The Mixed Blessing of Bad Publicity

December 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, celebrity Alec Baldwin made headlines when he was taken off an American Airlines flight due to his refusal to turn off his iPad because he was in the middle of a “Words With Friends” game. Perhaps what was even more shocking than Baldwin’s relatively petty reason for not complying with the airline’s rules was the astounding amount of publicity the story received in the days and weeks following the incident. In fact, Zynga, the company behind the WWF application on Baldwin’s iPad, was reported to have gotten a boost from all of the publicity about the event that circulated the story.

As a consumer behavior researcher, I’ve often heard the saying “any press is good press.” While my good conscience often doubted this notion at first, I quickly became a believer. Just turn on MTV these days and you will see what I mean (if you haven’t already, that is). It seems as though people are fascinated with shows that are filled with a smorgasbord of bad publicity, including (but not limited to) shows like the Jersey Shore, The Real World, and Celebrity Rehab. Nowadays, it appears that bad publicity is even becoming a type of business strategy for companies, as more and more incidences of scandals leading to increases in sales are becoming the norm.

On a psychological level, researchers argue that the attention-grabbing power of bad publicity is so successful because it is exactly that. When some type of bad publicity incident–be it getting kicked off a plane or being unfaithful like Tiger Woods–is shown over and over again, the story (as well as the main characters) tend to stick with people. Thus, more exposure means more saliency, and the more saliency can mean more audience interest. Combine that with the fact that individuals hold a cognitive bias where they pay attention to negative information more than positive, and you have quite the recipe.

Yet with the increasing value and popularity being placed on bad publicity, are we sending younger, more impressionable individuals in our society the message that doing something outrageously bad is a positive thing? After all, these are the individuals for whom a successful online presence is a priority, and thus might think of any attention as good attention for themselves. Furthermore, how is the trend of bad publicity changing the very values adults attempt to instill upon these individuals at an earlier age?

As an instructor of marketing courses, I often wonder how to solve dilemma of trying to instill a sense of ethics and dignity in my students in the face of a culture that is close to valuing bad publicity. Given that it is becoming so prevalent, I’m often finding bad publicity a topic that is hard to ignore in the classroom. While my original stance on the matter was pure disapproval, I cannot help but think that my students’ perceptions are quite different. Nevertheless, I feel that it is an important issue to discuss to some extent, both in business courses and beyond. After all, these are the future leaders of the world we are educating here.

Filed Under: Culture, Marketing, Media, Uncategorized

The National Conversation

December 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

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?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

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?

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media, What if . . .

Pop Cultural Pop

December 1, 2011 By 2 Comments

Doing pop culture analysis is like trying to carve a tunnel through a mountainside with a spoon. But as a daily rider of public transportation, I can’t help but notice the images that barrage us as we travel from one point to another. It amazes me that we have sold this space to advertisers rather than using it for art, news, or public dialogue.

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.

 

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Style

Grace Paley Occupies Wall Street

November 16, 2011 By 3 Comments

As I read some of the recent commentaries about the politics of space, Occupy Wall Street, and Zuccotti Park– “private space gone public”– I’m continually distracted by a very different pin on the map of the city grid: The War Resister’s League National Office, at 339 Lafayette Street, affectionately known as the “Peace Pentagon.” I thought of that hulking corner building as I read a review of the book Oppose and Propose!: Lessons from Movement for a New Society by Andrew Cornell in the latest issue of WIN, the understated magazine of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization that has been working for nonviolent change for nearly a century. The reviewer, Sachio Ko-yin, describes the consensus-building model that drew him into his first War Resisters League National Committee meeting in the 1990s:

“What impressed us most at the meeting was the complex consensus process called a spokescounsel, where power flowed from coordinated small groups to a synthesis process. Here was an organization that was resisting the war state…”

The “spokescounsel” Ko-yin describes sounds quite similar to the processes governing Occupy Wall Street. Christopher’s recent post enumerated the unique communication methods of the OWS protesters—hand signals, mic checks, labored consensus building through mediated dialogue. Ko-yin’s review reminded me that the rush to compare Wall Street occupiers with Tahrir Square dissenters sometimes obscures a grounding in a much closer and richer history– to the peace movement right here in the United States. In method, strategy, communication, and character, the whole Occupy enterprise borrows generously from the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements.

