The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook

November 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

It used to be that the anthropologist traveled far from his/her home, conducted research in a foreign culture, and wrote up findings which never made it back to those who were studied . Globalization and now social media have changed this paradigm (as well as debates over who research actually belongs to and what moral responsibilities a researcher has to those he/she studies). Now, the “natives” are your Facebook friends. This a positive development, we should be in conversation with our research participants, but what does this mean for their confidentiality and privacy?

Trobriand Islanders never friended Bronislaw Malinowski on Facebook. Judging by his posthumously published diaries, he didn't like them enough to accept the request anyway.

This post is more of a question than a statement. It is about research ethics, confidentiality and social media. When I began my research on tuberculosis (TB) in Romania, I did not have a Facebook account. I never imagined that TB patients I work with would be among my Facebook friends and that they would actively share my writings using social media in which they or their loved ones appear.

First, much of my PhD research was conducted at a mountaintop TB sanatorium, that one patient described as “beyond the sight of God.” I spent over two years studying TB and much of that was spent talking to dying people and sometimes even holding their hands while they died.  The field site was amazing—visually stunning, but tragic. It was a place of abandonment where many patients would go to die, not just of TB, but also of its complicating factors: poverty and hopelessness.  Dozens of patients I interviewed are now dead, but a few of those who survived keep in touch via social media.

I first met Mariana (all names are pseudonyms) in 2009  when I attended a Multi-Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB)  patients’  group therapy session. I had agreed  to have a question and answer session about my research and TB in general. The patients sat in a semi-circle across from me. I was nervous. My Romanian is very good, but in 2009 it wasn’t.  Worse still, I am terrible at translating when multiple people speak at once. There I was, nervous and awkward; wearing a mask that covered most of my face, trying to talk with patients about what it is like having TB and answering questions TB in America.

© Jonathan Stillo. "Hi, I'd like to ask you a few questions!" Me in my hospital robe and mask.

I was struck by the diversity of ages in the room. There were many young people.  Looking towards a group of patients I joked that this looked more like high school than a hospital. One young woman  fascinated me from the beginning. She was in her mid 20s, and looked like a skeleton floating in a fluffy pink robe.  Mariana is beautiful and despite being one of the sickest people in the ward, filled the room with laughter and jokes. Then,  after I mentioned how I wanted to improve TB treatment in Romania by working with policy makers and the government, she locked eyes with me and asked “Do you really think the government and the people in charge will listen to you?” I told her I did, because TB is a major health problem.” She replied “Then you tell them this: TB is an economic problem and patients need support.”  I would interview Mariana many times over the course of my research in Romania. I learned how she had become ill with the disease by caring for her father who died of TB, that she had a little boy and she was very poor. I have close relationships with a number of people I met over the course of my research 2006-2011, but Mariana is the only patient I really think of as a friend.  I have written about her in publications in Romanian and English. However, I faced an ethical dilemma when I received her Facebook friend request. I thought, of course I should accept, she IS my friend.  I am happy that she can actively consume the things I write about her, and that she even shares them with others (some of whom know the articles are about her and others who do not). While this added an ethically complicated layer to our relationship, I think it is a positive one. We can keep in touch more easily and she is able to read what I write about her and other patients.

“The mother of all the rabbits”

Elena was barely twenty when she died. I didn’t know what to do when her mother found me on Facebook.  I knew I was treading ethically problematic ground.  She friended me after reading an article I wrote in the Romanian popular press. She told me she knew I had interviewed her daughter before she died. I wanted to say yes, I knew her daughter well, and give her the recording so she could hear her daughter’s voice again, or at least tell her what we talked about—how even though she was dying, she dreamed of being an actress.  Finally, I wrote to her, but kept all those details to myself. I told her that I did know her daughter well, that she loved her very much, and I was very sorry for what happened. I tried to comfort her. I felt I had that responsibility.  I am a human first and always an anthropologist second. It is hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are so deeply woven into the lives of those you research.  When family members come to you asking for information about their loved ones final days what does humanity require you to divulge. I always feel terribly inadequate in these situations. Certainly not everything is sensitive information. Elena told me of how one of her happiest memories in a life full of sickness and suffering was when she played the role of “mother of all the rabbits” in a kindergarten play. Her mother might have liked to know this. She might have liked to know that I cried when I listed to the interview again thinking how her life was so full of suffering that she had to go deep into her childhood to find a happy memory to share with me.

