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

Human vs. Technological Amplification

November 22, 2011 By 5 Comments

I originally planned to write this post about the difference in communication between human and technological means. Specifically, I was going to look at the use of the people’s mic and police bullhorns as exemplified by the events on October 1 at the Brooklyn Bridge. While the group had been using the people’s mic to amplify communication within itself and to outsiders, the police used a single bullhorn. In a letter on behalf of the people kettled that day, lawyers argue that the bullhorn was unintelligible.

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

CUNY Police Attack Student Protesters from keith on Vimeo.

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

His Master's Amplified Voice

Filed Under: Administration, Audience, Baruch College, CUNY, Interpersonal Communication, New York, Oral Communication, Technology, Uncategorized

Stay, Staying, Sted? Who is Teaching these Kids Grammar?!

November 9, 2011 By 8 Comments

Note: It is somewhat hypocritical for me to complain about people’s grammar. A member of my dissertation committee has repeatedly urged me to purchase a grammar book and alludes that my unedited writing is annoying.

I’m not ready to declare the death of the English language and literature yet, but my faith has been shaken twice in the past week at my local Bay Ridge Starbucks. The first occasion involved a loud group of teenage girls trashing the novel “Catcher in the Rye.”  “Ugh…It is like the worst book ever.” Yeah. It is not even about anything.  Terrible!”  I quickly stifled my first reaction which was to curse them out for disparaging a brilliant book that ought to speak to the alienation they feel as young people.  Instead I just took a deep breath, and imagined myself as a cranky old curmudgeon in a rocking chair muttering about kids these days and just continued writing. Who am I to defend J.D Salinger anyway? I didn’t even know who he was until my mid-twenties.

Where did the ducks go?
Creative Commons License photo credit: BRNFRRR

Yesterday, it happened again. There I was sitting on the couch working on a grant proposal (edited by my girlfriend whose first language is not English, but whose technical grammar runs circles around my own, but I will get to that…) when four high school students  piled onto the large couch next to me.  The usual teen activities of passing around each others cell phones and talking about fake IDs was soon replaced by a heated debate over what the past tense of the verb “to stay” was. One girl argued at it was “obviously ‘sted’” two of the teens were unsure and didn’t offer opinions leaving only one guy arguing that it was “stayed.” I kept working on my own writing until the group had decided that an impartial arbiter was necessary so the “sted” girl asked me, “you’ll know this, “sted” is a word right? Like they left, but I sted, at his house.” I said no, that the right word was “stayed.” She looked at me surprised.  English was this girl’s first language, and probably her only one.  This wasn’t a case of an irregular form of the verb, just a simple –ed ending. So what is happening?

Could it be that my local high school is particularly awful? Technology is frequently blamed for the impending doom of proper English. I don’t think it is the problem.  There were serious worries about the telegraph ruining English prose by making it terse and choppy. That never happened. As this NPR story shows, the introduction of new communication technologies has not destroyed the English language. As evidenced by the fact that here you are reading my (mostly) proper English.

Teens are not using texting abbreviations when writing college placement exams so it appears according to researchers and I have never received student work with “OMG.” In fact, even text messages students send me often begin “Hello Professor.”  I’m convinced there is enough of a moat around formal English to protect it. Actually, this boundary is enforced by both teacher and student as I learned last semester when I  wrote “LOL” in my comments on a student’s essay. What she wrote was absurd, involving surveying people during a refugee crisis about what their favorite foods are.  I really did laugh out loud. When I handed the papers back, the students giggled at my use of such unprofessional language. I countered that, just days prior, LOL had been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and therefore my use of it was completely acceptable, though perhaps a sign of the apocalypse. This only got me laughed at for even knowing that bit of trivia.

I still struggle with my grammar, but being in my 8th year of a PhD, my writing is much better than it used to be.  The problem is that no one ever taught me formal grammar, or at least I never learned it.  The emphasis, especially when I was in high school was on literature and creative writing. When I am feeling grammatically inadequate, I joke that I was taught grammar by hippies:

Youth Culture - Hippies 1960s
Creative Commons License photo credit: brizzle born and bred

[Flutes playing and birds tweeting in the background] “just write, just get your feelings on paper, don’t worry about the punctuation.” It is partially true. One of my favorite teachers wore Birkenstock sandals, had a ponytail and introduced me to amazing socially conscious books and how to write passionately, albeit without commas. I had a great time writing in high school, got A’s in English, but then got to college and discovered that I was clueless especially when it came to commas and semicolons, and passive vs. active voice… forget about it.