Photo by Ed Hedemann

While many locate its direct origins with those independent culturejammers, Adbusters—very true!— the broader lineage of OWS remains aggressively pastiche. JoAnn Wypijewski’s recent ditty in The Nation draws a surprisingly fluid connection: through the more corporeal emphases of the Occupy Movement, she argues that critics itching for ‘demands’ from this movement “need only pay attention, because like the women’s health movement in the 1970s, the AIDS solidarity network that evolved from it in the ’80s, Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs embody their demands.” Each of these examples, however, suggest activist groups that have faded with the shifting priorities of the moment. The Peace Pentagon is a powerful symbol of the workers who have kept the peace movement humming along, toiling away– and frequently getting arrested– for decades.

I was interested, then, to see the Peace Pentagon mentioned– and not– in a recent New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about Global Revolution,  a media collective that acts as “the switchboard” for the live coverage of the OWS protests across the nation. “The revolution is being streamed from a dilapidated second story office in NoHo,” the author, Andrew Marantz, explains, mentioning only the A.J. Muste Institute, a pacifist organization founded in 1974, skipping over the fact that it was the War Resisters League (WRL) that originally purchased it in 1969 and created the Institute to maintain it. The Institute leases office space to Global Revolution for a mere $400 a month. In this way, they have fanned the embers of resistance activity in this real estate mad metropolis: the Institute provides cheap space to many of the dendrite-like organizations of the OWS movement.

But the WRL itself isn’t mentioned in the article; Marantz quotes the fellow behind the live streaming, who jokes that he’s overstayed his welcome: “the building’s owners should have known this would happen when they invited us, but we have sort of occupied the space.” (I’m quite sure, sir, that they have seen it all.) Marantz– no doubt hemmed in by a word limit– makes no mention of the fact that this dilapidated building is host to any number of activist organizations, many of whom are playing a role in OWS. The video below goes a long way in explaining the significance of 339 Lafayette Street for New York City’s activist communities– with a list of concerns and passions as wide and varied as those of OWS. (A partial list of their past and present tenants can be found here– it includes the Catholic Peace Fellowship, The Grannie Peace Brigade, Peace Action, Grey Panthers, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Metropolitan Council on Housing, GI Resistance, Health Care Now. To name just a few.)

But there’s another face of the WRL that I see reflected in the OWS protests: Grace Paley, the wonderful writer of short stories and active member of the War Resisters League who passed away in 2007. During my first trip to see what all the hubaloo at OWS was about, I immediately noticed the Granny Peace Brigade members there. The Grannies were wearing the sort protest-sign-smock-vests that made me think immediately of a famous image of Grace—her author photo from the back of her essay collection, Just as I Thought:

Photo by Jackie Snow

Photo by Dorothy Marder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While her exquisite stories of quotidian heart break are widely celebrated, Grace Paley was also famous—and sometimes infamous—for protesting much and writing little. Vietnam, nuclear arms, municipal stupidity: all ranked worthy among her protest causes and efforts. In 1979, Grace was fined $100 for unfurling a banner against nuclear energy during a protest on the lawn of the White House; in the 1980s, it was the Women’s Pentagon Action. As Marianne Hirsch explains in her article about Grace’s myriad contributions, Grace was a member of many activist groups that refused to be quiet about the connections they saw between racism, sexism, heterosexism, the disregard of the environment and unfettered militarism. Much of Paley’s advocacy work focused on the military budget, but this was before the disparity between rich and poor had grown to such mammoth proportions. Yet Grace even then was linking economic injustice with the plights of our urban areas: “Our cities have already been effectively bombed by the military budget,” Grace said. “Billions of dollars are put into what’s called defense, while the needs of the people are neglected.”

