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.

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

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

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

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

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

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

2008 Electoral Map

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

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

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

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

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

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

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

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

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

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

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

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

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

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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.

“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.]

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?

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

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).

Some low-tech social networking?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

In all three scenarios, we heard from leaders and experts assume the mantle of authority to dissuade the panic-stricken from questioning our energy economy, or–gasp!–suggesting we make meaningful moves towards alternatives. These ‘accidents,’ as the NYT itself terms them, continue to be framed as matters of risk management, regulation, and oversight.

Let me suggest a different take the environmental and health risks of nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, and mine explosions are not technical failures but political ones. The expertise and ownership infrastructures necessitated and supported by these industries are what have produced “irrational fears about risk.” Why do we live in a world where people don’t know what processes power their lightbulbs, washing machines, and computers? We need a renewed global conversation about energy, technology, and democracy now.

As a colleague of mine reminded me recently, this conversation has precedents: see Ivan Illich’s 1973 essay “Energy and Equity”. A pithy excerpt:

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and “cold turkey”—between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps—but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

I want to draw attention to the ideological blindspots hidden in the notion that ‘natural disasters’ bring people together under the banner of humanitarianism. This is the imperative sense of our moral responsibility (‘response-ability,’ as John framed it), and there is nothing wrong with it: we need ever more of this kind of altruism and less cynicism. But the thing about natural disasters is how they naturalize many aspects of our world that are not natural. In fact, we see this view as a smokescreen for all kinds of new projects of class power, as documented in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. As geographer Neil Smith noted about Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that effectively functioned as a mass eviction of poor people in New Orleans, “far from flattening the social differences, disaster reconstruction invariably cuts deeper the ruts and grooves of social oppression and exploitation.”

This brings up the question I posed before: what kind of horror-movie is contemporary capitalist society? Comedian Patton Oswalt offered three possibilities: zombies, spaceships, wastelands. In the midst of the current Japanese calamity, it seems appropriate to call for the return of the monster movie.

"Om nom nom nom"

Many American audiences enjoyed and dismissed Godzilla as a campy sci-fi flick and thus missed its scathing critique of the nuclear age. The monster, a symbol of science gone berserk, appeared in cinemas in 1954, the same year as the thermonuclear detonation on Bikini Island. “Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood,” notes Peter Wynn Kirby. (Interestingly, a new monster film by Guillermo Del Toro, ‘Pacific Rim,’ has come under pressure to ensure ‘insensitive’ references to Japan being attacked are excised from the screenplay.) I wonder what idiom the political mobilization against the excesses of the science/energy industrial complex might have to develop to capture people’s attention the way Godzilla did in the 1950s.

So, I am concerned and skeptical about the attempts to silence political debate under the rubric of “we must all band together in a crisis.” Human beings as a global society are transforming the earth to the extent that our collective activities are increasingly entangled with so-called natural processes. Some have harkened in this era as the ‘Anthropocene.’ Perhaps there is no way back, but there must be a different way forward.

Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

Image from http://wwww.threeimaginarygirls.com/files/uploaded-images/wolverines.jpg

Image from http://www.bigchicosmovieblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/red-dawn.jpg

Quite possibly the best mix of Patrick Swayze Jennifer Grey mix pre-Dirty Dancing, Red Dawn was actually the stuff of my nightmares! Imagine getting to Brooklyn all the way from Kabul and seeing this movie — it opens with paratroopers landing by the high school just as the teacher finishes up a lecture on the invading Mongol hordes!

This 1984 teen film was released right around the time that the Soviet-Afghan war was at its thickest and Afghans were winning popular American support. You can see the connection in these two photos I’ve juxtaposed — the first, the Wolverines (brave rebels fighting Nicuaraguans, Cubans and Russians who were invading the U.S.) and then the Mujahideen (brave warriors fighting the Soviets and given their own Afghanistan Day by Reagan in 1987)

Image from http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6100000/Red-Dawn-1984-80s-films-6130207-1024-768.jpg

It’s like the cast of The Outsiders and St. Elmo’s Fire merged and were given military weapons.

Photo by Jonas Dovydenas

See the similarities… okay so the Afghan Mujahideen are not wearing letterman jackets and posing on bleachers, but you get it! In this photo, the Mujahideen are photographed in the Kunar Province, 1985.

Image from http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/reddawn.jpg

This one is in the mountains — come on way too similar to 80s photos of the Mujahideen!

Image from http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/reza_p57%5B1%5D.jpg

One of the most famous Mujahideen glory era photos of Ahmad Shah Masood by the famous international photographer, Reza.

Image from http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4asx7ilAA1qzzh6g.jpg

Not sure if die-hard Red Dawn fans will buy this connection. I’ve already had one facebook comment war with a friend from high school who was vehement that Red Dawn had nothing to do with the Mujahideen. But… you and I know better.

Image from http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/02/10/reddawn120704.jpg

It’s all fun and games till the commies conquer the McDonalds! What could happen next? Silver Spoons in Russian?!!

Red Dawn (1984)

Now onto the remake, which has its own issues of being Sinophobic. Honestly, I thought the easiest step would be to make invading Turbanismo Warriors. But apparently, they decided to have the Chinese invading America. Some have said that it’s anti-Asian sentiment may have even canceled it. Hmmm… maybe it would have been better to invest in a remake of Robocop?