Many students are escaping formal grammar instruction or at least it is not sticking. There is quite a debate over how grammar should be taught, when and if at all.   Some students are not taught it in school or home school.  So unless the “Ellis Christian Academy” extends its K-3 program to college, this little girl may have as hard of a time as I did when I presented my passionately written run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to college professors who were not at all impressed.

So why don’t we teach grammar? And when it is taught, why aren’t students learning it? How can we explain the large numbers of college students who have poor grammar if we don’t blame the usual suspects, technology and “kids are just lazy these days?” What can we do to make sure that students as they are entering the job market can properly write a cover letter, or an email.  I think part of the problem is that no one is telling students why they need to know where a semicolon goes or the difference between “affect” and “effect” (something I learned last year finally, I think…) I explained it this way which got a few wide-eyed looks and raised eyebrows: “if you all don’t learn how to write properly, you will not get hired. Your peers are not hiring you, people like me are, and I am not impressed.”  Ugh…I have become the professors I hated in college.

Filed Under: Language, Technology, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

Occupying the Brooklyn Bridge

October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Normally, after I teach a four-hour class on Staten Island, which takes me two hours to get to and two hours to get back from, I go straight home and take a nap. But there’s no denying that something special is in the air these days, and since the Express Bus passes by Wall Street in any case, I thought I would go and have a look at the most exciting potential social movement since the 2003 anti-war protests.

The iconic image of Seattle '99. All other photos (below) were taken today with my little phone camera.

I had only been living in New York City for a couple of years when the Bush government began a palpable build-up towards the war in Iraq. The 2003 protests were much larger, perhaps because there was a single clear and urgent demand uniting us and bringing us into the streets: Do not invade Iraq. But the urgency and poignancy of this demand was matched by a sense of inevitability as it became apparent that our country could and would start a war in Iraq despite our attempts to stop it.

Protesters and cops on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Despite the fact that I believe profoundly in a politics of social protest and radical democracy, I’ve always found it hard to participate on more than an occasional basis. On a personal level, I’ve often found the act of protest unsatisfying. It’s not precise, well-crafted, or efficient. I believe in it, but I’ve always want to be part of something more clearly defined, something within which I could have a clear role and a clear set of responsibilities. As a result I have pursued an artistic practice and eventually academic studies: areas where I could set long-term goals for myself and feel I had some chance of achieving them.

But I think I may have been wrong. Maybe social movements are, in their own way, precise and well-crafted and efficient. Maybe it is possible to find or make a clear role for oneself in a social movement. Maybe it is possible to set long-term goals. Maybe the problem for me in 2003 wasn’t that protest didn’t make sense to me but that it couldn’t provide me with a living. Now that I have a more stable income, at least for the time being, and now that my artistic practice is also more secure, I wonder again how my life and my work could be made to serve more directly political ends.

The police begin a long process of peaceful arrests.

I had barely arrived in Zuccotti Park when the 3:00pm march began. The crowd flowed uptown as a line of police kept our chanting and placards confined to the sidewalk. “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK! OCCUPY WALL STREET!” Not one but several double decker tour buses passed alongside the protesters. We cheered at them and sometimes they cheered back. The mood was festive. “BANKS GOT BAILED OUT! WE GOT SOLD OUT!” A woman with a tape recorder briefly interviewed me: “Do you feel proud of these people?” Yes.

We filled up the entire sidewalk, making it difficult for non-protesters to get through. There were cameras everywhere. One man spoke into his own tape recorder, calling the crowd “inspired and eclectic.” He was right. Although there was a substantial portion of visibly punk-influenced protesters, they were not the majority. There were plenty of older folk and a range of dress styles including a few people in suits. “TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” From where I stood the group seemed predominantly white, but by no means entirely.

Protesters stopped traffic on the bridge.