So my question is: how do we as researchers and citizens in this new world of social media balance ethics and privacy concerns with our responsibilities to our informants (which do not end after we leave our field sites)?  What might the future look like as more of our informants also become consumers of our research through social media? How can we balance our deceased informants privacy with their loved ones desires to know what their final days were like? What about participants who choose to reveal their identities and take on advocacy roles? Is it not their choice to do this, even though it violates IRB protocol? And finally, do our informants really understand how their activities on Facebook might lead to a breach in confidentiality?

Filed Under: Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology, To Ponder

What if we only see the gorilla?

October 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Part One:

At last year’s Symposium, during the morning roundtable discussions, my table got into a conversation about how to manage students on laptops in the classroom. Are they really writing? How do you know they aren’t on Facebook? I think I said something like, “well, some days I just have to say: ok, today let’s write with our pens.” Composing by hand in a notebook and directly onto or into a computer are distinctly different processes (for me at least), and I think a lot about how one’s attention span and outlook on the task at hand changes depending on the medium used.

In James’ recent cac.ophony post, he pointed us towards the recent New York Times articles on “education without technology.” While I certainly do use a lot of technology in my courses, I also realize that sometimes we need to unplug. So, for me, the question is not so much about the value of technology (which is more about the teacher than the tool in many cases), but rather an inquiry into how our “Net Generation” students’ brains create and process information.  I can’t help but think of  two early moments in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains:

  1. “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13).
  2. “The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing…But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it–and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became” (16).

It seems like Carr is blaming the “immediate gratification” of the web for impatience or for his own fading attention span. And, I’m not sure I agree with him. Can we really blame technology for the inability to read a book from cover to cover?

When I heard Cathy Davidson speak at the Graduate Center in September, I found myself quickly obsessed with the “invisible gorilla” video we watched (and is referred to in the opening of her newest book, Now You See it).

\”The Invisible Gorilla\”

The video is an experiment made to test “selective attention”–viewers are supposed to count balls being tossed and focus on the act of counting so thoroughly that many viewers fail to see the charming person in the gorilla suit frolicking about. Davidson writes, “By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst” (2). Some people do see the gorilla, however. Davidson saw it, and I only really noticed the gorilla. Davidson continues, “without focus, the world is chaos…Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them” (2). Davidson sees potential in the fact that technology enables us to play with and against distractions and to really discover where our own focus can be most productive.

I began to really think about the classroom and technology, the page and the keyboard, and the student(s). If we all pay attention differently, is there any way to know who sees the gorilla at any moment in the classroom? And, if technology does indeed empower our different “forms of attention,” what does this tell us about the writing process? Do we uniformly move from page to screen?

Part Two:

This semester I’ve been playing around with something that I loosely call “The Artifact Project.” When I bring technology + writing by hand into the classroom, it is often the sort of thing where we watch something (music video, short film, feature film, etc.) and write while watching. The writing can come in a number of different forms–but what I am interested in is what happens when we write (by hand in a notebook) while engaged in paying attention to something else. Initially, I had a number of videos I wanted to show–mostly hip hop videos where there is a combination of narration, word play, and persuasive/jarring images. But, after the first week of classes, I decided it might be more productive to see what the students do. So, every class period we begin with 2 “artifacts”. These things need to be multimedia, class appropriate, and the student/presenter/ researcher needs to come to class with a writing prompt/activity that he or she will guide us through.