But back to the War Resisters League. Taking the omission from the Talk of the Town piece as a kind of provocation, I did a quick search of the New Yorker archives for mentions of the WRL, which turned up some interesting (and also brief) mentions of the organization: 2003 war protests in Times Square, demonstrations after the nuclear accident on Three Mile Island in 1979, and a 1973 article about the Vietnam cease-fire, which included an interview with David McReynolds, a field secretary for the WRL at the time.

Armed Forces Day Parade, 1979. Photo: Grace Hedemann.

McReynolds also appears in the Peace Pentagon video above. (In describing the significance of 339 Lafayette Street, he gives voice to ideas that apply easily to OWS– especially in its ability to link causes such as labor with the principles of anti-violence and an international viewpoint.) McReynolds had been working to bring the war to an end since 1961, the year of the first American casualties; the New Yorker asked him what he thought would become of the peace movement:

“…The underlying problems of an unrestrained Presidency and a huge military establishment remain. It’s true that the war in Vietnam was an outgrowth of American history and character but so is the anti-war movement. There is a great tradition in America of independence of judgment and resistance to tyranny.”

 

Filed Under: Culture, Media, New York Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Nonverbal Communication

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In 1957, James Vicary proclaimed that a movie theater in Fort Lee, NJ was broadcasting subliminal messages to viewers. More specifically, he claimed that ads flashing for 0.03 seconds for Coca-Cola and popcorn had led to an increase in sales for those items in the weeks following. As a result, the CIA subsequently banned anything that came remotely close to subliminal advertising. However, when challenged to replicate the results of this study, Vicary failed to do so, and had been deemed a hoax for decades.

Courtesy of featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Although the real results of Vicary’s study remained inconclusive, more recent work has suggested that things for which we are not fully aware can indeed influence our behavior. For example, a series of studies on “nonconscious influences”  has suggested that stimuli that are too fast or otherwise weak for our sensory organs to consciously perceive may nevertheless still have a powerful effect on our thoughts and behavior. In one study in particular, researchers exposed some study participants to either an Apple logo or an IBM logo by flashing it in front of them on a screen for 2 miliseconds, below the point of conscious perception. Later, when asked to come up for uses for a brick (as a creativity assessment), the researchers found that participants who had been primed with the Apple computer logo were much more creative than those primed with the IBM logo. They reasoned that this happened because of the association between the Apple brand and creativity.

In addition to this study, there have been many other instances in which individuals’ behavior was shaped by stimuli with which they were nonconsciously primed with (and instead of providing the details of each of these studies here, googling “nonconscious influences” will lead you to find much of them). While the implications of all these findings are endless, I believe it is important to consider the consequences that nonconscious influences can have on our (and especially our students’) behavior. In a previous post, I noted how the average American is exposed to roughly 5,000 advertisements in a single day.

If the research findings in the nonconscious influence area have any merit, it’s easy to imagine the potential effects this can have. Although we try to teach our students well, we are also competing with 5,000 other stimuli they are exposed to, a majority of which they are not even aware they are perceiving. Perhaps it not our students’ fault when we get writing assignments that we deem to be “too dry” and uncreative. They may have been written on an IBM computer.

Although the issue of nonconscious influences may be a hugely complex phenomenon, I have often asked myself the question of whether there is something that I can learn from all this research, and use it to ultimately help my students in their academic endeavors. Ideally, I would love to have pictures of the Apple logo in every classroom I teach, but that doesn’t seem too reasonable or feasible, or even ethically sound. Additionally, if we educate students about the possibility of nonconscious influences on their behavior, is it even remotely likely that anything would change? And if so, what do we tell them short of cutting themselves off from all media? Thus, I invite others to provide their thoughts on this issue.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Marketing, Media, Non-verbal Communication, teaching, What if . . .