I was surprised when I saw in front of me that the protest was headed up onto the Brooklyn Bridge. I had thought we would circle back to the park or perhaps head up towards Union Square as I knew happened recently. What was the plan here? Were we going to walk to Brooklyn? What would we do once we got there? But it didn’t really matter. A point was being made. We were walking. We were appearing. I wanted to be part of this appearance. As I told the woman with the tape recorder, I don’t have any expectations, but I do have a hope. I hope this is the beginning of a new social movement.

I followed the line of protesters onto the pedestrian walkway and we began to cross over the bridge. Then, slowly, I began to realize that there was another group of protesters below us on the other level. They were down there with the cars. And the cars were stopping. At first traffic was reduced to two lanes, then one. Finally it came to a halt. “WE ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! YOU ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT!” At least two hundred protesters jammed the bridge, making it impassable. It was an electric moment, one that seemed not to have been anticipated either by the protesters or by police.

Detained protesters are lined up on the side of the bridge, separated from the rest.

We were taking over the bridge.

From the pedestrian walkway, I watched the other group below. Those of us above were protesters, but we were not breaking the law. They were. It was our job to witness whatever happened to them.

Police vehicles line up on the bridge for mass arrests.

After several minutes the police began to arrive from both sides on the lower level. No one was in any hurry. I heard someone ask: “How do you de-escalate a situation like this?” The answer: You don’t. The protesters wanted to walk to Brooklyn. They were not going to turn back. And at a certain point the police would no longer let them. “WHOSE BRIDGE? OUR BRIDGE!” Soon the police had set up barriers around the protesting group. Cops and protesters faced off. From above, we watched.

The police began to arrest the protesters on the lower level of the bridge. It was unceremonious and simple. They didn’t need any cause beyond the fact that the protesters were blocking traffic. Yet how could this end? Surely they were not going to arrest hundreds of people? Then I began to understand that this is exactly what they were going to do.

“THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH! THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH!”

Traffic was completely blocked on the outbound side of the bridge.

Or perhaps they would not be officially arrested, but merely detained. Separated. Hands bound behind their backs with white plastic zip-ties. Lined up sitting against the side of the bridge. Trucks and buses called in to bring them away. The bridge cleared for business as usual.

It was obvious that this was going to take hours. Hours in which outgoing traffic would be halted, causing jams throughout lower Manhattan as everyone leaving the city had to take an alternate route.

From above, we watched.

Police escort protesters off the pedestrian walkway.

Some protesters were very angry at the cops for doing this. Some of them were yelling that it was our right to be on the bridge because the bridge is a public space. A few were screaming at the cops and calling them Nazis.

I didn’t feel any anger at the cops. I don’t consider the police force to be entirely aligned with the interests of the rich. We do not live in a police state. From what I saw today, the cops behaved respectfully, even if their attitudes were verbally and physically aggressive.

I understand why there is a law that says you can’t block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not a bad law, as laws go. The point isn’t that protesters should be allowed to do whatever they want with impunity. The point is that protesters can choose to break the law peacefully but firmly in order to draw attention to their cause.

But what is the cause?

Organizer hands an activist newspaper to the driver of an inbound car.

No single demand is being made by the protest movement that has become known as Occupy Wall Street. I think that’s a good thing. The demands of this seedling movement are too broad and fundamental to be captured in a single demand or even a list of demands, at least so far. The Tea Party did not begin with a single demand. It’s a party, a group, a community. It has pulled the Republican party to the right. Can this new movement pull the Democratic party to the left?

It would not be hard to describe the basic politics of the people gathered at Wall Street. They are against corporate globalization and the ever-increasing, unjustifiable gap between rich and poor. Surely most of those gathered there also support environmental sustainability, green technologies, feminism and anti-racist politics. But there’s plenty of room for disagreement as well. And when it comes to putting these values into practice through specific social policies — that’s a whole different question.

I wonder if an action that clearly breaks the law, such as stopping traffic on a Brooklyn Bridge, does imply the need for a clearer demand. To peacefully occupy Wall Street is one thing. Such an occupation could go on indefinitely. It could last for days, months, even years. It could become the epicenter of a new social movement in the United States, something that hasn’t been seen for decades. A city within a city. A beating heart for a new body politic.