What I’ve noticed (some preliminary observations):

  1. My students pay attention/focus/observe in a very different way than I do. They notice more.
  2. I thought that when given the freedom to have a sort of show & tell (ultimately youtube dependent), the majority of students would automatically go to the music video. They didn’t or haven’t. The students do a lot more research–they’ve found a variety of different relics (or “real” artifacts) from the past to explore–they are really interested in unpacking commercials, in particular–comparing advertising from the past with that of the present.
  3. They do understand that technology is not all good. Many of my students prefer to write by hand–they use e-readers and notebooks.
  4. When given the opportunity to create their own writing-based activities, students really seem to come up with very analytical tasks–they want to think about what they see specifically versus sweeping assumptions (which populate their formal papers).

So, what does any of this have to do with the gorilla?

I’ve intentionally focused on focus and attention and the role of technology in how I see my students pay attention. I’ve stayed away from cost and privilege. But, the question still lingers…how much equipment belongs in the room? Who should ultimately decide?

I know that I only see the gorilla, but my students see everything at once, it seems, what are the implications of that for a writing classroom? How quickly can we challenge them to move from medium to medium, even if I (as teacher) lag behind?

 

Filed Under: EdTech, Higher Education, Internet, Media, Pedagogy, Writing, Writing Instruction

Occupation Communication

October 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

The Occupy Wall Street protests (which my colleagues have written about here and here) started to gain traction as a national news story this past week. Coverage of the protests increased as more sensational stories surfaced of police beating protesters with night sticks, protesters rushing barricades, and the old-left stalwart labor unions joining in by holding a rally that filled Foley Square to over capacity. While the protesters began their occupation complaining about the lack of “mainstream media” coverage, they now have an abundance of coverage, but are having trouble controlling the narrative. Perhaps this is because the protests do not fit into a nice, clean-cut, two-party view of politics.

 

How do these self-avowed leaderless protesters communicate to the world and to each other? To answer that, we must start by looking at the founding of the protests. Three groups with very different approaches to spreading their messages of social change sounded the initial call: Adbusters, Anonymous, and the NYC General Assembly.

Adbusters is an anti-consumerism group probably most well-known for its annual protest Buy Nothing Day (held on Black Friday). Its modes of mass media include many forms of culture jamming: an advertising-less magazine, “open source” shoes, and anti-advertising commercials. Art, message, content, and form blend together to create striking works of protest, whose purpose is to disrupt the viewer’s experience in order to begin a longer, more complex discussion about the effects of advertising on culture.

One of Adbusters's "classic" culture jamming anti-ad

 

Anonymous is most famous—infamous?—for two ongoing protests related to uninhibited free speech: one against the Church of Scientology and the other in support of WikiLeaks. Both of these protests included web videos declaring their stance, coordinated hacking and denial of service attacks, and protests in Guy Fawkes masks. While the masked protests have become the photographs associated with the group, they mostly organize online in “leaderless” internet forums.

Members of Anonymous at an in-person protest

Creative Commons License photo credit: Anonymous9000

 

Blending the cooperative leaderless mentality of Anonymous with the organized critique of mass media of Adbusters, the third group, the NYC General Assembly, has become the core of the protests. More of a process than an actual group, NYC General Assemblies use both high- and low-tech solutions in order to reach consensus among the various (and there are many) fractions of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Certainly no one will deny the impact of Facebook and Twitter to organize the disparate individuals currently residing in Zuccotti Liberty Square—after all, the protesters like to compare their occupation to the “Arab Spring/Facebook Revolution” in Tahrir Square. There are other network technologies at play in the Wall Street protests: websites (of the pre-”Web 2.0” variety), Kickstarter campaigns (to fund specific projects of the occupation), Livestream (to broadcast live video from cellphones, laptops, and other internet-connected cameras), WePay (to accept micro-donations to buy food, although the fund was later moved to the Aliance for global Justice for 501c3 status), and even GitHub (a social media technology that allows to access to the technology that the protesters are using).

