioned whether it was happening at all.

Interestingly, Al Jazeera was one of the media outlets which first recognized the plan for a protest.  Other small news organizations online followed the story from September 17th on.  The New York Times City Room blog picked up the story on September 19th, while nothing was put into print until September 25th, when a version of a September 23rd online article titled “Protesters Are Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim“  and beginning with the sentence “By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka,” was published.

Since then the General Assembly of the occupation has released a declaration and the movement has its own subreddit.  However, the lack of specific demands, particularly from the outset, has been seen as a weakness and has led some people to propose their own.

Clearly, social media has played a key role in this movement.  Yet, ultimately, social media doesn’t stray very far from a standard news cycle.  Here are Google searches and news stories for occupy wall street:

(courtesy of Google Trends)

And here are the tweets containing occupywallstreet:

(taken from Trendistic)

The tweets, Google searches, and news reference frequency all have peaks on the first day of the protest, on Sept. 25 when images of pepper spray being used by the NYPD spread and a high number of arrests occured, and on Oct. 1 when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Eventually, though, whether the movement has succeeded or not, it will fall out of the news cycle and off of people’s radar.  Even though as I type this Egyptians are protesting military rule in Tahrir Square, not many Americans do searches related to Egypt these days:

It’s unfortunate, but it appears that social media news runs alongside the news cycle.  Facebook posts can catch our attention, but only for so long, and what seems to be fueling tweets about the protest are acts of violence rather than its actual rationale.  Also, isn’t there a risk that we are beginning to confuse posting items on Facebook with really exercising our civic duty?  Last week five or more of my friends posted about the execution of Troy Davis, but how many actually took action in contacting local representatives or representatives in Georgia?

In fact, a Yale student recently claimed to have proven that, based on what occurred in Egypt, a “sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention.”  A journalist quickly used the study to point out how mass media, even as it spreads consciousness, can create a passive public.

Paradox Number Two:  Social media brings networks of people with like interests together, but in doing so it can create information bubbles.

In May of this year Eli Pariser presented a TED Talk in which he warned about how Google, Facebook, and other online companies use algorithms that customize what information is presented to people based on their individual tastes:

Thus, just by virtue of being ourselves, our internet is filtered.  We go further to filter our own experience when we read websites that cater to our cultural background or to our political interests.  Despite a study which seems to indicate that this personal filtering is not an issue, Bill Davidow and Ethan Zuckerman have argued that online media can give too much attention to extreme groups and views, and that “positive feedback” loops might push us to take more extreme views ourselves.  Eric E. Schmidt, the chief of Google, takes a middle ground view on the issue, acknowledging that for those who don’t know how to curate their own information, the internet can be a breeding ground of ignorance.

In the classroom, discussing and giving assignments that reflect on how media is curated, either invisibly or explicitly, in different contexts (on Wikipedia, in academic journals, on Facebook, in Google Scholar) can give students a wake-up call regarding how they navigate the web (and increasingly, how the web navigates them).

apartment (noun): a suite of rooms forming one residence; a flat. ORIGIN: from Fr. appartement, from Ital. appartamento, from appartare ‘to separate’.

To separate. Our shared need for distance allows us to remain together. In cities we pack closely together, our buildings made of boxes inside boxes. Apartments inside buildings, rooms inside apartments. This one is mine, that one is yours. This is the bedroom, that is the kitchen. So we keep things organized. I’ve also lived in more communal spaces, in squats and lofts and cabins. But it’s true, what they say: The older I get, the more glad I am to have my personal life boxed and protected in the confines of an apart-ment. This isn’t because I want to isolate myself from the world. On the contrary, it’s because I want my engagements in the world to extend beyond the level of neighbor and neighborhood. As a teacher, artist, and academic, I spend most of my time and energy cultivating a public existence through those larger institutional channels. At the same time, I also need a private life, an intimate life, the kind of life that can unfold within an apartment. This leaves precious little time or energy for neighbors and the neighborhood.