AWAKEN! Protesters coming off the bridge.

Blocking traffic is something else. We are the people. Ultimately, when united, we hold all the power because we are everyone. We can shut down the city. We can redistribute the wealth. We can create a federal works program. We can rebuild infrastructure. We can regulate the banks. We can pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We can release nonviolent offenders. We can forgive student debt. Because if “we” is everyone, there’s no one else to stop us. But “we” do not agree on all these things. We have different perspectives, different values, different ideas.

Who occupied the bridge? I’m not asking for the names of individuals who were there. I’m asking who these individuals represent. The idea that a small group can represent a larger one is tricky, dicey, delicate, but absolutely essential. We will not have pure consensus among three hundred thousand people, let alone seven billion. Some form of representation is essential.

So who was it that occupied Brooklyn Bridge today? Was it a bunch of left-wing New Yorkers? Was it the NYC branch of a global anti-tyranny movement that started Tahrir Square? Was it the face of democracy? Was it the people of the United States of America? Was it you?

Eventually the police came and cleared us off the pedestrian walkway as well. By the time I left perhaps a quarter of those on the lower level had been arrested. I wonder if they are still there now, as I write this, in the process of being arrested. More importantly, I wonder how many people will be back tomorrow and the next day. Increasing numbers, I hope. More every day. Until we find out what this moment really means for this city, this country, this world.

(More details and photos here.)

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, edupunk, New York, Politics, Process, Social Media, Social Networking, To Ponder, Uncategorized, What if . . .

Conformity in the Classroom

September 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s famous Milgram obedience experiment conducted at Yale.

Considered to be one of the most notable experiments in the field of social psychology in particular, and perhaps even the research world in general, Milgram originally set out to examine the question of why people obey authority, even when doing so contradicts some of their fundamental morals and conscience. In this research, an innocent participant was given the role of a “teacher” who had to punish the confederate “student” with an alleged electric shock of increasing intensity every time the student would make an error on a memory task. The teachers were constantly prodded by the experiment to continue, despite some of their blatant resistance and genuine concern whenever the student would receive a shock. Milgram’s question: how much would people follow the command of the authority, or in this case, the experimenter, even when it meant “harming” another human being?

Although the methodology used was questionably ethical by today’s standards, Milgram’s conclusions were a shock to many: about 65% of the participants in his experiment went as far as administering the strongest voltage available.

While 50 years have passed since Milgram’s original experiment, we, as a society, would like to think that we have moved on, and that what Milgram found in his laboratory doesn’t pertain to the way we think and behave. After all, we are a society in which individualism is a value, and doing our own thing and going against authority is key. If put into that same experiment room, we would surely act much differently.

Yet has much changed? Have we really moved on and learned from research such as Milgram’? Or, is it simply human behavior to act as Milgram’s subjects did? One can hardly imagine that in today’s day and age anyone would conform to authority to such an extent that his or her own conscience would suffer. After all, we are much “smarter” today than we were back then…

In thinking about these questions, I’d like to bring attention to world of street art. Many street artists have often found their inspiration creating art that represents society’s dire dependence to authority and conformity. In their eyes, as in those of many similar skeptics, we continue to act like Milgram’s subjects, albeit in a more disguised way. We continue to obey like authority, act like everyone else, and believe it is the right way to exist. Commercialization, they argue, is simply a means to this end. We are constantly being bombarded of how we should think, feel, and act, and indeed we follow.

 

Well, there may not be anything necessarily wrong with “fitting in” to the molds society has carved out for us. In fact, sometimes it’s required. For example, take the world of business, a place near and dear to my heart as an instructor of several business classes. To be able to succeed in a place like corporate America, individuals must think, feel, and act like all others who have gotten ahead in times prior. Put in another way, individuals need to conform and obey the rules that have been set forth, leaving little room for creative expressions of individuality.

So I ask the question of how can we, educators of undergraduate students (and business students in particular) who are at the brink of entering worlds like Corporate America, properly educate students how to communicate and express themselves with their own voice, while still fitting into this mold? How can we encourage them to be their own people, but not appearing too different that they won’t be able to succeed?