IMG_7594

Some low-tech social networking?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Brennan Cavanaugh

 

The means by which the protesters communicate, however, are not solely highly technological. As Sara Ruth Jacobs mentioned last week when discussing Navid Hassanpour’s paper on the Egyptian Revolution, the loss of online social media can increase active participation and connections between individuals in a shared location. And even though the protesters set up generator-powered charging stations in the privately-owned (but by law publicly-accessible 24-hours a day) park, computer technology doesn’t solve every communication issue. This is where low-tech social media help to keep the Occupy Wall Street protesters connected. While marches, chants, and hand-painted signs are the means of communication most often shown in news coverage, there are other less visible communication tools employed by the protesters.

General Assemblies and working groups use consensus building to determine the actions of the participants. Without consensus (defined by the NYC General Assembly in the organizing leaflet for the occupation as “no outright opposition”), no group action will take place and proposals must be revised for the next assembly. The means of achieving consensus with such a large group relies on two low-tech social media technologies: hand signals and a “mic check.”

 

Hand signals:

A manual version of the clickers familiar to those of us who have taught or taken classes in large lecture halls in recent years, hand signals quickly allow the group poll on a particular proposal. Four major hand signals mean yes or agree, no or disagree, point of process (similar to a “point of order,” meaning someone is not following the process), and block the proposal from passing in its present form (used only in extreme circumstances when you can’t remain a part of the group if the current proposal passes).

Hand signals from NYC General Assembly manual

While these are useful in measuring interest and passing proposals, the basic four hand signals are only a form of selection and not intended to engage the group in open-ended dialogue. This hole in the process of group communication has been partially addressed as protesters develop new hand signals specific to the situation. The yes/agree signal evolved into a related, “enthusiastic yes/agree” with the addition of “jazz hands” (or one of the American Sign Language signs for “applause”). One of these new signals, “I can’t hear,” would be a welcome addition to any event—how many times do I have to hear that annoying shout at a conference when a presenter isn’t speaking directly into the microphone? Another collaboratively developed signal, “loud noise coming down the block,” is useful in lower Manhattan’s labyrinth of twisting streets where cavernous skyscrapers play fun acoustic tricks with traffic sounds.

 

Mic Check:

A “mic check” is a method to allow anyone to address the crowd, as well as a means of disseminating information to the crowd. The effect sounds like a call-and-response chant that protesters use to get their message across to audiences standing on the sidelines during a march. However, the purpose of this call-and-response is internal, rather than external, communication. When an individual wishes to make a proposal to the group, that person shouts “mic check.” The crowd around the person replies “mic check.” This is repeated until the speaker is certain that everyone understands what a mic check has started ( once or twice is usually sufficient). The original speaker then starts the message he or she wished to communicate to the group. Broken up into short phrases of a few words each, this message is relayed through the same call-and-response chant that started the mic check. This serves as a way to not only amplify and transmit the message to listeners far away from the speaker, but it also reinforces the message in the listener-repeater’s mind. If someone hears the person next to them repeating a different phrase than she or he did, a mini-discussion can help clarify what was actually said.

Even famous philosophers can use the mic check to amplify their lectures (although more complex sentences can be difficult to transmit).

 

As the Occupy Wall Street protests solidify into a movement—with affiliated protests in DC, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tampa, Boise, and many more towns coming soon—the ability to achieve consensus will become more difficult. Hopefully these protests will not become merely the liberal version of the Tea Party protests—that is to say, a hierarchically controlled sub-set of one existing political party or the other. This narrative is already attempting to be applied to the Occupy Wall Street movement. To avoid falling into this trap, it will be necessary to continue the radical multi-tiered approaches to communication and social media in order to ensure that a plethora of voices can be heard.

Filed Under: Internet, Language, Media, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Oral Communication, Politics, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Social Platforms on the Web: How Fashion Brands Benefit from Using Crowdsourcing Technologies

October 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Since the late 1990s, fashion brands have been using online storefronts as a means of promoting and selling clothes and accessories. Today, online storefronts are firmly embedded into the fabric of contemporary relationships between fashion brands and consumers.

Recently, with the rise of social networking, there is a trend to use social platforms to connect with audiences worldwide. Versatile social systems provide access not only to news and product information but also benefit brands by enlarging their fan base. New social platforms serve as a means for generating and distributing content, connecting people in real time, and offer multiple opportunities for communication, sharing and collaboration. Fashion consumers become producers and share their vision with manufacturers.