I’ve always romanticized cities, even though I’ve almost always lived in one. My childhood dreams and fantasies were brimming with golden and silver cityscapes inspired by films and books like The Fifth Element and Imajica. As I grew up I became more interested in actual cities, which are sometimes golden and sometimes silver but always also real and mundane and frustrating and specific and impossible to capture or describe or comprehend. During this apartment search I don’t think about the cities of my childhood imagination. I’m fixated on the realities of rent stabilization, demographics, transportation, and square footage. But afterwards, looking back, it’s clear that I have been walking through one of those cities about which I used to dream. The force of New York City no longer hits me with a single impact like the fantastic cities of literature and film. I’ve never been up into a helicopter to see it from that distance as a single glimmering artifact. But this city has something else going for it that my dream-cities never had: It’s real.

Next to the east side of Prospect Park my partner and I visit a large, high-ceilinged apartment in a vast old mansion of a building. Apparently this building is the best if you have dogs. Everyone there has dogs, and there is the botanical garden across the street where you can walk your dogs. But we don’t have a dog, and the apartment feels cold to me. It makes me think of a nineteenth century novel full of strange illnesses and ongoing, unspoken suffering in the drawing room. Even the neighborhood feels cold to me: no shops, no cafes, no restaurants. Each person alone in their apartment with their dogs. But it’s also raining that day, which makes a difference.

Close to the heart of downtown Brooklyn we discover a gem of an apartment with a small stained-glass window and old, decorative, perfectly maintained wooden doorframes. Someone has put a lot of love into this apartment and it shows. It’s priced below market rate because the bedroom is in between the living room and the kitchen and bathroom. This means that if one person is up and about, the other can have no guarantee of peace or privacy. Even so, we can’t afford it. The market has changed since we looked two years ago, and not in our favor. Now, if we want to have cafes and fresh produce nearby, we’ll have to find them the edge of the gentrification wave.

In Crown Heights, we find ourselves walking along that thin edge. In a way it seems inevitable that we will end up living along a border area like this, where class, race, and cultural history collide before our eyes. Here we can have our cafes and groceries, if we don’t mind living on a somewhat desolate street where half the block is taken up by an enormous parking garage. The apartment itself is beautiful, but is it worth pushing our budget when the subways nearby are not quite the ones that we want? As New Yorkers we are reconciled to the fact that we will spend a good portion of every day on the subway, in those moving boxes that bring us all together and carry us on our separate ways. Transportation by subway is another complex calculus to be applied to the apartment hunt: Which subways exactly, and just how far away?

We even look at one of those ridiculous new luxury buildings that claim to offer “a high-quality living experience” with gym, lounge, and optional valet parking. The cheapest studio, its price brought down to within our range by the economic travails of the past few years, is luxurious but tiny. Far worse is the feeling that living here would be equivalent to selling one’s soul, aligning oneself with all that is wrong in the world. Culturally we are as out of place here as we are in the housing projects that are hidden in plain sight, two blocks away, next to the highway. There we feel like invaders, threatening and threatened, simultaneously guilty of privilege and anxious to protect it. Here we feel something different but equally painful: This is not what buildings and apartments should look like. This is not what we — I mean all of us — should be doing with our money. This is not what we should be doing with New York City.

Differences in culture and differences in privilege map onto each other in complex and not always obvious ways. In south Williamsburg we find ourselves in a Latino neighborhood where music and advertising and signage in Spanish mark a distinct community. Two years ago we looked at an apartment in the Hasidic neighborhood next door. In both places we still feel out of place. Differences in language, clothing, and food are both personal and political. For us as a couple they are simply preferences that have emerged organically from our lives and backgrounds and interests. But we cannot pretend that in living here we would not also be part of a much larger wave of change in this area. And if it’s really a question of (white) “hipsters” vs. Latinos then we are inescapably in the category of the former. That’s how privilege works: You have to own it even if you don’t identify with it. White, male, “hipster” — I am none of these and yet I am all of them. It depends what each term means. It depends who you ask. It depends if we are talking about privilege or identification.