As a crucial part of college education (and as other writers have noted), it is necessary to teach students the basics and have them conform the rules until some comfort is reached and students can feel confident in expressing themselves uniquely. However, based on my own experiences, it appears that students never fully disengage from this generic mold, but rather learn it and stick to it without really exploring their own selves and style. The reasons why this occurs can be plenty, ranging from specific educational experiences and instruction that has encouraged this type of communication, to fear of not landing a good job if doesn’t do exactly as told, to the external pressures of a society which (implicitly) values conformity.

Thus, despite it being over 50 years since Milgram’s original experiments, it is easy to see that perhaps very little has changed about the ways in which we, as individuals, fundamentally behave. While that research may have taught us to be more knowledgeable and stop to think before following fascist regimes, we might also want to think about the implications the research still has for other areas of our lives. As educators, it is our job to ensure that students do receive a quality education like everyone else, yet also free themselves of the confines of our instruction.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

On ArtSpeak

May 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

This past weekend I was able to attend one day of the two-day symposium “Art Speech” at MoMA, organized by Pablo Helguera, MoMA’s Director of Adult Education, and art historian and critic James Elkins. Billed as “A Symposium on Symposia” it promised to “anatomize art historians’ and artists’ habits at the podium,” presenting possible models by which lectures, gallery talks, slide presentations, and other conventions of communication in the field (such as museum audio tours and multimedia presentations) might be analyzed and their effectiveness assessed.

Sounds pretty basic—at least to the WAC-oriented among us—but it generated plenty of excitement across the field from the moment it was announced, and the sold-out auditorium held a pretty diverse range of people across the field: from academics, journalists, and bloggers to artists, museum directors and curators. Since accusations of impenetrability and obscurantism are leveled at so-called “artspeak” from within and without its many and varied institutions, and have been for some time—at least since the dawn of postmodernism—an interrogation of its forms seems well overdue at this point. (Of course, there may well have been such investigations that I’m just not aware of, but not by a preeminent institution like MoMA. Somewhat embarrassingly, the only one that comes to mind was featured in the one-off parody rag November, a spoof of the entrenched art history journal October: it featured the transcript of a roundtable on the perks that roundtables afford neo-Marxist intellectuals.) As the organizers pointed out in their opening remarks, the catchall concept of “performativity,” to which discussions on the conventions of art speech are usually relegated, has thus far not been tremendously useful.

Philosopher and critic Jonathan Gilmore, in a brief historical survey of the slide lecture, read a quote attributed to a student of legendary Swiss critic and “master of extemporaneous speaking” Heinrich Wölfflin: “[He]… places himself in the dark and together with his students at their side. He thus unites all concerned and becomes the ideal beholder, his words distilling the experiences common to everyone… Wölfflin’s speech never gives the impression of being prepared, something completed that is projected onto the art work. Rather it seems to be produced on the spot by the picture itself. The art work thus retains its preeminent status throughout. His words do not overwhelm the art but embellish it like pearls.” As anyone on the receiving end of the average art history survey course cam attest, this is one nineteenth-century straw man that may, in fact, still need a bit of demolishing.

This question of audience, and the pitfalls and practicalities of imagining such an “ideal beholder” was a problem to which speakers and the audience would continually return. In dishing out interpretation to an artificially “unified,” authoritative voice to an equally constructed recipient, what happens to the cacophony of argument that comprises the field in actuality—and how do those conversations move forward, rather than being preemptively shut down? Writer, curator, and editor Monika Szewczyk, whose ongoing “Art of Conversation” series centers on the interruptions of speech in and around art, focused on this problem in the context of a prosaic form: the museum audio guide. Deconstructing MoMA’s audio text for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (by its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Temkin), she pointed out that it “fails to ask a single question” or “provide more than one perspective.” To avoid perpetuating both the common disdain for the guide format and the dismissive, unproductive notion that one cannot pack any nuance at all into two minutes of speech, she took a stab at producing an alternate entry. Briefly, it pointed out that the work was an interpretive battleground, and touched on the Cubist struggle to present multiple points of view on a single picture plane and the picture’s confusion of feminine, masculine, and supernatural signifiers. It ended with a reference to Serge Guilbaut’s now-canonical assessment of New York’s replacement of Paris at the hotbed of the modernist avant-garde. In a discussion that followed, an audience member fantasized about furthering audio guide options to include brief examinations by other methodologies: ie, “Press “2” for a feminist interpretation of this work; press “3” for a psychoanalytic interpretation..” I, for one, love this idea—at least for some of the museum’s most iconic works.