Inspired by Red Alma MMA successful example of such collaboration is Polyvore.com. Polyvore users can mix and match hats, skirts, gloves, bags and other items to create a perfect outfit that can be posted on Polyvore for others to see and evaluate. Rebecca Minkoff, an accessories designer, used Polyvore to spice up her New York Fashion Week bag collection. Over 6,500 Polyvore users took part in her challenge and designed a new Rebecca Dee clutch.

Another example is Burberry’s Art of the Trench. Trench lovers and Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist created a database promoting the trench as a timeless and essential part of the modern wardrobe. Partially due to Burberry proactive online strategies, their annual revenue jumped to £1,501 million in March 2011 vs. £1,185 for the same period in 2010.

Zara People! Challenge invites consumers to submit an image containing at least two items from Zara’s latest collection. The winner gets €300. Zara designers are known to be trend followers and not trend creators. Watching how fashion forward people wear Zara provides an instant insight into what styles are popular at the moment. Zara remains one of the largest fashion companies in the world.

While almost every fashion brand has some presence online, the challenge is to create a competitive advantage by reaching the crowds and creating clever crowdsourcing strategies that can be used in designing new products and generating sales.

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Style Tagged With: , , ,

Two Social Media Paradoxes

October 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Paradox Number One:  Social media foments revolution, but a sudden removal of social media can increase mobilization and create even more unrest.

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).

 

Filed Under: Audience, Debating, Internet, Interpersonal Communication, Literacy, Online Learning, Politics, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0

Talons: A Case Study in DIY Educational Technology

June 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

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]

Filed Under: Audience, Computer Mediated Instruction, EdTech, Education, edupunk, Internet, Media, Music, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Terence McKenna, Kinetic Typography, and the Evolution of Consciousness

May 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apart from being an adequate summation of the thoughts and feelings that churned through my head while watching Grant McCracken‘s presentation at the Schwartz Communication Institute’s Annual Symposium on Friday, the above video provides a potent condensation of the philosophical contributions of a complex and fascinating American cultural figure, Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s interests ranged from psychedelics and shamanism to technology and aliens.  Among the many insanely weird ideas he brought into the culture (through a series of books and recorded lectures, often passed between fellow travelers like Grateful Dead bootlegs), McKenna intuited, at a very early stage of its development, that the Internet would launch humanity into a new state of conscious evolution.  For example, in this “trialogue” with esoteric colleagues Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, recorded in 1994, McKenna repeatedly predicted the rapid expansion of digital technology and insisted, to the skeptical voices of Sheldrake and Abraham, that “within a decade” the web would play a dominant role in all sectors of human social organization.  All three, however, agreed that human beings alive on the planet at this point in history have access to exponentially larger amounts of data than any previous.  As available digital information becomes literally infinite, acquiring knowledge will become a significantly different experience.  More than ever before, it will be important for people to consciously navigate these streams of data by editing out the extraneous and unnecessary, and developing the skills to more effectively locate (and internalize) the most useful bits. In other words, we are going to have to learn how to find the good stuff in ways we’ve never imagined.

The above video is an example of “kinetic typography,” a form of animated text that provides a visual accompaniment to spoken word.  The medium is perfect for condensing complex ideas and highlighting particular portions of larger speeches and lectures, mainly because it transcribes the actual words and makes the words themselves visually arresting.  I’m intrigued by the development of “pedagogical art forms” like kinetic typography that seek to reduce great ideas to their essence while maintaining the original intellectual rigor.  The RSA Animate series, featuring this popular entry from CUNY’s own David Harvey, similarly takes what might seem like “difficult” ideas and makes them come alive in a brilliant, easy-to-digest, entirely satisfying experience:

I’ve also shown this clip featuring Slavoj Zizek to my classes on a couple different occasions, and even though Zizek’s ideas can sometimes be hard to follow, by the time the clip is over, students have always been eager and able to conduct a serious discussion of the issues he raises:

I have no doubt that developments like kinetic typography will, in a relatively short amount of time, be built upon, changed, and probably discarded as technology and collective creativity combine to develop new forms of transmitting valuable information within an ever-increasing cacophony (no pun intended) of available data.  This process will likely constitute a sea change in the evolution of human consciousness.  As McKenna himself once declared, the terms of this transformation are clear:

“It’s as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how ‘if God did not exist, Man would invent him,’ and said ‘if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it’ — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.”