“The King’s Speech” is getting dismissed a bit by observers as ‘just’ a historical drama, a costume piece, and a buddy movie (the king and his speech therapist). It does, however, offer some interesting implicit speculation on what kind of king Edward VIII, friendly to Germany, might have been had he not abdicated. “The Social Network” presents a slice of history as well, albeit an incredibly recent one. The fact that the historical moment “The Social Network” explores is so recent certainly highlights the remarkably fast evolution and impact of social networking technologies. Is it because evolution in communications is so rapid, intense, and ongoing, that “The Social Network” manages to pull out the drama of a recent moment as clearly as if it were a costume piece and we’d had decades to process it? Or maybe it’s just the great job that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did with the screenplay, which also won an Oscar.

“The King’s Speech” deals with politics, and “The Social Network” with academia and the business world, but both of them are ultimately about relationships, the human element that should not get lost in the shuffle when we think about information and communication technologies. With Twitter and Facebook in the news daily as part of the political upheavals occurring in the Middle East, it’s worthwhile to remember that communication is about people, even when technology is their conduit. Twitter isn’t toppling oppressive regimes; it is people who are already energized for change, using it as one tool to communicate, who are effecting that change.  “The King’s Speech” isn’t about radio, it’s about a lonely king as Eliza Doolittle and his pal the speech therapist as Henry Higgins. And “The Social Network” isn’t just about the origins of the social networking tool Facebook. To me, it says much more about social class and exclusion; it could be an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel, for the pitfalls of social climbing and hubris it explores so poignantly.

Both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” are really good movies, both about relationships and communications, and extremely well-done.  “The King’s Speech” was heavily favored, but “The Social Network” was my pick, and not just because of its relevance, nor the fact that social media are observably impacting our lives every day. It’s just a compelling narrative, and I loved the ending, which imagines Zuckerberg sitting at his computer hitting Refresh every few seconds, hoping that the girl who rejected him will ‘friend’ him now on Facebook.

You know what’s cool?  [Hint:  it's not a billion dollars.]  What’s cool is a timeless story about human frailty, and about the imperative we all feel, as social beings, to communicate and connect with others.  Both movies offer that in spades.

photo credit: smemon87

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been following with some curiosity the groundswell of blogosphere rage  following Camille Paglia’s attempted takedown of Lady Gaga in the Sunday Times. (A few of the many examples here, here, and here.) Each day for the past week or so, every glance at Twitter or my RSS feed yields up another vehement rebuttal, attacking Paglia’s thesis (an admittedly shaky one, centering on the disembodied asexuality of Gaga and her generation) and Paglia herself (comments range from critiques of her archaic interpretations of feminism to pretty vulgar bursts of outright misogyny). Given Gaga’s immense popular appeal, as well as the fact that she’s become a novel cultural “text” to be continually unraveled by and for the academic community (she’s even the subject of a self-described, hagiographically-titled academic journal, Gaga Stigmata), this is unsurprising.

But the more I read, the less interested I became in analyzing Paglia’s argument and its various deconstructions, and the more I began to speculate whether more effective writing on Paglia’s part might have won a few more readers over to her side. Respondents parsed her arguments (fairly accurately, it seems) without critiquing her actual writing. But the writing itself fails to function as the academic work of cultural criticism it’s framed as, structurally and syntactically. It’s rife with generalizations—and dated ones, at that (ie., Gaga is often seen “tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up,” with a “bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves,” and a face that’s “creepy” as it mouths “insipid” lyrics). Tucked amid dangling modifiers and abrupt transitions, her generalizations shift in the direction of Gaga’s demographic, a generation of “atrophied” voices forced to “communicate mutely through a stream of atomized, telegraphic text messages.” Of course, this generation comprises Paglia’s students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she teaches media studies—ostensibly without attempting to understand new conventions in communication. I have to wonder, though—does she understand the old ones, either?

People like the main character’s ex-wife Betty, and his colleague Pete Campbell, have particularly stiff and proper speech styles that frankly sound somewhat phony today.  Does Pete Campbell’s proper speech style ring true for 1965, in terms of his character’s background and aspirations?  Like Data on Star Trek, Pete doesn’t even use contractions [I mean, he does not], and uses what Zimmer calls “minced oaths,” like hell’s bells and judas priest.

An interesting part of this conversation concerns what evidence the writers might properly use to reconstruct the reality of speech from the ’60s.  Would the letters people wrote in that era be a good measure?  How about popular film?  After deciding that letters would be too different from spoken language, they consider that movie dialogue is an unreliable indicator, too. Social pressures may have pushed screenwriters and actors to make it all sound more proper than everyday speech actually did in those days.

So what spoken language examples could you find then for casual speech from that era, as a point of comparison?  John McWhorter suggests a radio show that recorded people when they did not realize they were being overheard, Candid Microphone, a precursor to Candid Camera.    Having listened to these old recordings, he thinks that, except for some now outdated expressions, ordinary people in those days — “in terms of sloppiness,” and slang, and cursing — sounded just like us.

I was trying to remember how my own parents spoke in those days. My parents were from the deep south and spoke with heavy southern accents, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t sound like the New Yorkers on Mad Men. In fact, cursing was considered so unladylike in the south that I never heard my mother swear at all. It was also bad form for a family man, so my father cleaned up his epithets to things like “Flitter!” Sounds as quaint as hell’s bells in retrospect.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend  “Texts Without Contexts,” an essay from this past March by literary critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times books section.  Kakutani begins with a review of many of the challenges involved with production of media in our time, including reviews of texts new and old that challenge the boundaries of copyright law.

I found this part interesting, but was most struck by the next section, beginning with the following:

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Kakutani focuses on intellectual, cultural, and social changes associated with the consumption of media.   She is not writing about teaching students how to read and research, but it is not difficult to see the implications for the classroom, as well as for graduate-level research, and the general communication challenges we grapple with on this blog.