A few blocks away, but across the highway and a few blocks closer to Bedford Ave — the fount of this gentrification wave — we find the first apartment on which we are moved to put down a deposit. It’s smaller than the other but we have our cafes and our restaurants and our groceries. Once again we have landed right on the edge on this wave, this pattern that is beyond our control. One block away is a coffee shop dominated by famously entrepreneurial laptops. Half a block in the opposite direction, kids play basketball in the street under a string of Puerto Rican flags. So the city puts us in our place. This is the kind of neighborhood we want. And we can afford to live here, as long as we don’t mind that the kitchen floor is peeling up and there is no sink in the bathroom. From this apartment we can stage our own projects and journeys and battles with and through the city. Perhaps this is why it already feels like our home, and why my sweetheart starts kissing me when the realty agent isn’t looking. This hasn’t happened in any other apartment so far: The kissing test.

I am glad to be a new Writing Fellow at Baruch College, itself a towering vision of the contemporary city, hundreds more boxes within boxes organized to bring us together and keep us part according to the organizational system we call higher education. The architecture of the vertical campus reminds me of the towering luxury condominium in Fort Greene, but the student body is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. My first impression of the Bernard Schwartz Communication Institute is that it is much less diverse than the rest of Baruch, a subject I hope to explore in a future blog post. Nor do I feel at home in a world focused on “business” as distinct from culture, ecology, and social justice. But I do see the potential here for a new generation of thinking about communication, education, and how we choose to build our collective future. I see that this school, and CUNY in general, is the future of this city, dirty and golden and real.

IMAGE CREDITS: City from The Fifth Element (see also City and The City). “Gentrification… Just say NO” from southside rants. Gentrification diagram from Geosimulation. Avalon Fort Greene from Rent.com (see also “Suddenly, a Brooklyn Skyline”, New York Times). Cafe photograph from Atlas Cafe. “Puerto Rican flags strung across a street in South Williamsburg” from City Limits. Baruch College Vertical Campus from Architectural Record.

On June 9, 2011, students in the music program at Gleneagle Secondary School, a high school in Vancouver suburb Coquitam, BC, played its spring concert to a packed house in a 450 seat auditorium. A first in Gleneagle history, the performance was broadcast live over Internet radio to listeners all over the world. And while  that might sound like a huge undertaking requiring serious AV and IT infrastructure, it was not. Not at all. In a brilliant feat of do-it-yourself EdTech (or what some folks might have once called edupunk), the concert was streamed live by Bryan Jackson, a Music and English teacher in the school’s TALONS program, and graduating senior Olga Belikov, with a Macbook, some free software and a USB microphone. That’s it. That’s all it took to broadcast the spring concert to anyone anywhere who wanted to hear it. And it sounded great.

Gleneagle’s Principal was aware of what was going on but wasn’t entirely clear on the details. During one point in the concert, he  walked backstage where Bryan explained all the moving parts: the unremarkable laptop and microphone, the free software, the web radio station (DS106Radio — read about it in my last post and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), how he and Olga used Twitter to build a live audience of listeners from from all over the US and Canada, and  that the broadcast was being recorded and would be posted for posterity to Soundcloud, a free audio sharing site, so that anyone in the Gleneagle community or anyone else anywhere could listen to and respond to any part of the performance. Bryan also explained how he had been using various other social media tools at Gleneagle including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and web radio to enhance lessons, to share performances, and to communicate with students and colleagues. His Principal was duly impressed. The administration had been aware of and supported Bryan’s and other teachers’ use of social media but had never up to this point fully engaged their potential to increase engagement, promote programs, and share and interact with parents, teachers, students, and district administrators or anyone else. While they had an inkling of what teachers were doing with free web tools, this broadcast, its recording, and the new interest at the school in webcasting were, according to Bryan, probably the first tangible outcomes of Gleneagle teachers’ experiments with creating and sharing on the web. Here is a one minute audio clip of Bryan describing the Principal’s visit backstage:

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

I love the irony here: Bryan tells us that he was able to experiment with various social media and web publishing tools and explore how their use might benefit his program and school only because one of the school’s IT people gave him his computer’s administrative password, which he really wasn’t supposed to have. It’s fairly common practice for IT departments in companies and educational institutions to withhold admin access to computers from end users for fear that they will go messing where they shouldn’t and damage the computer, contract a virus, install unauthorized software, or do things on their machines of which the IT department or the institution does not approve. This also ensures that end users have to rely upon IT personnel to perform simple maintenance tasks, modify configurations, and to update or install software. This is the traditional model where IT is in control of who has access and who does not while the end users are disempowered and must rely upon IT to make any changes to their machines. Here’s a wonderful example of a teacher who was trusted with full access to his computer and was able to use it to break new ground without hinderances imposed from above. When creative teachers have the latitude to experiment with the technology that’s readily available to them, wonderful things can happen. If there was ever an argument in favor of rethinking the model of how and to whom administrative access is granted at educational institutions, this is it.