Artist Carey Young presented the most original examination of “art speech” by inverting its context completely: instead of interrogating the speech practices of art experts, her Speechcraft project asked non-experts to engage in object analysis through the organization Toastmasters. (Toastmasters is an international club in which members, striving for greater success as “leaders” in what seems to be a primarily business context, learn to communicate authoritatively and charismatically by means of regular meetings and peer critique.) Among the objects Young had members interpret: a red candle in the shape of Lenin, a clear rubber ball encasing MoMA’s logo, and “Wall Street” brand cigarettes. Would lay persons produce more interesting critique around these objects than the artist herself might have? From the limited video I watched, sometimes yes and sometimes no. The real potential to the project, for me, is the affective explication of the values associated with the speech of a “successful” leader in “business:” clear, authoritative, and well-rehearsed—but with the impression of being absolutely extemporaneous. Laid bare in the context of an artwork, the efforts of Toastmasters members, even when wholly and charismatically competent, seem unusually, surprisingly poignant.

Much of the rest of the symposium day involved an analysis, through a sort of de-construction and re-construction, of a snippet of a talk by famed Marxist art historian TJ Clark. Swiss economics and management professor Claus Noppeney attempted to strip away Clark’s rhetorical flourishes and present his main arguments (on Paul Cezanne’s critique of his teacher Camille Pissarro’s changing style) in Powerpoint, resulting in laughably banal bullet points like: “History is Valuable; Great apprentices find unique ways to learn; and Imitation can lead to Innovation.” A fun diversion, but an unnecessary one: I’m not sure anyone present would have argued for the respective absolute autonomy of style and content. Happily, English scholar Ellen Levy followed with an insightful analysis of Clark’s style: his liberal use of value judgments in his speech (things are “wonderful” or “brilliant” and historic predecessors “surely wrong” in their analysis) as appealing to a primal desire in listeners; his use of the first person, building the impression of the art historian as primal excavator of meaning; and his denigration and characterization of the idea of artworks as harboring a single, unified idea as “lyric.” (The latter, though not meant as an actual dismission of poetry, irked at least one poet in the audience.) Levy gave a really convincing assessment of the agonism inherent to Clark’s speaking style, in which he conjures, by inference, the polyphony of debate and political superstructures that comprise the construction of meaning.

There was much touched on that was valuable and potentially useful that day. However, after Levy’s beautifully nuanced model, the conversation devolved somewhat into a discussion of the “best” art talks that the audience and remaining panel members had ever experienced: a conversation which ultimately, and somewhat uncritically, began to privilege an art-speech model of narrative surprise-fact-unearthing and case-making: art history as detective novel with a surprise twist ending. This slide from modes of analysis to modes of experience was, for me, premature and disappointing: I had hoped for more and further revealing insights on the constructions of language around art; for example, the many rhetorical crutches we all (sometimes detrimentally) rely on in the field. Levy’s insights come from the study of language and poetry; perhaps more people outside the field were needed: a linguistic anthropologist, maybe? Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow up on Saturday’s discussions: I’ll have to wait til the symposium shows up on MoMA’s website (or until someone enlightens me in comments).

Filed Under: Art, Conferences, Uncategorized

Clear as Mud

March 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Page A15 of the New York Times on March 7th looked suspiciously like a story from The Onion about the tangled mess that is teacher evaluation in New York City public schools. Winning the award for the most understated headline of the year, “Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie,” Michael Winerip tells the (predictably?) sad story of Stacey Isaacson, a 7th grade English and Social Studies teacher at the Lab school, described as “very dedicated,” “wonderful,” and “one of a kind,” by teachers, students, and principals alike.

So why, then, is poor Ms. Isaacson ranked in the 7th percentile of city teachers when it comes to student academic progress?

Because of this formula, designed to calculate a teacher’s value-added score by the Department of Education’s “accountability experts” (satirists, start your engines):

Click to view full size.