Rite of Myself

November 1, 2011 By 4 Comments

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This Saturday I will perform a solo work called Rite of the Butcher at the United Solo Festival at Theatre Row near Times Square. I want to take this opportunity not just to plug the performance but to write briefly about it from a perspective I do not usually share: not the aesthetics of the work, not its relationship to other forms of theatrical and embodied research, not the technique that underlies it or the poetic language that structures it — but its meaning for me personally. Why do I do it?

Creating a work like this not only doesn’t pay but costs money. I have paid the festival to produce me and several studios to house my rehearsals over the past year, not to mention videography and a few other purchases here and there: things like a carving knife, a pair of round blue glasses, and a hem on the cuffs of a pair of black pants. And beyond the monetary cost there is a huge number of hours spent mostly in the studio developing and rehearsing the score. Plus the administrative work of applying for venues like this festival and of doing publicity for the show.

I no longer think of myself as an actor because I have not performed in a work directed by someone else since 2005. I have no interest in auditioning or being shaped and directed as actors and dancers usually are. Even in collaborative ensembles I always found myself unsatisfied on an intellectual and artistic level. I simply don’t like embodying performance scores unless I feel that I have been in on their development since the beginning. That’s why I’ve never trained in yoga or martial arts for more than a few months at a time. It’s not mine.

This sense of “mine-ness” could seem greedy or controlling, except that the thing that is mine does not exist, it is not an object, it cannot be possessed. In fact it’s not really “mine-ness” so much as “me-ness”. I want to do what I am; to be what I do; to know what I’m doing; to understand how and why I am doing it. In other words, I want to be the creator and the doer simultaneously. That’s why I can’t be an actor or a director, and why I don’t think of myself as a theater person even though I spend most of my time either creating or writing about theatrical performance. That’s also why for the past six years I have worked either alone or with a single other person in a long-term collaborative partnership.

From 2002 to 2010, I didn’t like to think of what I was doing as “theater” because I associated theater with the moment of spectacle and with a relationship to a public sphere that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in. These days, perhaps due to my academic work, I have a much stronger but more complicated sense of the public sphere. It no longer feels ridiculous or absurd to want to appear “in public” as doing something: writing a book, making a presentation, or giving a performance. I no longer dismiss the public sphere as entirely dominated by consumerism, even if mainstream entertainment and advertising remain omnipresent and nearly omnipotent.

But still I do not like to think of this performance as a “show”. That word for me remains stuck in too many dangerous connotations: above all, the passiveness or at least separateness of the spectator, as if what I am doing onstage is categorically different from what each of us does in our daily lives. It is not. My movements are just movements. My songs are just songs. My words are just words. Do not look at what I am doing for its strangeness. Do not admire it as a decorative object. Do not ask what I mean to say but what it means that I am doing it. Ask why I am doing it and look in it for what you recognize as your own. I do this because the details of this practice are me; they are what I am. But we all have practices, we all entwine ourselves in the details of specific field, and this is what makes the world go round.

More and more I think it is fundamental to remember how much of our world is created and sustained by human activity. The more artificial our world becomes, the easier it is to forget this and to think that the world sustains itself. But the family, the city, the institution, the social movement, the corporation, the bank, the court of law, the country, the tribe — each of these is created through embodied practices. Each is sustained through human work, and each can be dismantled or transformed in the same way. What would happen if, when we looked at things, we saw the work that went into them? Not the performance, but the performer — not the building, but the builders — not the institution, but the people.

[Photos by Ian Douglas. Rite of the Butcher created and performed by Ben Spatz. For more information and other projects please visit Urban Research Theater.]