I don’t know much about the general feeling at Gleneagle toward the privacy and security implications of web publishing and social media in instruction and for promotional purposes so I can’t speak to that. But it seems to me that, generally, there’s still quite a bit of trepidation about such things among educators. That trepidation, I’ll argue, tends to grow out of 20th Century notions of public exposure and our relationship with mass media and their roles in our lives. Privacy and security are certainly real concerns (FERPA exists for a reason), but it does appear that the discourse around them is often animated by outdated ideas about the production and consumption of media. It used to be that if you appeared on TV or radio, or in print, you had done or were involved in something a small group of editors and producers felt it was their imperative to broadcast. It had to be fairly remarkable, for good or for ill, to make the papers. Having your image or story broadcast to the world via a mass medium like radio or television, was special — something fairly unusual in the “look, Mom, I’m on TV!” sort of a way, unless you were among the relatively few who made a living in front of a camera or microphone.

Now, when anyone can shoot a video on a mobile phone and upload it immediately to YouTube, where it can potentially be seen by thousands, if not millions of people within just a few days, there’s a real banality to this sort of exposure. Most of our students share their lives on the internet in some way  every day. More and more of them live their lives in both physical and virtual space — this is something that those of us in their 30s and 40s who teach and administer programs are just now getting our heads around. Whats more, the means of media production, it has been said again and again by new media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and a host of others, are now in the hands of everyday people, no longer just media professionals. With relatively little effort and technical expertise, anyone can publish to the web. Anyone can broadcast audio or video to the internet on a mobile phone and an application that costs almost nothing. Heck, a bunch of us edtechhers built an open community radio station out of nothing more than a $25/mo server and a desire to play radio DJ.

Bryan Jackson and his colleagues at Gleneagle understand this well and are making amazing use of it. Thanks to a leadership that seems to appreciate the possibility the new media order offers educators, they have been empowered to use a combination of social media to do on their own what once was the province of AV professionals and marketing departments and required substantial infrastructure. While we’re by now used to seeing inklings of this sort of thing on the post-secondary level, it is encouraging and inspiring to see in happen in K-12. Bravo, Gleneagle Music! Bravo!

[This post is cross posted at my personal blog, thisevilempire.com]

Ciny Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978

I had been waiting a very long time for the elevator on the seventh floor of the vertical campus, leaning against the wall, listlessly refusing to take the stairs when I noticed that right next to my shoulder was a Cindy Sherman print. Sherman, one of the few living artists whose work I could recognize is maybe most known for photographing herself in “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she appears as an actress in her own imagining of a 1970s movie. I associate Sherman with expensive art books and magazines, Vogue magazine, and museums and galleries.

After noticing this print under the florescent lights by the elevator and those grey and white signs on each floor of Baruch that list departments and room numbers, I began to wonder about what other works of art might be hiding in plain sight, and found the Mishkin Gallery website listing an Alexander Calder (Mishkin collection) and a Joan Miro (alumni collection). Dr. Sandra Kraskin, curator of the collection, told me that much of it was sent to auction in 2009. The Miro “was in the president’s private office.”

I looked closer at some colorful prints on the sixth floor hallway outside classrooms, but I couldn’t find out the name of the artist because there was no label. Kraskin told me that there was no money available for them. Which kind of offsets the argument that public art educates and enriches us all, or maybe just reflects a general ambivalent nature of art as part the state budget, and as a donation from wealthy alumni. The “Percent for Art” program, administered by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and begun by Edward Koch in 1982, “requires that one percent of certain city funded construction projects be used for art commissions and acquisitions. Over the past twenty-five years, more than 26 million has been spent for art.” This is not a very significant amount in relation to the 2011-2012 state budget. The rest has been donated, much of it by alumni: both a gift and a tax deduction.