As someone who once taught for the NYC Department of Education and is also a product of it, I wasn’t really surprised that they had gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t even surprised to imagine that they would think such a formula could be an accurate method for tenure evaluation. They did, however, outdo themselves in the category of overall incoherence; not only did this tool strike me as wrong-headed, but it was also completely unintelligible. This is so unbelievably unhelpful a formula (ready-made for critique by visualization genius Edward Tufte), that no teacher could be expected to look at it and see her work (or her true challenges) reflected within it. Matrix-like in its complexity and opaque in its reasoning, it is a formula incapable of communicating what it is measuring or how a teacher might improve her practices based upon it. And from what I can tell, the variables are wonky, too.

It is not until the 16th paragraph of the article that Winerip summons the courage to try to explain the thing:

According to her “data report,” Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. “Her students were predicted to get a 3.69– based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored a 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s valued added in 3.63-3.69.” Simple enough, right? Wrong. The author– who knows he’s hit pay dirt with this one– goes on:

“These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as ‘the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Eh? And the calculation for her predicted score is based on 32 variables, which are plugged into a statistical model– the one that made me feel like I was, surely, reading The Onion.

Anyone reading this case study of Ms. Isaacson will naturally wonder a few things, like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to calculate what percentage of Joel Klein’s contract at Fox News Corporation represents Ms. Isaacson’s salary?” or, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to invite these statisticians to actually teach us this formula and how it works?” I frequently work on assessment at the Schwartz Institute, and it is also a built-in aspect of every course I teach. So I know that evaluating teaching and learning is a tricky thing indeed, a hall of mirrors in which you think you see the student reflected but often, you don’t.

I decided, then, to concoct my own formula, with my own variables, to evaluate the teaching that I do at Baruch in my capacity as a Fellow and an instructor of Communication Studies. What variables get in the way of student progress that cannot be accounted for after you have observed my class, read my syllabus, and tested my students for their proficiency level?

Click to view full size.

What if you really tried to articulate the variables that come into play when facing a group of students and a set of learning objectives?

Winerip explains that teachers are eligible for tenure based upon three categories: instructional practices (including observations), contribution to the school community, and student achievement (which is where the formula comes in). Now, I’ve never been much of a whiz at statistics, but maybe that’s okay. After all, if the communications people made the formulas, and the formula people made the communications, perhaps we’d all start getting somewhere?

So please—in the spirit of collaborative learning, improve upon my draft and post your own visual and/or variables in the comments section.

Filed Under: Assessment, Baruch College, Education, Uncategorized, What if . . . Tagged With: , , ,

Stitch and Ink

March 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, talk focused on strategies for teaching close reading. Unanimous nodding broke out when John H. mentioned the importance of asking students to write out, on paper, the very lines of literary text they’re grappling with. Something about the intimacy of bringing one’s hand, mind and ink into sync with a given stretch of words–so that inscription belongs as much to the student as to the Great Works anthology–seemed essential. Hours later and a few blocks away, I found myself cramped into the 5th Avenue window display at the Graduate Center, arranging small, hand-made books to draw attention to the the Third Annual Chapbook Festival (www.chapbookfestival.org) — taking place March 2-5 both at the GC and at other locations throughout the city. The Festival celebrates, per its name, chapbooks–small publications, usually of poetry, ranging from the simplest construction of sewn sheets to elaborate, collectible editions–produced outside the machinery of commercial publishing. The colorful, beautiful little books in the window–etched, embossed, embroidered, delicately made–seemed to belong to the same universe as the practice of writing out lines of text — both not-so-lost arts.

Filed Under: Art, Language, literature, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

Scholarly writing gets hijacked, interpretation is a wild ride

January 31, 2011 By 2 Comments

pen mightier than sword
Creative Commons License 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.

Filed Under: Audience, CUNY, Language, Media, Politics, Uncategorized

So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?

October 26, 2010 By 5 Comments

Here’s a tragically-funny-because-it’s-true video that speaks to some of the concerns Talia raised in her most recent post. Discuss.

Besides deflating grad students and recent PhDs, this video is great example of what you can do on Xtranormal.com, a fun site that allows anyone to easily create animated movies, about which Lauren posted some time ago.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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