 

Filed Under: Culture, Internet

Dear Cac.ophony

April 14, 2011 By 5 Comments

This was in my inbox this morning.

Dear Cac.ophony,

My name is XXXXXX from XXXXXXXXXX. We have a client who would like to pay you for the opportunity to sponsor a blog post that you have recently written. We know that blogs can be expensive to run and our client would like to opportunity to support you in that endeavor.

In return our client is asking for one link that they specify placed into the body of the blog post(no porn or gambling). Feel free to contact me with any concerns or clarifications you may have.

If you would have any questions or would like to start the process, please email me at XXXXXX@XXXXXXX so we can begin.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXX
Outreach Manager – XXXXXXXX

Product placement? Not here. Sorry. Though I am curious about which is the post in question and who the client might be. My revulsion to this aside, it seems that this sort of thing is quite common, especially on sites that feature product reviews. See this 2009 NYT article on sponsored blogging.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Fun, Internet

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Once in a red moon

December 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

News flash: Saturday Night Live might be funny and <gasp!> socially relevant again! I, like most people, haven’t been bothered to watch SNL for many, many moons (More on moons at bottom). However, last week featured arguably–and I don’t want to argue over this now–the show’s first real bit of cutting social commentary in decades:

…the aforementioned cutting bit from the sketch being this line from Bill Hader playing chief WikiLeakian Julian Assange: “I give you private information on corporations for free and I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”

The Information Age is going through an awkward but inevitable shift, we are told. The release of government cables on Wikipedia, the threat of extradition and conviction brought by those governments on Assange’s head, and the hacker assault on the corporations (Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal, etc.) withdrawing services from Wikipedia amount a world cyber-war. Assange and Zuckerberg, A and Z, polar opposites in ideology, but two characters tied by the common feature of their fame and fortune: the peddling of private and confidential information.

Embedded in the language of ‘awkwardness’ and ‘inevitability’ is that our society will adjust to the changes and embark peacefully into a new world of greater transparency and less privacy. As John Heilemann remarks, “The question about the new transparency isn’t how to thwart it—because we can’t. The question is how we live with it.”

Notwithstanding the technological teleology of this sort of talk, it is interesting how rarely the gobs of attention from the commentariat attracted by Facebook and WikiLeaks manage to consider the immense effect of the state on the future production, circulation, and consumption of digital information.

The FCC new ruling on ‘net neutrality,’ a 3-2 vote that meant that service providers can’t block or restrict bandwidth for content they discriminate, effectively leaves the door open to future corporate control over the Internet. The stakes are poorly understood and poorly reported to the public, yet I would agree with SNL-alum-turned-Senator Al Franken and others that it constitutes the most critical First Amendment issue of our time.

Most of the talk about information technology today concerns how gizmos, search engines, social networking, and the like are changing our habits of thought, ways of relating to others, of understanding ourselves. Net neutrality is a matter that indicates that there is a flip side to this dynamic: that the Internet is a reflection of us, as well, and more precisely a reflection of growing inequalities. The corporate vision of the web is of “a fast Internet for the rich and a slow Internet for the poor,” writes Dan Lyons.

Most distressing, of course, is that the stakes of this debate do not reach the public in any kind of clear and sustained way precisely because the media are dominated by the very corporations who stand to battle over billions in profits. (I wonder how many Americans know that the airwaves, all those frequencies over which radio, TV, cell phone calls, and wifi travel, are publicly owned and licensed by the government.) Tough for SNL writers to slip that one into a sketch, I reckon.

Happy Solstice and lunar eclipse, everyone.

Filed Under: Internet, Politics
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