Dr. Kraskin said, “Most great universities have art collections, we feel our university should have same benefits that Harvard has.” There are works by Elizabeth Murray and Lynda Benglis in the vc campus: Kraskin explained Murray’s exceptional recognition (she had a show at both Moma and the Whitney), and also described Benglis’s metal wall relief sculpture as significant.

I grew up near the Brown University campus, and the sight of undergrads lounging in the sun on a Henry Moore sculpture in the spring was emblematic of the college experience for me: your job as a college student is to place yourself in the midst of great works and get comfortable there. I like the idea of this message conveyed to students through what surrounds them in their daily trek to and from class. The shows at the Mishkin gallery are targeted to students, and teachers build them into their curriculum. But I wonder how much the “Percent for Art,” and individual donations entail this goal, relative to investment or tax break, how much of the art chosen for significance has significance within the art world versus to the people who pass by it. Artists Komar and Melamid’s research on art and popular taste showed that if left to polls, most countries would surround themselves with landscapes that include trees and water. I’m curious about how other people who pass these works of art as part of their work are or aren’t affected by it. When I don’t like a piece of art, I measure it against a working escalator, laptops for students, my own salary. When I do, I find I don’t draw these kinds of equivalencies. The current exhibition at Mishkin, of paintings of mountains by Hai Tao, creates its own few rooms of quiet delicacy, mystery and solace, which maybe somehow does respond to broken escalators, students who try to write papers without MSWord because they can’t yet afford the 300 dollar subsidized price from Baruch, and other daily stresses.

photo credit: smemon87

After reading violent threats against Frances Fox Piven online, my first thought was “If books are so powerful, then why threaten with a gun—go and write your own book.”

Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, describes violence as indicating the lack of power. Power, she says, is the capacity to capture people’s hearts and minds, to change the way they think and act. In the late 1960s, she wrote against what she saw as leftist writing that glorified violence (she cited Fanon and Sartre). Power is what separates Karl Marx’s ideas, which galvanized, inspired, and engaged debate, from Joseph Stalin’s regime of suppression through threat and through actual violence. (See also page 2 in her article in The New York Review of Books). Fascist regimes, according to Arendt, are regimes without new ideas (see her review of The Black Book in Commentary, page 294).  What they have instead is a monopoly on the means of violence.

But, what is the written threat of violence? It is not the same. This week seemed like a good time to turn to Judith Butler’s scholarship on hate speech (Excitable Speech). I was surprised to find that Butler takes apart the distinction between physical violence and language, and two of the main terms she uses in this project are control and vulnerability. In society, people are vulnerable to and dependent upon language, and language is beyond our control. Therefore, hate speech is said be “like a slap in the face” because being called a demeaning name actually affects a person’s sense of their self and the way they appear to others.

Control—language is beyond the speaker’s control. Frances Fox Piven’s writing has been interpreted in ways she never intended, ways that seem irrational to her (and to me). Yet, Butler argues, engaging in language always means the speaker does not control the way her words will be interpreted. Others may not read the same material in the same context in which you wrote it. The speaker can suddenly find herself in a struggle she never intended to enter, one with terms and stakes she never predicted.

Even in the absence of real violence, does the written threat of violence prove Hannah Arendt’s point—does violence in language indicate a lack of power, and the lack of new ideas? If it does indicate a lack of power, how is one in the position of professor at City University, and other professors and authors, to respond? As Butler argued, it seems to me that suddenly authors are being unpredictably granted a power they have not themselves presumed to wield. Are they responsible to a power that anyone ascribes to them?

Graduate scholars are aware of how insular and hermetic our work and our communications can be. Now I’m wondering if scholars should be prepared to take their ideas out for a spin, outside the contexts of journals and conferences, to imagine interpretations from more diverse audiences and to defend and delineate their ideas. This hasn’t been part of my training—I’ve been trained to confront some scholarly authors with the oppositional arguments of other scholarly authors.  As a writing and public speaking teacher, I coach students to consider their intended audience, to write towards their common knowledge and interests. Now I’m wondering how much writers and speakers need to consider their ability to respond to unintended interpretations, unintended audiences. It’s a frightening challenge, but Fox Piven seems to be responding steadily in what I can only imagine has felt like a very shaky playing field.