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Media, Music, New York, Politics, Presentations, Process, Writing

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

Interactive Fiction

September 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The other day, a story came across my newsfeed that caught my attention: The King of Shreds and Patches, a new work of “interactive fiction” by Jimmy Maher, was being released for the Kindle. This news should not have elicited a strong response from me, even with its reference to Shakespeare. After all, I like to think of myself as an old-school computer game aficionado (read: nerd), and “interactive fiction” was nothing new. Long before computers could display the immersive, three-dimensional worlds of the currently popular Halo franchise, before even the side-scrolling two-dimensional triumph of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, even before the disorienting dimensionality of Pac-Man (Was the maze an overhead view or ground plan? If so, why do we see Pac-Man and the ghosts in profile?) there was the genre of the text adventure.

The initial page for Colossal Cave/Adventure

This origin of this genre is shrouded in mystery, so much so that there is not even agreement on the first game’s title. Sometimes it was known as Colossal Cave, other times merely Adventure—an unassuming name that belies its importance in the history of the genre. However it was titled, this text adventure required players to read screens full of descriptions as they descended into a seemingly endless cavern (actually, the game only contained 130 pages of rooms, but it seemed endless). Players would then interact with the text by typing their own instructions that directed the narrative, such as examine lamp, go south, take box, or use key. The grammar of the interaction wasn’t very complex, only two word phrases consisting of verb-noun, but it did allow for open-ended attempts to make the computer “understand” the player’s intentions.

 

Infocom Hitchhiker's Box Front

The box (including a bit of advice) from my favorite text adventure

 

For me, the pinnacle of the text adventure genre will always be Infocom’s adaptation of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There were other text adventures by Infocom that I played, like the extremely popular Zork series or the supposedly simpler Wishbringer, but the game based on Douglas Adams’s very English science fiction humor radio plays and novels captured my attention in a way no other game has. With a more highly developed language parser than Colossal Cave/Adventure, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was able to take complex, more natural language, instruction from the player. Many of the puzzles in this game required sentences with multiple subjects and direct or indirect objects. The level of interactivity even included the game making fun of the player for misspellings or grammar mistakes (at one point, the game cannot advance until the player completes a subplot based on a typo that concludes with the admonition, “You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.”). Text adventures became one of my favorite genres of computer games. Not only did most of them play perfectly well on my older computer, but they seemed to me to be deeper and better written than most of the high-graphics games of the early nineties which mainly consisted of running and jumping. The niche genre has continued to exist, even in the age of games with cinematic graphics. Although no longer called text adventure, “interactive fiction” continues to be written and published on the internet.

Choose your own adventure

A well-worn Choose Your Own Adventure book

Up to now, I have been writing about games played on a computer. Interactive fiction exists in non-digital form, too. When I was young, I checked out every Choose Your Own Adventure book that our local libraries stocked. Written in second-person perspective, every few pages these books would present the reader a choice of two or more actions with directions to turn to a specific page depending on which action was chosen. This series changed my relationship to reading. No longer was the reader beholden to the order set down by the author or publisher, starting at page one and reading through to the end. They were required to physically manipulate the book, turning back and forth, bookmarking particularly difficult choices in order to try all alternatives. Interactive reading was not relegated to the virtual world of the computer, but could travel with you in the form of a very well-thumbed paperback.

Nabokov at Stella's

Interactive literature, the later years

When I became too old for the reading level of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, I thought my tastes had matured. But in college, I was giddy to discover Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a more highbrow, literary version of interactive fiction. In a complex shadow of my techniques for dealing with the multiple paths of my childhood’s Choose Your Own Adventure books, I followed the footnotes left by “Kinbote,” bookmarking page after page in the futile attempt to find my way back from running off after a sub-footnote to a digression. No two experiences, except perhaps a boring straight-through reading or a very systematic approach, of Pale Fire would be the same.

As I entered more serious academic studies, the source of Nabokov’s humor for his novel in endless footnotes became apparent. I would find myself tracking source after source, reading footnote references sometimes more intently than the article to which those little superscript numbers were attached. Was this also a form of interactive literature?