Twice in the past week, a teacher has told me that they are teaching two classes of one section, and that the two classes respond completely differently to the same material. Shown the same video, one class is inspired and engaged, leading to animated class discussion. The other class is bored. This situation is a good litmus test for a teacher—you know the lack of response from your students isn’t a direct reflection on your work. But, what are you to do? Is it our job as teachers to inspire and engage? Of course, it is a two-way street, students have to come ready to extend their imaginations, not simply be catered to.

My questions is–how to account for this disparity in student response? Should we change our tactics from one class to another? Is it, as other teachers I’ve spoken with have guessed, group dynamics? And how do you change the dynamics of a group, when you’re only one in 24?

I finally figured out what to write about for Cacophony! Following the advice of my colleagues at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, the best way to approach this was to write about something I am familiar with in the context of my work.  As a professor myself, I set specific guidelines and objectives when giving assignments to my students in order to avoid writer’s block because of the openness of possibilities. I don’t want to curtail, however: Cacophony’s open posting policy makes it versatile and unique.

I hope this post gives some basic guidelines for anyone out there interested in organizing debates as a classroom assignment.  The topics of the debates I am coaching are in the 12th Edition of the Management and Society textbook issued by the Department of Management at Baruch College. But you can device your own and have students do a little research to defend their positions.

The first step is to assign students to groups and divide the groups into PRO and CON sides of a given topic.   Then, provide precise instructions about the format of the debate.  For example, one format consist of a ten minute opening presentation, followed by a five minute period for rebuttal, and three minutes for conclusions, going back and forth between the PRO and CON side.  Ten minutes for the PRO, Ten for the CON; five minutes for the PRO, five for the CON; and three minutes for the PRO, and three for the CON. You can make them longer depending on the number of participants and the time available.

Make sure students understand that the objective is to persuade the audience that their point of view (in the debate) is the most valid: they need to make arguments.

In the beginning, they should introduce themselves, the issue, the point they are defending and any terms that might be unfamiliar or that might take a particular meaning in the context of the debate.  For example, in a debate that deals with whether genetically modified foods should be labeled, it is necessary to know from the beginning what constitutes a genetically modified food product.

Encourage them to read the materials a couple of times (in the management course I coach these are organized in chapters), even the reading for the opposite team.  In that way they can figure out a strategy to organize their presentation as well as anticipate the points are going to be brought up against their arguments.  It’s also important for students to practice their entire presentation out loud so they have an idea of time management as they become familiar with public speaking.  In terms of oral presentation skills,  you should emphasize to the debaters that they should not read, and should maintain eye contact with the audience,  which is a non-verbal way of engaging their attention.  Index cards are an acceptable way of keeping track of the order of the arguments they will stress, but in order to avoid reading too much from them,  suggest they write bullet points, rather than entire sentences.

If they are using numerical data such as statistics and/or percentages, remind your students that if they are hard to understand, the audience will just glaze over them.  Quantitative data should be easy to read and understand and should make a strong point.  If they are quoting textbooks or the internet, make sure they cite valid sources and not just random articles (especially online),  and that they have those sources (author’s names particularly) readily available during the debate, in case someone asks.

Time does not have to be equally split, but all students in a team must participate.  Have students dress professionally (although this is not a strict requirement).  Attire is a non verbal language that reveals many things, and it is difficult to find credible someone wearing an oversized sweater whose sleeves are longer than the arms. Lastly, remind students to keep their language appropriate and to keep their composure.   Debates can get heated,  but for as much as a Jerry Springer fight will definitely engage the audience, the loudest people are usually revealing insecurity.

The end of each debate could be marked by an open Q&A period where the audience can participate and ask questions or comments to the presenters.  Here you can explain how the topic is still current and give an informal assessment of the students’ participation.

Over the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).

I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.

photo credit: Olivander

Aside from its main mission to establish a relationship between academic and business discourses, this year’s Symposium has, in my view, peripherally addressed another notorious bifurcation of academic and creative writing. Perhaps Peter Elbow’s proposition to ignore audience for some time can be hard to grasp in the context of business letter writing. It does, however, resonate fully with our experience with more expressive writing forms, those that convey a personal voice and in turn strike personal notes in the audience.

Listening to Elbow, I recalled a Q&A session with Orhan Pamuk. To my question whom he imagines as his audience when drafting his autobiography, he quickly responded “myself.” He explained that thinking about potentially disapproving readers would hamper his authenticity and creative effort. Another writer, whose personal journals have been a subject of my scrupulous analysis these days, connected his inability to write truthfully about his life to his typewriter, seeing it as his immediate audience.

But a self-invitation into a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf has famously called it, is something we seek also when working on projects less posh than a poetic autobiography (though a psychologist can easily make a case that a dissertation is a piece of autobiography); I’m referring to such prosaic items of academic life as seminar papers, articles, and dissertations. For me, an important take-away from Elbow’s speech was that the process of composition happens in very similar ways for writers engaged in creative and academic projects. Whether one is working on a novel or dissertation, the vocabulary to describe the writing process would be the same, ranging from such romantic concepts as exploration to such terrifying buzz words as writer’s block.

In both cases, receiving effective feedback from, alas, audience, at later stages of the composition process becomes essential as well!

“The audience in our head usually affects us more when we write than when we speak. When we speak, the real audience is right there dominating our attention and drowning out other audiences. When we write, however, all audiences are in the head, even the real audience. In the dark of the brain a real audience is easily trampled by an insistent past audience” (187).

Elbow’s advice is that, in order to exorcize the demon of the dangerous internal audience that inhibits our words or thoughts, we need to actively “change” our audience and capitalize on the support of a loving audience that we once had or that we can imagine. I think that this suggestion could prove useful in improving our teaching methods, too.

Finally, attending the Institute’s symposium reminded me of C. P. Snow’s 1959 argument on the division of two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I assume that in this case it is the division between business and academia whose cultures we try to bring together, as partly shown by Jarvis and Elbow. I see how these seemingly disparate fields can hit it off and have productive conversations in the right setting like this year’s symposium.

This video is 12 minutes long.

This video is 10 minutes long.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the show, you have to give American Idol credit for continuing to be one of the highest rated shows on television. Some people attribute this to the fact that the show is a true “family program,” and in essence people of all ages and across all demographic groups can watch it. But I believe its popularity has a lot to do with the interactivity of the show. The audience has power over the outcome – “America votes!” Whether America agrees with Simon Cowell’s sneers or Paula Abdul’s cheers is somewhat irrelevant. Sure, this year they implemented the “Judge’s save,” but ultimately it’s the audience who selects the next American Idol. Of course, not everyone who watches the show bothers to vote (I draw the line there myself). But millions of audience members do vote, and that’s pretty amazing. The audience is not merely spectators, but jurors as well.

On a somewhat related note, I often feel like an American Idol judge when I help students rehearse their class presentations. It’s our job as fellows to critique their “dress rehearsal” and provide feedback on how to improve their skills before the final presentation in class. Just like the American Idol judges, however, we don’t grade the students (i.e., vote them off) … the professor does that. So should I tell it to them straight like Simon Cowell? I know I should, but it’s important to be encouraging as well, so I also emphasize the positive things I see (a la Paula Abdul). Has anyone else had these thoughts while conducting rehearsals, or do I just watch too much TV?

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Surely, once we receive a particular degree or become a part of a particular profession, we immediately set expectations and become anxiously self-conscious about fulfilling them. In various ways, academic settings tend to enhance our sensitivity to whether we come across to our audiences – and to ourselves – as uncultured oafs. The article brought back memories of my first year in graduate school when I felt like a total impostor in a circle of aspiring young scholars. I was also reminded of the eagerness with which beginning graduate students sometimes imitate the convoluted and often incomprehensible academic prose they read.

Trillin wants to do away with the very label of uncultured oafs, it seems to me, as most of us want to do away with the bifurcation of high and popular culture, or academic and real worlds. Have we all been successful?

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?