Pardon my digression—the influence of a certain Dr. Charles Kinbote, perhaps?—but originally I was writing about my surprise at being surprised by Jimmy Maher’s The King of Shreds and Patches. Obviously, there have been over thirty years of computer games within the interactive fiction genre. There also exist books that utilize a similar interactive structure, requiring choices to be made by the reader. And in my research, “engaging with the text” became a key tool of the trade. Therefore, novelty was not the reason that this particular work caught my attention.

Was it the fact that this was an ebook, rather than a computer “game” or traditional “book” where I had seen this interactivity before? No, I had seen other interactive ebooks on other devices. I am thinking specifically of the iPad with its touchscreen interface. The iPad has plethora of children’s ebooks that border on fully animated cartoons. There are also annotated Shakespeare titles that allow for pop-up line notes, instantaneous modern language translations, or dictionary definitions of obscure Elizabethan terms. You can take extensive notes and mark up the page of a book using your finger, a stylus, or keyboard. While the Kindle does allow for rudimentary note-taking and highlighting, ebooks on an iPad are much more “interactive” than this one.

The Suck

Consumption technology?

Why, then, did this particular title catch my attention? To answer this, we must look to the marketing of the iPad and the Kindle. In the past few years, media technology has been divided into two categories: media production and media consumption. The desktop and laptop computers are classified as “production” technology—those devices designed for writing, editing, publishing, and generally creating works. “Consumption” technology—like the mp3 player, ebook reader, or video playback device—are for listening, reading, or watching the media created on “production” technology. In between, but still leaning toward “consumption,” are smartphones and tablets—while still primarily used to receive media, these devices are capable of some level of “production.” If Maher had released his work a smartphone, tablet, or computer, I would not be as likely to have noticed. This is evidenced by the fact that earlier versions of The King of Shreds and Patches were originally published for computer and even won interactive fiction industry awards, and yet it did not grab my attention.

Cognitive dissonance caused me to pay attention to this new “ebook.” Years of marketing and specific use as a “consumption” technology trained me to think of the Kindle as a passive distributor of media. I had attempted to buy one a while back, but the inability to take handwritten marginal notes—a very academic form of low “production” technology necessary to grad school reading—made me look to tablets for my particular ebook needs. I had written off the Kindle as incapable of “production” technology. Therefore, when I read about The King of Shreds and Patches where the reader has some control over the narrative, the astonishment came from my perception that a “consumption” device has transformed—even if ever so slightly—into a “production” device.

Now the question remains, is this a game or a book? Am I playing or reading? As the clear lines between production and consumption technologies blur, the terms we use to describe our modes of interaction also change. I had no doubts in writing the above sections that I was “playing text adventure games” and “reading Nabokov’s book,” but Maher’s ebook confuses things. On Amazon.com, the work is marketed as “an interactive novel for Kindle.” While on the writer’s website, it is alternately described as a “game file” and “story file,” both of which are “played,” rather than “read.” Maybe you “play” the story as you play a drama rather than a game. Or, perhaps, in the end, I will just end up playing it on a laptop while reading it on a Kindle.

Photo Credits: Colossal Cave/Adventure, from Wikimedia Commons. Hitchhiker’s Guide, photo credit: John Morton. Choose Your Own Adventure, photo credit: Ian Kershaw. Pale Fire, photo credit: mabel.sound. Consuming Technology, photo credit: Big Fat Rat. King of Shreds and Patches, credit: Antiquarian Productions.

Filed Under: Media, Technology

At Home in the City

September 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Finding a place to live is a complicated, essential, bittersweet, sometimes unexpectedly profound part of living in a big city. Having spent the past two weeks touring Brooklyn in an apartment search, I feel newly connected and newly aware of the patchwork fabric of diversity and interconnectedness that is our shared urban world.

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.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Media, New York, Politics
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